Havsvelg

neiothi de gaia phaineto psammōi kyaneē
and beneath, the earth appeared black with sand.
— Homer, Odyssey XII

Hunting in Saltstraumen on the turn of the tide, I held my harpoon poised to fire the instant a halibut precipitated from the depths. To hunt in the maw of a maelstrom is to have almost no time: nothing stays still there, the streamings are too violent. Silver blankets of pollock mark the vast currents — they remind me of the moving fields that hold us together, that align us, that moor us. Then I found myself in a stream moving on its own, off the main current. I had been hunting the periphery of the strait, but this unruly water hooked its tentacles around me and wanted me in — into the heart of the maelstrom, into its mouth. Swimming with all my power did nothing. The current was too strong. When I dove, the silver blanket of fish slid down into the deep, and the kelp was braided diagonally downward with it. The inevitability of the surge toward the mouth was terrifying: a vast power that takes you with its ubiquitous will. Terrifying, and sublime.

The Norse word for maelstrom is havsvelg — ocean maw, the very throat of the sea into which everything flows. Homer describes Charybdis as a great vertical tension with black sand at her nadir. Like a cauldron over a great fire, she seethes and rises like a thunderhead. It does not surprise me that he gave the maelstrom a woman’s body. No amount of ego or intellect can argue with a current that strong.

Language is a phenomenon of distance — of representation, of standing apart from the thing to name it. Saltstraumen is a system of pure presence, of salty intimacy. Here the streaming that every human phenomenon is rooted in — lived experience, the body before its names — becomes tangible. It is the blood-system that unites everything I hunt in this fertile strait.

The other day I played chess with a friend just back from Ukraine. What had moved him most was not the politics but the binding: a people made one by a danger held in common, a shared current that gave their belonging a full-blooded, almost sacramental weight. He said our religions and ideologies have thinned because they have lost touch with that — with the lived streaming they first precipitated out of. It is the same observation from the other shore. A nation, a faith, a self: each is a form that holds only so long as it stays moored to the current beneath it. Cut from the stream, the form hardens into mere structure — doctrine without pulse, identity without ground. Kept in the stream, it stays alive, and dangerous, and real. I answered him with Hölderlin: where the danger is, there grows the saving power also. This is the havsvelg: the throat that swallows is the throat that gives.

For the danger in Saltstraumen — one of the strongest maelstroms on earth — is the very gravity that orchestrates the life around it. To hunt there is to be part of a massively distributed body, a circulatory system that gives with one hand and takes with the other. The maelstrom spews and sucks. There is no harmony there, only pulse.

Salt — that ancient figure for the body, ye are the salt of the earth — eats at everything. It erodes and it preserves at once, a metabolic phenomenon, the way our bodies are. It first appeared at hydrothermal vents: water that had trickled down fault lines resurging on volcanic heat, minerals released and filtered through vesicles in the rock like the proton gradients that cross a cell membrane. What enters the mitochondria is transformed; what leaves the maelstrom is transformed too. The halibut changes its skin to match its ground — the smaller, more vulnerable ones especially. The big ones don't bother. They are usually bible black.

One of them, 173 centimeters, appeared beneath me as an obsidian mirror. I had been swimming a day through ocean deserts, and crossing a ravine it crystallized out of the ground , the sea floor gathering into form. I had neglected to unhook the harpoon from my belt. I followed it for minutes, matched its exact speed, dove, fired, and was moored to what felt like a thunderbolt of lead. The power shot through me like an explosion. Descending fast, hands going cold, I managed to drop the belt and surfaced after what felt like minutes.

We drew it from the abyss. The whirlpool had become a wellspring.

Filleting her later on the shore, I felt grateful to her — the ocean — and part of her: her streamings, her raw currents both inside me and outside me, aligned, moored.