#Depth Fear

Depth comes in many forms: depth of data, depth of perspectives, depth of time, depth of space. It is a crucial word in the lexicon of place. Depth is also a crucial descriptor of the two overarching themes of this book: waters and maps. The possible definitions of depth overlap, with culture and space stretching out to create multi-disciplinary modes of profundity. In this essay, my goal is to explore the intersections between a deep mapping that takes into account the different modes of oceanic depth, and a blue humanities that moves beyond thalassology as the dominant mode of mapping deeply. Depth is, as Stacy Alaimo observes, an immensity, an excess, simply 'too much'. In her ruminations on the abyssal zones, Alaimo reflects on the writhing, animalistic protean something encountered in the deep.

..Derrida's ruminations are ... drenched in the language of the depths, as he describes the question of human and nonhuman subjectivity as "immense and abyssal," requiring that he wres­ tle with the "several tentacles" of philosophies that become, together, "a single living body at bottom." If we shift Derrida's ruminations on the "animal abyss" from an encounter with the gaze of a specific animal to the collective "composition" (in Bruno Latour's terms) of the vast abyssal zone and its surrounding territories, we discover the same sort of vertiginous recognition that there is, indeed, "being rather than nothing." But what does it mean for the abyssalbeing to be or become "too much"?¹

This presence evokes a primordial fear. It is in many ways the oldest fear. The cosmogony of many faiths is predicated on a formless and lightless void, something that existed before the world and awaits to claim it. Other cultures do not fear the deep, seeing it as vast and unknowable, but not something to intrinsically fear. The reason that fear is important is simple: it is the horror story of scientific positivism. It is hard to decide whether the fear of nothing or the fear of something is greater. It is important to acknowledge that this fear is culturally relative, and to interrogate it. The fear of the abyss permeates epistemology at every level, but its expression is reflected through a lens of positivist lacuna. We can learn to cope with it, to embrace it as a positive facet of the human condition, to use it as a stimulus. But we can never escape it. We can sense and detect more and more of the world every day and revel in this progress, but there will always be more darkness. This talk sits on the membrane between knowing and unknowing and considers what it is to fear depth. The surface world of measurements and quantities wars with a deep unconscious that is dark and deep:

The geographer Anne Buttimer’s phenomenological approach to mapping recognizes the inner contingencies of human agency and observes that our “behavior in space and time [is like] the surface movements of icebergs, whose depths we can sense only vaguely.” Thus, one of the main representational issues in deep mapping is how to balance the positivistic indices of latitude and longitude and degrees, minutes and seconds gridding the Cartesian perspective, with the “off-grid” contingencies of the human condition, or what Samuel Beckett states are impressions of “all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their Sabbath.”²

The oceans were never for humans to know, and it is a master trope of the blue humanities - back to Steve Mentz and his discussions of the 'new thalassology' - that European thought is not at home in the ocean. It is possible to embrace a sea of islands that is home, that is knowable, that is complex and ever-changing and yet part of the social sphere. However, it is possible - and indeed eternally likely - that all knowledges of waters sit atop a vast unknowability, a lacuna, a place that is not for humans to know. Indeed, the depths were once thought to by the natural sciences of the 19th century to be 'azoic', or devoid of life.³ The revelation that an unknowable something, a vast and diverse network of non-human actors, came hand in hand with the awareness of its strangeness to surface life. Blind-eyed fish, mouths bristling with teeth, strange flashes and patterns of bioluminescence, creatures that survive on thermal vents and falling biomass above. Not nothing, but not familiar or knowable. One could not sit with a sketch pad and observe the depths. It was not amenable to the scientific method. It remains so, if in the context of ever-expanding sensory and sense-making augmentations. Total knowledge is not possible where it is sought, and not desirable where it is not. Depth requires superabundance and excess of meaning beyond comprehension: it is the magic and the terror of water.

Footnotes

1. Stacy Alaimo, ‘Violet-Black’, in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. by Lawrence Buell and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 234 ↩

2. Charles Travis. ‘Representational Issues in Deep Mapping: Peeling the “Poetic and Positivistic” from the Western Geosophical Onion’. In Making Deep Maps. Routledge, 2021, 65-77, here p. 65 ↩

3. Stacy Alaimo, ‘Violet-Black’, in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. by Lawrence Buell and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 233 ↩