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.
The deep ship was completed in 1948, but was soon after damaged during a storm and sold off to the French Navy. Implacable, the Piccard’s began work on a second Bathyscaphe, this one named Trieste. Built in Italy, the Trieste was first launched in 1953, off the coast of the island of Capri. Initially used to make experimental surveys of the Mediterranean seabed, the ship was operated by the Piccards and the French Navy. Initial dives took them to depths of around 3,000 metres. This was quite deep for subs of the day, but the Piccards longed for the highs and the lows, and the middle sea was too shallow for their ambitions. They were waiting for the ocean to rise up and swallow them. After several years of service the Piccards and the Trieste made contact with the united states Navy. The US was looking to increase its capacities under the sea. Oceanographic research was a military strategy, and the Piccards with their deep ship were welcomed on board. Never lacking bravado, the navy wanted the first mission to be the penultimate. Codenamed Project Nekton, the goal was to send the Trieste as far down as anyone could go, down into the Abyssal plains below the pacific ocean. Down into the Mariana Trench. Into the Challenger deep.
In January, 1960, the Trieste and Jacques Piccard were taken to the island of Guam, part of the chain of islands known as the Marianas. Close by is the island of Tinian. It was from Tinian that the atomic attacks against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were launched. It is in this volcanic region that the Mariana Trench joins a series of cleavages stretching right up to the coast of Japan. It is a fissure in the skin of the earth, part of the pacific ring of fire. The Mariana islands are themselves the tiny tops of great seamounts, spewed up by volcanic eruptions, just breaching the surface with the tips of their fingers. These points of earth spot the outline of an immense curving arc, the edges between two huge shards of earth, where one rubs up against another. The Phillipine plate, like a huge ripple out from the continent, plunges under the Marianas plate, which buckles and rides up over the thrust. On the sea floor, where the two edges crush together, is a breach into the interior of the world.
At the time of Project Nekton, the Trieste resembled something like a conventional submarine crossed with a stratospheric balloon. Beneath a fifteen metre long float hung a small, german made pressurized steel gondola. The entire bulk of the float was taken up by buoyancy tanks filled with gasoline, and with ballast tanks holding 16 tons of magnetized iron shot. The shot was used to weight the ship for descent, and released gradually to control ascent. The Trieste looked like a swollen white boat, with a small globe attached to the underside of its belly. Inside the sphere, the crew had less than 3 square metres of space. The rest was filled with electrical equipment. The sphere also had two windows, one in the aft to observe the connection with the hull. The other was a slightly downward facing observation porthole. A plexiglass portal into ocean. Through that small aperture, the sea was supposed to reveal its deepest secrets. The navy wanted to demonstrate their omnipotence. The Piccards were high on the depths. The world’s spaces unfolded, and a new realm was declared sovereign. Or so they thought. In truth, the world has no limit, only distance and darkness, mystery and madness.
III
They were nearing the depths measured by the HMS Challenger in 1949. Piccard flipped the switch for the ballast tanks, releasing several more tons of iron shot into the sea. Their descent slowed, the iron shot sank down into the blackness. “10,000 metres”, said Walsh, “no sign of the bottom, though”. Piccard looked over at the echo-sounder that complemented their depth gauge. It would show them when the sea floor came within reach. But they continued to fall, and no echos returned to them. “10,500 metres”. Piccard released more shot, they slowed again, but kept falling. They were now at a depth lower than that measured by the Challenger. The Abyss was deeper than thought. In their slowness they felt they were inside a vast emptiness beyond all comprehension. The world had disappeared. All that remained was their cramped cabin. They were beyond even the tested capabilities of the Trieste. Silent, secret and epochal, a new world opened around them. A world of immanence, without form, without duration. With them they brought time, they brought light. They brought life. Or so they thought.
A sudden loud explosion and their hearts lunged, clutched with ice. They looked around them. Nothing. All gauges working. The front portal unbroken. Silence again. Then a faint hooting. Their equipment blinked. Echoes were returning to them from the bottom. They had reached the seabed. Piccard released some more shot. The falling pellets hit the bottom and sent up a great cloud of murky sediment. The Trieste, indifferent to the nearly 200,000 tons of pressure clamped to its metal sphere, balanced delicately on the few lengths of guide rope that protected its underside. With a subtle shake and shudder it settled lightly onto the ocean’s floor. The depth gauge read 11,000 metres. They were under the ocean. Under the world.
In the stillness that followed neither of them spoke. Their breath slowed. Their pulses slowed. They were adjusting to the new dimension. Would it welcome them? After a few minutes of silence, the faint ticking of stressed metal echoing through the ship, the water around them cleared. They peered out into the sea. A cone of light shot out from their porthole into the void, lighting a world that had never seen the sun. It was as if they were creating space and time. The bottom appeared light and clear, a waste of snuff colored ooze. Piccard remarked that they had landed on a nice, firm bed of diatomaceous ooze, which, according to samples taken during the Challenger expedition, was composed almost entirely of the siliceous remains of the tropical diatom, Ethmodiscus Rex. The ocean floor was covered in ancient strata of fossilized plankton. A living bed of frustules and tests, silica and calcium. And it lives, too. It lives. It feels.
Staring out into the previously unimaginable, Piccard and Walsh cried out as they saw something in the beam of light. Close to them, close to the ground, was a kind of fish. One foot long, grey and bulge eyed. “It looks like a kind of flathead,” Walsh said. “Or maybe a Sole”. “What is it doing here?”, whispered Piccard. Walsh had no answer. The alien fish appeared to watch them. But how could it even have eyes?, Piccard wondered mutely, too shocked to say anything. How it could survive this living burial? The fish regarded them with alien indifference. Slowly, extremely slowly, it swam away. Partly in the water, partly in the ooze, it disappeared into the night. Slowly too, Walsh and Piccard shook hands. They were at the bottom of the ocean. Underneath them, the ground shivered. Underneath the ocean, in the not-quite-nothingness, something was stirring. Something could feel them, could feel the light (the Light!), and was awakening.
*
Radiolaria. Foraminifera. Diatoma. Plankton. Protozoa. All encased in a billion years worth of liquid fossil ooze. Rich seams of potential life and fuel. Potential forms of life, sources of heterogenesis. The essential fuels for life coagulate, unmoved on the ocean floor. After several million years of pressure, microscopic territories merge. Amongst the fossilised remains live minute numina, called ‘Foraminifera’. They build for themselves delicate walls of living clay. They live amidst the wastes of living plasma. They develop worlds, cosmos, relations between matter, sentient and inert. Intelligence seeps out of the living into the almost alive. Borders collapse, seepage occurs. And throughout all of this a memory lingers in the anatomy of the compressed billions. Light. The Sun. Helios. Sol. And under the soft rays of the visiting alien ship, photosynthetic memories spark, linkages form between dormant cells, neural-like arrangements of filaments and soft tissue. The light! The light! The source of almost all life has visited the land of the dead. It is calling them. Waking them. It is telling them to wake. Diatoma, once dead and dormant, recombine, reanimate. A shimmering wave of kinesis and bioelectricity floods the seabed. Where walls once existed between life forms connections appear. A biological circuit of hunger and sun-worhip. The miasmatic faunae coalesce in a secret amalgam of neuralgia and awareness. Otherness, sameness. Hunger, thirst. The seabed ripples, like a cuttlefish, transforming itself into whatever it touches, becoming everything it is and isn’t all at once. Slowly. With great pains and the crushing of cells. It tries to reach out to the light. The Seabed, alive and rippling, reaches out to light, to the light shining down on it from above.
*
Inside the Trieste Piccard was finishing up with some simple scientific measurements. He checked for radioactivity, water temperature, abyssal currents and other such contingencies. He went through his tasks with the slowness that seemed to characterise all events below the ocean. All of a sudden, his movements ceased, and he stared up with a look of confusion. The sound of static washed through the sphere. Crouched above him, Walsh had miraculously managed to make radio contact with the surface boat. “Wandank”, Walsh whispered quietly into the radio, “This is Trieste, do you read me? Over.” After a few long seconds the astonished response came with a ghostly echo and delay. “T-rieste w-e re-ad yo-u. Wh-at is yo-ur sta-tus? Ov-er”. Walsh turned to Piccard, looking him in the eye, holding his gaze for a moment. Into the radio he whispered, “Wandank, this is Trieste. We are at 6,300 fathoms. We are in the Challenger Deep.” The radio fluttered lightly with static. Again the response came as if through time, with a faint echo. “Ro-ger, Tri-este. Yo-u are rig-ht on sche-dule. Ho-w w-ill yo-u pro-ceed?” Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh were silent. The plan had been to spend only half an hour at the bottom. They were already well beyond the anticipated depth, and the Trieste groaned and creaked under the pressure. Partly out of fear and partly out of prudence, Piccard decided they would begin their journey to the surface. “Wandank, we will begin our surface journey immediately”. “Ro-ger Tri-este. Wi-ll sta-nd b-y”. Before releasing the necessary ballast Piccard took one last look out the porthole, into the deepest inner space of the sea. In the vague undulations of the biotic floor, he thought he saw something move. The floor seemed to bend, as if trying to rise. Suddenly, a red flash, and an accompanying ripple in the bed. Then nothing. He blinked, unsure of himself. A load groan and a sound like cracking ice stirred him. He flipped the ballast switch and tons of iron shot poured out of the tanks, sending a blinding cloud of diatomaceous remains flowing up into the water. With a light jolt the Trieste lifted up off the floor and began to rise, out of the cloud and upwards, through the void towards the surface. Piccard switched on the aft light, and Walsh, who had climbed up to check some instruments, exclaimed loudly. “I see what caused the shock earlier!” The small aft porthole that looked out above the hanging sphere near to the hatch had cracked. Little fractures and fissures ran through the plexiglass. Under the pressure of the ocean it would likely hold, but they were gripped with anxiety.
Their ascent was much faster than their journey down. They shed more ballast as they rose up through the waters. Below them, unseen, the cloud of ooze had grown. It boiled and swirled, ever smaller as they rose, invisible in the blackness, writhing and knotting itself. Suddenly, from within the living cloud, a titanic, formless energy exploded and rushed upwards through the water. From the deepest abyss a force had woken, and like an infant, was reaching up to clutch at the life which had woken it. But the Trieste, ignorantly rising, floated just out of reach, and as the light disappeared into the watery sky, the storm subsided into itself, collapsing in a vast cloud of murk and magic.
After an hour or so the divers began to see marine snow again. And then light. They were rising with a speed of several metres per second. Shooting up through the deep blue depth, the sluggish water thick and cold. Their thoughts were on the cracked window. Piccard thought no more about the flash and murmur he had seen down there. The Trieste was well above the breach, floating up into the currents of the pacific ocean. They floated up past streaming diatoms, plankton and krill. They rose past shoals of fish and silent hunters. Past billowing swarms of jellyfish. Through rippling currents of warm water, streaming from the coast to the other side of the ocean. The sphere rose ever up and up, reversing the diurnal rhythm of its descent. Up through the final bright layers of warmest water, the Trieste burst through the surface with a light splash, whorls and eddies streaming around the sudden eruption. The sea around them still rolled and swelled, threatening to unleash the full fury of a squall. But Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh were buoyed up on a tide of nameless emotion. Something like gratitude, flushed with awe. The air around them seemed to crackle and spark with life. Stepping out of the hatch into the atmosphere and turbulence, they were relieved to see they had returned to the world they had left, not long after they had left it. Their journey into the deeps had perturbed their sense of time and place. It would not have been a great shock for them to find themselves surfacing in some other world, aeons after their descent.
*
Down below the teeming layers of light and currents. Below the fading zones where hunters surprise shoals of deep diving fish. Under the arenas where whales and squid fight epic battles to the death, where the loser is crushed and eaten alive. Way beneath the cosmically empty voids that fill the basins of the ocean with cold, black water. Below the vague places where even the krakens cannot go. Right down, way down, past the depth of the ocean's floors and right into the heart of darkness, where the earth pulses close, where volcanoes are born, screaming into the dark. In this place, the last place, the lost place, something is moving. Something is waiting, longing, hungry for the light which made it live again. It is made up of billions and trillions of uncertain cells, falling into each other, fueling each other in the absence of the sun. Bioenergetic seepages arc between cell walls, while silica kaleidoscopes reshuffle themselves to join with calcium skeletons. The entire seabed is a rippling mass of transformation, becoming something constantly, consuming and spawning, conjoining and differentiating. The silted remains of the oceans, flooded with occult longing, waiting again for the light to descend and illuminate it. The seabed is growing, learning, feeding on itself. And while it feeds it receives from above, the snow that falls forever through the deep. More cells, more chlorophyll, more hunger. The deceased and dying protists that flood the ocean, transmuting sunlight into life, turning gold into crystals and chemicals. The snow falls endlessly into the abyss. Unseen in the pitch blackness, drifting down, to settle into this new flux of kinesis and desire. The seabed waits for the light from above. It will come, and be consumed. It will fall again. Like the soft marine snow that drifts through the night, unending.
*
