Submarines
Each one a Nemo in hir own right: the captain — and self-appointed, usually degree-less, mostly unqualified but mostly unpretentious and good willed (or maybe that’s only sometimes) naturalist, historian, archaeologist, scientist, collector, antiquarian or futurist or now-ist-maybe-buddhist, classifier, obsessive-compulsive magpie, or simply, in accordance with and out of [unconscious?] respect for ancestral careers, a hunter-gatherer — of a floating bubble with, imagine barnacles on a whale… now, make them float just off the whale, an inch! Imagine an entirely barnacle-inhabited sphere, imagine condensation displaced illusorily just an-arbitrary-distance-not-too-far from the ice-water glass as though its surface actually hung, unseen, just outside itself. Imagine a Dyson sphere and there you have it: each little submersible with a googol of artifacts about itself, trapped, orbiting.
And I among them: I gently place my satellites into bottles, folders, clouds, and label them. Where did it come from? What is it? Where is it going? Where does it belong: what class, family, genre, species, what else? These are mine and they make Me, although I did not make any of them. [Well, maybe ~10% are my regurgitations.] I seem to acquire a personality: a Who who has selected these — only this Who could have selected these in this way, only this Who could have woven such a web, as differentiable as the variable homes of individual spider species. I gently lace my Self into a cloud.
Some float entirely anonymous, some pseudonymous, armed with their orbiters and gazing out of the only, rectangular space left clear of debris, out of their submersibles, out into the Sea of Things. They project their Selves like Pepper’s Ghosts onto the outsides of those little rectangles so that each has a face. A façade. Some in swarms, some bobbing along alone, interacting via ripples sent between them: marine mammal calls? Tap, tap, tap, Roger, I acknowledge you!
And there! Where crest meets trough, a mating ritual! One performs the part of the male bird, waving all his stuff around. The other: tap, tap, tap, assumes female, and collects the flying accessories. The question becomes: Where have you been, what have you seen? That’s the basis for value judgement. You can tell if a being’s been around a bit by the state of that one’s personal-social curio cabinet. Are they cosmopolitan; do their choices reflect worldliness in a non-literal way: the way of subtle references and selections of rarities that only someone who’s been around the seas could make? Or are they still provincial, guided, like-like-liking all the safe, peddled, re-selected versions of things?
Each one in hir own little submarine, choosing choosing, outfitting a 2D, imaginary, coded, but very real Self with the Appendages of the Seas…
