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Blue mind: on the language and literature of marine depth

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Blue mind: on the language and literature of marine depth

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Content BLUE MIND:
ON THE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF MARINE DEPTH
by Katharine Ogle
A Disserta@on Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Par@al Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
May 2024
Copyright 2024 Katharine Ogle

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I fully believe in both, in the poetry and in the dissec@on.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Naturalist,” 1834
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmuta@on of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bi_er,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, u_erly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses,” 1979

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Acknowledgments
I would like to express gra@tude to my commi_ee—David St. John, Susan McCabe, and John
Heidelberg. Your support of and faith in this project made it all possible.
I am grateful for the funding provided by the University of Southern California, especially the
awards of Provost Fellowship, Graduate School Travel Award, Maddocks-Brown Award,
Middleton Disserta@on Comple@on Fellowship, and the Mildred Fox Hansen Award for Women
in Crea@ve Wri@ng.
Without my spouse, Ryan Bubalo, this document would not exist. Thank you, Ryan, for the
support you provide in every form—from the prac@cal to the magical. You dreamed with me,
you relocated with me, you were curious with me. At the right moments, you’ve cheered me up
and talked me down. Your own skill and intellect s@mulate me, and your confidence in me is a
sacred source of energy.
Thank you to Oscar and Archie, my children, for moving and changing this work in necessary
ways. Becoming a mother revitalized my senses and makes me love being alive.
My parents, Roy and Rebecca Ogle, and my sister Molly Ogle, are a large part of my inspira@on
for this project and for this degree. Their work as scien@sts is my lifelong inspira@on. Nabokov
said a writer should have “the precision of a poet and the imagina@on of a scien@st.” Before I
knew how to describe the inextricability of art and science, I was raised at its vital intersec@on.
My idea for this work comes out of conversa@ons with Richard Kenney. The “Poetry and Science
Symposium” became the stage on which I understood the value and infinite depth of this
discourse. In this cohort, the people to whom I also extend my gra@tude, who helped me teach,
write, and understand: Elizabeth Cooperman, Adam Summers, Kevin Crai, Rebecca Hoogs,
Sierra Nelson, Jason Whitmarsh, Bill Carty.
Lastly, I could not have undertaken this journey without the support of my colleagues and dear
friends Stephanie Horvath and Catherine Pond. Thank you for your a_en@on, your friendship,
and your inspiring crea@ve work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ii
Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................iii
Abstract ..........................................................................................................................................v
Chapter 1: At the Couch of the Green-Bearded Ancient................................................................1
Chapter 2: Neither Out Far Nor In Deep ......................................................................................22
Chapter 3: The Poe@cs of Marine Taxonomy ...............................................................................35
Conclusion: On the Value of Art to Science and Science to Art ...................................................62
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................75

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Abstract
“Blue Mind: On the Language and Literature of Marine Depth” is invested in the rela@onship
between poe@c device and scien@fic inquiry and how language frames percep@on in the context
of the marine realm. The first chapter, “At the Couch of the Green-Bearded Ancient,” sinks
straight to the bo_om of the sea, considering how literature composes and sustains a concept
of the seafloor as both graveyard and treasure trove. This chapter is a medita@on on ars
poe(ca, uni@ng a personal encounter with the Riace Bronzes (two statues recovered from the
sea) and James Merrill’s poem on the same subject. The second chapter, “Neither Out Far Nor In
Deep” rises to the surface, organizing my observa@ons about oceanic waves and their
similari@es to the form of the poem through close readings of waves in a range of literary works
and le_ers on crai by various ar@sts. The third chapter, “The Poe@cs of Marine Taxonomy,”
focuses on figura@ve language in the names of marine organisms, no@ng a development
between organisms of the sunlight zone and those at the midnight zone and below. All of these
chapters touch on metaphor, metonymy, and the rela@onship between language and knowing.
This inquiry explores the primary paradox of the sea itself—that is: we know a lot about the sea;
we know li_le about the sea. The sea and the poem have this mystery in common, and I hope
to show how a subsequent symmetry between the poe@c and the scien@fic may take shape
within this conversa@on.

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Chapter 1 | At the Couch of the Green-Bearded Ancient: On the Sea Floor
In a climate-controlled room in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia of Reggio-Calabria in
southern Italy, two larger-than-life bronze statues known as the Riace Bronzes, or the Riace
Warriors, are secured to anti-seismic marble plinths. A plaque on the wall behind them dates
the male figures—nude, muscular, in nearly identical contrapposto stance—to the 5th century
BCE. A short film loops in the cool room, telling the story of their discovery in shallow waters
near Riace, Italy, not far from the site of the museum.
In the epigraph of “Bronze,”1 an 11-page poem about an encounter with these figures, James
Merrill offers the discovery of the Riace Bronzes as the context for the poem:
In August 1972 a skin diver off Riace, on the Calabrian coast, saw at a depth of seven or
eight meters an arm upthrust from the sandy bottom. Having made sure that it was not
of flesh, and remarking nearby a second, sanded-over form, he notified the local
Archeological Museum. Frogmen easily raised the two figures. Even encrusted with silica
and lime, they were from the start felt to be Greek originals. Their restoration, in
Florence, would take nine years.
By including the story of the Bronzes’ discovery as the epigraph for the poem, Merrill formally
implies that this story is the occasion for the poem. This essay, too, is occasioned by the story of
the Riace Bronzes. I emphasize “story” because I am less interested in the bronzes as artifacts
of a particular era of Greek sculpture (though they are exquisite and significant in this regard as
well) as I am in exploring their relationship to the seafloor. How can the Riace Bronzes help us
understand what the seafloor means and how it has come to mean what it means. What do we
see in the mind’s eye when presented with the idea of the sea floor? What historical narratives,
literature, and art have contributed to this perception, and how does this compare to the

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biological and geological truths of the sea floor? And finally, what does it mean to have been a
denizen of the sea floor for a significant period of time, as the Riace Bronzes were?
So allow me to begin as Merrill begins—with the story of my encounter with the Riace Bronzes.
I visited the sculptures in 2019 while traveling in southern Italy. Being in Calabria, it would have
felt strange not to visit the Bronzes. They are the literal poster boys of the region.
Advertisements for their exhibition at the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia in Reggio
Calabria flagged the streets as far north as Tropea. A tourist map for Reggio Calabria was titled
“The City of the Bronzes.” They are a point of pride—Italy’s only complete ancient Greek
bronzes—and at over two thousand years old, a symbol of the endurance of art and beauty and
history. Complete bronze statues from the ancient world are incredibly rare, as most were
destroyed and melted down to make new works or other bronze objects like cannons. Their
homecoming to the region followed decades of restoration and exhibition in Florence.
There is both pride and possessiveness in Reggio Calabria’s claim to be the home of these
figures. This is reflected, first of all, in their name as the Riace Bronzes, named after the site of
their recovery and not their origin in Greece, and sustained in the myriad ways the region
stakes itself in relation to them. It takes on the shape of chiasmus: Reggio Calabria is celebrated
as the home of the Bronzes, the city of the Bronzes, even the gelato shop is di Bronzi—while the
Bronzes are known as i bronzi di Riace, the Bronzes of Riace. Rhetorically, this gestures to a

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sense of inextricability. It’s impossible not to feel this, whether in the museum or wandering
around the city.
Walking outside the museum, I spotted an old advertisement from the Bronzes’ long-awaited
2015 return to Reggio-Calabria after their restoration in Florence. The poster was flaking from
geologic layers of a bulletin board in the city center that featured the faces of the figures and in
bold red lettering read: STIAMO TORNANDO, “We are coming back.”
Before you ever see the bronzes themselves, a short film playing outside the gallery ensures
that you view the statues through the lens of their discovery. It reminds me of visiting the
California Science Center in Los Angeles to see the retired space shuttle Endeavor. Before
entering the massive hangar where the Endeavor is housed (though it has since moved
locations), you are led to a small theater showing a ten minute timelapse film of the shuttle’s
journey over Los Angeles’ city streets from the airport to the Science Center in Exposition Park.
The Endeavor drew throngs to the sidewalks to watch as it passed laundromats and clipped the
branches of palms. Families perched on rooftops—much like they would to watch a celestial
phenomenon like a meteor shower or eclipse—to watch the Endeavor, the magical vehicle that
had traveled back and forth to space, now driving down a common street.
The video outside the statues’ gallery doesn’t emphasize the crowds that attended their arrival
(though they had those, too), but rather the provenance of their rebirth as the Riace Bronzes.
The video introduces Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome, who was on a recreational dive

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in the Riace Marina when he saw that “arm upthrust from the sandy bottom,” to use Merrill’s
words. Upon his inspection, he realized it was an ancient Greek bronze statue of a man and not
a corpse, and immediately noticed the second figure lying beside it. The coincidence here, the
sheer serendipity, does not suggest that Mariottini was a particularly lucky man—rather that
the Bronzes were waiting to be found, hiding in plain sight, and by extension that the sea is so
rich with treasures that valuable things might be relatively easy to uncover. Mariottini
fascinated me. I imagined I was him, coming upon the bronzes at such a relatively shallow
depth. Days later, the bronzes were brought to the surface in a collaborative effort among the
Messina Underwater Police Unit, museum specialists, and archaeologists. Mariottini posed with
the statues, holding one at the shoulders as you would a loved one, and in another photo,
caressing the statue’s cheek.
In the footage, the dark bronze figures look sort of like the five thousand year old mummy
housed in the next room of the museum. The Carabinieri’s efforts to raise the sculptures struck
me, as I wrote in my notebook that day, as “so much like the recovery of a corpse.” The officers
lift the figures carefully, horizontally. The bronzes are padded and bound with articulations
similar to those of a gurney or a body bag. Later, as I watched footage of their restoration, I
wrote that “the restoration workers look like morticians” in their white lab coats with the
Bronzes laid out on tables at hip-height.
My husband and I spent an hour in the bronzes’ gallery, taking notes in the style of the
undergraduate creative writing course I was to begin teaching in Rome the next week. That

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note-taking style is one of sensory impressions, descriptions grounded in image. “Don’t write
that Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa in Ecstasy looks erotic,” I tell my students. “Write that her
mouth is an open circle, that her shoulders are slack.”
I sketched the sculptures, a practice I find useful because it forces me to look at both the whole
and the details of an object. To articulate the outline of one of the figures, my eye (and then
pen) must travel the contours of the body. When they sketch, I remind students to notice what
they notice and try to write that down, make a record of how their eye and attention travels.
For example, while sketching Bronze A’s head, I had to draw a line across his forehead to
articulate a headband. I’m not sure I would have registered it without the sketch.
Two middle-aged women stepped between me and “Bronze A” to include him in their selfie.
The selfie is the modern way to say: I saw this. It takes the place of souvenirs. In The Art of
Noticing, Rob Walker calls such a practice “documenting […] proximity.”2 I teach students that
attentive notetaking can document proximity more effectively and more intimately than a
selfie.
In front of Bronze A, I wrote:
enormous eyes—the whites of them still intact; missing the green iris in his left eye; a
headband pinning down his cascade of hair; (because I know he was underwater), his
hair looks sea-like to me—curl pattern is waves; I see a little red left in his lips; curls of
his beard tighter than the curls on his head; I love his teeth, they are distinct from one
another, real; a pink teardrop—tear duct?; on his right hand, index finger escaping from
his fist—maybe he used to hold something?

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I added what a docent told me:
lacrimal caruncle – a pink stone; sclera – white calcite; irises – glass paste; lips and
nipples – copper; teeth – silver paper.
I named him Lorenzo, and then I transitioned to sketching taking notes about Bronze B, who I
named Rocco. “Bronze A” and “Bronze B” were not real enough names, I decided. These figures
deserved designation and distinction. While the bodies of the figures were nearly identical, they
each had too much personality not to have distinct names. Scholars generally agree they
started with the same mold, but likely had different sculptors finishing them. They each stand
around 6 feet 7 inches, both posed with their weight on their right legs and their left arms bent
at the elbow. Their forearms extend where they used to hold shields. Their faces distinguish
them. Lorenzo gives an overall more handsome impression, while Rocco—poor Rocco—with his
one vacant eye socket and narrow conehead, emanates a goofy tenor. Of him I wrote:
a cyclops of a kind—one sea-green eye, one vacant socket; torso & legs much more
greened—was he face down in the sand for thousands of years?; his fist still full of
cement—a hole where his held thing, some pole, used to be; weight in one leg and the
other slightly bent, similar to how I stand now; forearm cuffed for a missing shield; veins
pronounced in the back of the hand, blood pooling at the ready; maybe a little red paint
still on his nipple?; he used to have shin guards.
I think my impulse to name the figures, thereby engaging them as people—or, at least, as
characters—is one that can be traced into James Merrill’s poem, where the Bronzes speak
aloud, adopting an opinionated, boisterous tone. “Bronze” recounts Merrill and his partner
David Jackson visiting the bronzes in Florence where they were briefly exhibited for the first
time at the Museo Archaeologico in Florence in 1980-81. Merrill and Jackson are staying at the
house of their friend Umberto, who suggests the visit to the lovers.

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“[T]hey won’t be in such easy reach / Ever again,” Merrill writes in the second stanza of the
poem. The speaker means that he and David should take advantage of an opportunity to see
the sculptures while they are visiting Italy, but these lines also play with the story of Mariottini’s
discovery, especially as they are positioned so closely to the epigraph detailing the “arm up-
/thrust from the sandy bottom.” The ‘easy reach’ is the figurative proximity of the speaker and
David, but these words also evoke the image of the outstretched arms of the statues. This
exchange between the bronze figures and the couple in the poem is the energy through which
the poem moves; it is not about the Bronzes, it is with them that the poem’s narrative
develops.
The story that the poem tells is broken into eight sections. The first grounds the narrative in its
primary characters—James Merrill, who is both the poet and the speaker—“David the Fair,” or
David Jackson, Merrill’s partner of thirty years at the writing of the poem (though the poem’s
narrative tracks the relationship’s end). The third character is their friend and Italian host,
Umberto. The poem tells us Umberto has hosted the Americans before, is elderly, and will die
within a year of the visit. Umberto is the one who suggests that David and James visit the
bronzes. The speaker wants to go, but David “hesitates” and the speaker reveals that David is
“unwell,” describing him as quiet, sensitive to cold and heat, tired, moody. The speaker is angry
about the hesitation and wants to go, and deals with this feeling by choosing his “weapons— /
Notebook and cigarette” and stepping outside to write. Presumably the composition of the
poem begins in this moment.

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The visit to the bronzes is delayed over a hundred lines as the poem gives a long-awaited story
of Umberto’s involvement as a translator at a crucial moment for Italy in WWII, where he
where he “megaphoned […] the terms of peace, translated, to the crowd.”
Finally, in the third section, the couple trips to Florence in a rental Fiat to see the bronzes. The
section populates the poem with marine imagery and creates a landscape within which the
Bronzes can appear—as they do in the following section. The coast beckons the lovers to pull
over for a picnic. They watch as the ocean’s “[u]ndulating dullness fans / Itself to tatters.” They
spot the buoy-markings of scuba divers mid-dive and the poet uses this image to describe the
process of writing—where the surface, the observable, is a writer, writing, but the mind is the
scuba diver deep below. “Here at my desk, but fathoms deep // […] The plunge of leaden look
or phrase / Thudding to rest where none can see . . .” The iambic pentameter seems to further
sink the lines here, the regularity of stressed syllables pulling the poem down the page. It is
here that I really notice the pacing of the poem—the reader has been carried a long way into
the poem that has teased these bronze statues from the beginning—from the very title and
epigraph—and yet we still haven’t met them.
But we do, finally and suddenly, in the following section, which occurs entirely in the voices of
the bronzes. The first line of this section, “—Not a moment, poor babies, too soon!”, does a lot
to establish the voice of the figures. They have interrupted, or at the very least exuberantly
joined the conversation. They speak in exclamations. They address David Jackson and James

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Merrill as “poor babies,” a diminutive that is both condescending and endearing. They have a
sense of humor. They have opinions about contemporary technology, criticizing the use of
“desktop computers.” They reveal a sort of playful intellectual superiority by accusing Nietzsche
of exaggerating “God’s death.” In the first few lines we have a sense that these statues have big
personalities. They are outspoken, well-read, and downright sassy.
Because this section is 70 lines served continuously in italics, the reader is visually reminded
that the Bronzes are speaking. Italics are often used to designate another language in a text, or
to cue overheard language as in an announcement. It also looks a bit like a transcript, a radio
broadcast. However, this is not the first time the poem has featured an outside voice at
length—Umberto’s story in the second section unfolds at a length of 42 lines, though it is
filtered through the retelling of the poem’s speaker (who notes that the recall is impressionistic
and “blurred”) even as quotation marks are used to cite Umberto’s language. By contrast, the
Bronzes are speaking directly to James Merrill and David Jackson (“poor babies”).
And yet, the hand of invention is seen more clearly in this section than in Umberto’s story.
Umberto’s story we take to be historical fact, more or less—a retelling of a retelling. By
contrast, because the Bronzes’ speech gestures to some culture contemporary to Merrill’s
tastes— because they read Nietzche, Mary McCarthy, and Rilke, because they reference Second
Wave Feminism—we read the text as persona, Merrill speaking through the Bronzes. This is
supported metrically in the text, too, as the other sections of the poem proceed in Merrill’s
signature iambic verse while the Bronzes’ section unfolds in triple rhythms. Triple rhythms in

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poetry are the signature of epic poems and give a sense that the Bronzes are speaking in a
manner that is of their native Ancient Greece. I like to think of it as a way to speak in a sort of
ancient accent. But I believe the more attention the reader pays to the way the Bronzes are
speaking, the more likely they are to recognize the craft at work and the poet behind the text.
Readers of his other works, in particular The Changing Light at Sandover, associate Merrill’s
poetic voice with a tendency to channel the language and spirit of other people, as he is wellknown for summoning and mediating communication with the dead through his work,
beginning with a poem called “Voices from the Other World” and continuing throughout his
career. His impulse to experiment with selfhood is at the heart of Merrill’s style—he even titled
his autobiography A Different Person.
Part of the kinship I feel to Merrill’s writing about the Bronzes is his consistent return to seeing
himself (and sometimes David Jackson, sometimes Umberto) in the figures. My notes from the
Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia record my impulse to strike their same poses—one leg
out, one arm out. I caught my husband covering one eye when he was in front of Rocco, who
has only one eye. He was trying to see as Rocco sees, and Merrill does this throughout the
poem. Most explicitly, in the final section, the speaker says, “I too exist in bronze.”
In 2006, Sacha Sosno, a French sculptor and painter created a sculpture in response to the
Bronzes that is two large red steel slabs with cutouts of the figures3. The sculpture is installed in
a pedestrian thoroughfare in Cosenza. The silhouettes of the statues are framed such that a

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passerby could fill their space, a physical suggestion to exchange oneself with the Riace
Bronzes.
Throughout the poem, the speaker performs a similar exchange, invoking elements of the
Bronzes and inviting us to see them in the poem’s other characters. The Bronzes’ interiors are
packed with clay from the site of their origin. Thus, we think of the Bronzes when the speaker
describes Umberto, writing “The life inside him’s like a local clay / Gritty with names.” Later this
concept is picked up in the context of the restoration of the Bronzes prior to their exhibition in
Florence: “Dissolving / The clay at our core, sonar probe and / Restorative poultice have
brought / The high finish in which we began / Back to light.”
While the clay remains at their core, the Bronzes have lost something. They were crafted in the
“lost wax” manner, which means their shape was created by the process of sculpting a wax
figure first, then creating a cast around it and allowing the wax to melt away. Some scholars
argue that the statues are variations created from the same cast. The speaker plays with this
idea when, in the opening lines of the poem, David Jackson is described in a way that is
transparently both a description of him and also one of the bronzes: “still, after all these years,
/ Marvelously young, gentle in manner—yet / A certain eager bloom is lost, like wax.” All of
these relational ties to the human characters of the poem, all of this stepping in and out of the
statues returns to the Bronzes exactly what is missing from the archaeological descriptions:
their charisma. The Bronzes are compelling. I argue with myself in my notebook about which I
like best: Lorenzo is undeniably my favorite, I write, although the one-eyed situation with Rocco

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is obviously appealing. There is something that made me argue with myself in my notebook
about which I liked best. There is something that made James Merrill take on their voices, and
hear such sass in them.
What makes the Bronzes charismatic? It cannot be only that they are objectively beautiful
figures, crafted exquisitely, and incredibly rare, and incredibly old. They are all of these things,
yes, but Italian museums are full of artifacts worthy of the description.
But not all artifacts inspire the reaction the Bronzes earn. In 1980, the New York Times
reported: “Until they arrived, Reggio was known primarily as a beach resort, an agricultural
market for fruit and tobacco and bergamot essence, and a stopover on the way to Taormina.
Now it is known as the home of i bronzi, as if no other bronzes existed in the world.” The
journalist of the article had just visited the Bronzes, and described them as “presences of
extraordinary power” and told of how the crowds were overwhelming the exhibit. “Those who
could not get in stormed the closed iron gates outside the neo-classical structure. ‘I bronzi! I
bronzi!,'’ they chanted. Museum officials had to summon the police to disperse them. They
threatened to return and take the museum apart, piece by piece.”4
I, too, felt the pull of these figures. And I think I know what accounts for it. What’s
“extraordinary” and “supernatural” about the Bronzes is that they spent two thousand years in
the sea. It is the story of their loss and especially of their retrieval that makes them unlike the
few other bronze sculptures that still exist from their time period. And what makes them

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mysterious, powerful, and utterly remarkable is the details of the circumstances of their
disappearance and recovery—that they were in the sea, in particular. And this, in the end, tells
us something about how we regard the sea.
“Contagious magic” is a term coined by the anthropologist James Frazer to describe the way in
which “things once in contact are always in contact.”5 This law of contact, also called a law of
contagion, explains how association between things can remain “even after physical contact is
severed.” For example, this is why I keep a t-shirt from my grandfather in my drawer, this is
why I wear a necklace that my grandmother used to wear. The contagion of a grandparent to
object—the t-shirt, the coin necklace—remains even while the grandparent is impossibly,
permanently absent. Because they each once wore these objects—no matter that they’ve since
been cleaned—they are special, stained with their original owner’s essence. I wear the t-shirt
and necklace and feel closer to my grandparents. Once in contact, always in contact.
In a poem about grieving her mother, Rachel Eliza Griffiths writes, “I still carry a faded slip of
paper / where she once wrote a word / with a pencil & crossed it out.”6 Why would a slip of
paper be sentimental to a daughter? It is unlikely to have symbolic meaning—this slip of paper
is not the deed to the house the speaker grew up in, it’s not a birth certificate or some other
important document. It’s just a word that’s been crossed out. Maybe something like a grocery
list in which the singular item to be remembered has been collected: milk. It isn’t a love letter
or a poem. So why does the speaker travel with it everywhere? Because the piece of paper was

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written by her mother. Because it was written in her hand, by her hand. Because it touched her.
Because nothing can touch her again.
In literary terms, the law of contact is a form of metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech in
which an object’s name is replaced by the name of an attribute or something closely associated
with the object. Metonymy comes from the Greek metōnumía, meaning “change of name.”
Metonymy frequently happens at an etymological level. The name for a diver in Italian is
urinatore. The etymology highlights the physiological phenomenon of diuresis in response to
the increasing pressure of immersion when diving.
7 To call a diver by the name of ‘urinator’ is
an illustration of metonymy—the name is coming from an attribute related to their activity.
Metonymy isn’t always glamorous.
The linguist Roman Jakobsen defined metonymy as a rhetorical device that relies on
associations based on contiguity.8 Among these definitions, the inarticulable charm belonging
to the Riace Bronzes emerges: the statues have a metonymic association with both the sea and
antiquity. They are special because they lived in the sea for two thousand years! And because
things in contact are always in contact, they carry with them the metaphorical resonance of the
sea. It is the story of their second life, and their recovery–they are, after all, the Riace Bronzes–
that captivates us.
The story—finding two human figures on the seafloor, first thinking they were “of flesh” and
then understanding they were sculpture calls to mind the most quotable moment of The

15
Tempest, Ariel’s song: “Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made, / Those
are pearls that were his eyes.”9 In this description, we see a figure transformed by the sea. A
body from the human world transformed, part by part, into something of the marine realm. His
bones have turned to coral, his eyes to pearls. This metamorphosis owes in part to the passage
of time—pearls form from a grain of sand over the course of years. But the transformation also
represents the transformative power of the sea. The sea is an underworld, another life beyond
the mortal one, a magical deathland.
Prior to accessible recreational diving technology and prior to photography and film, art and
literature and story stand in for public access. This moment in The Tempest is as real as the
seafloor gets for a few hundred years. Even as scuba technology developed—allowing humans
to dive deeper than one breath’s depth—and accompanying marine technologies gave way to a
more detailed picture of the sea floor: underwater cameras, sonar mapping, etc.—ultimately
the imagery of this passage is still representative of how our mind’s eye fills in the image of the
sea floor. Why don’t we fill in the imagery with the growing body of scientific truth about the
seafloor? Perhaps because, as Thoreau writes in Cape Cod, “We do not associate the idea of
antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land,
for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.”10 That is, that the figurative resonance of the
sea is ultimately outside of time and cannot develop.
Emily Dickinson, who mentions the sea in dozens of poems, acknowledges that it is an idea
more than something encountered: “I never saw a moor, / I never saw the sea; / Yet know I

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how the heather looks, / And what a wave must be.” In fact, many poets writing about the sea
prior to the 20th century were doing so without ever having experienced it. Coleridge’s “Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,” a foundational text in the literature of the sea, was written before he
ever went to sea. And, as noted in his Biographia Literaria, when he did get to sail a little a few
years after the publication of the poem, he was “exceedingly disappointed” by the
experience.11
It is human nature to search for treasure and for human forms when swimming or diving near
the sea floor. Literature both reflects and sustains this fascination. In Clarence’s dream in
Richard III, he imagines drowning, sinking slowly to the sea floor:
Lord, Lord! Methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit they were crept,
As ‘twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.12
Here we get a succinct summary of what commonly captures the human imagination about the
sea floor—it is both treasure trove and graveyard, it is a sublime landscape of loss. We see this
in literature. We see it in films ranging from 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea to The Little
Mermaid. And although the “bottom” of the sea is more of a concept than a location of depth—
Mariottini’s sea floor was only 8 meters, while the canyon under Monterey Bay, for example, is

17
4 kilometers deep—at its varying technical depths, the bottom of the sea is an imaginative
space from which art is occasioned again and again.
In Clarence’s nightmare, to drown is sensory overload: “noisy” in the ears and an assault of
“ugly sights of death” in the eyes. The seafloor is crowded with shipwreck remains “[t]en
thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,” an image which can mean both the skeletons of these
men but also corpses in the process of decomposition—since the ambiguity of “gnawed upon”
allows the reader to see both a finished skeleton and also flesh with teeth marks. As terrifying
as the description begins, it gives way to a description of desirable treasure: “Wedges of gold,
great anchors, heaps of pearl, / Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels.” The treasure is
inextricably linked with danger—one cannot see them without traveling through the scary
images–and indeed the vertical layers of the text seem to offer a pseudo-physical experience of
depth just by reading. And the treasures at the “slimy bottom of the deep” are dubbed
presumably inaccessible to the living, and such is part of their value. They are “inestimable
stones” and “unvalued jewels” –Shakespeare negates the words “estimable” and “valued” in
order to highlight the unavailable living figure who would have to estimate or value these
precious objects.
So no wonder Mariottini thought the bronzes were “of flesh,” and no wonder I thought the film
of the recovery of the sculptures resembled the recovery of a corpse—we are primed to think
of a graveyard when matters of the seafloor are involved. Ancient maps marking unknown seas
with illustrations of monsters prime us. The Old Norse myth of the Kraken, a gigantic and

18
deadly depth-dwelling monster primes us. In fact, there are stories supporting the idea that the
deep sea contains dangerous monsters in the literature of nearly every sea-faring culture. The
Timingila, for example, whose name translates in Sanskrit to “swallow whale,” is a leviathan-like
figure in Hindu mythology and one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean.13
And mixed in with this terrifying anticipation of death is always the possibility of treasure. That
mixture of terror and pleasure, to borrow from Edmund Burke’s definition, is known in a
literary sense as the sublime—and the Bronzes themselves give the sea floor the epithet of
“oozy sublime” in Merrill’s poem. The Bronzes are their own sort of treasure. The Wall Street
Journal ran an article about them in 1993 titled “Rusty Gifts from the Sea.” One theory (roundly
debunked) of how the Bronzes arrived in the sea proposes that they must have been found
elsewhere and deliberately hidden, in anticipation of an illegal sale—because how else do we
account for them being found so close to shore, in such shallow water, so neatly placed next to
one another? Whether or not it is true, that such a theory has even been hatched underscores
a tendency towards treasure-seeking on the seafloor.
In Merrill’s poem, the Bronzes give their own version of the story that tells how they ended up
in the ocean. Historians believe they were jettisoned from a ship that was in trouble—probably
in a storm—while being transported. The Bronzes reclaim some agency in this narrative in
Merrill’s poem, stating “We […] knew best how to throw around weight / And go overboard.
Thus we arrived / At the couch of the green-bearded ancient.” In this version of the story, the
Bronzes chose to go into the sea, citing both the assets of their intelligence and strength. And

19
how marvelously succinct the story is, as they settle in on the sea floor, “[a]t the couch of the
green-bearded ancient,” for the next two thousand years. I love thinking about what it means
to arrive at the couch. Do they imagine themselves to be couch-surfers? Planning just for a
night or two before they might move on but instead ended up staying thousands of years? Or is
the green-bearded ancient their psychoanalyst and they’ve arrived at the good doctor’s divan
to confess their childhood trauma? The lines that follow suggest that their time in the sea was
not necessarily pleasant, stating:
We […] suffer the centuries’ limpet
Accretions unwelcome as love
From a weakling, cold lessons imparted
Through waves of revulsion, yet taken
How deeply to heart! From their oozy
Sublime we have risen.
Here the Bronzes describe a static, somewhat unremarkable tenure in the sea—one where
their stillness turns them to reef-like objects as they accumulate limpets (a marine mollusk that
clings to rocks). The explicitly negative experience is cued by words like “unwelcome” and
“revulsion.” These are the only lines that describe those two thousand years—there is no
narrative, no nuance, no detail to these millennia. Just the indication that they suffered. The
reader must infer from this that those two thousand years, yadda yadda yadda, were all the
same. The concision of description of the time period collapses it, and also proportionally
designates emphasis on the events that earn more description in the poem—like what happens
next.

20
—they are exhumed: “From their oozy / Sublime we have risen.” This image is what excites me
so much about the poster in Reggio-Calabria reading Stiamo Tornando—we are returning, we
are coming back. The poster was referring to the return of the Bronzes to the region after some
lengthy restoration work, but it also captures the big subject of the Riace Bronzes, what makes
them important—their return to terrestrial life after two thousand years in the sea. Stiamo
tornando. We are coming back. If these statues had made it to wherever they were headed and
avoided being melted down and made into something else, and had survived a total of 2500
years—they would be special. But they would not be what they are today. They would not be
the occasion of Merrill’s poem. They would not be magical, spell-binding, miraculous. They
could not offer some reverse periscope into the sea. They could not offer a seat for us all at the
couch of the green-bearded ancient. But because they were once of the sea, now always of the
sea—they are inextricably linked with the oozy sublime from which they have risen.

21
1 Merrill, James. “Bronze,” Collected Poems. Edited by JD McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. New York: Knopf, 2001.
p.449.
2 Walker, Rob. The Art of No3cing. New York: Knopf, 2019. p.31. 3 Sosno, Sasha. Bronzi di Riace. 2006. Steel cut-out sculpture. Museo all’aperto BiloQ, Cosenza. 4 Shirey, David. “Italy Celebrates Two Greek Bronzes.” New York Times, 10 October 1982, p. 286, 288. 5 Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: a Study in Compara3ve Religion. Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1891. p.19B. 6 Griffiths, Rachel Eliza. “Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees.” American Academy of Poets. 11 April 2019.
h]ps://poets.org/poem/elegy-surrounded-seven-trees. Accessed 20 April 2019. 7 Oleson, John Peter. “A Possible Physiological Basis for the Term Urinator, ‘Diver.’” The American Journal of
Philology, vol. 97, no. 1, 1976, pp. 22–29. JSTOR, h]ps://doi.org/10.2307/294109. Accessed 4 Apr. 2023. 8 Jakobsen, Roman. Fundamentals of Language. Mouton & Co., 1956. p.69. 9 Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Act I, scene 2, lines 395-400. Edited by Frederick S. Boas. Boston: D.C. Heath
& Co, 1911.
10 Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. p.174. 11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. New York: Leavi], Lord & Co., 1834. p.36. 12 Shakespeare, William. Richard III. Act I, scene 4, lines 22-34. Edited by Barbara Mowat. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996. 13 "Ramayana." Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Jan. 2024, h]ps://www.britannica.com/topic/Ramayana-Indian-epic.
Accessed 4 January 2024.

22
Chapter 2 | Neither Far Out Nor In Deep: Annota6ons on Ocean Waves
“I didn’t see a huge wave coming,” Claude Monet wrote to his future wife Alice Hoschedè in
November 1885, recounDng an experience he had of painDng en plein air at the cliffs of Ètretat
on the Normandy coast. He was trying to paint the Manneport, a natural arch that stands as the
beach’s defining geographical feature. Mistakingly thinking that the Dde was going out instead
of in, and evidently well-absorbed by his work, painDng, Monet was thrown by a large wave
against the cliffs and then dragged into the sea, along with his canvas and supplies. “My
immediate thought was that I was done for,” he wrote, “My boots, my thick stockings and my
coat were soaked through; the paleOe which I had kept a grip on had been knocked over my
face and my beard was covered in blue, yellow etc.” He concludes the leOer on a fearful note:
“To think I might never have seen you again.”i
Monet menDons in his leOer that, despite losing his painDng, easel, paints, brushes, and nearly
his life—he plans to go out to remake the painDng. And Waves at the Manneporte (1885) must
have followed. True to its Dtle, waves are the subject of the painDng—the headland of the
Manneport arch is cropped from the composiDon. The water clashing against the stone—
depicted in Monet’s signature impressionisDc style—are highlighted with strokes of bright gold
and contrast with the choppy blue waves.ii In his leOer, Monet affecDonately refers to the sea as
an “old hag.”

23
In 2011, I visited the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon Coast with a poet friend of mine named
Fox—I was keeping him company on a road trip from SeaOle to Los Angeles. The hotel was on
Fox’s list because it was a literary hotel, each room themed with a different writer. We checked
into the Gertrude Stein, which was decorated a_er her line “a rose is a rose is a rose.” A rose
duvet, rose wallpaper, a rose-shaped doorknob. The room was small. I remember there was a
sink in the room that you could use si`ng on the bed. A_er checking in, we headed down to
see the beach. The hotel’s owner warned us to be extremely careful, as a guest at the hotel had
died the week prior when a wave had claimed him on a similar walk upon checking in to the
hotel. I recall realizing I had not taken her seriously enough when the water stole one of my red
waterproof ballet slippers as I walked along a part of the beach I thought for sure would stay
dry. The water came so quickly I couldn’t get out of it, and as Fox yelled to me (at me?), I ran
further inland and le_ a shoe behind. I waited for a while, thinking the sea might spit the shoe
back out, but it did not. I threw the other in the trash and we did not walk on the beach again.
We did, however, become enamored with the hotel. We stayed an unplanned extra night and
switched to the Tennessee Williams room, marked with a doorplate reading STELL-A, and
somehow talked the hotel owner into comping our room in exchange for a contribuDon to her
décor. She was looking to change the Edgar Allan Poe room—which no one booked because it
was too frightening—to the Jane Austen room. I suggested we could make some Victorian-style
silhoueOe portraits for the room in exchange for a night in the double beds that looked like
streetcars in the Williams room, and she agreed. We went into town and bought flashlights and

24
black posterboard and Xact-o knives and I traced the silhoueOe of Fox’s profile onto a
posterboard and he traced mine and we cut them out before dinner.
That night, the hotel owner served mulled wine in the a`c, a sort of library si`ng room which
was not themed a_er a parDcular author save from a locked side room that was labeled with a
handwriOen sign reading: THOMAS PYNCHON – NO ACCESS. I sat with a copy of Moby-Dick I’d
inherited from my aunt, which was annotated with her impressions from her undergraduate
study of the text. On one of the book’s blank back pages, she had begun a list of phrases
Melville uses to describe waves, which I picked up and present in compleDon here:
all God’s sun-lit waves
the cold malicious waves
the warm waves
the sharper waves
the dark waves
the leaping waves
the swi_ madness and gladness of the demoniac waves
the salted wave
the slippered waves
the exulDng wave
a large rolling wave
a headlong wave
[the] riotous waves
the blue waves
the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves
the ever-rolling waves
the so_ waves
[the] high rolling waves
the midnight waves
[the] confluent waves
the torn, enraged waves
the head-beat waves hammered and hammered
a combing wave

25
And of course there are many other moments where waves are menDoned but without epithet.
One of my favorites, and one of the last in the novel, comes from Ahab directly addressing the
sea: “Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uOermost heads drive them in!” he cries
arrogantly, “[Y]e but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine: –and
hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”iii Ahab is referencing the prophecy delivered to him by Fedallah
the one-toothed harpooner, in which Ahab has been assured he will never be in a coffin or
hearse and that he will meet his death by hemp (via the gallows, Ahab assumes). In his
characterisDc overly confident way, Ahab taunts the ocean. Through repeDDon, he speaks the
language of the waves, pounding the word “drive” three Dmes. He’s making a comparison
between the repeDDve moDon of a hammer on nails and the repeDDve moDon of waves against
a ship, and simultaneously replicates the noise.
Rachel Carson notes in The Sea Around Us, “[T]he one essenDal quality of a wave is that it
moves.”iv So then it follows that the one essenDal quality of the literary evocaDons of waves is
that they must conjure movement. Many poets and writers do this with repeDDon—Tennyson
Dtled an elegy that uses the sea as conceit for grief: “Break, Break, Break.” In Whitman’s “As I
Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” he writes: “the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and
closer.”v And looking east from Montauk, Whitman wrote later in Leaves of Grass the charge he
felt from “the wild unrest […] that inbound urge and urge of waves, / Seeking the shores
forever.”vi

26
InteresDng to note that someDmes it is the verb that describes the wave that is repeated (e.g.
“break” or “drive” or “urge”), and someDmes it is the noun of the wave that is repeated. For
example, in Paradise Lost, Book VII, Milton writes, “Wave rolling a_er wave, where way they
found,”vii and the noun of ‘wave’ is given two iteraDons to enact repeDDon and then picked up
homophonically in the word ‘way,’ to demonstrate the capacity of waves to repeat with
variaDon. In both methods, the animaDon of waves through word repeDDon means they
become duplicated—evoked on the page, embodied in the speaker when read aloud.
Many writers take care to stress that the breaking of waves is interminable. A late chapter of
Moby-Dick opens with the line: “The rolling waves and days went by.”viii Here, Melville assigns
equal grammaDcal weight to the movement of waves and the passage of Dme and in doing so
presents them as interchangeable. Baudelaire defines waves as an “endlessly unrolling surge.”ix
The liminal space where sea meets land and the waves interminably break someDmes invites
the imagery of the geologic Dmescale. In The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson calls the coastal
interDdal zone, “the place of our dim, ancestral beginnings.”x This calls to mind the image of the
evoluDon of man (the first iteraDon was called “The March of Progress” and was published by
Life Nature Library in 1965) that shows a sequence of figures walking as if in a line, the
evoluDonary forebears of primates giving way to the final figure of modern man. Riffs on this
image extend the beginning of the line into the sea, and show a fish following a salamander
which follows a vaguely defined quadraped which follows an ape which follows a few other

27
iteraDons unDl the human figure heads up the line. The visual sentence presented is that we
were of the sea unDl we evolved the ability to walk out of it.
Aimee Bender’s short story “The Rememberer”xi considers this logic via inversion. The story
follows a woman, Annie, whose lover is “experiencing reverse evoluDon.” She keeps the lover,
Ben, in a pan of sea water, having rapidly undergone transformaDon: "one day he was my lover
and the next he was some kind of ape. It's been a month, and now he's a sea turtle.” Annie
anDcipates his eventual metamorphosis into a unicellular being: “I cannot bear to look down
into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the Dny waves with a microscope lens
and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, bloated and blind, brainless, benign, heading
clear and small, like an eye-floater into nothingness.” And Ben does not actually make this full
transformaDon within the boundary of the story because Annie releases him when he is at the
evoluDonary stage of a salamander:
I put him in the passenger seat of the car, and drive him to the beach. Walking down the
sand, I nod at people on towels, laying their bodies out to the sun and wishing. At the
water's edge, I stoop down and place the whole pan on the Dp of a baby wave. It floats
well, a cooking boat, for someone to find washed up on shore and to make cookies in.
It is a wave that becomes the actor in this moment—taking Ben the salamander out to sea, out
to his desDny, away from the human world, from his marriage, from Annie. Annie trusts that the
wave will take Ben out to sea and return the container to someone on land who needs it “to
make cookies in.”

28
Perhaps what accounts for waves being such an enduring moDf in literature is the flexibility they
offer. At once, the sea at the site of breaking waves can be that evoluDonary stage and also the
mortal stage. The novel LiMle Women culminates with a death that is described in this very
theater. “As Beth had hoped, the ‘Dde went out easily.’”xii Waves are seen alternately and
someDmes simultaneously as the mortal and the eternal.
The precise locaDon of the beach where waves are finishing is a sustained locaDon for the
occasion of a poem. Not the beach as seen from distance, or the sea as seen from a boat. In
Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” the poet describes the common experience of
looking out at the waves on a beach. He points out, first of all, that “people along the sand / All
turn and look one way,” emphasizing the way in which the breaking waves of the sea sort of
organize and physically orient human beings—we typically face the waves to watch them. We
don’t stand with our backs to the waves and listen. We listen and watch. “They look at the sea
all day,” he writes.xiii So what is it that fascinates us about looking at breaking waves on the
shore? It is a repeDDve moDon, and one that does not change much, nor reveal much. As Frost
writes, those looking at waves as we all compulsively do: “They cannot look out far. / They
cannot look in deep. / But when was that ever a bar / To any watch they keep?” Marianne
Moore seemingly picks up this idea in her poem “A Grave,” wriDng “it is a human nature to
stand in the middle of a thing, / but you cannot stand in the middle of this.”xiv Which is to say,
one of the features of the human experience with waves is one of liminality—to be within the
border of sea and land and specifically to not be wholly in the sea or wholly on the land. To

29
perhaps, as I did once, have one shoe sDll on the foot and one in the water and of the sea
forever.
In the book Blue Mind, marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols explores the scienDfic link between
human engagement with the sea and feelings of physiological and psychological well-being.
In an interview about his blue mind theory, Nichols describes the state of involuntary aOenDon
that being on the shore can create: “The background we see is fairly controlled, which allows
part of the brain to relax. Against that consistent background, the brain conDnues to search for
something that wasn’t there before, since the essence of survival is the correct interpretaDon of
things that don’t fit in the landscape. Because bodies of water change and stay the same
simultaneously, we experience both soothing familiarity and sDmulaDng novelty.”xv
Upon checking out of the Sylvia Beach Hotel, I bought something in the gi_ shop: a liOle figurine
of Herman Melville. Melville’s head could be li_ed off his body to reveal a small cavity within his
chest, which was painted white and presented a small three-dimensional white sperm whale, as
if he’d swallowed one, a liOle capsule, a sort of reversal of the story of Jonah. Or perhaps a nod
to the one-armed Moby-Dick adversary that Ahab meets, Captain Boomer, who explains why,
a_er losing an arm, he will not pursue the white whale: “I’m thinking Moby-Dick doesn’t bite so
much as he swallows.”xvi A few days later, Fox and I reached his new home of Los Angeles. One
of our first stops was Venice Beach, to close a sort of cosmic loop we’d opened earlier in the
summer when we’d traveled to Venice, Italy, a_er teaching a creaDve wriDng class together in
Rome. Venice-to-Venice, to us, seemed like something we had to do.

30
Venice, California, is named a_er its Italian counterpart due to the sixteen miles of canals dug at
the town’s incepDon by a man named Abbot Kinney who wanted to create an homage to the
enchanDng “Queen of the AdriaDc.” Many of the canals were converted into streets during the
boom of LA car culture in the 1920s, and now six waterways remain.xvii The waterways feature
arched bridges that are reminiscent of Venice, Italy, while simultaneously achieving a more
suburban, natural vibe—not, as Shelley writes in “Lines WriOen Among the Euganean Hills,” a
“peopled labyrinth of walls,”xviii or as Samuel Rogers wrote in Italy: A Poem, a place where “the
salt sea-weed / Clings to the marble of her palaces.”xix In the end, there’s not much to these
canals—they achieve their Italian reference without substanDal commentary. So Fox and I took
them in for a few minutes and then made our way to the beach.
The word “susurraDon” means to speak so_ly or murmur, coming from the LaDn susurrare,
which means to whisper.xx Though not in the definiDon of the word, the context is always the
natural world—as in the susurraDon of leaves, the susurraDon of waves lashing the shore. When
Fox and I traversed the wide yellow-white beach to get our toes wet with the Pacific, the waves
did not susurrate. They crashed. They boomed. They thundered. So many of the verbs that
describe what a wave can do are also a descripDon of sound. ScienDsts most commonly classify
waves based on the length of the wave period, or how far apart the crests of the waves
measure. They also consider the depth and frequency of the waves.xxi Surfers care about the
strength and shape of the waves, as well as whether they break just before or at the shore.

31
There are spilling waves (also known as mushy waves), plunging waves, surging waves,
collapsing waves, Ddal waves, Tsunamis, inshore waves, internal waves, Kelvin waves,
progressive waves, ultragravity waves, sleeper waves, slipper waves, capillary waves, refracted
waves, seiche waves, gravity waves, deep water waves, storm surges, swells.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote ecstaDc passages while watching waves in his journals
in 1872:
I was looking at high waves. The breakers always are parallel to the coast and shape
themselves to it except where the curve is sharp wherever the wind blows. They are
rolled out by the shallowing shore just as a piece of puOy between the palms whatever
its shape runs into a long roll. The slant ruck or crease one sees in them show the way of
the wind. The regularity of the barrels surprised and charmed the eye; the edge behind
the comb or crest was as smooth and bright as glass. It may be noDced to be green
behind and silver and white in front: the silver marks where the air begins, the pure
white is foam, the green/solid water. Then looked at to the right or le_ they are scrolled
over like mouldboards or feathers or jibsails seen by the edge. It is preOy to see the
hollow of the barrel disappearing as the white combs on each side run along the wave
gaining ground Dll the two meet at a pitch and crush and overlap each other.xxii
Hopkins would fit right in with the surfers on Venice Pier who sip coffee from The Cow’s End and
chat about the surf forecast. They note the height of the waves. The direcDon of the swell
(“parallel to the coast and shape themselves to it”). The shape (“[t]hey are rolled out by the
shallowing shore just as a piece of puOy between the palms”). The “regularity of the barrels.”
Hopkins would say, “[T]he edge behind the comb […is] as smooth and bright as glass,” and a guy
named Glen Walsh beOer known as Glenice Venice would scratch under his shirt and say, “Sure
is.”

32
Around the Dme that I moved to Los Angeles, a friend of mine named Sam, who surfs the
Breakwater just north of Venice Pier most mornings, and who gets his forecast from Glenice
Venice, introduced me to the term “mind surfing.” It’s a sort of close-reading of a wave. A surfer
who is on the beach watches a wave pick its moment, and then mentally projects himself onto
the barrel and follows it in real Dme, as if surfing, unDl the wave turns out into the foam. He
says everyone who surfs does this when they see a wave breaking, they mind surf. I propose
that Hopkins may have been the first to mind surf. Another passage from his journal a year
later:
We rose at four, when it was stormy and I saw dun-colored waves leaving trailing hoods
of white breaking on the beach. Before going I took a last look at the breakers, wanDng
to make out how the comb is morselled so fine into string and tassel, as I have lately
noDced it to be. I saw big smooth flinty waves, carved and scuppled in shallow grooves,
much swelling when the wind freshened, burst on the rocky spurs of the cliff at the liOle
cove and break into bushes of foam.xxiii
In the same way that other writers use repeDDon to evoke the moDon and sound of waves—
“Break, Break, Break,”—here Hopkins also makes language material. Read aloud, these words
have texture, and the paOerns made by the sheer variety of consonant sounds are loud and
sDcky in the mouth. But the effect of a phrase like “[b]ig smooth flinty waves, carved and
scuppled in shallow grooves” isn’t to onomatopoeDcally represent the sound of the waves. Its
effect is to slow down the sentence with sound and dicDon in order to match the pace of the
descripDon to the pace of the wave’s movement—to mind surf.
Vija Celmins, while studying art at UCLA in the 1960s, would walk her Alaskan malamute in the
evenings to the Venice pier. She began taking photographs of the surface of the ocean as seen

33
from the pier, and drew from these images in a process she said was “re-describing the
photograph.” Celmins’ skill is of such precise representaDon that it is hard to train the eye to
see it as a drawing and not a print.xxiv
The surface of the water Celmins represents is not populated by the big charismaDc breakers
that a surfer’s eye could get lost in—but an even smaOering of texture along the surface of the
water, a sort of miscellaneous chop, no singular crest or arch prioriDzed.
“I was going to make a film about it, but I didn’t do that,” she explained to art criDc Calvin
Tomkins in 2019. “I’d made a few films, and they weren’t very good. What I wanted was to pick
an image that just described a surface, and to document that image—place it out there, without
any feeling. Of course, that’s impossible, unless you’re Duchamp. I wanted to remove myself
and leave something, a sensibility.”
The verbs “describe” and “document” and “place” so carefully align with Celmins’ stated
intenDon to represent the sea “without any feeling.” At the same Dme the energy of their
restraint reveals the ulDmate impossibility of such a goal. Tomkins notes a passage he found in
Celmins’ journal in 2013: “The first look at a wave should (maybe) (if only for a moment) be
reminiscent of being in love—a feeling of Oh—of surprise, or senses waking up.”
A_er all, there is no way to capture a wave—not literally, and not in image, in wriDng, in sound,
in the mind—without it passing through you.

34
i “Monet’s Le+ers: Waves at the Manneport.” Sea$le Art Museum, 25 Aug. 2021,
h+ps://samblog.sea+leartmuseum.org/2021/08/monet-le+ers-waves-manneport/. ii Monet, Claude. Waves at the Manneporte. Circa 1885, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. iii Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1851, p. 627. iv Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. New York, Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 112. v Whitman, Walt. “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” Leaves of Grass (1891-92). Whitman: Poetry and Prose, Library
of America, 1996, p. 395. vi Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass (1891-92). Whitman: Poetry and Prose, Library of America, 1996, p. 613. vii Milton, John. SelecFons from Paradise Lost. “Book VII,” line 298. Edited by Albert Perry Walker, Boston, D.C.
Heath & Co, 1897, p. 216. viii Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1851, p.594. ix Baudelaire, Charles. “Man and the Sea,” trans. Richard Howard. Poems of the Sea. Edited by J.D. McClatchy,
Everyman’s Library, 2001. x Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956, p. vii. xi Bender, Aimee. “The Rememberer.” The Missouri Review. September 1997.
h+ps://missourireview.com/ardcle/the-rememberer/. Accessed 14 May 2020. xii Alco+, Louisa May. Li$le Women. Boston, Li+le, Brown & Co., 1916, p. 456. xiii Frost, Robert. “Neither Far Out Nor In Deep.” Poems of the Sea. Edited by J.D. McClatchy, Everyman’s Library,
2001.
xiv Moore, Marianne. “A Grave.” Poems of the Sea. Edited by J.D. McClatchy, Everyman’s Library, 2001. xv “Wakatobi and the Blue Mind.” Wakatobi Flow, 25 Nov. 2023, h+ps://blog.wakatobi.com/wakatobi-and-the-bluemind/. Accessed 4 March 2024. xvi Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1851. Page 491. xvii History of abbo+ kinney & venice xviii Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Lines Wri+en Among the Euganean Hills.” Poetry Foundadon.
h+ps://www.poetryfoundadon.org/poems/45127/lines-wri+en-among-the-euganean-hills. Accessed 3 January
2024.
xix Rogers, Samuel. “Venice,” Italy: A Poem. Paris, Baudry’s European Library, 1840, p. 49.” xx “Susurradon.” Online Etymology DicFonary, Douglas Parker,
h+ps://www.etymonline.com/word/susurradon#etymonline_v_22441. Accessed 3 January 2024. xxi Toffoli, A. and Bitner-Gregersen, E.M. “Types of Ocean Surface Waves, Wave Classificadon.” Encyclopedia of
MariFme and Offshore Engineering. Edited by J. Carlton, P. Jukes and Y.S. Choo. 6 March 2017
h+ps://doi.org/10.1002/9781118476406.emoe077. xxii Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Aug 10: Journal (1872).” The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford
University Press, 1959, p. 223. xxiii Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Aug 16: Journal (1873).” The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford
University Press, 1959, p. 235. xxiv Tomkins, Calvin. “Surface Ma+ers.” The New Yorker, 2 Sept 2019. 18-24.

35
Chapter 3 | The Poe.cs of Marine Taxonomy
The mornings at my house are punctuated by my one-year-old, Archie, calling out to the dogs
he sees passing by our dining room window. We have a nice patch of grass to pee in, so we get a
lot of traffic. He woofs soAly at masBffs and labradors, shih tzus and beagles. Poodles and
shepherds and pugs and huskies all alike. He is an amateur taxonomist in this way—because
even with his limited lexicon, he knows the category of “dog.” He does not bark at birds or cats.
Humans are paKern-seekers by nature1. Our ability to categorize is the skill that gives way to
reasoning, language, imaginaBon, memory, and magical thinking. Hamlet invites Ophelia’s
father Polonius to engage this neocorBcal impulse while looking at the sky:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th’mass, and ‘Bs like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.2
The experience of looking at clouds and making something of them is common enough that it
has a name: pareidolia, or making meaning in shapes where there isn’t one. Examples of
pareidolia include seeing two eyes and a mouth in the holes of an electrical outlet, seeing the
Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, or—like Hamlet—seeing a camel in a cloud (and then a weasel,
and then a whale).

36
Hamlet and Polonius’ conversaBon can be taken a couple of ways. In the context of the play,
Polonius is revealing that he’s willing to go along with whatever Hamlet says, placaBng the
alleged madman. Another way to look at this exchange, though, is to observe the invitaBon,
which is an inquiry into human connecBon: do you see what I see? Pushing the explicaBon
further, this exchange also experiments with how language can frame percepBon. A weasel and
a whale are indeed “backed like” one another, in that they both have backbones. The camel too,
for that maKer. In the Linnean classificaBon system, they are all found in the same phylum,
“chordata,” (from the Greek root chord- meaning “string”) in which all members of the category
possess a rod-like structure supporBng the shape of the animal’s body at some point in their life
cycle. However, though these animals all share a scienBfic category, they don’t make similar
enough shapes to suggest that they are interchangeable in outline. And yet, as proposed here,
you can see it. I do. I see the shape of a cloud moving and morphing quickly, where one side of
the shape—an arc or line across the top—stays stable so that it at first looks like the long body
of a weasel and then maybe picks up some girth as the winds change or the end of it pinches
together to form a fin.
As a poet, pareidolia is a big part of what I do. Rae Armantrout’s poem “Upper World” describes
how language acts to order and compare our experiences: “PaKern recogniBon / was our first
response // to loneliness. // Here and there were like // one place.”3 Language is the medium
for such comparisons. In a lecture in New York in 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that the
act of connecBng percepBon to language is the poet’s job, that the poet “re-aKaches things to

37
nature and the Whole” by arBculaBng or naming things.4 This could also serve as a definiBon of
taxonomy, and is precisely where poetry and science overlap.
Emerson’s descripBon of how the poet goes about “naming things someBmes aAer their
appearance, someBmes aAer their essence” is remarkably similar to the project of biological
classificaBon via binomial nomenclature, wherein organisms are organized by traits into a
hierarchical order and given a two-word name referring to their genus and species. In the
chapter of Moby-Dick named aAer the biological study of whales, “Cetology,” Ishmael makes fun
of the system even as he engages it, calling it “repellingly intricate” and full of “endless
subdivisions.”5 The scienBfic name of the novel’s whale-in-quesBon, the sperm whale, is
Physeter macrocephalus (or, according to Ishmael: “Macrocephalus of the big words”).
One of the pleasures of bringing my poeBc interests to a discussion of science is that I find the
process of unpacking the taxonomy of a biological organism to render the same sort of joy and
discovery that I find in the process of explicaBng a poem. I will demonstrate by unpacking the
taxonomic layers of Physeter macrocephalus. The hierarchy of the taxa is: Kingdom, Phylum,
Class, Order, Genus, Species (or: King Philip Came Over for Good Soup). StarBng with kingdom
(since “domain” was not yet an established taxonomic rank when the organism was named), the
sperm whale is classified in the kingdom Animalia, coming from the Greek root of anima, which
originally simply meant “soul.” Taken up later in LaBn, animalis meant “having a soul” as well as
“having breath,” and with a few excepBons everything in the kingdom uses oxygen. Narrowed
further, the organism belongs in the phylum Chordata, the root there being chord, referring to

38
the spine. So all organisms in the phylum Chordata have a flexible rod supporBng their dorsal or
backsides, and in most cases this is a vertebral spine. Within the realm of chordates, this
organism is further specified in the class Mammalia, which is related to the word “mammaries,”
and refers to a physical feature that applies to females of the class. All organisms in the class are
sustained by milk from mammaries in early life.
The roots of all these words have metonymic roots. Metonymy is a type of figuraBve language
that subsBtutes the name of a thing with an aKribute or part of the thing. To illustrate—when a
captain is asked to report how many souls are on board a ship, they are invoking metonymy.
When a captain barks: All hands on deck!, they are invoking metonymy. In both cases, the
names use just a part of a person—the soul or the hand—to represent the whole. In each case,
the metonymic detail that is chosen to stand in for the whole is selected based on context. If a
captain is being asked how many souls are on board, it is usually an emergency, when the life of
passengers and crew members are in quesBon. If a captain is asking for hands, it’s because they
need help that literal hands can offer: someone to load cargo, someone to clean a slick spot,
someone to work the anchor.
Metonymy is at work when the name of the thing can be replaced by an aKribute or part of the
thing. For Animalia, everything under this umbrella is named aAer their breath. Breathers.
Chordata, these things have spines. Mammalia, these things are fed milk from their mothers.
Milk-eaters. Note that the members of these groups are not idenBfied exclusively by the
singular characterisBcs that their names gesture to. For example, animals in the mammalian

39
class also have sweat glands, four-chambered hearts, and hair or fur, to name a few of the
characterisBcs in a complex matrix of aKributes that classify them in the category.
And names within taxonomic classificaBon use metaphor too. Following Mammalia, our
organism-in-quesBon, our sperm whale, is in the order of whales, which is Cetacea. This word
comes from the Greek kētos, meaning “sea monster.” So this category describes what it contains
in a different way, giving us a whole organism to consider, rather than just a feature.
The family Physeteridae and genus Physeter return to the paKern of metonymic naming, as the
ancient Greek root phuseter meant “blowpipe.” Now we’re down to the most specific category
(and note that this is where the word specific comes from–the species epithet in binomial
nomenclature), and the species name for a sperm whale is macrocephalus. “Macro-” meaning
“big” and “cephalus” meaning head (both from LaBn). Old big-head. Sounds almost like it could
be a playground insult.
Taken all together, the explicaBon adds up to something like a suspect composite sketch–the
metonyms building like clues: the organism has breath, a supported back, feeds on milk. Then
we get the shape of the whole thing, a whale or sea-monster, before we place the blowhole.
And then, finally, we are leA looking straight at its big fat head.
The macrocephalus of a Physeter macrocephalus is indeed notably large. According to Jacques
Cousteau its “monstrous head [is] 20 feet long, 10 feet high, and seven feet across... At 20

40
pounds, the spherical brain is not only proporBonally much larger than that of baleen whales,
but the largest of any creature that has ever lived."6
SporBng the Biggest Head Ever superlaBve, sperm whales are inevitably suited to an
interpretaBon as intelligent. Coupled with their capacity to dive as deep as 10,000 feet, the
animal is oAen associated with wisdom. “‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muKered
Ahab… ‘Speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has
dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the
earth’s foundaBons.’”7 Here we see the same metonym at work in the species name,
macrocephalus, at work as an actual name for the creature when Ahab addresses Moby-Dick as
if ‘mighty head’ is his name.
Even the organism’s common name, the sperm whale, engages a metonymic paKern. The whale
is named for its spermaceB, a waxy substance that funcBons in the whale’s body to focus
acousBc signals and assist in the regulaBon of buoyancy. Hundreds of gallons of spermaceB may
be harvested from a single animal. During the heyday of the whaling industry, spermaceB was
sold for use in oil lamps, lubricants, and candles. I can’t help but wonder to what extent the
naming of this organism supports or guides human engagement with it. If the sperm whale had
been named aAer the shape of its head (like “blockhead whale”) instead of aAer its biological
contents, would the spermaceB industry have formed around it in the same way? InteresBng to
ask, maybe, but difficult to invesBgate. Such a name change would, however, have eliminated
the rumor that sperm whales are named aAer the extraordinary amount of semen they produce

41
from their extraordinarily large penises. Which isn’t a bad guess—a sperm whale’s penis can be
up to 13 feet long and weigh up to 800 pounds. I haven’t got the heart (the guts?) to look up
how much semen they produce, but I’m sure it’s a lot. Another common misconcepBon about
the etymology of “sperm whale” is that the organism is named aAer the resemblance it has in
shape to a sperm cell. No doubt these readings are seemingly reinforced by the most famous
sperm whale we all know, Melville’s Moby-Dick, having the word “dick” in his name.
Common names for organisms reflect the culture in which they are coined. The contemporary
confusion about the referent in the name “sperm whale” is certainly in large part due to the fact
that spermaceB is no longer used since commercial whaling became illegal. Observe how
metonymy works as I trace this history: Physeter macrocephalus became commonly known as
“sperm whale” at a Bme when spermaceB was a valuable material. HunBng sperm whales at the
commercial level became illegal in 1986.8 As the spermaceB ran out and became replaced with
kerosene and other energy sources, the name “sperm whale” was draining of something too.
Nearly forty years later, we’ve filled in the associaBons of “sperm” with what has meaning to us
now (semen and dick jokes).
Now that I’ve demonstrated just how much I can wring out of a close reading of the name of a
single whale, it won’t be surprising to read I’ve spent a lot of Bme poring over various field
guides to marine organisms. In doing so, I’ve created categories (as is my human, paKernseeking way) for the naming convenBons of the common names of marine organisms. The four

42
most prevalent categories are: eponyms, geographical names, descripBve names, and figuraBve
names.
Eponyms are organisms named aAer a person and are linked possessively, like Steller’s sea lion,
Joubin’s octopus, Agassiz’s sea cucumber, or Nuvng’s sponge. Eponyms are also found in
binomial nomenclature to remember researchers involved in their naming, but also for more
diverse reasons–as honorary/elegaic designaBons (like the fossil hermit crab
Mesoparapylocheles michaeljacksoni, named by Fraaije et al. because it was discovered on the
same day that the researchers learned of Michael Jackson’s death9) and by some link of likeness
(like the Eocene crab Gaudipluma, named by Artal et al. because its carapace resembles the
characterisBc architectural style of Catalan designer Antoní Gaudí).10 In his memoirs, the Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda wrote, “[t]he loveliest things I ever collected were my seashells [...]
Thousands of Bny undersea doors opened for me to dip into.” Neruda loved the sea and had
three homes on beaches.
11 A bivalve discovered at the seashore of El Quisco in 2014 was named
Austrogena nerudai in his honor by Krylova et al.12 Neruda was known to be afraid of the sea
while simultaneously entranced by it, and called himself an “armchair sailor.” I like to think he
would have parBcularly enjoyed having this type of organism named aAer him because they
dwell interBdally (rather than having a deep sea creature named for him, for example).
Geographical names highlight the locaBon of the organism’s habitat–giant Pacific octopus,
common AtlanBc octopus, California rock lobster, Spanish lobster, West Indies spiny lobster–and

43
tend to indicate in such a disBncBon that many species variaBons of the organism exist among
the world’s oceans.
DescripBve names and figuraBve names take a liKle more explicaBon. I use the term
‘descripBve’ for names that invoke a straighyorward adjecBve to modify the type of organism in
a physical or behavioral way (e.g. the leathery anemone or the blue coral) and ‘figuraBve’ for
names that invoke metaphor/metonymy to illuminate a physical or behavioral characterisBc
(e.g. wine glass hydroid, brain coral, comb jelly). DescripBve names and figuraBve names both
seek to highlight disBncBve physical aKributes and/or notable behavioral aKributes. Here is a
sampling of organisms in each category.
Descrip/ve names Figura/ve names
Translucent chiton
Striped chiton
Marbled chiton*
Branching coral*
Pink-Bpped anemone
Threespot dascyllus
Green chromus
Longfin smelt
Prickleback*
Brightbelly sculpin
Sharpnose sculpin
Smoothhead sculpin
Lightbulb tunicate
Leaf barnacle
Sea star
Porcupine bryozoan
Jackknife clam
Staghorn coral
Organ pipe coral
Toadstool leather
Saddle carpet anemone
Feather boa kelp
Sweetlips
Double saddle buKerflyfish
*note that even seemingly straigh1orward adjec6ves may have figura6ve etymologies. “All language is fossil
poetry,” Emerson wrote.
DescripBve names use adjecBves that generally stay in the physical realm, using words like
“translucent” or “striped” or “marbled” to modify a chiton. By my esBmaBon, descripBve names

44
so regularly stay in the mode of physical descripBon that a descripBve name that refers to
behavior had the capacity to surprise me. For example, I was looking at a secBon of a Peterson
field guide to marine life on sponges: giant barrel sponge, branching tube sponge, boring
sponge, orange lumpy encrusBng sponge. I laughed, reading “boring” as an accusaBon, a
character flaw—a dreadfully dull and unremarkable sponge: a boring sponge. However, the
boring sponge is a bright yellow sponge that bores holes in its prey—not unremarkable in the
least.
FiguraBve names link an organism with an unrelated object through metaphor. For example, a
leaf barnacle has nothing biologically in common with a leaf. And yet the union of two unlike
things in these names does the poeBc work of proposing a thought experiment, an exchange,
an invitaBon to see one thing as the other and therefore learn or know something about it.
For example, the jackknife clam is a long, thin bivalve with a white and brown exterior and an
extremely sharp rim. The metaphor in its name is a proposal to see it as a jackknife, and the
organism is indeed about the size of a jackknife or pocketknife, which has a blade of about 5 cm
and is folded into a handle which was tradiBonally oAen brown and white in color due to it
being carved from a deer antler. The common name of the organism evokes relaBve size, shape,
and the essenBal characterisBc of sharpness. It is more effecBvely descripBve than some
alternate common names for the organism–razor clam (which gives sharpness but not shape or
size), or bamboo clam (which gives color and the long thin shape but not sharpness). And sBll,
because when “jackknife” is used metaphorically in other contexts, it is used to gesture to the

45
capacity of a jackknife to fold into itself (like a jackknife dive or a jackknife semitruck accident),
one sBll might assume something about the jackknife clam that isn’t meant by the metaphorical
name—because a jackknife clam doesn’t have that switchblade-like mechanism.
A metaphor is a proposal, an exchange, a version of the “do you see” quesBon that Hamlet asks.
In order to beKer understand how a metaphor might work in the name of a marine organism, I
will trace what a metaphor is capable of in a literary context. In the chapter of Moby-Dick Btled
“The Chase–Third Day,” Ishmael says:
“RetribuBon, swiA vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and in spite of all
that mortal man could do, the solid white buKress of his forehead smote the ship’s
starboard bow, Bl men and Bmbers reeled.”13
When we accept this proposal, we see how easily the ship is damaged by the whale. The two
parts of a metaphor are someBmes called tenor and vehicle, or alternately source and target14.
The metaphor works when we select relevant aKributes of the source and graA them onto the
target. So we think of the buKress and we think stone, constructed to last, sturdy, and we take
these aKributes and give them to the forehead of the whale at the moment he is buvng into
the ship. We see stone crashing into wood, angles into curves. I love how translucent that
applicaBon of a metaphor can be.
When a metaphor is really good, when the writer is very skilled, the vehicle or target is so
perfectly selected for the tenor or source that, when it’s applied, even more associaBons fall out
or come together. So here, when Melville selects the word “smote” as the verb for this acBon,
we get a sort of religious tone. And that brings out the associaBon we may have with buKresses
and cathedrals, which is where they are most prominently recognized and featured. And from

46
that relaBonship, we get the sense that the whale is working with some divine power or
strength. And that overwhelming sense of strength disrupts the power dynamic. The members
of the Pequod who’ve been hunBng Moby-Dick are now seen a liKle differently. Melville
develops the diminuBve sense of the seamen with the selecBon of the word “reeled”—men and
Bmbers reeled. Which describes what’s literally happening here as they are being physically
displaced. But also, the word “reel” is part of a fishing pole, and given just at this moment, we
can see the fishermen here as prey instead of hunters.
In the realm of naming organisms, the metaphorical act of subsBtuBon has the capacity for
descripBon and associaBon that is more efficient and ambiBous than what an adjecBve can
accomplish. It can also make an organism memorable. I remember my dad catching a fish from
the beach in Emerald Isle, North Carolina, when I was about 8 years old. It had black and white
stripes and really large, smooth chiclet-shaped teeth—teeth you wouldn’t expect to see in a
fish. He asked if I knew what kind of fish it was. I didn’t think that I did, but something in me
offered the word “sheepshead.” I looked at the black and white stripes and thought the
suggesBon coming from within made no sense—and based on the stripes I thought maybe I
should say “zebrafish.” But the something in me said “sheepshead” again, louder, and then I said
it aloud to my dad. He laughed, proud that I knew the name (no doubt he’d been the one to
introduce it to me, even though I couldn’t remember), and he carefully threw the fish back. The
name comes from the teeth—if you see one, you’d understand how uncannily it does look like a
sheep. This phenomenon of names welling up in me—which happens most oAen, for me, with

47
the names of plants—where I feel as though I’m not really remembering but listening to a
suggesBon, is effect of the magical memorability of a good name.
The sand dollar is a type of flat, burrowing sea urchin. Relevant to the quesBon of how naming
guides percepBon, I wonder if the metaphor here could be going exBnct. The comparison of this
round organism to a dollar is likely lost on a young beachcomber today, for whom it no longer
resembles a dollar. When it was given the common name of sand dollar, the Spanish dollar—a
silver coin that had a 40mm diameter—was in circulaBon. Nowadays if you asked people to
picture in their mind what they think of when you say “dollar,” they would more likely picture
the green paper dollar. Or perhaps there’s no image at all. In Derek WalcoK’s Omeros, an epic
poem with elements of Homer’s Iliad rendered in a contemporary St. Lucian context, the hero
Achille shows some kids a scar on his leg that looks like a sand dollar: “[H]e shows them a scar
made by a rusted anchor, / rolling one trouser-leg up with the rising moan // of a conch. It has
puckered like the corolla / of a sea-urchin. He does not explain its cure. / ‘It have some things’—
he smiles—‘worth more than a dollar.’”15 These lines and the pun within rely on the reader’s
associaBon of a dollar with a silver coin of monetary value and simultaneously on the reader’s
ability to picture the “puckered” underside of a sand dollar in order to see Achille’s scar. If the
reader doesn’t know the sand dollar, they will not see the scar or get the joke.
The sand dollar has a number of other common names that vary regionally. In South Africa, the
common name for this organism is a “pansy shell,” and the relaBonship being drawn here is to a
five-petalled flower. In regions where the sand dollar is actually a bit thicker than the ones seen

48
on the west coast of the United States, the common names are sand cakes, sea cookies,
snapper biscuits, cake urchins. Biscuit widdlies.
There is a paKern at work here—metaphor works to cast the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar,
and when it comes to the sea, we are likely to make comparisons that cast the unfamiliar
marine realm in terms of the more familiar terrestrial realm. But what makes certain
metaphorical comparisons resonate and last? Why would one culture see dollars where another
sees flowers? And what impact does the frame of the name have on the way humans regard the
organism? I imagine that naming something aAer money would make people more likely to
want to collect it, pick it up, keep it. But maybe not—pansy shells earned endangered status in
1973 aAer being overcollected by tourists in South Africa.
16
The emerging field of environmental linguisBcs studies the relaBonship between language and
the natural world. Scholars take up some of the types of quesBons I’m gesturing to—for
example, the scienBst Deng Palomares of the University of BriBsh Columbia notes that the Coast
Saanich people on Vancouver Island use different names for coho salmon to indicate various
stages of their life cycle. They are called “sináech” when swimming upstream and “k’wolexw”
aAer they’ve spawned, to disBnguish between the vital life stage in which they should not be
harvested and an acceptable Bme to fish them.17
I’m tempted in the direcBon of environmental linguisBcs but will aKempt to stay in my lane as a
poet and instead of guessing at the impact naming has on the environment, I instead will

49
evaluate the quality of metaphors that fall into the marine-terrestrial paKern. For example,
consider the possum shrimp. I can’t really make up my mind whether I think the possum shrimp
is a terribly clever metaphor or kind of off. Immediately it has charisma—the wildness of the
comparison is alluring, almost humorous, and certainly striking. In The Poet’s Tongue, W.H.
Auden invokes the definiBon of poetry as “memorable speech,”18 and I argue that “possum
shrimp” qualifies as memorable.
To understand it beKer, I’ll unpack the reference. The “possum” comparison refers to a brood
pouch in which embryos spend several weeks, evocaBve of the marsupial pouch of the possum.
I believe you couldn’t get away with calling this by another marsupial name. It’s not a wombat
shrimp. It’s not a kangaroo shrimp. But my associaBon between a kangaroo and its pouch are
actually so strong that I might be able to guess that this organism has a weird pouch situaBon if
it were named kangaroo shrimp (although then I would wonder if it hops, somehow). And in the
meanBme, my primary associaBon with the behavior of possums is their ability to play dead.
However, when you look at a possum shrimp, it kind of looks like a possum (and not at all like a
kangaroo). In its own, shrimpy sort of way—but sBll. And this is, finally, why I wallowed so long
in the explicaBon of figuraBve naming, because I think metaphor and metonymy are working
together here. The metonymic detail we are supposed to take from the possum is the pouch.
And even though I’m not sure it carries here, they are gevng away with it because the whole
organism looks like a possum. Recall Emerson’s phrase someHmes aIer their appearance,
someHmes aIer their essence. SomeBmes both.

50
In literature, a metaphor that fails is a bad wriBng. Robert Frost’s pithy definiBon of poetry is a
“momentary stay against confusion.” If a metaphor confuses rather than clarifies, it is not doing
its job. I’ve noBced over the course of my lifeBme an emphasis on changing the common name
“starfish” to “sea star,” alongside the logic that the echinoderm is not really a fish. Well, it’s not
really a star, either. However, “sea star” is clearer in terms of metaphor—the comparison is
more easily apprehended in this construcBon, it is a star of the sea. The clarity of the metaphor
relates to the operaBve parts—the source and the target. In both “starfish” and “sea star” the
organism itself is the target. The “source” is the proposal to see the organism as something else.
So while “sea star” is an invitaBon to see the organism as a star of the sea, “starfish” proposes
that the organism be seen as a star and then the word “fish” can’t decide if it wants to be
source or target. If “fish” is the target, then the name means a star-shaped fish—and this is why
biologists take issue with the name. Because it’s not a fish. If it’s trying to be part of the source,
an echinoderm and a fish are not adequately unlike another to qualify for a comprehensible
metaphor. When a source and target are too close to one another, the metaphor fails because it
verges on descripBon, and risks confusion. For example, to express that a meal doesn’t taste
good, someone might say, “This tastes like garbage.” The source is garbage, the target is the
meal. The aKributes of the garbage are transposed on the meal and it is understood to be
repulsive, smelly, possibly expired, inedible. One could not say “This tastes like compost” and
get the same effect.
False assumpBons may be drawn from metaphorical comparisons when there is a certain
disconnect between an aKribute that a name might suggest and the biological features it

51
actually possesses. For example, the swordfish is named aAer its long, flat bill that protrudes
like sword. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael makes up a story about a sinking ship and a muBny on board.
As the men baKle, they work the pumps of the ship to try to keep the craA afloat. “They
supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her.”19 Here, Melville has taken liberBes with the metaphor
of the sword, demonstraBng the fish using its bill to poke a hole in a ship when in fact, according
to swordfisherman Linda Greenlaw,
20 swordfish can only swipe back and forth. You can see how
Melville might have goKen carried away here—a fish with a bill that looks like a sword, a bill
that looks like a sword as the fish slashes it side to side—why couldn’t it also use the sword to
spear or lance something?21
I do not wish to suggest that the metaphor at work in the name “swordfish” is bad, or poorly
craAed. FiguraBve naming oAen does valuable work that descripBve naming cannot. If one
pictures an actual sword when thinking of a “swordfish,” they are automaBcally in the right
ballpark of scale of the organism—as the bill of an average swordfish is approximately the size
of an actual sword. The sword of a swordfish is also sharp in the ways that a blade is sharp, and
on both sides. And finally, the swordfish is a blue-silver color, so picturing a silver metal sword
has you mentally reaching in approximately the right place in your crayon box. Compare this to
what you get with the descripBve name “blue crab.” All you have is the crayon.
So I admit that I enjoy when a figuraBve name is working well, on a metaphorical level. And I
noBce that the primary conceit of the comparisons at work when marine organisms are named
follow a marine/terrestrial paKern. That is, we regularly employ the imagery of our terrestrial

52
life to name and explain that which resides in the sea. I worry about the accumulaBon of this
paKern, funcBonal and memorable as the metaphorical language may be. Taken as a consistent
trend, the conceit can read that the life of the sea is like that which we know on land. I believe
that undercuts the fundamental complexity of the marine realm, and I wonder if such a paKern
limits our understanding of just how strange and miraculous and unique the sea is.
Another way to look at the figuraBve relaBonship between the marine and the terrestrial is to
observe what happens when it is reversed—when do we use an image from marine life as the
familiar referent to describe something that needs clarificaBon? Aristotle wrote: “To make good
metaphors implies an eye for resemblance.” So—what of our lives resembles the marine realm?
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson describes her placenta as “a bag of whale hearts.”22 This is the
final gesture of explanation after a more straightforward description: “it’s utterly indecent and
colossal—a bloody yellow sac filled with purple-black organs.” In fact, the heart of a blue whale
is 400 pounds and the size of a golf cart. This organ is so big that when a whaling museum in
Massachussetts received a life size model of a whale heart, they had to take the doors off the
museum to get each half of it in.23
After delivering my firstborn, Oscar, when his cord was clamped and cut, they took him to a
warming plate while I delivered the placenta. I was thinking about two things. One, I’d read
about Kim Kardashian’s doctor, who delivered babies at the same hospital, scraping the
placenta free with her fingernails. Before I had a birth experience of my own, that detail was

53
about the gnarliest thing I’d ever heard of. Luckily my placenta delivery was executed without
fingernail assistance. It was more painful than I was prepared for but came out with a welltimed push while my husband counted Oscar’s toes across the room. When it came out, a nurse
asked, “Would you like to see it?” Oh, Hamlet—do you see?
“Does it look like a bag of whale hearts?” I asked. The second thing on my mind.
The nurse did not understand what I said. Perhaps I was slurring. She responded, “If you want
to have it encapsulated to eat, I can send it home with you in a cooler. Or you can dispose of it,
or donate it.”
I wanted to see it. She held it up with two hands and I could see from the pressure her gloved
fingers used to grip it that it was heavy. I understood Nelson’s metaphor now. Effective
metaphorical work is not limited to a comparison strictly of physical dimensions. As Aristotle
noted, metaphor has the capacity to give “clearness, charm, and disBncBon.”24 The image of a
bag of whale hearts was so vivid to me that I carried it to one of the most intense moments of
my life. And before I saw a placenta with my own eyes, I saw it through the frame of Maggie
Nelson’s words. And even though I knew the scale was hyperbolic, the comparison sBll evokes a
fundamental sense of weight and size that prepared me for it. Some elements of the
comparison check out more literally—the dark and slick of it, the veins and blood. But finally,
the disBncBon of the metaphor here is partly the evocaBon of the marine world. It must be a
bag of whale hearts and not a bag of dinosaur hearts or elephant hearts (mammals that would

54
have similarly large hearts). It is the selecBon of the whale that brings the experience of being
immediately postpartum, so recently split in two, body coursing with hormones, that vaults the
experience into one of alterity—and the fact that the comparison is disproporBonate only
enhances a sense of the supernatural. This sort of experience benefits from a marine
comparison because it directly profits from the sea’s synonymous relaBonship to the
otherworldly.
Another example of a literary use of explaining experience in the terrestrial world through a
marine comparison was pointed out to me by Susan McCabe, in her luminous book about the
poet H.D. and her partner Bryher. In what McCabe calls a “peculiar experience” and one that
Bryher termed a “jellyfish experience of a double ego,” Bryher wrote that a ‘transparent glass
spread over [H.D.’s] head like a diving-bell and another manifested from [H.D.’s] feet.” Bryher,
delighted by the image, “coached” H.D. to further arBculate the experience: “No, no, it is the
most wonderful thing I ever heard of. Let it come.”25
The complexity of the associaBons at work in this metaphor are fascinaBng. First, there is shape
at work—two jellyfish, one at H.D.’s head and the other, inverted, at her feet. The two bellshapes encapsulate her. That they are jellyfish and not something that evokes a similar shape—
like, say, two umbrellas—asks that we pour other features of the jellyfish into the experience.
The rim of the bell is lined with the nerve system that takes the place of the jellyfish’s brain. And
the tentacles floaBng from the bell, which in the double-jellyfish image you would imagine
reaching toward one another, tangling a liKle, are well-known to contain sBnging elements.

55
There is a vibrancy of sensaBon called to mind with the jellyfish, and H.D.’s posiBon within this
feels both protected and dangerous. To be in proximity of jellyfishes is to inhabit their sensate
world. Finally, in order to imagine H.D. inside two jellyfish, you are imagining her floaBng in the
ocean. The weightlessness ascribed from this experience disembodies H.D. in a way—she is,
within the image, free of her body’s mass. The weight can then seKle within the
mental/emoBonal aspects of the experience.
A notable aspect of this example is the way the metaphor can be observed in acBon—language
having an impact on thought. The image of the jellyfish occurs to H.D., who arBculates it to
Bryher, and then Bryher validates it, asking her to say more. McCabe notes: “H.D. even might
‘have dismissed it at once’ had she been on her own, admivng again, ‘It was being with Bryher
that projected the fantasy.’” So Bryher projected the fantasy, but language—the metaphor of
the jellyfish—created it. Within this metaphor, where the human centralized nervous system
gives way to an embodied and sensory intelligence, H.D. reenacted giving birth.
When writers use the marine world to describe an experience, it is one that they wish to
communicate has the feeling of otherness, otherworldliness, ethereality. Birth and psychically
transcendent feelings lend themselves to a marine explanaBon. Death goes there too.
Anton Chekhov’s short story “Gusev” follows the death of a young man at sea, and according to
a leKer he wrote the same month the story was published, partly based on a burial at sea that

56
the author witnessed.
26 The construcBon of the story reveals not only a death at sea, but death
as sea.
The Btle character Gusev and a number of other discharged soldiers are traveling home from
baKle and dying of consumpBon. A character called Pavel Ivanych passes away in front of
everyone and Gusev is next, dying slowly over the course of a few days. Gusev, sewn into a
sailcloth with weights to help him sink, looks “like a carrot or a radish: broad at the head and
narrow at the foot.”27
Gusev, already linked by simile to food, sinks into the sea and is nibbled at by sharks and other
foragers as he descends the esBmated three miles to the boKom of the sea. “AAer eight or ten
fathoms he begins to lose speed, his body swaying rhythmically as if wavering, then, caught up
by a current, driAs faster sideways than down.” A kind of whalefall. The narraBve follows him
carefully as he conBnues to sink: “Now he runs into a school of liKle fish called pilot-fish. Seeing
the dark body the fish stop dead in their tracks, then all of a sudden turn tail and disappear.
Less than a minute later they swarm back at Gusev, like darts, zigzagging around him in the
water.”
A shark rips open the sailcloth binding Gusev’s body, and the iron weight helping him towards
the boKom tumbles out and to the sea floor. Suddenly the narraBve pops back to the surface.
Though the narraBve is in the third person, it is so close to Gusev’s percepBon throughout the
story that the reader conflates Gusev and the narrator. At the surface, the story ends with a

57
descripBon of the light on the water and the look of the clouds. Like Hamlet and Polonious in
the passage quoted at this essay’s opening, the narrator makes meaning of the shapes in the
clouds:
Overhead, meanwhile, clouds are accumulaBng toward the sunset. One of them looks
like an arc of triumph, another like a lion, a third like a pair of shears... A broad green
shaA of light breaks through the clouds and stretches to the very top of the sky; a liKle
later, a violet one lies down next to it, then a gold one, then a rose... The sky turns soA
lilac. Gazing at this glorious, this enchanBng sky, the ocean scowls; but soon it too takes
on the gentle, joyful, passionate tones for which human language can hardly even find
words.
By the final sentence, the reader understands that Gusev is fully gone. It is, grammaBcally
speaking, the ocean, not Gusev, looking at the clouds. This reads as a sort of second death for
Gusev, since the reader has been following his body from the ship overboard and down into the
depths, back up to the surface, and expects that he is the one looking.
What’s parBcularly brilliant about McHugh’s translaBon of this last movement is the selecBon of
the word “tones.” In other translaBons, this word is “colors,” and the idea is that the ocean is
reflecBng the colors of the sky and the final movement is a sort of craAed aphasia—the scene is
so beauBful that cannot be put into words. Using the word “tones” allows the ocean to inhabit
both color and sound, thereby accumulaBng even more power.
Language frames percepBon. In literature, it is the direct line to the mind’s eye, to imaginaBon.
In taxonomy, language is meant to idenBfy and disBnguish. But using the tool of language in the
discipline of science does not strip it of its poeBc powers. It starts with Hamlet’s quesBon—Do
you see? For example: calling an organism “feather boa kelp” is an invitaBon to see its shape,
noBce the way it moves, seeing how the fronds grow from a central sBpe. The name “staghorn

58
coral” invites one to noBce the branching paKern of the organism’s growth and the substanBal,
bone-like density of its skeleton. These names are so similar to the character looking at clouds
and calling out comparisons.
Look again at the images in the interpretaBon of the clouds: an arc of triumph, a lion, a pair of
shears. First of all, it’s a diverse bouquet—architecture, animal, inanimate object—no shared
phylum here. It also differs from the Hamlet quotaBon which references the changing nature of
a cloud or perhaps just the indecision in trying to find the proper comparison to describe it—
Polonious and Hamlet think weasel and then whale, agreeing whatever it is has a backbone, and
that it arcs in a certain way. I’m not sure there’s enough in the story for the reader to place
symbolic meaning on these objects—an arc of triumph can take the most pressure as it seems
to offer a portal, suggesBng the transiBon from life to death that Gusev has just passed through.
It also is a cultural symbol for victory and celebraBon and power, though these seem less
applicable to the story. The lion and the pair of shears seem sufficiently unconnected to the rest
of the story that they can be taken merely as their shapes in a genuine aKempt to allow the
reader to see the clouds. In this way, the images work well—they are clear—I can easily see a
cloud that looks like a lion, or one that looks like a pair of shears. This is not unlike the choices
that the scienBst is making when they choose a figuraBve name for an organism like the
“keyhole limpet.”
Hamlet starts the cloud conversaBon with Polonious asking: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s
almost in the shape of a camel?” His reach for a figure of speech is not decoraBve—it’s

59
funcBonal. Imagine if he just said, “do you see yonder cloud?” Presumably the sky they’re
looking at is full of clouds. Polonious would say, Which one? But by comparing it to a camel, he
is able to guide Polonious’s view. Polonius can affirm that he sees what Hamlet sees by agreeing
to the camel (and then to the weasel, and then to the whale).
FuncBonally, Chekov’s moment of interpreBng the clouds ensures that the reader that was just
watching the pilot fish and sharks play with Gusev’s body now comes up to the surface and
looks at the sky. The reader floats, not unlike a corpse.
This is one way to answer a quesBon I’m oAen asked about what poetry is for. I think it’s for
seeing. I think it’s for seeing as someone else sees, for a minute. In the realm of empiricism and
science, this conBnuity of percepBon is requisite in order for knowledge to be established. But I
think the marine taxonomist is also doing the work of the writer when creaBng a figuraBve or
descripBve name and using the poet’s tools of metaphor and metonymy. They are framing the
percepBon of the organism. The name is one way we consistently see the organism. For
example, because “anemone” is the name of a type of flower, people oAen don’t realize sea
anemones are animals and not plants. Names can also carry affect. For example, at depths
where there is no light, things start to get spooky name-wise: dragonfish, viperfish, fangtooth,
hagfish, vampire squid.
Before Gusev dies, he witnesses a fellow soldier perish on board from the same illness. The man
dies suddenly, dropping his cards and falling onto the floor. No one can quite believe it, and they

60
call to him and one man even tries to get him to sip some water. Gusev, who understands
immediately that the man is dead, is angry and yells, in tradiBonal translaBons, “Why are you
knocking the jug against his teeth? […] Don’t you see, turnip head?” In McHugh’s translaBon,
the line is: “Don’t you see, dickhead?”
In addiBon to taking this essay from cloud-watcher to cloud-watcher, I’d like to make a liKle
bridge from the phrase “Do you see” to “Don’t you see, dickhead” as a way to conclude my
thoughts on marine taxonomy. FiguraBve comparisons first ask do you see (naming an organism
“lightbulb tunicate” asks: do you see the shape of this thing, its translucence, how the glowing
notochord looks like an electrical filament?) and this happens conBnually as we communicate—
in literature, in science, and in everyday conversaBon. ParBcularly well-matched figuraBve
comparisons achieve the urgency of don’t you see, dickhead? For example—Maggie Nelson’s
bag of whale hearts says, don’t you see how surprisingly large and weighty and slick and dark
and mysBcal this organ of the placenta is? The name “possum shrimp” asks—don’t you see how
unique and strange and miraculous this shrimp is, carrying her young in a pouch? The tools of
metaphor and metonymy that might be tradiBonally ascribed to the writer are at play whenever
language is being used and parBcularly when a name comes about. The craA of the name
shapes the thing in some way. What we noBce about it, how we feel about it, whether or not
we remember it. What starts with aKenBon ends with aKunement.
1 “When Knowledge Conquered Fear.” Cosmos: A Space6me Odyssey, created by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Season 1,
Episode 3, Cosmos Studios, 24 March 2014. 2 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act III, scene ii. Edited by W.G. Clark and W.A. Wright, Macmillan and Co., Oxford,
1885.
3 Armantrout, Rae. “Upper World.” Up to Speed. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

61
4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” Essays: Second Series. Munroe: Boston. 1844. 5 Melville, Herman. “Chapter XXXII: Cetology.” Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. Modern Library, 1926. p.134. 6 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves. Whales. Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1986. p.87. 7 Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. Modern Library, 1926. p.346. 8 “Sperm whale.” Species Directory. NOAA Fisheries. h`ps://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/sperm-whale.
Accessed 4 July 2020.
9 “Mesoparapylocheles michaeljacksoni: Fossil hermit crab named ader Michael Jackson.” Phys.Org. Science X
Network. 19 January 2012. h`ps://phys.org/news/2012-01-mesoparapylocheles-michaeljacksoni-fossil-hermitcrab.html. Accessed 4 January 2021. 10 In a note of the etymology, the scienests wrote: “in allusion to the shape and ornament of the new taxon which
is defined by sinuous lines, reminiscent of his works.”
Artal, Pedro, et al. Gaudipluma Artal, Bakel, Fraaije & Jagt, 2013, n. Gen. Dec. 2013,
doi:10.5281/ZENODO.6159019.
11 Neruda, Pablo. Trans. by Hardie St. Maren. The Complete Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2021. 12 Krylova, Elena M., et al. “Austrogena: A New Genus of Chemosymbioec Bivalves (Bivalvia; Vesicomyidae;
Pliocardiinae) from the Oxygen Minimum Zone off Central Chile Described through Morphological and Molecular
Analyses.” Systema6cs and Biodiversity, vol. 12, no. 2, Informa UK Limited, 3 Apr. 2014, pp. 225–46. Crossref,
doi:10.1080/14772000.2014.900133.
13 Melville, Herman. “Chapter CXXXV: The Chase—Third Day.” Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. Modern Library, 1926.
p.632. 14 The terms tenor and vehicle come from Richards, and the terms source and target come from Lakoff & Johnson.
Richards, I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press. 1936.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980. 15 Walco`, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc. 1980. p.4. 16 United States Congress. Public Law 93-205, The Endangered Species Act of 1973. 17 Zimmer, Katarina. “What’s In a Fish’s Name.” Nau6lus. 12 March 2024. NauelusNext, Inc. Accessed 12 March
2024.
18 Auden, W.H. The Poet’s Tongue: An Anthology of Verse. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1935. p. v. 19 Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. Modern Library, 1926. p.271. 20 As told to Richard J. King in a personal interview: King, Richard. Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of MobyDick. University of Chicago Press, 2019. p.120. 21 King notes that there were reports of the bill of swordfish secking in the hulls of ships that Melville could have
read about, though no reports of full ship sinkings linked to the phenomenon (King, 122-23). I maintain that the
inveneon here is an issue of Melville geqng carried away with metaphorical reasoning that cannot be rescued by a
biological technicality.
22 Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. New York: Gray Wolf Press. 2016. p.133. 23 Barnes, Jenne`e. “A Whale of a Heart: Life-size Model of a Blue Whale Heart Arrives at New Bedford Whaling
Museum.” City of New Bedford. h`ps://nbedc.org/. 3 May 2018. Accessed 19 March 2021. 24 Aristotle. Aristotle's Poe6cs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. 25 McCabe, Susan. H.D & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism. Oxford University Press. 2021. p.82. 26 On 9 December 1890, Chekov wrote to A.S. Suvorin: “On the way to Singapore we threw two corpses into the
sea. When one sees a dead man, wrapped in sailcloth, fly, turning somersaults in the water, and remembers that it
is several miles to the bo`om, one feels frightened, and for some reason begins to fancy that one will die oneself
and will be thrown into the sea.”
Chekov, Anton. Trans. by Constance Garne`. “9 December.” LeXers of Anton Chekhov. Project Gutenberg,
2004. h`ps://www.gutenberg.org/files/6408/6408-h/6408-h.htm. Accessed 22 February 2024. 27 I read muleple translaeons of this story. When I reference tradieonal translaeons, I am quoeng the Garne`
translaeon. The translaeon by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov was sent to me via email by the translator and
I’m not aware of its publicaeon, though I believe it came out in a journal.
Anton, Chekov. Trans. by Constance Garne`. “Gusev.” The Witch and Other Stories. Project Gutenberg.
2006. h`ps://www.gutenberg.org/files/1944/1944-h/1944-h.htm#link2H_4_0009. Accessed 8 December 2023.
McHugh, Heather. “here (a`ached) was our old translaeon.” Received by Katharine Ogle, 24 March 2024.

62
Conclusion: On the Value of Art to Science and Science to Art
On the morning of Thanksgiving 2021, I met with two scien:sts and a film director over Zoom to
discuss a short film project in which I had been hired as the writer. The scien:sts—Dr. Karen
Lloyd, a marine microbiologist, and Dr. Peter Barry, a geochemist and volcanologist—had been
granted an award from the Na:onal Science Founda:on to make something crea:ve to highlight
their collabora:on as interdisciplinary researchers of subsurface microbes, or microbes that live
below the Earth’s crust.
Lloyd and Barry had taken a first pass at a script which was broken into seven “acts” and began
with the heading: Act One: What the heck is a microbe? As a teacher of college-level essay
wri:ng, I’ve become a quick diagnos:cian when it comes to a wriWen work. The script was, at
the risk of sounding cruel, kind of boring. Indeed, “What the heck is—” is a func:onal place to
start, but not an engaging one. One that makes the mind kind of numb over.
I leY the mee:ng briefly to baste my turkey and when I returned, Karen was telling a story
about going to Costa Rica with Peter and nearly dying in a volcanic erup:on. Something clicked
for me in that moment—rather than star:ng from scratch with a defini:on of the microbe, the
research could be highlighted through a presenta:on of the researchers. Through character.
Karen Lloyd and Peter Barry were interes:ng.

63
So invented a third character, a token microbe named Mickey. I took a lot of poe:c license with
Mickey. I became obsessed with the idea of a microbe with a strong personality, one that a
viewer could become endeared to, quickly. Given that the film had to be rela:vely short—we
weren’t making a feature, or even a 20-minute film—we actually didn’t have :me for significant
narra:ve development. There could be no Freytag’s Pyramid—no exposi:on, no incremental
rising ac:on, no denouement, no hero’s downfall. In lieu of this, I thought, we could just have a
bit of hero. Someone to care about, or be curious about, as the viewer gained a bit of
knowledge about microbes.
Un:l rela:vely recently, people assumed nothing could survive below the Earth’s crust. An early
version of the script was called “The Science of Hell” because of how strongly people associate
conven:onal hell imagery with what’s going on in the subsurface. It turns out, there are
subsurface microbiomes and complex communi:es of microbial life thriving down there, and
scien:sts know they are drivers of biogeochemical processes that affect life on Earth, but the
extent and details of the processes are s:ll being studied.
The numbers and figures of this research are not easily palatable for a general audience, which
makes the significance of the research difficult to relay. Subsurface microbes make up an
es:mated 12-20% of Earth’s biomass and yet most people have never heard of them.
I felt strongly that a crea:ve narra:ve frame would be the best way to draw an audience to
engage with the subject, which is objec:vely fascina:ng once you get it. I played around with

64
possibili:es of the form of the film. The rela:onship of form and content is a considera:on a
poet takes on frequently, and one that a scien:st may not think about as much. As a poet, I’m
frequently thinking about how, for example, long lines might contribute to a sense of
breathlessness in a piece, or how short lines disrupt syntax and therefore call aWen:on to the
language and shape of the poem. I know that love poems frequently appear in couplets and can
choose to engage or subvert that conven:on when I write about love. I know that a three-line
stanza can be destabilizing and a four-line stanza holds an inherent capacity to evoke a sense of
safety or completeness. I can write in tradi:onal forms like the sonnet or the villanelle and take
my place in a historical conversa:on. Scien:fic papers oYen follow the same five-sec:on form:
Introduc:on, Materials & Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. Ul:mately, I decided the
script should take the shape of a mockumentary—knowing that the conven:ons of the form,
par:cularly one-on-one interviews and humorous presenta:on—would suit the needs of the
subject.
With the form in mind, what I was looking for primarily was tension and contrast between what
the researchers had to say and what the microbe himself had to say.
During one of many conversa:ons with Karen and Peter, they let slip that poten:al applica:ons
of this research might be cancer research and/or climate change research. Cancer research
because these subsurface microbes in their demanding environments have tremendously slow
rates of cell division—and a problem of cancer is tremendously quick cell division. Climate

65
change research because subsurface microbes consume carbon—and at the heart of the climate
crisis is an excess of carbon. I remember David’s eyes sparkling when they talked about this.
I felt a sparkle, too, something to hook the audience. But as a poet in a family of scien:sts who
research stem cells and regenera:ve medicine, I also understand that the research of biologic
processes carves a long path toward becoming, if ever, a cure to anything. And the researchers
are not the ones who can speak to applica:on. Their spirit is inquiry. Ques:ons that beget
ques:ons.
Something finally clicked into place for me as I listened to Karen and Peter back away from the
declara:on of these applica:ons of the research. The loose-lipped and self-important Mickey
could tell the audience just how important he was or could poten:ally be—and the scien:sts,
called in for interviews in the mockumentary, could soYen the claim, qualify it. Could s:ll say
exactly what scien:sts say—which is true, that they can’t predict the future, that they are just
studying with curiosity what’s in front of them.
This is what a crea:ve presenta:on of a scien:fic narra:ve can do that scien:fic wri:ng
cannot—it has the capacity to hold nega:ve space, untrue things, and then set them next to
truth.
So we all collaborated on a script that went something like this: an ambi:ous documentarian
named Gio interviews a salty Mickey the Microbe, who couldn’t be happier to see a camera

66
crew and be posed in front of a microphone. He’s sipping a s:ff drink, he’s punctua:ng his
sentences with puffs of a cigar. His “version” of his life story is spliced with informa:ve but
conversa:onal clips of the researchers studying him—Dr. Mariana the marine microbiologist
and Dr. Ash, the volcanologist. And by the end, you know a bit about what a subsurface microbe
is and why researchers in two fields as different as geochemistry and microbiology might come
together to study them. You would be teased with the idea that the research has tremendously
interes:ng poten:al applica:ons, should it have a chance to develop.
At this point, you may have no:ced that I am Mickey—slightly drunk on the idea of my own
importance in all of this. I believed strongly that the interdisciplinary collabora:on among the
scien:sts, the filmmaker, and myself as writer, was also playing a key role in the poten:al story
of subsurface microbes. That making an ar:s:c point of access for the research had the
poten:al to engage more people in support of and knowledge of the science.
Knowing that Mickey is a part of me, it’s easy then to understand my surprise and indigna:on
when the first (incredibly talented and appealing) animator David hired to bring the film to life
took a look at the script and said she didn’t understand why Mickey was such a miserable
asshole, and that she would like to work on the project if his aotude could be cleaned up a liWle
bit—if he could become more likeable.
The script went through many more cycles of revision and cuts, and a new animator jointed the
project. The budget only allowed for a five minute film, in the end, which wasn’t enough :me to

67
tell the story I planned. We leaned into the form of documentary interviews and prompted
Karen and Peter to candidly explain some of the most fascina:ng aspects of their research,
recording these responses and splicing them in, further cuong the original script. A friend
recently watched the film and aYerwards asked me, “But how did you write that?” He could
hear that so much of it is in the voice of Karen and Peter, bits that are prompted and extracted
but most certainly not wriWen. I think this choice ul:mately turns up the volume on the contrast
and tension among the characters—and simultaneously the characters of Dr. Mariana and Dr.
Ash became Dr. Karen Lloyd and Dr. Peter Barry.
And I’m not sure if Mickey is endearing, or understood even. I can’t even tell, actually, because I
am so aWached to him s:ll. And even moreso aYer the charming anima:on created for him, a
cilia-spiked purple blob who sips scotch throughout and briefly grows two addi:onal heads as
he speaks the line: “People find out I’m from under the Earth’s crust and they’re like—So you’re
from hell.” He’s voiced not by an actor but by the New Zealand-born father of the film’s
producer, who recorded his part in just a few takes, remotely from his wine cellar, raWling a
highball glass filled with ice water and taking care to make audible slurps.
I’ve taken you far down a rabbit hole, a perhaps unreasonable depth, maybe as deep as Mickey
was sourced, which is “about a mile below the Mariana Trench,” according to Dr. Barry in
Unearthed, as a way to conclude this cluster of essays with an illustra:on of how language
interacts with marine science and depth.

68
If the chapters cohere around an understanding that language frames percep:on, a logical
extension might be: to what end can/should we use language to frame percep:on of the marine
realm? Especially given the climate crisis, and the essen:al need for people to beWer
understand the ocean in order to save it. I think that ques:on has a lot of ego, though, and is
too big for this poet to answer. I’m interested in reflec:ng on the ways in which interdisciplinary
collabora:on can invigorate both contribu:ng par:es. If the story of my wri:ng process for
Unearthed argues for the poten:al for crea:ve narra:ves about scien:fic subjects to help
engage an audience, allow me to also show what science means to a crea:ve work.
I recently interviewed the fish consultant for Finding Nemo, a friend and colleague of mine
whose handle for email and social media is “fishguy,” Adam Summers. As a biomechanist,
Summers’ specialty is in movement. He first became acquainted with Pixar because he
happened to be ren:ng a 400-square-foot basement apartment from the head of Pixar
University while doing a fellowship at Berkeley in the late 1990s. She knocked on his door one
day and asked if he knew anyone who knew about how big animals move. As a biomechanist,
that was precisely Adam’s field—although his specialty was fish. He recommended the guy he
knew who as one of the top biomechanist in the field of big animal movement—elephants,
etc.—and she used him as the consultant for Monsters, Inc.
In an interview with Nature, Summers said: “People think they are not biomechanists. The truth
is that every human is an excellent compara:ve biomechanist, because we evolved in an
environment of being eaten and ea:ng things. And that tunes your brain to the movements of
other organisms.”

69
From talking to Summers, I immediately understood that he did not appreciate the biomechanic
representa:on of ants in the Antz movies. Because the ants in the film don’t move like real ants
do—according to Summers, they move like “four-legged animals in ant costumes.” This
phenomenon is adjacent to the concept of the uncanny valley—an idea first put forth by
robo:cist Masahiro Mori in 1970, where Mori proposed that while giving robots humanlike
quali:es can make them more likeable, there is an area of being too humanlike that makes the
viewer feel creeped out.
Even though the uncanny valley typically refers to the representa:on of robots and their
similarity to humans—Summers is sugges:ng that the paWern of emo:onal response extends to
apprehension of images of animals. In other words, the character of Sully in Monsters, Inc.
displays sufficient biological truth with respect to how big (real) animals—like elephants—move,
that the viewer is more seamlessly engaged with the character. The ants in Antz lack
fundamental biological truth—par:cularly in the way their six legs move, which corresponds
more closely to quadrupedal movement—and therefore the viewer cannot fully engage with
the ant characters. He told me this mistake plays out as an assault on reality and ul:mately
“changes the way you get the story.”
This brings up an interes:ng ques:on not only about the rela:onship of truth and fact, but also
the rela:onship of truth to art. Animated monsters/animals that can talk are fic:on. But the

70
monsters in Monsters, Inc are more biologically true than the ants in Antz and therefore more
engaging. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats wrote.
Knowing the stakes of biological truth in the representa:on, it would be logical to conclude that
to present an animal in anima:on, one must try to represent the animal as faithfully as possible.
However, that leaves out the essen:al ingredient of personifica:on—we engage with humanlike figures. So that leaves storytellers with the delicate balancing act of crea:ng an engaging
character that is humanlike enough to aWract the viewer, but biologically true enough to sa:sfy
the internal biomechanist in us all.
The animators of Finding Nemo were clearly interested enough in biological truth to hire
Summers as a consultant. Summers told me they eventually asked him to point out where the
eyebrows of fish are.
Summers quoted his reply: “Here's the thing about fishes, uh, is they don't have any of what in
mammals are called the muscles of facial expression. So they have no brow muscles. They have
no cheek muscles. They have jaw closing muscles. They don't have anything that might flare the
nostrils or wiggle the nose or wiggle the ears. They don't have any hair. So they have no
eyebrows. They have no eyelashes and they have none of the equipment to move them. they
don't have, they don't have eyelids. So they don't have the muscles to move eyelids.”

71
The animators looked at Summers said, “Ah, mmhmm, well, you know, the thing is, they're
going to need eyebrows.”
They needed eyebrows because eyebrows are essen:al to the expression of emo:on. The key
to geong this right, then, appears to be knowing when to priori:ze the representa:on of the
human-like characteris:cs, and when to priori:ze anatomical correctness.
Summers’ solu:on to the problem was to pull models of the skulls of each of the types of fish
represented in the film and look at them with the animators. He taught them the names of the
bones in each and they began to explore what the fish as a group had in common, craniofacially
speaking, and what bones they could make move (even though they don’t actually move in the
fish). Summers concluded “if we pick the same bone across all the fish, then you get this variety
that is truthfully based.”
Together, they picked two bones—the fourth supraorbital and the third supraorbital—that
together moved to sufficiently gesture to humanlike expression.
Summers said: “It really works. I mean, you see these things that aren't—definitely aren't—
eyebrows moving in the fish's face. And you're like, okay, I get it.”
Finding Nemo became the highest-grossing animated film at the :me of its release—and it’s
impossible to quan:fy the contribu:on that Summers made to that success, but undeniable

72
that the film could not have been as successful as it was without the aWen:on paid to essen:al
biological truth.
Do I have to bring it back to metonymy? I do. The reason the eyebrows in the fish were both so
essen:al to get right is that they are the “telling detail”—the metonymic detail—of human
expression and percep:on.
This is the same method that metonymy and metaphor use, with visual image in the place of
the linguis:c rendering of an image. I reach through this example as a concluding gesture to
hopefully underscore that the mechanisms at work in metaphor and metonymy are those which
churn toward truth and beauty.
In fact, the metonymic detail that connects the fish to human expression is leY off of the
representa:on of the deep sea anglerfish that two of the characters encounter when they swim
deep into the apho:c zone. The anglerfish is supposed to be scary and threatening. Therefore, it
does not have eyebrows. And it does not have pupils. And it does not speak. I was talking about
this with a poet friend of mine recently and his 8-year-old daughter, a Finding Nemo devotee,
said from the next room in response, “Monsters never speak.” Even though all of the characters
in the scene are fish, we have fish that are human-like and this one that is monster-like.
Finding Nemo is a story about human rela:onships—a difficult accidental separa:on between a
widowed father and a motherless son—told in a narra:ve framework that casts the characters

73
in the bodies of fish and in the seong of the ocean. Even though the story is not about the
ocean, it has to uphold certain elements of the truth of that environment in order to retain the
aWen:on of its audience. If the science fails, so does the story. Unearthed is a film that is about
the scien:fic topic of subsurface microbes and uses a fic:onal frame, which relies on story
elements which are factually impossible—that a subsurface microbe could make a prank call
and sip scotch and joke with the researchers that study him—to make the delivery of complex
scien:fic informa:on palatable. The symmetry between the contribu:on of art to science and
science to art demonstrates not just a link between the fields, but an essen:al and sustaining
channel.

75
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Creator Ogle, Katharine Adams (author)

Core Title Blue mind: on the language and literature of marine depth

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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Degree Conferral Date 2024-05

Publication Date 06/19/2024

Defense Date 04/26/2024

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Tag James Merrill,marine depth,marine taxonomy,metaphor,metonymy,Ocean,Poetry,sea

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