They say the beachfront is beautiful. During the day, the sun sets ablaze the excitement of the beachgoers playing and relaxing on the beach. Women tanning themselves and children playing in the sand and water with the innocence of not knowing what goes on further beyond the shoreline. At night, the ambience of the waves is a lullaby. Draped in obsidian dotted with tiny specks of light, the sea and sky embrace in a lover’s sleep, a sleep so peaceful that it appears that the world has approached a standstill. It is in these quiet moments that the earth reveals its true intentions.

The black horizonless sea inspires my imagination to run wild with what horrors and oddities it harbors. Large abandoned shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean. Mega fauna that dwarf these huge shipwrecks, and the further and deeper you go, the weirder and more Lovecraftian the creatures are. And then there’s the Mariana Trench, the Dis of the earth. The ocean is our darkwood: it’s wild, harsh, and impenetrable but instead of it not just being a place where the directionless lose their way, it creates a crisis in disbelief. They say the beachfront is beautiful, but I don’t think they mean beautiful in the same way that I experience it. At night, especially deep into the night when the world sleeps, is when the ocean becomes alive. In the silence of the night, you can vividly hear the waves crashing. Every once in a while you see bioluminescence. You can hear the crew from past ages and their panic as the ship sinks. Yes the beachfront is beautiful but in a terrifyingly sublime way. It’s one of the few things that makes me believe in some higher power, a high power that mocks the hubris of humanity.

The ocean is the last frontier on earth and I think one of the main reasons why we have not conquered it, aside from technological reasons, is because it is the collective vanitas of humanity. We have raped the earth of its resources and with climate change being our impending doom, the ocean waters continue to rise each year. There is a collective unspoken understanding of the otherworldly power of the ocean. It revenges itself against the human ideals of enlightenment, progress, and the mastery over nature, proving them not only irrelevant but it also mocks humanity’s desire to conquer it. It slyly coaxes us into giving into our most vainglory instincts to just in the end swallow us whole, back into the womb of the earth.

I find it telling that the sky is the boundary between the ocean and the endless expanse of space. Both are frontiers filled with endless mystery. The ocean is the chthonic mother and space escapes the confines of the anthropocene and between these two is the Apollonian sky fighting to not have these entities merge to become our oblivion. This is what I mean when I say that the beachfront is beautiful.