Surprised by a giant jellyfish

海底惊现巨大水母对人类的启示

Nothing underscores the otherworldliness of the sea quite like the jellyfish. Balletic in its strange clench-and-flex propulsion through water, a jellyfish's alien parachute appears impervious¹ to the laws of motion as it flits and glides². One can only imagine how dislocating it must have been for a pair of divers³ off the coast of Cornwall in the UK this week to turn suddenly from examining slippery fronds⁴ of kelp to find themselves floating face-to-face with a ginormous tentacled⁵ sea medusa.

没有什么比水母更能体现海洋的奇幻和魔力。水母在海水中的推进奇特而怪异，一张一合，仿佛在跳着芭蕾舞，诡奇的伞状体似乎不受制于力学定律，在水中轻盈地飞掠和滑动。最近，英国康沃尔海岸的两名潜水员在滑溜溜的海带中穿行时，突然在漂浮中发现自己正与这样一只张牙舞爪的海中美杜莎撞个正着。

The two divers, Dan Abbott and Lizzie Daly, were filming a series of aquatic⁶ experiences for a social-media fundraising project, Wild Ocean Week, when the unexpected encounter occurred. A photo (taken by Abbott) of Daly swimming alongside the outsized jellyfish quickly went viral. What's so striking about the image isn't only the scale of the sea creature, but the collision of worlds that the photo poignantly⁷ captures. The clash of textures⁸ between the fully wet-suited and snorkel-sucking Daly, rubber masked and artificially finned⁹, and the fragile beauty and effortless grace of the diaphanous¹⁰ sea beast, accentuates¹¹ how near yet distant our existence is from those with whom we share our world.

这两名潜水员，阿博特(Dan Abbott)和戴利(Lizzie Daly)，当时正在为一个名为“野生海洋周”(Wild Ocean Week)的社交媒体众筹项目拍摄一系列照片，捕捉海洋里的浮光幻影，就在这时，意外的“邂逅”发生了。这张照片拍摄到了戴利和超大水母共游的瞬间，随即在网上走红而疯传。惊人之处不仅在于这只水母的巨型体格，还在于照片神奇地捕捉到了两个世界的碰撞。戴利身着全套潜水服，嘴里含着呼吸管，头戴橡胶面具，脚蹬人工鳍。水母则呈现出一种脆弱的美丽，通体透明，姿态轻松优雅。两个物种质地上的冲突彰显出人类与我们共享同一地球的生物是多么的接近，同时又是多么的疏远。

Still, even in the strangest of shapes and those furthest removed from our own experience, we are capable of glimpsing a semblance¹² of ourselves. "A jellyfish, if you watch it long enough," the writer Ali Benjamin memorably¹³ opens her children's novel The Thing About Jellyfish, "begins to look like a heart beating... It's their pulse, the way they contract swiftly, then release. Like a ghost heart – a heart you can see right through, right into some other world where everything you ever lost has gone to hide." Ingenious shapeshifters (some are known to morph in order to fool predators), jellyfish are like living lava¹⁴ lamps or fluttering Rorschach tests; the way we perceive their almost amorphousness¹⁵ says more about who we are than what they are. They're the abstract art of the ocean.

然而，即使是这种形状最怪异、最陌生的生物，我们也能够在惊鸿一瞥中照见我们人类自己的影子。“水母，如果你看的时间够长，”作家艾莉·本杰明(Ali Benjamin)在她的儿童小说《水母的那些事》(the Thing About Jellyfish)的开篇中写道，“它开始看起来像一颗跳动的心脏……它们的脉搏，迅速收缩，然后释放。就像一颗幽灵般的心——一颗你可以看穿的心，一颗你可以追随着到达一个彼岸世界的心，而在这个世界你所失落的一切都隐匿于此。水母是一种巧妙的变形者(有些变形是为了愚弄捕食者)，有时像生命涌动的火山熔岩之灯，有时又像漂浮的水墨画。我们对水母模糊的认知，更好地说明了我们自己是谁，而不是水母它们是什么。水母是属于海洋世界的抽象艺术。

Abbott's photo, which draws us into its mystery, recalls the power of a late painting by J M W Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters. Unknown to scholars until half a century after Turner's death in 1851, when it was discovered by chance in the basement of London's National Gallery in 1906, the large oil-on-canvas pulsates¹⁶ with the same pink golds and luminous¹⁷ peachiness vibrating from the jumbo jellyfish that Daly and Abbot encountered.

阿博特拍摄的这幅照片将我们带入神奇秘境，使人们联想到英国19世纪风景画家威廉·特纳晚期的画作《日出与海怪》(Sunrise with Sea Monsters)。特纳生前这幅作品不为学者所知，他1851年去世，半个世纪后的1906年，人们才在伦敦国家美术馆的地库偶然发现了他这幅作品。

Anticipating non-figurative art of the ensuing century, Turner's unfinished painting dares observers to be certain of what, exactly, it is they think they see, struggling to take form amid so much muscular light. Critics remain divided over whether the turbulent dawn depicted¹⁸ by the artist is alive with mythic dragons, with workaday fish, or with anything other than sloshing waves designed to churn up the imagination. Or perhaps, like the jellyfish itself, Turner's painting is a pulsing mirror in which we perceive who and how we are as we squidge across the universe: joyous¹⁹ or scared, lost or found, imperilled or free.

特纳这幅未完成的画作预测到了下一个世纪出现的非具象艺术，此画挑战观赏者去表达自我的视觉认识，确切地说，是要让观画者在画作强烈的光线中尽力去发现他们自认为是某个生物的东西。这位艺术家笔下黎明时分波涛汹涌大海中的生物到底是是神话中的龙、普通的鱼？还是只为了激起观画者天马行空想象的波浪之外的任何东西？至今评论家们仍然意见不一。或许，就像水母本身一样，特纳的画作就像一面跳动的镜子，让我们在大千世界蹒跚前行时可以用来照视自己，让我们感知自己是谁，感知自己是如何的生存：是快乐还是忧心忡忡？是自我迷失还是自我已寻回？是身处危难之中还是身心均自由？