Upside down

Posted on March 27, 2009 in Creatures Reflections Writing Exercises

This is a writing exercise based on this picture.

The jellyfish face each other in a peculiar position that must signify a mating ritual. Their diaphanous blood orange beanies hang upside down. Their tentacles trail upwards, spurts of milk twirling in the cobalt-blue water. Their captivity in an aquarium is certain: nowhere else on earth is the water so impossibly blue as this. They ignore the barriers to unhindered free-floating. Their tank could be the sky or the lagoon of an atoll. What matters most to them now is love. Not the kind that spurs those who feel it to exalted declarations of feeling toward one another but that which calls on one to release oneself into calm waters and make a graceful turbulence. Love is, at the root of it all, the same for all. I doubt that jellyfish couple in the way that higher life forms do. The constituents that will spark the chemistry that will become their offspring must enter the water. They lack eyes to appreciate one another’s lacy beauty, ears to hear the alteration of the current cleaved by their wakes, and they probably do not smell. Their awareness of one another’s proximity mystifies me , yet I am certain that they know another is near because they begin to swim up and down in the dance of love. I would not be a jellyfish because I like to think. The life of drifting with only the slightest of movements to cut a keel through the water suits them just fine, however. Up and down, letting gravity hold them upright until the moment of ecstasy bids them to drive the sky to the place of the earth is what they loiter for. Or do I reduce things? Does the water massaging their caps cause them to scintillate states of consciousness that challenge our thinking in the pleasure and the pain it brings them? I don’t know what it is like to be a jellyfish because of the clutter of words and images in my head. The only thing that I can do is watch them, barely thinking “Look how they float with their tassels now below them, now above them. What a nice dance.”