DIATOMA

The Dive of the Bathyscaphe Trieste.

“For beauty is just the beginning of a terror we are barely able to endure.
And we wonder at it, because it so calmly disdains to destroy us.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Few objects are more beautiful than the minute siliceous shells of the diatomaceæ.”
– Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species

I

Under the cold, crushing weight of water. Under the oceans, under the world, there is stillness. Almost total darkness. A depth of blue like thickest indian ink. Aeons of lostness, coldness, collapse. Here, where the pressure crushes everything not made of living glass. Where the cold encases every living thing in crystal. Even here, under mountains of pressure, there is motion. Even here, there is life. Hunting, hiding, effaced by disguise, mysterious as ghosts. Some of it is monstrous, twisted into occult skeletons of bone and phosphorescence. And some of it, smaller than the eye can find, is sinking. Into an abysmal blackness. Into nothing else. Into years of silence, no currents, no lights. Movement downwards, descending by glacial degrees. Falling. Like everlasting snow.
    

      
    Plankton. Phytoplankton. Prokaryotes. Eukaryotes. Flagellants. Algaes. Diatoms. Life specks. Limitless billions of shells of chlorophyll and silica. A diffuse cosmos of living molecules. Microscopic sprites, with colossal life cycles. Leading them from the upper seas where they billow through currents like aquatic pollen. Harvesting sunlight, fueling the world. And after life, shutting down, falling apart. Sinking into the depths. For ages, sinking down. An unchanging descent into the vast abyss. Losing coherence in the blackness. Dropping through the final fade of light and into nothing but the dark. Becoming invisible. Becoming residue. Crystallized. Molecular. And finally, after years of waiting. Falling in, touching the earth. Becoming part of the sea floor. A biotic carpet of silt and sediment. Crushed in the darkness, waiting for the light.

II

Deep in the western territories of the pacific ocean, between Japan and Papua New Guinea, lies the Mariana trench, an abyss embedded in the ocean floor. Lodged between a series of volcanic islands, the trench cleaves the mountainous seabed, running north to south in a near perfect half circle. The fissure is over two and a half thousand kilometres long, hollowing the thin chasm between two plates of oceanic crust. At the southern end of the scar, buried between the mountainous folds, the trench's lowest point. It has been given a name. The Challenger Deep. And in this secret place, undisturbed for millennia, obscurely evolved species have plotted the depths, surviving by sorcery and violence. Until one endless night, something alien breached this place, something from the world above. Life, searching for something, descended into the dark, under the world, and shined a light into it.

*

The Bathyscaphe Trieste was designed by the Swiss scientist and inventor, Auguste Piccard. In the 1930’s Piccard had flown into the high atmosphere using pressurized spheres attached to gas-filled balloons. He reached record breaking heights, and became convinced that the steel gondolas which housed the aeronaut during his ascents could be used for other purposes. After his journey into the stratosphere in 1938, Piccard turned his attention to the possibility of using similar spheres to withstand the immense pressures of the ocean deeps. With the help of his son Jacques, he began to design the first of the deep ships, the Bathyscaphes. Jacques Piccard had begun his career as an economist, but he soon left his university teaching position to follow his father into the sea. Work on the first Bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, was halted by the outbreak of World War II, the world having decided to explore the abysmal depths between nations and people, rather than oceans or atmospheres. The Piccards, Swissfully neutral, waited for the killing to stop. In 1945, in the midst of the newest ruins of europe, work on the submersible was resumed.