Something has been on my mind

but it's probably not what you think

Rose

Feb 19, 2021

Dear friend!

I’m feeling some sort of winter ennui. Or maybe it is pandemic ennui. Or maybe it is whatever unrelated plague I have that is causing me to use the word ennui.

In any case, this week le boredom has led me, as it always does, to Al Gore’s Internet, where I found a number of interesting and disturbing things. (I have written him a letter about the latter; I’ll let you know what he says.)

But of the former, I encountered something I had never seen before, and it set forth such a flurry of curiosity in my mind that I could not stop thinking about it all week: Mobula rays.

To be honest, I have never given rays of this sort much thought at all. Before last week, they mostly just brought to mind Steve Irwin (rip), New Jersey (no thanks), and the grandma from Moana (this one is good). But now…I see something else entirely.

It all started with this video:

I don’t know why the wretched Al-Gore-ithm presented me with this, but it did, and I am a new woman for it.

The video, like these ones, shows some mesmerizing footage of a school of rays somewhere in the tropical waters of this here blue marble. And, in particular, it shows this funny little habit they have of leaping out of the water and into the air. I was hypnotized by this creature’s grace underwater, which, of course, made the whole bellyflop charade all the more bizarre and hilarious. Scientists don’t know why Mobula rays jump like this. Scientists don’t actually know much about Mobula rays at all (the Wikipedia page is abysmally short). But some think these rays breach the surface to attract a mate, to get rid of parasites, or to communicate. My favorite explanation, though, is that they just do it for fun. I thought the whole thing was absurd and wonderful, like most things in nature.

But it was about 40 minutes down my YouTube wormhole that it really hit me: for a creature that exists, with this one exception, entirely underwater, always under that pressure, built for it – what must it feel like to leap into the air?

What freedom is that? And what does it mean if this is a Mobula ray’s idea of fun – if this is joy?

Imagine weightlessness! Imagine relief! Imagine what it all could mean!

Do they do it for the feeling of coming out of the water? Or for the feeling of returning to it? Is that what an astronaut feels when they escape the only gravity they’ve ever known? Or maybe the ray wants to feel gravity, is looking for it, maybe this is the only way to experience that pull that doesn’t exist underwater? Maybe the bellyflop feels good; maybe to a Mobula ray, it’s their version of getting someone to scratch that part of your back you can’t reach. If they can tell the difference between the air and the water, does that mean they understand what the ocean is, unlike those fish from that story? Is it the vibrations that are sent through the water when they hit the surface on the way back down? Do those vibrations say, “hello, ocean!” or “do not mess with me, ocean!”? Or, perhaps it’s just Dating 101: the higher the jump, the hotter the Mobula ray?

I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about what they’re thinking about. What are they thinking about?! Are they, like, gotta get me more of that AIR shit!! What does the air feel like on their cartilaginous, rubbery bodies? When our inflexible bones would snap in the depths of the ocean, their bodies defy their original intent in avian mimicry. The Mobula ray is entirely mystical and deeply comical to me, like if a shark wished to become a butterfly.

I couldn’t understand why, at first, I felt so compelled to watch these little* creatures leap forth from the ocean. But I spent hours doing just that, reading whatever I could find about them, stewing in my curiosity. I mean, one could reason this is just the way of the Internet and I fell down one of many rabbit holes trying to Avoid Real Obligations. But it felt like it was touching something deeper and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

It reminded me of a recurring dream I had in childhood, a sort of “flying” dream, in which I would leap, jump, simply and elegantly, from one location to the next. Like having pogo sticks for feet, but I’d go way up into the air, travel hundreds of miles within two bounds. It led me to the Wikipedia page for “pain in fish,” which does exist and contains the horrifying information that “veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were taught to simply ignore animal pain,” which made me wonder why we think pain and suffering make us exceptional. It reminded me how easy it is to project oneself onto an animal that has no ability to correct your assumptions.

Whatever the real reason for this behavior – in myself and in the Mobula ray – it was the act of wondering, I think, that reeled me in. It was the process of considering an interiority that wasn’t mine that felt so good. In this case, not knowing felt more fun than knowing, which is an exceptionally rare feeling in this life. Maybe there is no reason beyond that it is what their DNA instructs, and maybe I was drawn to them for exactly the same reason. Maybe the lesson is that there is never a lesson at the bottom of a YouTube wormhole.

But, at the very least, it made me pause and ask: what would it be like for me to leap forth, up and out of everything that is assumed and taken for granted, to leave it all behind, even just for a moment? What would I feel, what would my body do, and would it change the waters I swim in when I return?