The Sea

It's 2 am. I think I had three cups of coffee today. I read somewhere that there is no real connection between coffee and sleeplessness, but sadly that vague half-knowledge is not making me any sleepier.
Because I couldn't sleep I reread 'The Kraken', by Tennyson, which is one of my favourite poems. Here it is:

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
 Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
 His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
 The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
 About his shadowy sides: above him swell
 Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
 And far away into the sickly light,
 From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
 Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
 Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
 There hath he lain for ages and will lie
 Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
 Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
 Then once by man and angels to be seen,
 In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Tennyson was some ridiculous age, like eighteen, when he wrote this.


A few years ago I happened to be in London when there was a lecture in the Natural History Museum, on giant squid. The most remarkable aspect of the lecture was the dearth of definite knowledge about the subject. Most of the questions put by the audience were answered with a genial shrug and a laughing 'we don't actually know'. It was, in the end, a very informative hour, and an interesting one, illustrating how mysterious the ocean remains.


The sea always seems to me like the outer-space of fantasy - scattered with multi-coloured stars, peopled by aliens. Ctenophores must be Martians, after all. Even the common jellyfish has two heavenly names: 'moon-jelly', presumably what star-men eat on their birthdays; and 'Aurelia aurita', which is the sound a comet makes when it whirls through the planets and whips its tail against the roof of the sky.


Emblematic of the ocean's quintessential strangeness is the sea slug. Slugs are its beauty-queens, its haute-couture cats; feather-boa'd, be-frilled, exuberantly coloured, and as carnivorous as any fashion guru. They quaff endangered coral and boast of their poisonous natures. If they had feet, they would chop off their toes to squeeze into pointy shoes. And if you can have beautiful slugs, it's no great surprise to find other fantastical creatures: shape-shifting octopus, narwhals with headgear nicked from unicorns, triffid-like anemones, and tiny jellyfish that seem to have cracked the code for eternal life.


I don't feel like going into the depressing side of things - the EU fisheries commissioner will be presented with a petition this week asking that the new Common Fisheries Policy guarantees sustainability. Maybe things will get better. Maybe we'll replace petrol as a source of energy, and avoid future spills. Maybe we'll abstain from tasty but endangered treats like tuna and cod and calamari for a while, and fish stocks will recover. The ocean is stately and grand and spooky and wonderful, and will hopefully remain, in the words of James Elroy Flecker,


The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.