Imagine an ocean without the skin of the surface. I had a dream a few days before coming to the island of Cheju (geography: South of South Korea, West of Kyushu, Japan, North of Okinawa and Taiwan), in which I rode on a boat, circumnavigating an island, and I could see a jungle of orange and purple coral reefs all around the island. It was cool, cause this dream projection seemed to be confirmed over this weekend. I got under the skin of the sea, spending two days scuba diving off Munseom Rock, off the South coast of Cheju. By virtue of its more Northern (yet still subtropical) latitude, the cool thing about Cheju scuba diving, in contrast with the tropical diving of somewhere like the Phillipines (which I’ve only heard a little about), is that here there’s 4 seasons underwater, too — the fish and the vegetation change according to the seasons, I’m told. It was a jungle underwater — so much soft coral, in so many different colors, pale blue, purple, pink, these leafy (with silvery glitter on the leafs) orange bushes that you could swim right through, these taller green plants, that reminded me of some evergreen tree struggling for life on a mountain ridge above the treeline. Particurly memorable was this obscure white and pink tree, which struck me as some alien life form.
Why does such beautiful underwater plant life have to be confined to the slopes of tiny outcrops of rocks? Why aren’t there entire fields of soft coral in the same way that there are endless fields of grass in the prairies of Canada? Is it some kind disfunction that I see the most beautiful thing, and think it should be bigger or more abundant? It’s just hard for me to accept that there is so much nothing in the ocean.
My travel reading list seems fitting: The Living Sea by Jacques Cousteau (about adventures in the early days of scuba diving), Eden (in which a group of astronauts crash onto the 4th planet from the Sun in another solar system, and discover obscure lifeforms of various descriptions) by the Polish writer Lem (who wrote a few stories from on which the Russian director Tarkovsky based movies), and Popul Vuh, the ancient text of the Mayan civilization (haven’t opened this one yet).
