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| Aral Sea, 4th largest lake, Aug '14: gone. |
And there was no longer any sea. Rev 21.1
Fifty States of Leviathan
The opposition against the sea, war on the sea, things that come out of the sea, the taming of the sea are bigger than singularity.
Images of Dagon, the fish god:
CTHULHU
RISING FROM THE SEA
LYING UNDER THE WAVES
The demonic is foisted upon the creation, upon fish and fowl, but these images do not come even from the weird tales, so called, not even from Breughel, for the Fall of the Rebel Angels takes from Revelation 12.2-9 (detail here).
Psalm 74 says, "you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters, you
crushed the heads of leviathan." Behemoth from land, Leviathan from the
sea. Egypt is like a dragon in the sea, Egyptians and Babylonians
together, Pharaoh king of Egypt, great dragon Ez 29.3-5, "on that day
Yahweh with His sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan,
the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent, and He shall
slay the dragon that is in the sea." Isaiah 27.1.
We should not fail to mention the end of Psalm 8, he gave him to have dominion over...whatsoever passes in the paths of the sea.
"He that cut down Rahab and wounded the dragon. Art thou not He
which has dried the sea, the waters of the great deep, that made the
depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over. Isaiah 51. 9,10
Detail of Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels:
“Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels
shows us there really is a force to subtraction: you subtract from an
angel until you end up with a demon. If you download an image of the
painting onto your computer, or better yet see it hanging in the Royal
Museum of Arts in Antwerp, you will notice how the rebel angels fall
from heaven at the top left of the canvas to hell at the bottom right.
Their wings are at first subtracted for the lesser wings of bats and
dragons. Towards the earth they are reduced to moths, frogs and other
soft things. They are driven together by the golden angels of heaven
armed with effulgent discs, lances and swords, whose task it is to
sanitise our world. You will see how the rebel angels continue to change
their forms as they are driven into a sea, whose opening is an obscure
drainpipe. They lose their legs, wings, all hope of surfacing, and
become fish, squid, spawn and seeds of trees never to be planted.
Underwater they continue to be subtracted from their former selves until
they are at last incorporeal and see-through at the bottom.” J. M. Ledgard
compare Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Fall Of The Rebel Angels” as here:
Look,
for instance, at the lone angel (or demon, now) sitting on a
tree-branch or root, coming out of a weird and perfectly round
formation, as if — unlike his associates, all around him — he’s been
through this, now, and is ready to think things through. The root/branch
that he sits on reminds the viewer of some niche or corner they,
themselves, might attach to, whether it’s a favorite place at work, or a
memory from childhood, and while this seems to be “his” spot, it
doesn’t seem to be very comfortable. In this way, the viewer is
discomfited, as well, due to the disconnect between associations and
reality. To the left, figures are hiding, and their occlusion is both
technically and ideationally unique. Technically, because, in a more
traditional setting, evil is given a face, or at least a presence that
is meant to scare. Ideationally, because if demons are in hiding, there
must be something even worse that this scene implies, but never really
shows. And that, by itself, is probably even more terrifying, since it
touches upon human fear as it ACTUALLY is: an inability to cope with the
unknown, as these demons clearly cannot. In this way, technique and
intellectual heft are mutually reinforcing, which is really where art
moves.
The actual forms of the demons, near the bottom, are also quite
arresting. One has a face whose mouth has been replaced by a far larger
‘O’, giving the odd quality of both a scream (the trite thing to do in
such a painting) as well as an object stifling that same scream, thus
making the whole arrangement that much more disturbing. One demon is
seemingly being eaten by another, while another looks on, either
laughing, or expressing some other emotion altogether. And still others
figures have been so manipulated, at this point, by their own
transgression, that they are merely heads attached to legs, arms, and
tiny bodies. Below, there’s the look of fire, and yet, instead of being
tortured by such — again, as would happen in more cliched paintings — it
is completely ignored, since the tortures, above, touch much deeper
fears, of more abstract, less definable things. This is why there is an
emotional impact, here, that the far more stale representations of God,
angels, demons, etc. etc. etc. rarely capture. As I said in my analysis
of a great Wallace Stevens poem, there are two ways to enter the heart:
by tugging at it, and only it, and hoping for the best, or the more
predictable (yet much harder to follow) route of the brain, which
requires some stimulation before a connoisseur’s more base parts open up
to be played with. This painting — and Hieronymus Bosch, in general —
takes the latter approach, succeeding on on terms that the High
Renaissance had not even defined yet." Alex Sheremet
When Psalm 94 says the floods have lifted up their voice, their waves, that Yahweh is mightier than the noise, than the waves of the sea, and this refers to the parting of the Red Sea to let Israel escape from Egypt in hot pursuit--All the people of the earth will worship the beast rising out of the sea. Then the second beast from the land will force everyone to take its mark that is its name. The ocean depths embody these chaos sea monsters, called Leviathan and Rahab.
Fugitives in alaska, deep net, poison soils, catching the underground el.
