In this collection of 10 essays Sabrina Imbler weaves science journalism and memoir to explore their own life and the lives of sea creatures. They begin with goldfish and an incident when they were 13 in San Francisco in which they were asked to leave a Petco for protesting the keeping of goldfish in bowls. San Francisco, they write, was built on saltmarsh, “no clear division between land and sea.” Sometimes goldfish find their way back into the wild (not through flushing though) and there they revert to feral, giant forms. But unlike perhaps the obvious cautionary ecological tale of invasive species and environmental ruin, Imbler sees in this a metaphor for possibility and transformation, particularly their coming into their sexuality and gender. “Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up,” they write.
How Far The Light Reaches (published with the much less evocative title of My Life In Sea Creatures in Australia) sees Imbler seeking similar resonances across their life. So in the trials of the Purple Octopus they see their mother and her obsession with diet; in the Chinese sturgeon their grandmother’s survival of Japanese occupation and migration to the US; in the sand striker sexual violence. Imbler sits fact alongside feeling to produce striking resonances; I learned for instance that the name the striker is more commonly known by, the Bobbitt Worm, refers to the case of Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis is response to him assaulting her. The ensuing media circus starkly illuminated the gendered nature of sexual violence. Science, so much of the published record of which has been produced by men, is full of such slights and oversights.
It’s a concept that gets better the more stretched the metaphor seems to get, until you get to Imbler’s essays on salps and yeti crabs, metaphors for queer community and queer night life respectively. They recount the discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977, which upended the idea that all life depends ultimately on the sun. On the discovery of chemosynthesis, Imbler writes:
I prefer to think of it not as act of last resort but as a radical act of choosing what nourished you. As queer people, we get to choose our families.
Their essay on salps, floating colonial sea squirts that are actually the closest relatives to backboned animals, grows out of witnessing a stranding of a swarm of the gelatinous creatures on Riis Beach, the queer beach in New York, the forgotten end of a strip of sand backed by sanitorium for children with TB and briefly considered as respite for AIDS patients:
We swarm on the gay stretch of Riis, umbrellas standing neck-to-neck, towels overlapping, microclimtes of speakers blasting Mariah and techno in a thudding, electronic din. The beach is not squalid, but it is far from pristine. The tides seem to funnel all the trash from the mile-long beach to the gay end of Riis, where plastic bags bob like crinkled jellyfish … It seems hardly coincidental that the least scenic stretch of Riis Beach came to belong to queers.
Recounting pride and queer protests in New York, they write that “Individual identity is confusing for a salp … for a salp, home is the rest of its salp”.
Throughout these essays Imbler emphasises the personal, both in their own life and in the lives of the sea creatures. They imagine the female Purple Octopus, starving to death while she broods her clutch of eggs, the Blue Whale struck not one but twice by ships, imagines themselves into the minds of cuttlefish. The effect is to personalise the lives of the more-than-human in a way that still feels daring in a field that has been resistant to anthropomorphism (I had a similar response to reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World). People, sea creatures, even the ones that live lives unfathomable to us, we’re not that different, our lives can reveal things about the others. In these essays Imbler erodes the boundaries that separate us terrestrial aliens from the ones underwater.
Gay rating: 5/5 for queer relationships, themes and sex.
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