Depth comes in many forms: depth of data, depth of perspectives, depth of time, depth of space. It is a crucial word in the lexicon of place. Depth is also a crucial descriptor of the two overarching themes of this book: waters and maps. The possible definitions of depth overlap, with culture and space stretching out to create multi-disciplinary modes of profundity. In this essay, my goal is to explore the intersections between a deep mapping that takes into account the different modes of oceanic depth, and a blue humanities that moves beyond thalassology as the dominant mode of mapping deeply. Depth is, as Stacy Alaimo observes, an immensity, an excess, simply 'too much'. In her ruminations on the abyssal zones, Alaimo reflects on the writhing, animalistic protean something encountered in the deep.
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... ==Derrida's=={Q130631} ruminations are ... drenched in the language of the depths, as he describes the question of human and nonhuman subjectivity as "immense and abyssal," requiring that he wrestle with the "several tentacles" of philosophies that become, together, "a single living body at bottom." If we shift Derrida's ruminations on the "animal abyss" from an encounter with the gaze of a specific animal to the collective "composition" (in Bruno Latour's terms) of the vast abyssal zone and its surrounding territories, we discover the same sort of vertiginous recognition that there is, indeed, "being rather than nothing." But what does it mean for the abyssalbeing to be or become "too much"?1
This presence evokes a primordial fear. It is in many ways the oldest fear. The cosmogony of many faiths is predicated on a formless and lightless void, something that existed before the world and awaits to claim it. Other cultures do not fear the deep, seeing it as vast and unknowable, but not something to intrinsically fear. The reason that fear is important is simple: it is the horror story of scientific positivism. It is hard to decide whether the fear of nothing or the fear of something is greater. It is important to acknowledge that this fear is culturally relative, and to interrogate it. The fear of the abyss permeates epistemology at every level, but its expression is reflected through a lens of positivist ==lacuna=={Q1396158}. We can learn to cope with it, to embrace it as a positive facet of the human condition, to use it as a stimulus. But we can never escape it. We can sense and detect more and more of the world every day and revel in this progress, but there will always be more darkness. This talk sits on the membrane between knowing and unknowing and considers what it is to fear depth. The surface world of measurements and quantities wars with a deep unconscious that is dark and deep:
The geographer Anne Buttimer’s phenomenological approach to mapping recognizes the inner contingencies of human agency and observes that our “behavior in space and time [is like] the surface movements of icebergs, whose depths we can sense only vaguely.” Thus, one of the main representational issues in deep mapping is how to balance the positivistic indices of latitude and longitude and degrees, minutes and seconds gridding the Cartesian perspective, with the “off-grid” contingencies of the human condition, or what ==Samuel Beckett=={Q37327} states are impressions of “all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their Sabbath.”2
The oceans were never for humans to know, and it is a master trope of the blue humanities - back to Mentz and his discussions of the 'new thalassology' - that European thought is not at home in the ocean. It is possible to embrace a sea of islands that is home, that is knowable, that is complex and ever-changing and yet part of the social sphere. However, it is possible - and indeed eternally likely - that all knowledges of waters sit atop a vast unknowability, a lacuna, a place that is not for humans to know. Indeed, the depths were once thought to by the natural sciences of the 19th century to be '==azoic=={Q28231900}', or devoid of life.3 The revelation that an unknowable something, a vast and diverse network of non-human actors, came hand in hand with the awareness of its strangeness to surface life. Blind-eyed fish, mouths bristling with teeth, strange flashes and patterns of bioluminescence, creatures that survive on thermal vents and falling biomass above. Not nothing, but not familiar or knowable. One could not sit with a sketch pad and observe the depths. It was not amenable to the scientific method. It remains so, if in the context of ever-expanding sensory and sense-making augmentations. Total knowledge is not possible where it is sought, and not desirable where it is not. Depth requires superabundance and excess of meaning beyond comprehension: it is the magic and the terror of water.
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The monster waits in the abyss, in potential. The hackneyed myth that medieval maps contained the legend of 'hic sunt dracones' or 'here be dragons' is untrue, and yet monsters still appear in the margins. Headless and single footed men, dog headed peoples, serpents, giants. In the depths of the ocean, krakens and leviathans and wonders await. Oceanography has only revealed more of how marvelous and alien the depths of the ocean and the unknown places may be, how outside human life and thriving. Literature, film, and popular culture are replete with genre pieces that draw on this master trope of fear.
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- wc:Naturalistslibra25-p326a-kraken.jpg caption=" Scene of a ship being ensnared and damaged by a 'colossal octopus'"
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Ludovica Montecchio has used the model of ==Medusa=={Q160730}, multifaceted metaphor for a multifaceted and plural abyssal vision:
Medusa’s dual stare will be a metaphor for the current deep sea explorations. Beautiful and delicate habitats and biodiversity are petrified and immobilized, isolated in time and places as pieces of resources that are disposable and ready to be extracted. This is the stony truth the Ocean floor is facing today, and in order to make sense of it, we need to look in the eyes of its truth. In the contemporary turmoil of acceleration, Medusa, daughter of deep oceanic parents, has forgotten her Chthonic roots. Her eyes see the truth, but by seeing it she petrifies it. Her gaze is what allows her to see the world, but prevents her from interacting with it. Yet, stones can be turned around in one’s hands.4
The monster gnaws at us, promising that something will reach out in the dark, grab us, drag us under. In our minds the monster could be anything, it is the thing that shows us who we are by shaping the contours of what we fear. And yet, who is 'we'? Who created the monster that has populated the dark margins, lacunae and depths of the terraqueous world? Where does terror become possibility? The monster was birthed from the same place as the dog-headed people and giants. The leviathan represents a Western cultural terror, that the unfamiliar contains wonders and dangers in equal measure. Maps have always been contours of our hopes and fears, tracing the boundaries of the familiar and yet tempting and terrifying with their absences. What is missing is what is to be feared, in potential. Deep maps even more so, for their scope and ambition and refusal to adhere to restrictions or orderly delimitations torment the quantitatively-minded. Just as ==Isaac Newton=={Q935} feared the vanity of tinkering on the shore when a great excess yawned, but the idea embedded in the quote as a popular culture phenomenon also explains much of the paradox inherent in deep blue knowledge. It has been understood as challenge: keep looking for the ocean because there is always more to learn. Without the god-fearing underpinning of the quote - a warning against vanity - the positivist quest has become a search for the entire ocean of knowledge, an anxiety that the unfamiliar lurks within this ocean and that humanity was not meant to apprehend it, and an optimism that this anxiety can be overcome. What is missing? Acceptance.
This book does not discount the possibility of learning more and of improving our scientific practices and sensing technologies. We cannot retreat from knowledge. The book simply asks a different question. What if we attempt to grow from the delving of the abyss, by befriending the monster, rather than by attempting to defeat it? We live in a world where it has never been more crucial to be comfortable with partial knowledge, to understand that we must place a limit on what once can know. Strive for more, but be comfortable with a reach that exceeds our grasp. We must learn to embrace the radical nature of this accommodation.
This question opens up many more. Can we become more by both knowing and knowing that we know nothing? Is dread at excess a forgotten dimension of the ocean's story and that of humanity?
Can we creatively essay excess, merging science and the arts to experience more and gain more agency by embracing the Leviathan?
Footnotes
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Stacy Alaimo, ‘Violet-Black’, in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. by Lawrence Buell and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 234 ↩
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Charles Travis. ‘Representational Issues in Deep Mapping: Peeling the “Poetic and Positivistic” from the Western Geosophical Onion’. In Making Deep Maps. Routledge, 2021, 65-77, here p. 65 ↩
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Stacy Alaimo, ‘Violet-Black’, in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. by Lawrence Buell and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 233 ↩
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Ludovica Montecchio,. ‘Body, Metaphor, Medusa: An Ecocritical Oceanic Exploration beyond Ocean Literacy’ (MA Dissertation: Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2024), [http://dspace.unive.it/handle/10579/26309](http://dspace.unive.it/handle/10579/26309 See also Stifjell, Celina. ‘She-Monsters and Sea Changes: Imagining Submersion in Speculative Feminist Fiction’. Doctoral thesis, NTNU, 2024. https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/handle/11250/3115470 See also Celina Stifjell. ‘She-Monsters and Sea Changes: Imagining Submersion in Speculative Feminist Fiction’. Doctoral thesis, NTNU, 2024. https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/handle/11250/3115470. ↩