INKTHINK #2: Suit

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

I spent most of my childhood enthralled by the possibilities of space. In grade school, my answer to any “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was always, unmistakably, an astronaut. Perhaps it was Tom Hanks’ charm in Apollo 13 or seeing that Lieutenant Dan not only grew some legs back but almost made it into the same shuttle himself. Perhaps it was just the sheer enormity of it. That space was some statue you’d admire and could never, ever wrap your arms around. In 8th grade Science, I had to do a group project on planets that quickly became a solo project. The other three members of the group quickly realized how little motivation I needed to do research about something I was already deeply intrigued by. So they let me do my thing. It was only at the end, when teacher gave me a giant, ugly D- – itself a practical joke to remind me of the importance of it being a GROUP project – that I realized you could never go that far up in the sky without a team. You had to trust people. You also had to accept you might not make it back.

While space maintained its hold on me, I found myself more and more lured into the mysteries of the deep. The San Mariana Trench, which I first read about it in Steve Alten’s Meg, waterlogged my daydreams. The fact an inverse Mt. Everest existed below the surface of the Pacific Ocean waves felt more tangible than the vastness of space. It also felt more terrifying. There, down below, you could not only run into the 80% of the ocean and its creatures we had yet to discover, but you could also, with one false move – one slight crack in the windshield – succumb to the pressure of the deep ocean and no longer exist. You could be crushed so fast no one would know.

Over the years, James Cameron’s passion for the deep sea only drew out mine even further. I’m still kinda mad at him for being too busy with blue cat people to adapt the best Sports Illustrated story ever. But if the man who created some of the biggest, most successful movies of all time could spend so much of his career in ever-shrinking, deeper-diving submersibles, then there had to be something he knew we didn’t. After all, the man had made an entire career out of being betted against and winning each and every time.

Recently, I found out one of my co-workers has a bone-deep phobia of whales. As I inquired further, her face grew with embarrassment, shaking it off with, “I read too much and had no friends”, a phrase meant to signify isolation but instead pulled the most empathetic of strings. I knew what she was talking about. Left to our own devices, we could read our way to a despair we didn’t yet know how to rise beyond. “But they’re so big and there’s so many of them and you know how big the ocean has to be to fit all of them?” I could only smile. “But that’s why I find them so cool,” I said. “Terrifying, yes, but also really cool.” I theorized out loud – a move I’d later learn to be a big mistake – that perhaps her phobia came from seeing something so big in a place in which you were so immobile, the water resisting your every move and reaction. “Stop,” she pleaded, embarrassed at the can of deep-sea worms she had given daylight. We agreed to only talk about beluga whales. They are small enough to comfortably think about.

Over the summer, NASA released the results of a $5 billion project over two decades in the making: the most detailed photos of space ever, taken by the new James Webb Space Telescope. Only the size of our own viewing devices could limit the awe contained with each photo released. And only just last month, NASA researchers found the first exoplanet with the Webb Telescope, a planet within 99% the size of Earth. How crazy is that, to know there’s a same-sized planet circling a star millions and millions of miles away, some parallel universe we’ll always be curious about? Another question: if we the Earth is 70% ocean and we haven’t discovered 80% of it, that would mean we have over half the planet unexplored. Completely off the grid. Unmapped and unknown. Why can’t we develop a Sea Telescope of sorts, an inverse version of the James Webb variety?

What I’ve ultimately grown to understand is how the lack of further exploration of our oceans mirrors our collective disinterest in saving the planet. More specifically: the collective disinterest of the wealthy elite – those with the power to make and avoid decisions that affect us all. There is so much to explore and, within them, so many possible solutions and realizations we need to stumble upon. You don’t need carbon-vomiting rockets to do it. You just need coordination and deep pockets. In other words: we may never know.

I drew this picture to draw attention to the parallels of both explorers. One for deep space, the other for the deep sea (at least until the pressure becomes too much for a suit to absorb). In many ways, they feel like two sides of a coin. They both offer death-defying exploration. They both captivate the imaginations of the youth in a way few things do. They both look cool as shit. But there is so much focus on space and far-off dreams of ghost colonies we’ll never build that I wish we could flip the coin over and see the other side, like we’ve been playing with tracing paper this whole time and people need to see the original. Wonder is a powerful thing. If only we could bottle it up in ways that weren’t meant for profit but rather the pursuit of a better future within our current home.