As a human body, I am somewhat organised, with seemingly discrete borders and boundaries. My skin gives the illusion of a hermetic seal that keeps my intricate plumbing mostly from view, this body appears to me as whole, separate, and organised. But my body of water also breaches the skin sac – regularly, imperceptibly, and also in periodic and demonstrative gushes.
Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water
For, we reflected, what if the entire intrauterine existence of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterised that aboriginal piscine period, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?
-Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa Or, A Theory of Genitality
“The ocean,” she said, “is a big lez. I can tell.”
“But not one of history,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “Of space and time.”
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties