Sea Cucumbers

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

—Italo Calvino

Surely Calvino's right. If a sea cucumber doesn't enclose the sea within her body, then I can't name a creature who does. This crawler I've just lifted out of shallow water, in fact, is blob-like and leathery. Her complexion is a color bomb—clefts of clementine nailing nooks of nonda plum. When I turn her toward the moon, rays of pearl pellicle her backside. In my wet hands she feels roughly five pounds and looks the length of a rainbow lobster. She's been vacuuming oceans for years, traces of sea-mint inside, and poop, which she excretes generously onto sea floors, bowels like sage & tomato sausages cold-pressed in Italian kitchens. I tickle her tentacles and watch her withdraw. If I were Dalí, I'd paint her as a warped pickle on a Paris clothesline, her imaginary bloomers wetting wildflowers: corn-cockle, dog-violet, fireweed. Though the pearlfish and the Harlequin crab make their home in her rectum, I'd choose not to paint them. I might, however, feature her cousins—the sand dollar and the starfish—for the sea, it seems to me, must have everything in the world to do with stars, to do with fish, trickling sands.

Sea cucumbers are omnivores. They eat with their mouths and their anuses. Sensing food on the surface of the seabed, a sea cucumber will burst forth its tentacles and yank microscopic morsels toward its opened head. Although sea cucumbers are brainless, heartless, bloodless, boneless, and blind, they are gluttons.

I try to imagine a juvenile spaghetti worm, wonder whether it can feel the nerve ring spreading, sense the presence of something hidden lurking, hear anything at all when fingers lunge like starved children, about to offer a sacrifice.

A juvenile spaghetti worm is translucent and lives among ocean drifters near the seabed. Smaller than a grain of rice, and probably polluted with tiny shreds of plastic in its backside, it has only the ability to pray away the danger, to wish it were a scorpion, an angler, a monster.

And then the sea cucumber's hand—like the lacy treetops in a prized Paris watercolor—snatches it and sucks the life out of it. Its long arm bends to its mouth and releases what's left of the structure. The juice satisfies. It makes the cucumber feel alive again.

But it doesn't stop there. The hand is accompanied by nine other hands and they go ballistic, gobbling up the worm's brothers and sisters and cousins—all young; and fiery; and mighty-fine looking.

What does it sound like, that initial suck? Does skin swoosh and swizzle like a toilet flushing after supper, like gale winds rustling bluebells? A flushing in slow motion like bricks breaking windows or belts beating lovebirds or needles violating vinyl, vinyl hissing and weeping for secretaries who'd always wanted to be singers—a fat kick to big knees around midnight?

Perhaps my painting must be an illusion. With fresh sheet of canvas, white and clean and expecting, the scene re-cast: marble café table lampside with bowl of soup. Yes. Sea cucumber as lamp, her bowels as light, ocean drifters as marble, coral reef as table, and—because even an illusion must embody realism—pearlfish as soup.

To capture the threat of the sea, I could certainly throw in a sea turtle or a jellyfish. Sea cucumbers are terrified of this lot, especially the latter, whether the Flower Hats or Cabbage Heads or Cannonballs. Any predator will trigger a 'fight or flight' response in the cucumber. It will flee into the belly of the coral, holding its breath, until the danger passes. If startled, it'll shoot its intestines through its anus. This shooting is white, stringy, sticky, and toxic.

But it can't hold its breath forever and the pearlfish knows it. It knows that the cucumber's rectum is multi-purpose: for breathing, for reproducing, for absorbing nutrients from food. And if the pearlfish can't have its...