sea caves

01 Sep, 2025

i woke up this morning feeling submerged and subversive. that underwater sensation of groginess has persisted. too lazy to clean my glasses, the lenses emulate little circular portholes. it is both unholy and unnatural to begin work in this state, yet here i am.

i feel as if i am swimming alone. waves crashing. a tentacle wraps around my ankle, pulling me under. "mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs, octopuses are called spiders of the sea. and so pimoa chthulhu and octopus cyanea meet in the webbed tales of the chthulucene."¹ we are all a part of the undying chtululcene, submerged in its mythology.

in this dream, i find myself trapped in a sea cave. sporting my googles and flippers, a flashlight revealing there is no exit, so i must dive. cousteau whispers in my eat, "you are a manfish!"

"when cousteau published a memoir in 1953 detailing his co-invention of the aqualung and his subsequent diving exploits, he began it by introducing the figure of the “manfish,” the body of the diver augmented by their scuba equipment so as to inhabit the oceans as a hybrid terrestrial-marine being, a kind of submarine cyborg."² i have less doubts about being a cyborg, than i do about being a manfish. to be honest, i don't like the water that much, so it doesn't make sense to me that i dream about it so often, let alone enough to become a manfish.

finally, in this dream, i dive deep and long enough to escape the cave and make my way to the shore. from afar, i am a speck on the beach. i catch my breath. everything tastes of salt. i see a car on the cliffs above. surely they will stop to help me. either way, i remind myself ... work tomorrow. but that pain remains hidden, like the cave i emerged from.

a short plateau extended to the lip of the palisades to the left of them before dropping down abruptly into the atlantic ocean. “the caves are below these cliffs somewhere,” declared joe, motioning toward the coastal side. the sea, hidden most of the time by a thick stand of woods and undergrowth, occasionally flashed through in brilliant glimmers.
― the hardy boys, the secret of the caves, franklin w. dixon