Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
   

   

(10 more like him here)
   

19th century thinkers like William Paley argued for the existence of God based on brilliant, beautiful, complex designs in nature — flowers, trees, bird plumage.

You might as well argue for the existence of God based on the ten astonishingly repulsive submarine lives in the link above: Alien forms so ugly they resist all aesthetic valuation. With walleyed gill-flutter they shatter the mirror and slither into the soft void beyond, where symmetry, harmony, color, line & beauty all become meaningless. They’re defiantly themselves, in silent, weird, ultra-pressurized pitch — Holy fuck, look at these critters.

My throat catches when I scan them all. The glutinous blobfish. The estuarine rockfish, severe & implacable as an Olmec head. The wheezing porcine lumpfish.

Why do I start to feel this way? Is it because I catch myself finding them wretched and laughable, ridiculously abhorrent, and then become ashamed with myself, knowing they can’t help how they were made?

Is it because I feel humbled in their presence, their ancient miles-removed presence, so coldly distant from mine that they might as well be martians wriggling among asteroids?

Is it because I feel smaller and uglier & more pathetic compared to their spiny, encrusted, cartilaginoid, mucoused, jellied but unselfconscious & heedless & glaring faces? More purely themselves in all their horrorshow gristle than all of us with our dissembling and meta-shit and second-guessing?

There they are, these deeptrench lives, captured in shock at the foot of ours, drinking all our drainage, our oldest and strangest cohabiters, blinking and mouthing in black while we feed them more plastic.

My tendons, sinews, wrinkles pop out in this light:

Articulated, discrete like the slats, dials, vents
of some chassis.

The hollow of my throat a vulva,
or the gutted cavity
of an upsidedown deercorpse.

My collarbone like ladle, stuck in mid-serve.

My forehead & scalp like a gleaming bronze bat
slapped against my skull.

Hair like long shrews plotting. Or tearing at flesh,
with the draining blood mottling down my brow.

I imagine them at night:
they clamber up & down my clay,
plot in my crags & creases,
leave lizard eggs in the folds of my ears as rent.

It’s time to go to bed. The more I watch myself, the more I don’t understand my biology, in the way a word repeated too much begins to sound alien. Already I don’t understand my shoulder, how its meat can hang on and mix with my bones, armpit, trapezius. So dissociated have I become that I picture, unflinching, what it would be like to pare back the skin, examine the fibers & ligaments.

My wife under the covers, does she ever see her body like this? Maybe not, but I think she does. Both of us watching our aging old-milk bodies curd and separate.

Do we have any yogurt-covered raisins left? Let me look. I could stick one in each ear, those are the lizard eggs. And I’ll paint little evil-red eyes up there for conniving shrew eyes. She’ll laugh in mild disgust when I eat the raisins, and chide me for my little vision later when I tell her what I was imagining. I’ll probably laugh too.

Then I’ll sleep and dream about what I always do nowadays: a white gauze curtain, so thin it’s like mist, flapping and twisting behind me, coy sharp dancing, water-splash-seductive, just barely in my periphery, lost in a shoal-dart as soon as I make the smallest move to watch.