Island of Atlas (Christine Cai)
Christine Cai
Island of Atlas
“Does
death occur in Turritopsis [dohrnii]? Turritopsis [dohrnii] is a unique medusa
and its transformation potential is unparalleled within the vast array of
lifecycle patterns found in cnidarians. This
is the first known case of a metazoan being capable of reverting completely to a clonal
life stage [...] Because all T. [dohrnii] medusae
regularly underwent transformation, we must assume that organismic death does not occur
in this species.
[...] All these
processes, however, imply
only a reorganization of the original morph. Instead, the
transformation of T. [dohrnii] may be considered a metamorphosis, though in a
direction opposite to the usual ontogenetic path.” (“Reversing the Life Cycle:
Medusae Transforming into Polyps and Cell Transdifferentiation in Turritopsis
nutricula (Cnidaria, Hydrozoa)”, Piriano et al., 1996)
---
“Turritopsis dohrnii, commonly known as the ‘immortal jellyfish’
and formerly known as Turritopsis nutricula, is a species of biologically immortal jellyfish found originally in the
Mediterranean and around Japan. It has a remarkable ability to ‘de-age’ when
placed under extreme stress, and medusae have been observed to revert to their
infant polyp stages. Since the mass Anthropogenic extinction, T. dohrnii has spread to oceans everywhere, and is
considered an invaluable specimen in conservation efforts.”
---
I blow a beautifully plain cloud
of dust from the pages.
Acer rubrum, Liriodendron tulipifera, Salix
babylonica, Prunus serrulata. I perform an autopsy on the leaves (Genus species, Genus species, Genus…)
still wedged in the spine of my textbook. Paper thin. Only the veins—knots of
bone-dry tissue, ghostly imprints on page 113—suggest that they once lived.
But weren’t they meant to die,
quietly, some autumn decades ago, before my
careless-ignorant-fumbling
hands destined them to embalmment in Odum’s Ecology? I didn’t know of the
importance of lining city streets with sodium-tolerant ginkgos, with leaves
fanned out like the skeletons of Alcyonacea
on proud display. I didn’t know of the importance of the coming of fall,
year after year, of perigean spring tides, of the way people screamed when the
seas cleansed the streets and kissed autumn roots with salt. I didn’t know Genus species when I pressed leaves
between fine print on auxins and cytokinins, made cadavers of those scraps of
curbside papier-mâché, vivid unchristened bits of color meant to be carried
sky-high and never seen again.
---
For the past hour, phone alarms have been telling us to clear the
shelves. Evacuate. There isn’t much important to take with me; the tanks by my
desk are empty save for the mess of polyps stuck to the glass floor and a
sad-looking, stomach-up blob of red. The pet betta that I had been trying to
revive for the past month had gone in fruitless pursuit of its oceanic
brethren, I noted dryly.
The
aquarium alarm, now, blares to a new high. I shove aside the bucket that I’d
been using to catch leaks to flip through last month’s annotated journal. I
already have my travel books stacked already in their box, untouched since the
last evacuation.
Papers.
Today’s brand new Journal of
Physical Oceanography. Post-it notes.
Scraps of
unfinished research, yet more scribbles on the incomprehensible genome of T. dohrnii. The Great Gatsby, by F.
Scott Key Fitzgerald. A book I had meant to reread for a while.
Odum’s Ecology.
I glance at my watch. We are—I
am—running late.
---
EVACUATION PROCEDURE:
1.
Collect
your belongings and go to your nearest flood
center.
2.
Do not
walk, swim, or drive through flood waters.
3.
Stay
off of bridges and away from ports. If you are near the East or Hudson coasts,
you are advised to evacuate
as early as possible. Manhattan has 5 flood safety bases,
Brooklyn has 2, Bronx and Queens have 1. Locate the
flood safety base closest to you.
4.
If safety
bases are closed,
move to higher
ground or a higher floor.
Move in a single file.
5.
If you are trapped,
stay where you are. Pressure
sensitive doors will lock automatically to keep water out.
Above all, please remain calm. For the
safety of yourself and others, do not deviate from the evacuation procedure.
---
The
doors are locked. There is a leak somewhere in the glass tunnel, and it slowly
drips saltwater an inch from my shoe. Unlike my betta, the jellyfish are not
fussy. They do not care. I turn the page.
---
There is a crushed sprig of
something sad in the margins. It is the phantom of something purple.
---
There
is a cracking against the door. I imagine that water is now seeping slowly
under the boundary that was supposed to be watertight. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Like boats borne
back into the past, the tide is receding now, bearing us back… I close my eyes.
And down the wall of water will come crashing. I want to see the mundane
streets of New York blossoming under seawater, flooded with the ghosts of fish
and coral reefs blanched to death long ago and polyps and polyps of glowing
Turritopsis dohrnii. I want to see the shadows of fins flutter across the
submerged sidewalks, the barnacles strangling the bare trunks of the pandering
trees, the skyscrapers like vague giants hovering leagues away in this indefinite haze of blue,
Atlases with no more skies to uphold. The crashing waves
that swallowed Long Island Sound will call to Manhattan
as they called
to the sailors centuries before, and I will revel in the epiphany of
the water’s song.
People
will go on without ever seeing a world of rippling sunbeams, where things
living and dead sway to the tides’ music. The song rears back, rises to its
screaming climax against the dead silence of aquarium glass. When I open my
eyes in the saltwater—human eyes evolved to see in seawater, after all—I will
have the underwater utopia all to myself.
---
FLOOD EVACUATION THREAT NEUTRALIZED.
---
And oh, what a wonderful sight it
will be.
For
my final project, I have done a combination of visual art and short-form
creative writing, somewhere between prose and poetry, to expand upon the scene.
The creative writing segment is moreso meant to convey a certain tone and
provide worldbuilding details to supplement the art itself rather than to serve
as a vehicle for plot; as such, although it is written in prose form, it is
intended primarily for aesthetic analysis much like poetry or art.
Thematically,
I wanted to address the idea of the cyclical apocalypse, though within the
context of a hypocritical climate apocalypse rather than in Kalacakra Buddhism.
I aim to address the question of whether cyclical apocalypses can really be
true revelations if humans are fundamentally unwilling to change. In a sense,
I wanted my piece to come across
as an “anti-apocalypse”-- something that objectively
meets the criteria of the natural disasters of an apocalypse, yet registers
very little in its revelatory elements. After all, through technical
advancements, we find ways to extend humanity and combat impending disaster
(such as the climate apocalypse), but many methods are simply conservation
rather than prevention, and so humanity lives on from apocalypse to apocalypse,
bound by the human condition to a state of ignorant conservatism.
To address this, I set my story in a dystopian (yet not too far in the
future) Manhattan, which has become a repeatedly flooding city due to rising
sea levels from climate change. I heavily equip water imagery and other imagery
of rebirth (namely the "immortal" jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii), particularly because water is often used to
denote revelation, new life, or baptism, be it in Christian or Buddhist
practices or even biologically as the cradle of all life. However, I subvert
the iconography of “new life” in cyclical apocalypses being necessarily tied to
actionable revelation. Rather, water represents the hopelessness in the cycle
of rebirth-- as in the Great Gatsby's
imagery of “boats borne back into the past”-- and the ironic inability to achieve nirvanic liberation.
I
also address the common apocalyptic theme of science-- but rather than as a
tool for progress, once again as a crutch for humanity to continue labeling and
compartmentalizing the world into things that we believe
that we understand too well, thus reinforcing our ability to live in a
comfortable world without significant revelation. In this sense, the motif of
science is employed in direct opposition to what science has often been
described as in works we have seen throughout class; for example, in Soylent Green or in nuclear holocaust
and robot apocalypses, there is the idea of science pushing the boundary too
far past what is ethical; on the contrary, in my project science does not push
the boundary enough past preserving the status quo.
The
title of my project is Island of Atlas,
referring to the island of Manhattan and the image of skyscrapers as “Atlases”
holding up the sky. Atlas is also the Greek titan of endurance, ironically
reflecting the “endurance” of the human race in spite of the environmental
damage that we ourselves have caused. However, this name is a literal
translation of Atlantis, which is an
apocalyptic Greek myth of the island that was submerged due to human hubris.
On
the art side, the image draws largely from David Alfaro Siqueiros’ El Fin de Mundo, John Martin’s The Last Man, and other paintings
featuring the trope of the last man standing in the apocalypse. Technically, I
use a similar gestural oil painting style to Botticelli, using a velatura
technique and painting over a dark blue underpainting to both provide a
contrast to and desaturate the few warm colors I used and encapsulate layering
and an encroaching threat of water at the forefront. The dramatic, dark shading
towards the viewer and at the very back is intended to capture depth and add a
sense of foreboding that contrasts the well-lit parts of the canvas, which are
deliberately placed so that the person is facing away from them. However,
stylistically I separate my painting from El
Fin de Mundo in the deliberate omission of violence and outright
destruction, and the painting differs from Botticelli in the lack of a clear
distinction between good and evil. The water is meant to be eye-catching and
high-contrast-- the viewer’s eye is supposed to be drawn first to the well-lit
water, then the high contrast of the waves on the floor. Yet the colors are
largely desaturated and restricted to a cool color spectrum: even the warmer
dark umber is only a warm color by contrast, and is in all actuality more of a
violet-mauve. The only hint of violent, fiery reds like
in Siqueros’ work deliberately highlights the ghostly jellyfish, faraway
windows in the silhouette of a submerged Manhattan on the right, and the last
man, to illustrate the similarities between what the jellyfish stands for and
the refusal of humanity-- in the form of the man and the city-- to progress.
The presence of exactly seven jellyfish re-emphasizes the idea of human virtue
and human sin: rather than having external violence, the “sin” here is
simultaneous with “virtue” of conservation and originates from mankind itself.
The dome shape of the structure in Siqueiros’ painting is now positioned
directly over the “last man” figure: symbolically, the person is underwater but
not drowning. The viewer is positioned closer now, right in the midst of the
action, perhaps implicating the viewer in this climate apocalypse. The
atmosphere is meant to implicitly allude to death in spite of the lack of
violence, be it through the lack of other sea life, the spectral desaturated
jellyfish, or the indistinguishability of the last man from the darkness.
In
the writing portion, the mundaneness of the tone with which the narrator
describes this very apocalyptic event of a flood emphasizes the lack of true
revelation. The quotation of the paper on T.
dohrnii (as well as the censorship of the initial mislabeling of the
species) prefaces the work by illustrating how the cycle of immortality is not
really a cycle of rebirth, but a stagnant cycle of de-aging and re-aging that
does not really change the individual itself. Though the idea of a “cleansing”
flood hearkens back to both Atlantis and Noah’s ark, it becomes clear that the
symbol of the flood is not “cleansing” anything at all in the long run, instead
becoming a recurring chore for New Yorkers to overcome. The piece is meant to
be infused with a deep longing to conserve the past, symbolized through
mentions of the trees and flowers that have been replaced by salt-tolerant
ginkgos to accommodate rising saltwater levels and mentions of fish and sea life that has died or become nearly
extinct. At the same time, there is an inherent inability to
truly stop exacerbating the issue-- the transplanting of ginkgo trees is simply
a quick way to get as close to the norm before flooding as possible-- and the
use of genus-species illustrates the hubris
of man’s belief
that they can neatly categorize nature and understand science. The unrealistic
sentimentalism for conservation and the past is juxtaposed with a refusal to
change and incorporations of even a large flood as a mundane routine of
everyday life. The narrator longs for “epiphany” in name only, romanticizing
some form of liberation at the end. It is meant to be open-ended whether the narrator is in actual
danger: the signs
that would be true threats
today (the ominously dripping water, the crack against the doors) are juxtaposed
with nonchalance and acceptance that this is another part of standard protocol.
The poetic desire for freedom and epiphany is quickly succeeded with an alert
that the threat has been neutralized, implying that in spite of a longing for
revelation, there may be another return to the norm for humanity at large. On a
meta level, this seeks to comment on the idea that humanity is often easily
swayed by these romanticized ideas of revelations and apocalypses, in spite of
their violence or inherent danger-- much like how people are drawn to the tale
of Atlantis. We are drawn to the idea of liberation, of epiphany, and yet
somehow cannot grapple with the costs because we simultaneously wish to remain
comfortable with our humanity; instead, just as how there is a layer of
separation between threat and revelation in the story, we maintain a layer of
separation between ourselves and the apocalypses we consume in the media by witnessing them from beyond
the fourth wall rather than experiencing them ourselves.
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