Monday, 8/18/03 - 21:53
Dive site: First Cathedral, near Lana'i. Visibility: 80 feet. Maximum Depth: 68 feet. Bottom Time: 45 minutes.
Though decscending in clear water over a pastel coral plain is a sight in itself, the cathedral was even more impressive. We entered a dark rocky passage lined with nooks like confessionals and then found ourselves at the bottom of the lava dome itself. There was supposedly a large altar rock on the bottom, but I completely forgot to look for it because the upper walls were riddled with gaps arranged roughly like a heavy-paned rose window, and the gaps were filled with quiet blue light. The scene had all the vaunted serenity docemented by the thirty sorry papers on Chartres that my students wrote last winter.
Thinking of the space as a cathedral meant that at first I stayed on the floor looking up, but after a couple minutes I remembered, hey, I can float; I can rise up and look at the walls. Then I curled into a fetal position above all the other people and looked up at the rose window to fix it in memory. It hit me later that it was an almost-forgotten bit of bodily vocabulary belonging to the same genre of experience; it was the same gesture I made at the public pool when I was little, at the end of open swim, when I went under one last time to look at the big warm light at the edge of the pool and enjoy the last bit of floating.
The dark felt calm and empty until the dive leader turned a flashlight on the walls and they emerged animated with bright red fish. At this depth, there's only blue and green light left. Red is invisible, and the flashlight struck me viscerally like a newly acquired sense for seeing invisible things. The question from the Orange Catholic Bible seemed inescapable for the moment, rather than trite: "Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
Then we looked at more of the reef with our guide pointing out wildlife via a glorified magnadoodle. I played follow-the-leader down a lava tube slide, grabbing my nose to clear my ears, headfirst into the darkness.
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
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Monday, May 12