The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

That was how she felt, looking back at herself as a child: Like looking at some half-minded thing. An inferior version of the self she was now. A failed attempt.

There are many levels of consciousness here on earth. Many animals are self-aware, to one degree or another. But culture, not consciousness, is what we are searching for. Not other minds, or other selves—which are everywhere—but other societies.

We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place. In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.

In our bodies as in society, our structures are built to replicate themselves, and themselves only. We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.

That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

This society—what we call modern society, what we always think of as the most important time the world has ever known, simply because we are in it—is just the sausage made by grinding up history.

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.

“I think, therefore I doubt I am,”

What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it.

“Neanderthal. The Denisovan hominins. Homo naledi. Homo floresiensis. Homo luzonensis. This isn’t a list of our ancestors: it’s a list of the toolmaking, culture-bearing species of humans we wiped out. Everywhere we have encountered someone we could communicate with, someone we could learn from, share this planet with, we have murdered them. We could have learned from them, grown with them, cooperated. But instead we bashed their skulls in, stabbed them to death, drove them out of the fertile lands into deserts, where they starved.”

She had been killed for the same reason a dolphin, tangled in a tuna net and drowned, was killed: the species that caught her didn’t care enough not to kill her. She meant nothing to them.