Terror Below -- The Sea

In my previous posting, I suggested that we are especially terrified by terrors below because we are instinctually programmed to expect attacks from above and beside, but never below. Yet as descendants from tree-dwelling monkeys, we carry genetical programming that does anticipate attack from below ... In other words, there’s this residual fear of attack from below, but that residual has been buried (so to speak) -- until it necessarily arises.

I suggested that this argument is especially pertinent to the sea. On the land we might presumably safely assume that nothing can attack from beneath us, but on the ocean, we ought to expect it, right?

Yet we find terrors beneath the surface of the ocean especially horrifying.

There’s this whole sense of the impossibility of boating, for example. “My God!” one ought to reasonably realize, "I’m barely suspended above miles of depths full of horrors, held barely in suspension by surface tension!" It’s the same terror that so many people feel when flying: "Wake up!" we scream inside. "My God! Falling is just pretend! We’re going to fall!"

Vertigo, that dizzying horror we feel on the edge of cliff, ought to be present in every trip on a boat. I suspect that it is there, but shoved back into the back of our minds ready to be reawakened as soon as something surfaces.

Compound this with the true horrors of the deep: sharks, giant squid, whale so big that they should see us as mere squashable gnats…

No wonder, then, that so many horror films and Greek legends have picked up our terrors from below when skimming the surface of those great unknown seas....

Anyhow, in the next couple of postings I want to first examine the more unexpected horrors of terrors beneath us while we are land, followed by an examination of related mythology.

Terror Below

Humans, we’re told, are a species of ape. Descended from monkeys, tree dwellers, evolved to expect danger from three dimensions—some monkeys have three distinct instinctual danger cries: one for eagles swooping from above, another for snake slithering along the branches, and a third for jaguars, leaping from below. Humans, on the other hand, have one cry: “Heads up!”

No surprise as our species migrated to ground where danger from below is seemly eliminated. But consider three personal tales. First, a great uncle, working for the CCC in Florida during the 30s. Out for a hike in the swamps and he steps on a gator. It lunges, grabs his leg, and starts to spin; this is its instinctual means of breaking limbs which it will follow by releasing the leg, grabbing the shocked victim’s torso, and dragging it below for drowning. My uncle, however, is a Florida cracker, having once with my grandfather captured baby alligators for the zoo and placed them in their rain barrel for temporary safe keepings, much to my great-grandmother’s alarm. So my uncle drops into a roll with the gator, spinning his body so that his legs are not broken, and when the gator lets go to grab his torso, he leaps up and limps off safely back to camp. “Boys,” he announces bleeding, “I been gator bit.” He wears the scar with pride for a lifetime.

Consider, secondly, a good friend who was bit and nearly killed by a rattlesnake as a youngster, also in Florida. When I know him, during cross country in high school, his snake-spotting skills border on E.S.P. On the surface of the tale, this does not sound like death from below, but consider the snake beneath those sticks where your foot is very nearly planted….

Finally (thirdly) consider the horrifying occurrence of my wife, seven months pregnant, getting up to pee for the third time in the night. “Pissss,” and suddenly there’s this squeaking. Her urethra clenches and the pee stops and the squeaking stops. She starts to pee again and the squeaking starts again. “I guess,” she thinks, “that pregnant ladies must squeak when they pee. Huh—nobody told me about that.” Stops peeing, reaches behind to flush the toilet, and turns around … just in time to see a bat swirling down the toilet. And then my son was born with wings and fangs!!! Okay—just kidding on the last bit—but seriously, there’s a horror tale in there, no?

My “heads up” example was, of course, a joke. But try this simple thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a crowd. Yell, “look out!!!” How many people in your imagination looked slightly upward or scanned left and right, turned around? More importantly, how many people looked down?

I have, perhaps, misconsidered the sailor. But the long and short of all this is that there is something instinctually terrifying about danger from below. Above—a pop fly to center field while we’re distracted by picking our nose?—we can deal with that. Sideways—a fist to the face?—well it hurts, but it’s the kind of danger we’re programmed to receive. But attack from *below*?!? Danger Will Robinson! Does not compute!

In some upcoming postings, I will take a look at few real-life animals that dwell below, before looking to fiction and the mythological. Danger still lurks from below, and our primordial instincts cringe. No wonder, then, that we equate hell and Gog and Magog with the Underneath?