Footprints by David Farrier

Author:David Farrier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ON THE REEF TOUR we were warned not to touch the corals, as human contact might cause damage, transferring harmful bacteria or removing important algae. Coral is also razor-sharp, and wounds can lead to infection and even blood poisoning. Indeed, throughout history this beguiling amalgamation of living creature and inert rock has invaded our imaginations with feverish visions and fabulous dreams.

The ancient Greeks thought corals were plants that petrified on contact with the air. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the hero Perseus rests on the shore, having defeated a sea monster that threatened to devour his bride, Andromeda. Next to him lies a trophy of an earlier victory: the head of the Gorgon Medusa, the sight of which turns any living thing to stone. As he washes the serpent’s blood from his hands, the plants around the Gorgon’s head of snakes begin to harden into rock. “Even today coral retains this same nature,” Ovid writes, “hardening at the touch of air.”

Coral seems to have had a hallucinatory, shape-shifting quality for later writers too. “Of his bones are coral made,” sings Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, of the supposedly drowned King of Naples: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” In 1646, the English antiquarian Thomas Browne cast doubt on the assumption “that Corall is soft under water, but hardeneth in the ayre,” and proposed that the experiments of Boetius, who handled coral a fathom underwater, indicate that its “concretion” was due to “the coagulating spirits of salt, and lapidificall juyce of the Sea.” Browne reports that a man sent to dive down a hundred fathoms (an implausible 180 meters) to observe whether the coral was hard or soft returned bearing in each hand a branch of coral “as hard at the bottome, as in the ayre where he delivered it.” Still, the perception that corals were plants in water and rock outside it persisted until Charles Darwin deduced that enormous reef structures—“mountains of stone” that surpassed even “the vast dimensions of the pyramids”—were in fact the work of tiny polyps. Coral fascinated Darwin, for whom the prospect of visiting coral reefs was the sole consolation for enduring the miseries of the Beagle voyage, the violence of Pacific storms, and his chronic seasickness. “I hate every wave of the ocean,” he declared, but even the thought of coral was “enough to make one wild with delight.”

Corals are a source of delight, too, in Paul Klee’s dreamlike painting Sunken Landscape. The picture is a riot of superabundant color. Branching blood-red and chlorophyll-green structures wave and dance, tined and curlicued to resemble the reef gardens I saw at Agincourt with my children. It’s a fantasy of life inverted: there’s even a great big upside-down daisy suspended from the top edge like a floral sun. It’s a joyful scene, surging with life—except in one detail. Like a dark twin to the sun-daisy, a black sun hangs, slightly decentered, in the middle ground of the picture.

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