Ocean is the New East

• Main Author: Montroso, Alan S.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: punctum books 2017
• Subjects: Stacy; North Atlantic; North Atlantic right whale
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.21983/p3.0182.1.03; https://punctumbooks.com/titles/things-from-the-sea/

On a recent visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, I lingered a little while longer than usual in my favorite exhibit: the Sant Ocean Hall (see oppo-site page). Wandering with no telos in mind, I let myself bask before bioluminescent beings, tremble in awe at the improbability of the extremophiles, and gaze up like a supplicant at the model of Phoenix, a North Atlantic right whale. Deeply affected by these strange strangers,1 I stretched my imagination towards the inconceivable and wondered at the sheer breadth of possibilities for ways of living in the still-occult thalassic regions of Earth’s oceans. I found solace in the evidence that so many vast and heterogeneous lives can flourish without the intrusive light of the sun or human reason, and that such animacy is possible in the darkness, which is, according to Stacy Alaimo, a “world where the Copernican revolution is irrelevant.”2 I then with some discomfort imagined myself embodying an oceanic form, imagined breathing without oxygen, thriving at thermal vents, and manifesting light with my own body. I imagined myself as an aqueous and somewhat amorphous body squeezed and strangled by the just bearable pressures of the deep sea. I attempted a posthumanist thought project similar to what Alaimo describes in “Violet-Black,” her contribution to Prismatic Ecology, in which she insists that “thinking with and through the elec-tronic jellyfish, seeing through the prosthetic eye, playing open-ended, improvisa-tional language games with deep-sea creatures, being transformed by astonishment and desire enact a posthumanist practice.”