Sea-reading
In this account of her visit to a hidden tide pool, Carson takes us out of the realities of the "land world", and also the "light" world. Time is suspended and the whole history of humanity seems to have been erased or is yet to come:
"Once, while exploring the night beach, I surprised a small ghost crab in the searching beam of my torch. He was lying in a pit he had just dug above the surf, as though watching the sea and waiting. The blackness of the night possessed water, air, and beach. It was the darkness of an older world, before Man. There was no sound but the all-enveloping, primeval sounds of wind blowing over water and sand, and of waves crashing on the beach. [...] I was filled with the odd sensation that for the first time I knew the creature in its own world. [...] In that moment time was suspended; the world to which I belonged did not exist and I might have been an onlooker from outer space."
In this passage, we become the "ghosts", as it were, beings that have no substance or reality in the world. We find ourselves looking in as outsiders on a world that has already erased us, much as the sea rushing in, erases the reflection of the starfish, or the tracks of the shorebird.
By twisting the techniques of ecomimesis, Carson traces a spiral paradox, like the spiral shells of the mangrove periwinkles: instead of embedding the reader more thoroughly in the world through her nature writing, Carson embeds a whole world inside the reader - the sea, as what surges through our bodies:
As sea-readers or "seaders" we are brought into being by Carson's text as something that has been evacuated from the very world that we "contain"..."When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal - each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. [...] Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea." (from Alaimo, States of Suspension: Transcorporeality at Sea)
