Chapter Three: Liquefaction

LIQUEFACTION

A slow expansion and release pulsate bio-morphic rhythms and liquid undulations. Thread-like arms move in gentle locomotion swayed in circles by tidal flows and lunar pulls. Hypnotic, ectoplasmic apparitions held in salty oceanic depths, thinking through skin. Viscously multiple. Viciously ethereal. A lung of hot glass. Aqueous ancestors from a time before time, drifting in thick translucence. As I follow the motion of the mucus-like bodies of the gelata - light weight, see through, barely there - I become aware of my fluid body. The pressure of my cerebral fluid encasing my brain, pressing upon my temples and bubbling in my ear drums. The synovial fluid pop primordial wetness from my bones. My blood filled veins running like tributaries under my skin, their blue and purple snake figurations transporting vital liquid to my organs. I feel the saliva on my tongue, the oil on my skin, the viscosity of my mucus, the acid of my bile. I smell the metallic tang of my blood. I smell my sweat as it leaks from the warmest parts of me. I touch the skin of my laptop screen, fingers plunging into the liquid plasma crystals toward the slick, jellied bodies of the medusae. I slide into genderless, asexual, utopic immortality. I become soft, liquid, ether. The wet invertebrate pulls me into sensuous embodiment with my fluid body.

Immanuel Kant’s sublime is that of formless, edgeless endings and infinite boundlessness.71 Its exquisite effect is evoked in witnessing the awe and terror of nature; a stormy tumultuous sea, a black thunderous sky, infinite mountain tops reaching unseeable heights. As these expansive wild and elemental forces confront the viewer, the mind requires a psychic rationalisation to soothe the shapeless horror at one’s immortal position within the colossal universe. The mind wrestles with nature to overcome its immensity and conquer its power. Esther Leslie writes of Kant’s theory of the sublime that it should be ‘contained mentally, bounded within thought, with Reason.’72 The sublime is a desire to conceptually dominate nature - mind over body. On the contrary, my feeling whilst watching the viscid smack of swirling moon jellies in my computer is purely sublime, in that I experience them with awe beyond beauty, for these alien creatures are not conventionally beautiful. What they arouse in me is bodily, visceral, embodied. As I gaze at their primordial watery-ness, I surrender my thoughts to their liquid mesmeric throb. In my sublime, body is over mind.

Hilda Doolittle or H.D., a poet and writer, moved to the Isles of Scilly in 1919, seventy-four years before I was born on almost the same patch of sand. She writes, from a place of deep contentment and peace, ‘I am in my spiritual body, a jelly-fish.’73 For H.D., the gelata translated a form of consciousness which she describes as her ‘over-mind’. An intense vision of great depths connecting her mind and body succinctly. Subject to psychic breaks H.D. frequented ‘unknown boundaries and strange thresholds’74 after a series of painful events during World War 1, including birthing a still born baby. Her ‘jellyfish experience’ marks a psychic equilibrium and a harmonious merging of an internal splitting that she was experiencing. Dualisms of body/spirit, womb/head are littered within Notes on Thought and Vision as she wrestles their segmentation. The over-mind is a space where these binaries disperse and dissolve, an awakening described as ‘a cap, like water, transparent, fluid

splintered selves and unifies psyche and soma whilst simultaneously connecting to the cosmos at large.

My mother’s body swelled and bulged with fluid, expanding from a dress size eight to eighteen stone in the space of nine months. Water retention thickened her wrists, feet and cheeks as she carried me. She was twenty-two when she went into labour on those same shores that H.D. and Perdita’s feet had pattered across decades before. Her waters broke upon the tidelines where water meets dry land. Amniotic fluid soaking the sand underfoot and flowing toward the sea. Her gestational waters and my urine mixed together and returned to the ocean. Time stretched out like a blanket of black, punctuated by undulating waves of pain. She held on, riding the crests and breaks, fighting opinions to cut me out. She swims in the vast blue sea, held within its cavernous depths. Skin blurring into the wet space, becoming indistinct from her watery surroundings. A body of water, in a body of water, in a body of water. I was blue, red and purple when I finally emerged forty-two hours later. My mother urged hospital staff to allow the sticky white mucus to soak into my skin. A milieu of microbial protection from her body to mine.

[...] a closed sea-plant, jellyfish or anemone.’75 She imagines this state of consciousness ‘centered in the love regions of the body or placed like a foetus in the body.’76 The womb jellyfish with its bell shaped body and umbilical cord arms extend like arteries giving life blood to H.D.’s personal perception of feminine subjectivity, whilst also providing a channel to re-birth herself. Her jellyfish vision, nurtured by her friend and lover Annie Winifred Ellerman or Bryher, on the shores of the Scilly Isles, becomes the tencalcular embodiment of her womanhood, motherhood, queerness and artistry. For H.D., the jellyfish fuses the mind-body connection that was severed when she lost her baby, resulting in her abandoning her body psychically. The oceanic creature becomes a symbol of life after delivering her second baby, a healthy daughter named Perdita (meaning lost and moon). Jellyfish vision is a transcendental experience that teaches her to be within her body, a feeling of catharsis and balance that drives her creativity and writing. Through becoming-jellyfish, she heals

Scattered across my desktop are images of jellyfish, wombs post-hysterectomy, fetus’ in utero and microscopic images of spinal and umbilical cord jelly, spit, sweat, hormones and blood. The screenshots are often indiscernible from each other as they blend into one another in digital fluidity. Blood reds, peach pinks and tangerine oranges merge into a warm pixelated pastiche of corporeal familiarity. The jellyfish looks like a womb, the womb a dead sea nettle, the human fetus in amniotic fluid is a polyp/sea-horse/ameba in the ocean, the cellular images of bodily excretes resemble universal things like iron rich cracked earth, swirling marble, aerial weather maps, a milky way, light from the Aurora Borealis. I try to decode these connections and visual overlaps but my intellectual comprehension and language fail. It is a knowledge of the body, a somatic and prelinguistic rhizomatic tangle resonating with all matter on this earth, vibrating in energetic chorus.

‘At some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another’77 writes Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body as she attempts to trace the location of the bodies that enmesh with our own, solidifying a physicality to the often invisible and immaterial. Her second body theory posits our bodies as vulnerably fluid. ‘A human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin - it is supposed to be inviolable.’78 Here the double body maps the cause and effect of our daily lives and interactions as a means of analysing our responsibility to others and the planet. This materialist approach links our bodies to anything or anyone we have a global connection to. Similar to how Timothy Morton uses the term hyperobject to designate tangibility to abstract and opaque concepts such as climate change, Hildyard gives form to nebulous ideas that feel removed from our own bodies, but are in fact directly related to our movements and choices.79 Our bodies are entangled with the harmful gasses in the atmosphere that we emit and breathe, the chemical-laden water trickling from our kitchen taps that we ingest and then expel and the jellyfish blooms that proliferate within the acidic oceans. Our fluid bodies are corporeally intimate and involved with one another and implicated within the cyclical contamination of our environment. ‘The space between our selves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin.’80

Toward the end of the text the speaker meets her second body in full force when her home is flooded by the river near her house. She admits to ignoring the warnings from the environmental agency and overlooking the consistent swing from flood to drought, and the erosion of the river bank due to devegetation that all point toward incremental and detrimental changes within the biosphere. Her second body seeps into her first body, under the door, gushing through the hallway, drenching the carpet and making tatters of her paperwork. ‘Fishes’, ‘bacteria’ and ‘slug-like creatures like early life forms’ take up residence in her home.81

Hildyard’s The Second Body echoes Karen Barad’s intra-active spatial and temporal enfoldings, overlaps and boundary spills82 as well as Haraway’s writing on entanglement with the ‘the more-thanhuman, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.’83 Post-human entanglement and queer ecology is performed within the illustrious and primordial phylum of the jellyfish. Tentacular arms and a singular oral mouth, colonial habitats, transsexual and gender indistinct identity with abilities to reproduce through cloning its own body, in addition to being deathless,84 makes the jellyfish the ideal entangled and queer subject ‘[t]o contemplate ecology’s unfathomable intimacies...not geared to ideologies about where the body stops and starts.’85

Astrida Neimanis reminds us that all water on this planet is already present, there is no more and no less, it flows in hydrological cycles through bodies, landscapes and all that lives on this planet.86 Aqueous ‘molecular intimacy.’87 The water molecule is the basis and beginning of existence. The gelata is the ‘maternal primordial feminine.’88 With a body consisting of 95% water, jellyfish are ‘water in water.’89 When washed up on the beach shore the splatter of mesoglea returns to the clouds in osmotic vaporous ascension, to begin again in another shape. Through jellyfish vision I witness amorphous embodiment with everything that flows universally and energetically. I am involved in

a transcorporeal exchange with water from the moment I become the wet cluster of cells within the maternal body until I decay into compost - fertile matter for life beyond our material bodies. Water is the fascia of entanglement connecting living things. I am a body of water.