Meehan Crist
10 Thoughts on Water
1. In your dream a silhouetted figure rises from dark water, massive head and shoulders dripping, face obscured. A woman crouches in the aqueous blue light beyond, smiling, encouraging you cannot tell what.
2. You sign up for scuba lessons. You try to convince yourself that not everything is a metaphor.
3. Of ocean life you learn: you need to avoid character judgments about an organism based on whether it may sometimes pose a hazard. An organism’s form and behavior spring from its survival needs, and nothing more.
4. You find this comforting, as one can learn to understand an organism and thus avoid the hazard.
5. Watching a jellyfish pulse across your laptop late one night, you remember someone once told you that the human brain and spinal column pulse rhythmically, like a swimming jellyfish, at a rate faster than breathing and slower than a resting heartbeat. You aren’t sure if this is true. But maybe we are all aquatic creatures hauling the ocean ashore in skin sacs and trying to survive.
6. As a chemical compound, water has the power to dissolve other substances, but as an action its effect is reversed. To water is to fuel, as in a fire. As in fiction and false assumptions fuel our fears.
7. Fire coral, sea urchins, and crown-of-thorns are all potentially dangerous, you learn, but since they lack intelligence or an obvious ability to move, you’re less likely to attribute injuries from them to an “attack.”
8. Underwater, the vast majority of “attacks” are defensive reactions.
9. You study the mottled greens and greys of the moray eel, and learn that it bites, and that reaching into holes is a good way to startle it into doing so. You take consolation in your practice of not reaching into holes. The same principle applies to a sea urchin or fire coral - merely touching it can cause the injury.
10. When you see her again, many months after the dream, you take care not to touch her arm, or hand, or the perfect tips of her nail-bitten fingers. You wonder how, when you have taken such care, you can still feel something burn.
10 Thoughts on Illusion
1. With an audience of the faithful, a magician can spin gold from straw.
2. Which is to say, a magician’s greatest trick is not speed or cunning, it is belief.
3. Even an unwilling audience will do. Rumplestiltskin did not need to name his apprentice “captive” to make her fingers move. All he needed was the right angle of light, a little smoke, a mirror.
4. Sometimes a simulacrum is enough.
5. Of course, some tricks can work both ways. Philippe Petit used to pick pockets in Paris; David Copperfield once used sleight of hand to make a mugger believe his full pockets were empty. Legerdemain is a flexible tool.
6. When the time comes, be sure you know what coins you have placed in what pocket and what each of them is worth, to you.
7. Sometimes it is a sweet and happy past that turns out to be the trick. This is to be avoided at all costs.
8. Sometimes is it the promise of tomorrow—the curtain pulled back in a bravado of velvet revealing a fool’s paradise.
9. Which is to say, you may wake up one morning, sheets tangled around bare legs, and realize he had no illusions about the trouble she was in.
10. Even then, last night’s dreams may glint and jingle through your thoughts. Whose sleight of hand is this, other than your own?
Meehan Crist is writer-in-residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Nautilus, Tin House, the Believer, Scientific American, and Science. She is also the host of Convergence, a new live show and podcast about the future.