Just a week ago, I received small but heavy box on my front door containing my author copies of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. It was a surreal feeling to slice through the brown tape and pick up a copy, still nested in its protective plastic wrap. “It’s alive!” I thought—no longer a Microsoft Word document! It had acquired dimensionality, and the color… was this beautiful shade of aqua in the top left-hand corner. My colleague at UCSB, Rita Raley, noticed that it’s a tinge greener and warmer than the digital images of the book circulating online, which we both liked.

This was an ironic conversation to be having because I had been thinking about the significance of the cover image for a long time. The prologue of my book, “Into the Blue,” meditates on the instability of “blueness” across perceptual and cultural contexts, and the memory of color underwater. The memory of color underwater always exists in tension with the recordings of photographic capture. This is because the ways that the human eye sees light filtered through the optical medium of the ocean are different from the ways that cameras (even adjusted by skilled photographers) pick up the same scenes. On top of this, color printing involves a whole other set of variables that have to do with the difference between how a digital photograph looks on a computer screen and the matte medium of paper.

Yet the main reason I kept staring at the final printed color is that I am the photographer that made the cover image.

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I took the image during a scuba diving trip to Gull Island (a small dot behind Santa Cruz Island in the Santa Barbara Channel) that was sponsored by UCSB’s scuba & freediving club, in November 2018. The club is mostly students, but also includes some faculty and community members. November in Southern California is actually a very good time to dive: the ocean retains just enough of summer’s warmth to remain tolerable in a 7mm wetsuit (and hood, and gloves, and booties). With some luck, you can also enjoy relatively calm seas and good visibility. “Good visibility” in the Channel Islands would be anything better than 40 feet—meaning, you can see at least 40 feet in any direction. Bad visibility is 10-15 feet—although I’ve also been in visibility of literally one foot. Under those conditions, you have to abort the dive and try again another time. There is a real way in which the opacity of seawater can get in the way of visual enjoyment of the kelp forests, as well as present a barrier to safety. It’s less easy to orient when you can’t see where you are going, so you have to rely on your dive compass, or even the ripples in sand, which tell you which direction the waves above are moving.

Yet part of my purpose in going out to photography my own book cover was precisely to engage with the aesthetic of opacity. I wanted an image that didn’t treat the ocean like idealized air, an invisible medium that revealed a crystal-clear object or scene (a shark, a nudibranch, a sea hare, the contours of a rocky kelp bed). I wanted an image where the opacity of water got in the way. I wanted the viewer to feel the experience of looking through the cloudiness of seawater, attending to the thickness and mediation of the ocean—much like the way Isaac Newton talked about “ether” when he imagined how vision works. After all, the subtitle of Wild Blue Media is “thinking through seawater,” not “looking at an object underwater.” It is this process of thinking “through” that constitutes one of the methodologies of Wild Blue Media: what changes when you displace familiar concepts in media theory underwater?

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At this point that I should mention that the boat we were diving from was part of the Truth Aquatics liveaboard fleet. I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone who is a scuba diver in the Santa Barbara area has been on this liveaboard fleet (liveaboard means you can sleep on the boat for a multi-day dive experience), because it is “the” point of access to the Channel Islands. They are fairly large boats of around 75 feet, and have sleeping quarters below deck.

Now, for those of you reading this post, the name might sound familiar because it was all over the news in September 2019, when one of its three ships—The Conception—broke out into a fire around 3am, and killed 33 passengers and one crew member who were all trapped below deck. Words can’t quite capture how viscerally horrifying this was to imagine. The situation for surviving divers is even worse than the public, because we have all been on those boats, and therefore also have a whole slew of vivid images to draw from in our own nightmares—contaminating the good memories of diving. We live with the possibility that it could have been any of us who suffocated and burned.

A federal investigation could not conclusively determine the cause of the fire—but their best guess is that it was caused by a device that was charging overnight in the galley. In other words, the culprit was very possibly… a camera.

Or a phone. Or several, in concatenating melt-downs.

It is probably best that it can never be determined which camera or phone, because the weight of guilt on the family of the person who brought it would be too much to bear. Another legal issue is that the liability forms of all the passengers were burned in the fire, yet another erasure. In its aftermath, the incident has drawn a heightened awareness to the dangers of battery charging aboard ships, as well as the importance of multiple below-deck exit options.

The day that I found out the news, I checked my copy of the magazine California Diver, which lists upcoming scuba boat trips at all kinds of locations. Earlier that summer, I had been looking to try a liveaboard dive boat for something short—not a five-day, but maybe a three-day trip. That seemed manageable. I had some free time towards the end of August/September as an option, and I had circled a few trip options in dark purple ink. One of the dates I had circled was a trip that would take place over Labor Day weekend, August 31-September 2, as well as two others. However, since August 31^st is my mom’s birthday, I thought I should probably spend the day with her, so it wasn’t seriously in the running.

It turns out that my mom’s birthday protected me from choosing the wrong day, because the Labor Day weekend trip on The Conception was the fated trip.

I showed my fiancé the magazine with the circled date, and then promptly put it in the recycling bin. He pulled it out and took a photograph of the page with his phone, and then put it back in the bin.

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I cannot remember (even sifting through my email) which of the three Truth Aquatics ships we were on during the Gull Island trip when I took the cover image for my book. It may have been The Conception, or it may have been one of the others. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. As I mentioned earlier: every diver in Santa Barbara knew someone, or of someone, who was on that boat. It cut to the heart of the diving community, and still haunts the memory of Channel Islands diving. Perhaps one small relief is that it was not the diving itself—or the ocean—that caused the disaster, but instead, a rogue battery. So when we recall our many experiences of being underwater, at least those can remain somewhat more joyful, even as memories of the Truth Aquatics fleet trigger other nightmare scenarios.

Yet there is a certain way in which memories layer upon each other when we look at an image. I think it would be accurate to say that The Conception disaster contributes to the opacity of the cover image of my book. Rather than looking straight “at” it, it constitutes a kind of melancholy silting that inhibits the clarity of recollection. This silting is an insistent presence. The photograph, by itself, acquires an archive of the future. It archives as it endures, gathering the silt of other things unto itself. As Roland Barthes cautioned, we should not mistake the photograph for the thing itself (in my case, the seaweed). The photograph—to any viewer—is deeply associative, and pulls at a whole semiotic spray of memory. This is what Barthes meant in “Rhetoric of the Image” when he said that the “literal” (denoted) meaning of an image is a matter of subtraction, of ignoring the superfluity of other meanings/associations being tossed up by the image in the moment that a viewer sees it.

Eduoard Glissant has been an important interlocutor for me, especially his writings on opacity, the ocean, and the Middle Passage. I’m also looking forward to reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ poetry in Dub: Finding Ceremony—also from Duke University Press—which is just out this month (aka shares a birthday with my book). These works bring important poetic and historical dimensions to thinking about the ocean as an archive. If the archive is always a matter of “for whom,” then media theory should address not only the functionality of ocean media, but the ways that ocean media relate to specific kinds of trauma. I address this in chapter 4 of my book on “Underwater Museums,” specifically through a discussion of Jason de Caires Taylor’s sculptural works under 30 feet of seawater.

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When I looked at my photographs after the Gull Island trip in 2018—a year before The Conception disaster—I scrolled through a number of clear shots: the kelp flowing through tidal surge, a starfish poised next to a moray eel, purple hydrocoral anchored to rocky foundations. These were all instances of me taking pictures of nice looking things, looking not at the water, but at them—at objects. Yet the one that I ended up selecting for the cover was from an unplanned “click” of the shutter that happened to capture the blur and opacity of seawater. I was at the end of my dive, hovering close to the surface to enjoy a last few minutes of immersion before my toes truly froze and I would have to go back to the boat. It was a pleasure to gaze down at the canopy of the kelp forest, with sunlight beaming down on a partially cloudy day, the tips of Macrocystis pyrifera reaching towards the light. I took a few casual shots, and then exited the water to go peel off my neoprene wetsuit and warm up my feet, which took a good five minutes under the boat’s hot saltwater shower.

Courtney Leigh Baker—the cover designer I worked with from Duke University Press—did a wonderful job with my request to capture “opacity” in the form of the cover. Working with the base image I offered of giant kelp, she selected a sans-serif font that appears in different shades and opacities of blue, sampled from different areas of the photograph. The lettering, then, looks like it could wash away at any moment. Yet even if they were to wash away, they would still contribute to the silt of the photograph, the haze that obscures vision, yet reminds you of the medium that you are not only looking through, but are actively buoyed by. The opacity remains even if you are doing your best to try to look past it.

 

Melody Jue is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and editorial board member of Media Theory. She explores how swimming and scuba diving can serve as interpretive methodologies in the humanities.

Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020) takes the ocean as an epistemic environment for thought that one might think through, rather than as an object of analysis or territory for investigation. By understanding the ocean as a milieu where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived, Wild Blue Media destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our views of mediation from within the cold buoyancy of saltwater—with specific implications for literary interpretation and media theory by addressing the connections between environment and metaphor. Through readings of science fiction narratives, underwater memoir, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art, Wild Blue Media reexamines media not only in, but through the ocean, offering a form of radically situated knowledge.