The boat, now stationary, rocks against the waves; the horizon shifts up and down according to the rhythms of the sea. A nauseating undulation, signaling that that it is time to gear up, to begin. You have prepared the equipment already, when your feet were back on the solid ground of the shore: strapped the air tank to the buoyancy control device (BCD), screwed the regulator to the tank, clipped the air hose in place, turned on the air. You’ve made sure that the tank is full, that the air inside isn’t tainted, that you have the correct weights, that your regulator, alternate air source, and BCD work as intended, that the air comes easy when you suck. It has become second nature; your hands work according to muscle memory as you attach various straps and clips to streamline the gear. Now, you check it all again, unscrew the air tank fully, then a quarter turn back. Make a note of how much you have. You spit in your mask and rinse it to stop it fogging, clip the snorkel in place on the left side of the mask (snorkels always on the left, regulator on the right). You and your buddy, your mutual responsibility underwater companion, examine each other’s set ups one last time.

This process, of checking and rechecking, ensures safety, but also provides a framework for not having to think. It’s ceremonial: to focus on the rituals of equipment is to quell the mind and stomach. The BCD, heavy above water with the tank attached, goes on like a rucksack and is buckled in place. You tighten straps, put on your mask and fins, half inflate the BCD, place the regulator in your mouth, and waddle-shuffle to the edge of the boat feeling encumbered, disorientated, and lightly nauseous. You’re transformed, cyborgian, no longer suited to the surface world.

The moment of impact—the splash—isn’t strange so much as the seconds before. The realization that you’re about to pierce the ocean’s surface throws your body into a world for which you are not designed.

On the surface of the ocean, you signal to the boat—fingertips on your scalp, elbow crooked—that you are OK. The weight of equipment is alleviated by the water but not its bulk. Bobbing around, supported by the inflated BCD, you feel lifejacketed, out of place, like something that might need to be rescued, but the strangeness of the situation has somewhat dissipated. It’s taken a lot to get to this point. You give your buddy a thumbs down, not of disapproval, but to signal descent.

 

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Descent

To descend you raise the inflator hose on your BCD and let out the air. Assisted by weights, you begin to sink. It’s felt in the ears, descent. Eustachian tubes constrict as the volume of air inside contracts due to the increased barometric pressure. To rectify this change, you pinch your nose through your mask and blow, as one might during airplane landings. This action—technically known as the Valsalva maneuver—forces air into the Eustachian tubes which equalizes the pressure. Descending divers, equalizing early, often, and before any discomfort look as though they’re repeatedly trying to hold in a sneeze. Not rectifying this internal pressure change would be excruciating and eventually result in ruptured ear drums. In The Art of Living Underwater, the astronomer Edmond Halley’s 1716 account of inventing one of the first operational diving bells, Halley describes the sensation: “a pressure begins to be felt on each ear,” he writes, “which by degrees grows painful, like as if a quill were forcibly thrust into the hole of the ear.”

Divers descend upright, as though imitating standing. Though adopted for its aquadynamic efficiency, this remnant of bipedality—and the period of descent itself—allows for a gradual calibration. We hold on to a vestige of life on land before we commit to the sea. It’s a form of self-protection: it curbs our disorientation, suppresses feelings of insignificance in the face of profound vastness. The sub-surface of the ocean can, of course, be glimpsed without diving—briefly through goggles perhaps, or while snorkeling—but viewing and being immersed are not equal.

In The Silent World, Jacques Cousteau recalls eating a lunch of fresh lobsters, procured during the first ever dive using an Aqua-Lung, the revolutionary untethered, self-contained diving system co-invented by Cousteau and Émile Gagnan in 1943. Cousteau writes that, during the meal, his colleague, Philippe Tailliez, “penciled the tablecloth and announced that each yard of depth we claimed in the sea would open to mankind three hundred thousand cubic kilometers of living space.” I love this anecdote, the notion that each increment of depth might provide access to almost incalculable horizontal space, as though the ocean is composed of concentric yard-deep circles, like an ancient oak.

A dive location is known as a site. The word suggests containment, circumscription, but it’s hard sometimes to shake the knowledge that oceanic bodies of water are interconnected—borderless—in ways that landmasses are not. You’re rarely, if ever, aiming for the bottom when diving. Sometimes, the sea floor can be hundreds of feet down and invisible. In these cases, the ocean registers as a boundless expanse of blue. Often, below is a coral reef, an ecosystem that covers less than one percent of the ocean floor but supports a quarter of its life. To touch the bottom would damage structures that’ve been slowly growing for thousands of years.

I tend to only half-notice my surroundings during descent. Broad impressions register—the outline of the reef, the position of fellow divers, whether the water is turbid or clear, the direction and strength of the current. But I’m preoccupied, with equalizing, depth gauges, and breath. The first rule of scuba diving is to never hold your breath, but to focus on an otherwise automatic function is to make it peculiar, the way repeating a word, any word, renders it meaningless.

Ten meters down the volume of air in a tank is half that at the surface and is twice as dense; at forty meters—the limit of recreational deep diving—it’s five times denser and only a fifth of the surface volume. Air is received through a mouthpiece known as a regulator and comes out cold and dry; the flow is powerful; more surge than sip. The sensation of inhaling isn’t passive; it feels as though you’re filling your lungs with something substantial, with matter. Each exhalation produces a swarm of bubbles, which expand as they float through lower pressure towards the surface, becoming, as Cousteau writes, “peculiarly flattened like mushroom caps.” They seem to have a certain structural integrity; their reflective surface reads as being forged from metal rather than air.

At depth, the axis flips. Instead of existing vertically on a horizontal plane as on land, one becomes both horizontally oriented and concerned with the verticality of depth. Underwater, your position in vertical space is controllable, and controlling it effectively is crucial. Regulation of this kind is made possible through achieving neutral buoyancy, the state where you neither sink, nor float, but hover. Neutral buoyancy is foundational to good diving, the site where much of the both the safety and pleasure is derived. As such, it’s been written about extensively and often rather lyrically. In her book Sea Change, marine biologist and oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes, “I merged with the water, allowed myself to hang, motionless, […] like a sleepy barracuda or a single molecule.” Tim Ecott, in Neutral Buoyancy, recalls an engineer saying that “he dived in order to experience flight […] like a bird, but on reflection he had decided that to be a fish would be superior [as] a bird cannot choose to stay motionless in the air.” Buzz Aldrin, the first astronaut to train underwater, in preparation for the moon landing, called it an “intricate ballet.” Quoted in Time magazine in 1960, Cousteau writes: “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free. […] Under water, man becomes an archangel.”

 

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At Depth

I learned to scuba dive the spring after I turned twelve. I hadn’t wanted to. I liked the sea, though I wasn’t a strong or coordinated swimmer­­. I was terrified, though not of sharks or drowning but rather of myself. I was an overweight, anxious, and claustrophobic child. My body never did as I wanted, particularly when any form of physical exertion was involved. I’d chafe, flush, sweat, stumble, get scared, do it wrong, panic. I was prone to embarrassment, which I felt viscerally, as though my skin was pressing up against the atmosphere which surrounded it, taking up far more that its allotted space.

I was convinced that being underwater would feel suffocating, as though the ocean was on top of me. I’d be contending with the weight of thousands of gallons of seawater pinning me in from all sides. I believed that my inevitable ineptitude at diving would burden my mother, who was excited to introduce me and my brother to this activity which meant so much to her. The thought of letting her down, or even of revealing my fear, would prove—according to my pre-adolescent brain’s logic—that I was weak. Letting her know how I felt was scarier than privately dealing with my fear.

Underwater, the things I kept hidden—looping anxious thoughts, compulsive plotting out of worst-case scenarios, the fact that the world seemed to hold an atmosphere of just-dormant catastrophe—served me well. In diving there’s a necessary and central acknowledgement of potential danger. Instead of feeling annoying or crazy, I was tasked with learning all that could go wrong and how best to prevent it. This permission to fret had a strangely countervailing effect on me. Those thoughts now had direction: somewhere to be deposited, a course to run. Once cast outwards, set loose, I was left feeling serene.

My relationship to my body changed too. On an early dive, I remember being hit by the realization that I had hipbones: I could feel them, working in tandem with the bones in my legs, and feet, and my flippers to propel me through the water. It moved me, this sudden awareness that I was anchored by a skeleton. It felt as though the ocean had dissolved everything of me that was extraneous; my pudgy mass had been replaced by a complex system of bone, muscle, tendon and breath. Automatic functions felt almost conscious, as though I was instructing each cell to work in unison with the next. I was embodied, a well-tuned machine. I felt, for the first time, both capable and small.

I developed a certain swagger. There’s a photograph of me standing on the deck of the dive shop the day that I certified as a Junior Open Water Diver. BCD slung on one shoulder, fins under my arm, I’m wearing a wetsuit emblazoned with the branding SCUBAPRO. My hair is wet and tangled. I’m squinting in the sunlight, my eyes have been almost subsumed by my flushed cheeks, pressed upward as a result of my grin. I look pleased with myself, happy. My brother is standing next to me. His head cocked at an angle, he almost smirks, clearly feeling his own power.

• • •

It’s an extraordinary feeling, being neutrally buoyant. A little like floating except you’re suspended in, not supported by, the water. Untethered from the laws of gravity, you can move freely in three-dimensional space. You feel aquatic, not in but of the water, as though you belong to this realm. With fins, propulsion is easy. Arms, needed only for communication and gauge checks, remain by your side, crossed in front, or tucked behind your tank. Micro-adjustments to vertical positionality can be made with breath. Underwater, lungs act as a ballasting system: inhaling from the diaphragm can provide the lift to clear, say, a protruding staghorn coral; exhaling fully enables you to descend below a ledge to see what lies beneath, often a lobster or moray eel.

Underwater, the systems of information upon which we normally rely fall short or don’t exist. Speaking, of course, is impossible, and most communication occurs through a series of hand signals: gestures used to pose and answer simple questions; give instructions; alert other divers to problems, hazards, and emergency situations; and point out a relatively wide range of marine life. The system is basic, but universal. As such, it traverses linguistic barriers, enabling divers who do not share spoken language to communicate with ease. I find a certain comfort in its limited nature. These signals deal exclusively in the essential and the visually remarkable; everything else is suspended for the length of the dive. It’s not that the remnants—all that cannot be conveyed—don’t matter or cease to exist. Instead, these thoughts and feelings remain private, even wordless. I let them ricochet around my mind: some gather strength, become formed, while others pass through, rapidly forgotten. Freed from the pressure of conversation, I feel almost preverbal, attuned instead to the sensory.

Submersion is registered aurally: that stopping-up sensation, both heard and felt, as water fills the ear canals. To hear the surface world is to still be part of it. We cannot be submerged, not fully, until we commit, get our ears wet, enter the undersea domain where surface sounds fail to penetrate. Their existence is easily forgotten, but they are not replaced by silence. An altered sonic order—a subaqueous soundscape—takes hold.

Sound waves travel faster—over four times faster—in water than air. They travel faster still in saltwater than fresh, in cold water than warm, and tend to be isolated to water of a similar temperature. It’s a matter of density. Sound cannot exist without a medium for its waves to traverse. A medium like sea water conducts sound waves more efficiently: they speed up and travel further. Sound waves bypass our eardrums, which are too close to water’s density to produce the tympanic vibrations we usually rely on to hear. Instead, in a process called bone conduction, sound travels through the mastoid bone, located just behind the ear, to the inner ear. The speed and method by which we receive it alters our perception. We no longer hear in stereo; sound becomes omniphonic: seemingly emanating from every direction, and from within ourselves, at once.

The sounds of breath are amplified. Each inhale produces a hiss-whistle-suck of pressurized air; each exhale is transformed into a gush of dispersing bubbles. Dives are soundtracked by this steady and perpetual rhythm: hiss gurgle hiss gurgle hiss gurgle. The sound is textured; you feel as if you could almost touch or taste it. The regularity of the pattern is bewitching; it reverberates in your head, takes on a life of its own. It causes a sort of auditory pareidolia, where you start to believe that words might be hidden within, yet they disappear before you can name them. The intensity lessens; the sound once again clearly the by-product of somatic function: repetitive, meditative, vital. To hear it is to know you’re still breathing, that you didn’t hold your breath.

• • •

Recreational scuba diving is a relatively recent phenomenon, but people have been submerging themselves for centuries, venturing underwater in search of food, shells, and seaweed; to collect sponges and pearls to trade; to salvage riches from the hulls of sunken galleons and merchant ships; to wage war.

We know this because of the bony growths found in the ear canals of the mummified remains of the Chinchorro people, who lived on the Atacama coast between 7,000 and 1,500 BCE; and because archaeologists have found 4,500-year-old shells in Mesopotamia that could only have been collected by diving. We know this because it’s written in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh attaches heavy stones to his feet to dive for a thorny plant. In Sumerian ñiñri means “to dive;” in Latin it’s urinari, and a male diver is a urinator. The ancient Greeks had words for both dive fishing and sponge diving. There’s diving, for oysters and sponges, in the Iliad, and Aristotle mentions breathing machines, diving bells, and sponge diving across his work, as does Pliny the Elder.

People went diving with no equipment, in loin cloths, in white to ward off sharks, with hollowed out reeds to breathe, and with polished tortoise shells as goggles. They descended in diving bells, rudimentary submersibles, wearing brass helmets weighing 250 pounds, and, in the case of John Lethbridge, a sealed barrel with arm holes and a lookout window.

Early divers were mostly men, but not exclusively. In 480 BCE, Hydna of Scione, accompanied by her father Scyllias, vandalized the Persian king Xerxes’ naval fleet by cutting the moorings of the boats. A contemporary writer argued her actions proved that “young women may dive into the sea without fear of losing their virginity,” that hymens and eardrums are not alike. In Japan, ama (sea women) may have been diving––for abalone shells, pearls, and seafood––for as long as 2,000 years, and certainly have been since 927 CE. In South Korea’s Jeju province, women known as haenyeo (sea women) have been diving since the 17^th century. As primary earners, the haenyeo created a regional semi-matriarchal society and family structure through their work.

Still, many early divers died: of asphyxiation, suffocation, oxygen toxicity, and barotrauma. Some died testing their inventions. Others were crippled by decompression sickness, most commonly affects the joints. Its colloquial name, the bends, stems from sufferers’ resemblance to the Grecian bend, the posture, popular in the 19^th century, in which women arched their backs to accentuate the bustles on their skirts. (It remains disputed as to whether the term was coined during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eads Bridge in St. Louis; many caisson workers were afflicted by decompression sickness during the construction of both). The sight of “bent” sponge divers was so common on the Greek island of Kalymnos, that a local folk dance, Michanikos, honors the afflicted.

• • •

Perhaps it seems strange that I haven’t yet focused on the obvious, by which I mean diving’s visual delights. Recreational diving is an ocular-centric endeavor; people dive in order to witness—with their own two eyes—what would otherwise be concealed. For many, I imagine, everything else is incidental, peripheral to the act of seeing. In researching this essay, I’ve read countless descriptions of dives. There’s a kindred triteness in much of the writing: prose littered with the words “alien” and “otherworldly,” “void,” and “abyss”; accounts which contain references to the color palettes of Gauguin, Chagall, Cézanne, or van Gogh; or which are saturated with synonyms for blue. In this mode, sponges become rusty amphoras or medieval cardinal’s robes. Clusters of coral are bouquets or patchwork quilts. Fish are relentlessly personified. Much, if not most of it, fails to ring true.

When a writer tries to reproduce diving’s images in text, the singular beauty—the particular interplay of light and matter which occurs at depth—fails to translate. It cannot be accessed by those who remain on the surface. Normally, I take pleasure in this gap, and even see it as a site of creative potential. In this case though, it’s a deficit acutely felt. I cannot think of another mode of seeing as immersive as that when diving, where the act of looking is inseparable from the totality of the experience in which it takes place. To focus solely on the visual is like spending a day collecting pebbles on a beach, only to take them home and realize their appeal was their wetness. You’re left with dull stone.

If the experience of diving is relatively uncommon, exposure to its images is not. A person who has never so much as waded in the ocean is almost certainly familiar with its contents through high-saturation photographs and the ultra-high-definition footage of contemporary documentary film. The ubiquity of these images (kaleidoscopic coral reefs, glistening dense schools of fish, close encounters with apex predators) serve to alter or supplant the reality of what divers can actually see. A slippage, I think, occurs between an individual’s memory of their experience, and a more collective or popular imaginary.

Scuba diving doesn’t just grant access to underwater scenes, it alters the very mechanisms of seeing. Dive masks tunnel the visual field and make objects appear 25% closer and 33% larger than they are. Colors are modified or completely transformed by both depth and horizontal distance between diver and object: yellow and orange look increasingly washed out; red turns brown then black. If you cut yourself diving, blood, which reflects some (normally invisible) green light, appears spirulina green. Visual perception—between dives and within individual dives—isn’t fixed. As divers pass through multiple depths, changes are registered as process, rather than sudden transformation. Seeing, then, is a state of flux: it shifts, mutates, according to conditions of depth, sunlight, and turbidity.

The issue is light. When sunlight meets the ocean, some is reflected off the surface (how much depends on the angle of the sun), but the majority is attenuated: absorbed by water molecules and scattered by salt, minerals, and various suspended particles. The greater the depth, the less light penetrates. About eighty percent of sunlight is absorbed in the first ten meters, and only one percent reaches one hundred meters. At six hundred meters the illumination is equivalent to starlight. In the aphotic zone, beginning at 1,000 meters deep, there’s total darkness. It’s not a straightforward dimming; the longer waves of the visible light spectrum are absorbed first: red by six meters, orange by 40, yellow by 100. Blue and green light penetrate deepest, giving the ocean its color and casting its contents in a distinctive permeating blueness.

In contemporary professional underwater film, blue is relegated, diminished. Complex lighting systems, expensive cameras, and post-production color grading work to eradicate the ocean’s absorption of light and color. Warm tones are restored and emphasized; vivid corals, brilliant anemones, and bright-hued little fish stand out, crisp against a backdrop of blue. But blue isn’t background, nor filter, nor obstacle. I don’t wish to see through it, though even if I did, it would be impossible. When diving, blue swaddles. It’s constant, the visual signifier of the medium in which all is suspended. When I dive, I am submerged—both in water and in blue.

• • •

In her essay “Touched by Water: The Body in Scuba Diving,” the cultural geographer Elizabeth R. Straughan writes that scuba diving is as an “obviously and deeply embodied experience.” She views the “diving body as illustrative of a particular porosity of the self.” The relationship here, between embodiment and porosity, interests me. Diving transcends the limitations of the human body, yet the experience is a deeply embodied one. Being underwater registers—at once, and more or less equally—visually, haptically, aurally, proprioceptively and kinesthetically. These entangled stimuli, what Cousteau called “an extra sense of the sea, a sort of autodiagnosis of depth,” are knowledge underwater, where the sensory overtakes—or perhaps becomes—the cerebral, and decisions are made according to body-logic.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, the body itself can feel porous and doesn’t always register as a discrete entity underwater. I don’t always know, or at least am not actively aware, of where my body ends and the ocean begins. Much of this results from the anti-gravity of neutral buoyancy, but equipment also contributes. Scuba gear extends and elongates the diver’s body, advancing their physical capabilities while obscuring most recognizable individual visual characteristics. The reliance on gear to survive, or simply to be underwater means that equipment feels less like accoutrements and more an extension of the self. Lips encircle the mouthpiece—in a fishlike pout—conjoining diver and regulator. The air hose becomes an external bronchus, the tank another lung. Fins turn feet webbed, frog-like. The diver, integrated with the apparatus, becomes amalgamated, a hybrid of flesh and engineering.

Divers—the good ones at least—like to see themselves as strictly passive observers, who look, enjoy, but never (or never intentionally) touch. But I’m not sure that’s right. Surely there can be no submersion without touch. Divers are in constant contact with water. The diving body is enveloped, shrouded, supported by the sea. Miniscule particles pass over the diver’s exposed skin. Once, I witnessed a smattering of tiny fish swimming amongst my brother’s unusually long leg hairs. The water had made each hair stand on end: a thicket of hair that swayed in unison to the rhythm of the swell. On a recent dive, I surfaced with a rash on my arm, caused by a rogue jellyfish tentacle, a leftover scrap from a turtle’s meal.

Looking, too, is far from passive. Divers lurk like underwater Peeping Toms. We invade space, slither around, peek in crevices, greedily prolong our stares. We get as close as we can without touching and act as though looking is unidirectional, as though we can’t be seen, and our gaze can’t be returned. As a result, diving has often struck me as being a somewhat voyeuristic—or, more accurately, scopophilic—pursuit; it’s grounded in the (often obsessive) pleasure of looking at what is usually concealed and shouldn’t be possible to see. Underwater, the diver can indulge in the sustained viewing of scenes which ought to signify her death—or imminent death—by drowning. What should be terrifying is overcome, instead transformed into a source of gratification, though the specter of actual danger lingers.  This confluence—of real and imagined dangers, novel sights, and unfamiliar sensations­­—serves to intensify the act of looking. Seeing becomes heightened, imbued with both anxiety and joy.

The necessary muteness of divers, and the relative anonymity granted by scuba equipment, precipitates a degree of both privacy and isolation; the diver is free to explore and satisfy the desires of her gaze, unencumbered by social conventions of appropriate looking. The act of looking is more important than the object: she might watch marine life, rock formations, or even her fellow divers.  (The “buddy system,” which dictates that divers keep close and near-constant watch over their assigned “buddy,” encourages a level of interpersonal surveillance which, under most circumstances, would be deemed invasive.) Underwater, the diver can enact her scopophilic fantasies and ogle with impunity. She luxuriates in looking, senses the power of her gaze, how she can make it linger or disregard.

This looking, though pleasurable, isn’t inherently or necessarily sexual in nature, but I think it would be inaccurate to argue that diving is entirely divorced from the erotic. The neoprene skin of a wetsuit—tight, dark, rubbery—resembles fetish wear, as do hoods and, to a lesser extent, masks and regulators. Coral reefs themselves contain a vast assortment of genital-like organisms: spongy orifices, phallic protuberances, and gelatinous masses; anemones and sea cucumbers; eels that slither into crevices and poke out of holes. Yet diving’s eroticism is less obvious than associative symbolic projection. When I first began to dive, I compiled a list of all the things which felt good: pissing in my wetsuit (warm), pulling on the neck or leg of my wetsuit to flush it with water (cool), massaging my saliva glands with my tongue (wet), pushing the purge button on the regulator to blast cold air against my teeth (pain/pleasure). The list reveals a sort of aimless autoeroticism: infantile, preverbal, exploratory. Divers must foreground the sensory and remain highly attuned to stimulus. This sensitivity and focus enables a certain sensuality; the diver is operating according to a logic of the body that exists too in infancy and in sex.

• • •

I don’t remember my first dive. I could look it up in my logbook, though the details I’d find—depth, duration, skills practiced, weight worn, creatures seen—wouldn’t amount to much. It’s not just that first dive. With a couple of notable exceptions (a very deep dive, two night-dives: the first magical, another terrifying) the particularities of individual dives evade me. I remember sights and sensations, but I can’t place when or where they took place. The processes of diving—the ur-dive, its structure and shape—are etched in my mind, but it’s near impossible for me to recall any of my actual dives from start to end. I’ve considered that it might be the fug of repetition, dives blending into one another like commutes or haircuts. But I don’t think it’s that. Diving cannot, for me at least, be considered quotidian. Besides, I can remember the details of other repeated activities: long walks, swims, flights. Perhaps, then, it’s the quiet. As though unvoiced experience cannot be converted to memory. As though, without words, narrative structure collapses, and remembrance fails to form or take hold. Yet this too fails to hold. Memory might be aided by telling, but I can recall much I’ve never uttered.

Let’s call it amnesia of the deep, though surface amnesia may be more accurate. Upon submersion, everything returns. It’s more than muscle memory: the time since the last dive, whether hours or years, evaporates. Stranger still, it feels as though the intricacies of each prior dive can suddenly be accessed. Details, absent above surface, are restored, and it’s life above water that seems hazy, almost as though it doesn’t exist. More than that, it’s a sensation of expansiveness; thinking itself seems transformed, almost boundless. The phenomenon reminds me a little of inhaling nitrous oxide as a teenager. The psychoactive effect brought on by both the gas and the self-asphyxiation of repeat rebreathing from a balloon filled with carbon dioxide rich air. The second it hits, all previous instances of use return to create a continuum of altered states: the pleasant dissociation, the zoning out, the mild auditory hallucinations of muffled, distorted sounds pulsating, bass-like: whomp whomp whomp. For two minutes that feeling is all that has ever existed, and then it is gone.

Nitrogen narcosis, the narcotic effect brought on by breathing pressurized air, is symptomatically almost identical to nitrous oxide. Depending on severity, which increases with depth, it can produce euphoria, laughter, over-confidence, impaired reasoning, reduced motor control, disorientation, short term memory loss, and hallucinations. But, while it can occur on shallower dives, its effects are usually not noticeable before 30 meters, the depth limit set by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors for advanced recreational divers. (It’s sometimes rather quaintly referred to as “Martini’s Law.” Thirty meters of depth, according to this metric, is the equivalent of drinking one martini; each further 10 meters is another martini.) I’ve never noticed its effects, even at depths of around 40 meters.

Perhaps explanation is futile. How can I diagnose a sensation I cannot retrieve, at least not in full? Doing so feels reductive. I don’t want to lessen the feeling—turn it into a symptom, pathologize it—when all I have are remnants, the residual sense or knowledge that underwater something is accessed, or produced, or altered. This psychic impression—one of vastness, clarity, elasticity, infinitude—feels oceanic.

The “oceanic feeling” finds its origins in a term taken from a letter to Freud from the French novelist and mystic Romain Rolland, which Freud later quoted in Civilization and Its Discontents. For Rolland, the oceanic feeling is religious in nature yet separate from organized religion and instead derived from Spinoza and Indian mysticism. Rolland writes that it’s “a feeling of the eternal…without perceptible limit.” Freud is somewhat skeptical of the feeling, writing that he “cannot discover” it in himself. He argues that the feeling, “of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” is regressive, the residue of an earlier infantile (pre-Oedipal) ego-feeling: one where, at the mother’s breast, the infant is unable to demarcate its self/ego as being separate from its mother or the outside world. For Freud, the oceanic feeling “might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism.” It works against the delineated, mature ego, threatening its stability.

I have often wondered if my preoccupation with diving is similarly regressive, born from an unconscious desire to return to a pre-natal state of womb-like envelopment. I had heard that amniotic fluid is near identical to sea water, but it turns out that’s false; the salinity is off. So, too is the scale. The unborn—closely encircled by uterine wall—do not know expanse. Besides, unlike a fetus, divers are untethered. The connection between diver and sea isn’t symbiotic, or even co-dependent. In diving, one entity—the ocean—holds all the power.

It strikes me as possible that physical submersion (and all its somatic effects) might bring about a paralleled psychic submersion for the diver. After all, the ocean and the psyche are close linguistic allies. “Fathom” and “plumb” are polysemous; both describe the process of measuring depth, particularly that of the ocean, and hold figurative meanings related to thinking deeply. And the affiliation of mind and sea extends beyond the semantic. Across cultures and millennia, the ocean has persisted as a site rich with symbolic meaning and significance. One common thread is its association with the mind and, in particular, the unconscious. Like the unconscious, the ocean is unfixed, fluid. Both have inaccessible depths and can conceal their contents. Monsters lurk deep below the surface, their presence not always known or verifiable. Whether the un- or barely-known marine life of the deep, or the repressed materials of our psyches (dreams, desires, traumas, memories), these slippery creatures thrive in the absence of light.

It’s not that diving triggers a descent into the unconscious. I’m not plumbing my psyche for its monsters. My body remains intact. I operate according to the sensory wisdom of a bygone age; one that is prelinguistic, primal, ancient. Conventional systems of time and progression, of cause and effect have collapsed. I exist outside of them here, in this atemporal, or perhaps extratemporal, region of the deep.

Is it odd that placing my body where it doesn’t belong—where I cannot survive unassisted, or for more than an hour or so—provokes these feelings of return? Maybe, but the ocean is the locus of creation. Its waters are the place from which life on earth most likely originated, in or near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, at least three and a half billion years ago. In an evolutionary sense, then, we’re all of the ocean, distantly—over billions of years, and through countless adaptations and extinctions—descended from the sea.

Yet I’m more interested in the ocean as the site of mythological beginnings: the watery chaos from which the order of land, then life, emerges. The motif of a cosmic ocean, of non-differentiated waters engulfing the cosmos at the time of creation, is so widespread as to be near-universal. Formless, all-consuming primordial waters feature in Norse, Vedic, ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, ancient Greek, Zoroastrian, Yadizi, Yarsani, Alevi, and ancient Iranian creation mythologies, among others. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, in the Old Testament, before there was light, there were waters; prior to commencing active creation, the Spirit of God hovers over these waters, over the dark surface of the deep. Hindu mythology gives us the legend of Varaha, in which the earth is stolen by the demon Hiranyaksha, who buries it in the depths of the cosmic ocean. Varaha, an avatar of Vishnu in the form of a wild boar, dives into the primordial waters to liberate the earth. After a thousand-year battle, he slays the demon and, victorious, raises the earth—supported atop his tusk—from the watery mire.

In Earth-diver creation myths, a subset of the cosmic ocean genre, the creator sends an emissary­­—most often a semi-aquatic animal, such as a waterbird, toad, muskrat, or beaver—to dive to the bottom of the primordial waters in order to collect matter—mud, clay, sand—from which the earth is constructed. This myth is particularly prevalent amongst indigenous peoples of North America, but versions exist across Asia, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. As a result, there’s substantial variation: in several Native American versions, Earth is built atop a tortoise’s shell; and in one, on a frog’s stomach. Slavic versions, which have been somewhat Christianized, feature God and the devil in the animals’ place (it’s the devil who does the diving, except in Slovenia, where it’s God himself).

I’m particularly fond of Earth-diver myths. The implicit notion that there is value in depth—that something essential exists at the bottom of things, whether a sea, a psyche, or something else entirely—appeals to me. In most versions of the tale, multiple animals die before a final one succeeds, returning exhausted, half-dead, with a tiny clod of primeval muck in its claws. The quantity is always slight; the act of expansion—a speck transformed into the world—all the more magical as a result.

 

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Ascent

The ascent is slow, drawn-out, considered, and potentially dangerous.  Often, it involves a safety stop: hovering for three minutes at a depth of five meters. These procedures exist to aid the elimination of nitrogen buildup in the body.  Breathing pressurized, compressed air while diving causes nitrogen to be absorbed into the bloodstream and other tissues. As a diver ascends—and the ambient pressure reduces—the nitrogen is released–—t’s absorbed by the lungs and safely exhaled––through a process called offgassing. But, if the ascent rate is too fast (or a diver has exceeded safe limits of depth and dive time) bubbles of nitrogen form, which can lead to decompression sickness (the bends). These bubbles often congregate in the joints causing localized pain, but can also affect the lymph nodes, skin, lungs, spinal cord, or brain.

Divers don’t like ascents. It’s not the risks, which can be almost completely mitigated by diving according to procedure and within safe limits. Rather it’s the knowledge that it’s ending. The surface—which, from below, resembles textured privacy glass, the kind used in bathrooms—creeps closer. Sunlight intensifies; breathing feels different, less substantial. The algal hull of the boat looms overhead, an ugly reminder of the world above. The process is drawn out, then sudden; the moment of surface penetration bewildering, undignified, like leaving a bar drunk in daylight.

First you notice the return of stereophonic sound—a disorientating cacophony of surface noise. Then, lesser nuisances: windchill, waves, and unpleasant sensations. There’s the pinch of hairs trapped in mask straps; thirst; the press of the now-inflated BCD against your sides; an off-putting salty taste, unnoticeable at depth.

The surface sun is too bright after the filtered, subaquatic rays. You squint, still wearing your mask, which you are not permitted to remove until on board (being maskless on the surface is a sign of a diver in distress). The sensory harmony of the deep—how each faculty seems to work in tandem, deftly compiling lifesaving, necessary data—is over. In its place, a barrage of discordant impressions. Diving’s extra-temporality is replaced by the mundane and hurried process of returning to shore. It feels like an affront, a rude reminder of the temporary nature of your underwater existence.

The oceanic feeling experienced at depth has receded. There’s no possibility for self-dissolution or what Julia Kristeva calls “jubilant osmosis” while passing fins up to the boat, or inelegantly hauling yourself—still laden with equipment—up a pitching ladder, abruptly and painfully aware of gravity’s dominion. Underwater you felt lithe, aquatic. Now, onboard, a hulking, soggy mass; it’s almost as if you’ve forgotten how to walk. You waddle, nauseous as you secure your equipment with bungee cords. Snot drips from your nose; salt-matted hairs stick to your lips and get in your eyes.

The boat’s engine starts up. The slight waft of fuel re-engages your sense of smell, dormant underwater. It registers as acrid, an olfactory assault. Still, the engine’s hum drowns out the (inane and competitive) chatter of the other divers. You focus on the horizon, on the sensation of the wind thumping against your cheeks and eardrums. You zone out a little, and something returns or is restored. All, then, is not lost.

The feeling is softer, hazier than before, but still manifest. It gives the impression of having external origins, as though the ocean has imprinted a cast upon you. These traces form an aureole about your person; you feel like you’re enrobed in a salinated chrysalis. Of course, this chrysalis must break apart, but disintegration is a process. For now, it lingers. You feel cozy yet detached—a fuzzy calm infused with anticipatory loss. For now, you exist between these two worlds, not fully committed to the workings of either, aware of the transitory nature of this odd reverie.

Within a few hours, the residual nitrogen held in your body will vanish—imperceptibly, incrementally—as you breathe. You’ll be fully reincorporated as a being of the land. By then, the effects of depth, each sensation keenly felt, will likewise fade, then disappear altogether. Surface amnesia will return. For now, you must bask in the ebbing sensations. Savor whatever diminishing scraps remain. Even a vestige of the deep, a distant trace of that feeling, is—has to be—enough.