Echo: Chapter 2

 

When I was younger and therefore more pretentious, I used to write poems about the sea a lot.  In all probability I may have abused the metaphoricity of all sea-related things - lighthouses, boats, sailors, waves, albatrosses - all standing for one emotional crisis or another. Most of the time I would, like a teenager who doesn't know his Shakespeare (I still don't), fill a card and send it to my boyfriend, having written about an obtuse poem featuring a lone sailor on the sea with stars and whatnot only to guide his way, filled with love and longing for something he knows he cannot have, or even successfully navigate (since the sailor is an idiot).  And most of the time I would get a baffled response along the lines of "If the sea represents me, and the sailor is you... Why is the sailor male?", or something like that.  Which of course begs a lot of questions, the first one being, “Why use the metaphor of sea-sailor when mountain-hiker or toaster-bread would just be as inefficient?"

There's something about the sea that's readily romanticizable - it doesn't take anyone profound or wise to romanticize something so goddamn big.  Were I profound or wise I would have shut up about the sea the first time I found I could string words together and pretend it was a revolutionary style of poetry.  But I was neither, and hence I carried around, silently, this image in my head, of a romanticized sea.  Even when I go to my sister's in La Union and stand in front of the thing, that image lays itself on my eyes like a veneer, preventing me from just being in front of it or being in it while I actually am in it.  I got a terrorizing epiphany which ridiculed this pretentiousness and spat on its eye when we went on our annual department outing in Batangas, and I (along with some office mates) snorkeled in Twin Rocks.

I have snorkeled before, in Palawan, with my family.  It was a very pleasant time, if I recall well, and, after a few mistakes as to how to breathe properly using a snorkel, I was flopping around in a life vest trying to make out what seems to be a giant clam and rocks the color of stale butter underneath my feet.  Depth perception was hell, and the fear of not knowing just how deep the sea was was unnerving - but I was with my family, and I'll be damned if I scream like a ninny.  So I didn't pay attention to my initial fears and flopped about to my sunburned content.  However, it was in Batangas that I came to panic, the kind of panic that might be what those with general anxiety experience, though I can't be certain.

Because this is the age of the internet and self-diagnosis, I quickly came upon thalassophobia (fear of the ocean and/or its creatures; fear of being away from land) and bathophobia (not to be translated literally in English, but fear of depths).  I seem to not have either; since I still go to beaches and am not afraid of caves or tunnels.  But of course, I could go on to sites that detail denial and god complex syndromes, so pfft.

The Twin Rocks are named for the yellowish blobs rising out of the depths, the average of which is around sixteen meters (fifty-two feet plus change - but the deepest parts are measured at ninety feet).

The view of these rocks from the boat is intriguing - why are they yellow?  Why's the middle part darker than the rest of the water?  What's down there?  So I swam towards them, took a deep breath, and plonked my head in the water.  

Where I quickly wished I was a better person and I was certain my brain was crawling out of my ears for all the blood pounding through them.  "This is it," I remember thinking.  "This is when I kdafjskafj;ald."  I realize I cannot step on the rocks since I might crush corals, but I cannot stay afloat nor flop around due to terror.  What I saw down there is the definition of alien, all the more terrifying because were my head to traverse the three inches on top of it, the world would return to familiarity.

You see, having your head above the water gives you the comforting illusion that what is up here obtains when you are down there.  That somehow the grandeur of the mountains is similar to the grandeur of the sea, in that nature is truly a majestic and impersonal motherfucker capable of gloriously killing you with a sneeze after making you live up to a hundred.  "Grandeur" does not make sense down there.  "Grandeur" is for poets with heads up their asses.  What I saw down there was different - not contradictorily different, but different in another sense altogether.

The rocks loom upwards towards my face, and everywhere there is teeming fish and unending water.  Touristy, and therefore stupid, pictures of The Twin Rocks always show fish, corals, the occasional eel.  Having these actual things in front of me unbalanced me and removed all pretensions to idealized sailors and seas; for what hit me is the very real feeling of seeing no boundaries while being enveloped by a yawning depth which quickly renders something useless if you take walking for granted: legs.  My legs are entirely useless in this territory.  Even if I were to propel myself forward, it is the gaping abyss everywhere underneath that tells me that being upright is a random and unimportant thing.  It is when I realized that the sea is not underneath me; I am in it, and it is everywhere.  I cannot stand here, and even if I were able to, I will always know that the abyss underneath and not underneath me will always be something my mind cannot contain.  Depth perception is still hell: the rocks are larger than anything I have ever seen, and the sea, larger still, and more terrifyingly, deeper still.  I cannot see the bottom.  And even if I did, I know this sight and this knowledge will not help me.  

In that moment I was not afraid of sharks, or unknown things.  I was afraid of the sea.  It might be the stuff of poets, but in that moment, it is not.  It is not stuff.  It is a world that is not a world.  It is beautiful and terrible, as anything alien is.  It is terrible and beautiful because your eyes and your legs and your mind - all the puny parts of you that you take for granted as hooks to reality - are rendered futile by the sheer alien magnitude of it.

I might have stayed on that particular spot for a minute, or two, or three - I really don't know.  My swim back to the boat was shaky, but, since I swim like a retarded fish anyway, it didn't really make any difference. Bathophobia be damned: I am not going to write a poem about the sea ever again.