Dismantling the Rainbow: The School Underwater

There are as many blues underwater as there are greens above. You don’t notice it when you’re down there. But afterwards, when you’re looking through photos or videos, it’s the first thing you see: Ink, Bombay Sapphire, Glacial - and you a dark putto, hovering in a sky. You can feel a bit like an icon under there with the sunbeam halos, glories and water-spectres.

I've been doing a diving course over the last few weeks. Each time our instructors wanted to teach us something, they would gather us on the seafloor in a circle, or facing them, and show, or sign to us what we needed to know and do next. I’ve learned many lessons in my underwater school: to navigate by the direction of sand ripples, or the angle of the sun; that I can make myself the weight of water, and when I weigh what water weighs, I need do nothing but lay on my tummy, gravity-less, an astronaut being swashed around a little by the tides; I’ve watched how teachers' and students' breaths become alchemy: lava-lamp like, mercury streams that merge with one anothers’, and are pulled aside like a stage curtain.
 
One of the things I was most nervous about, was one of the the things I enjoyed most. For one exercise, I had to release my air and turn it into a furious torrent - a kind of upside down waterfall which I then sipped from with the corner of my mouth. In Spanish, the word for waterfall is cascada. It was this, but the wrong way round, in this jaunty world where the ceiling seems to be the floor. The thing that blew me away, was that it tasted sweet, and that I was in water, ‘sipping’ air like a kitten. After each dive my mouth would feel a little puckered - as if I’d been blowing balloons up for too long. I was silenced by the water - exhausted, and very still, very quiet. Each night, when I lay down, I had dock rock and would be swaying and lifted in a phantom choreography. On our second dive, I missed the surface - I had culture shock: a homesickness and longing for the familiar comfort of breezes, noise, voices.
 
When you dive, red is the first colour you lose. Then orange. Yellow follows. Green. Blue. And finally, violet. You can measure and know how deep you are by their loss. The depths of the sea carry the same names as dawn and dusk and night: twilight, midnight, sunlight zone. A deep-sea diver told me that one time, she was surrounded by so much blue that the only way she knew which way was up, was by watching her air bubbles. I often think of this descent as a breaking up and dismantling of the rainbow, until only a celestial black space is left - it reminds me of a poem called The Darker Sooner by Catherine Wing.

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here...
We were farther and further
                                                                         Catherine Wing

In Richard Dawkins’ book about the partnership of art and science, Unweaving the Rainbow, he opens with a reference to John Keats.  Once, when everyone had sat down for a dinner, Keats raised his glass and proposed a toast "to the confusion of Newton". When his friend (and fellow Romantic) William Wordsworth paused before drinking, and asked what he meant, Keats replied: "Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism."

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful Rainbow once in heaven

                                                                               John Keats, from his poem, Lamia

The sciences used to be called Natural Philosophy; and Scientists - Natural Philosophers, thinkers, questioners - wondering and imagining. I have found nothing unpoetic in science and have no less awe for trying to understand things to a molecular or chemical level. In fact, I see more of a kinship between poets and scientists than I do other artforms sometimes: both are diligent observers, both trying to capture, understand and convey something honestly. Both are wonderers. There are many young poets working in this way: Marshallese poet and climate change activist, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner - and in the UK: Dom Bury, Isabel Galleymore, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Jen Hadfiled and Nancy Campbell to mention only a few.

Science is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service."
                                                                                  Richard Dawkins

It has only been a day since I finished the course and already I am missing being underwater. For me, the best classrooms are not rooms and the best lessons - not just factual, but felt: what it feels like to look a sea turtle in the eye, so close you see yourself reflected in its iris - and then to have this ancient creature, (whose species is 150-million years old) swim vertically up over your body; how it feels to always have someone beside you and you both looking out for each other (most of SCUBA teaching focuses on how to save, calm and keep each other safe); what it’s like when a species of fish you haven’t seen before drips down in front of you unexpectedly; and most of all, what it is to be in a border-less space that connects every part of our planet. You feel, truly, part rather than apart, as if you could go everywhere.