Monsters

[poliphilo]

Almost every large body of water in the world has a monster. Nessie is only the most famous.

Evidence comes in by dribs and drabs. Plenty of sightings, but the photographs are always teasingly ambiguous (or faked.)

And then there are the sea monsters.

What are these things? I want them to be plesiosaurs, but the weight of probability is against it. Loren Coleman (and he's the man) suggests that they're a rare breed of long necked seal. That really does cut them down to size.

I have been fascinated by them all my life. When I was a very small kid I has scared of paddling out into the sea in case a monster came swimming by.

Actually, that fear has never gone away.

I was never scared of sharks or jelly-fish or things like that- real things that posed a real threat. Only of these hypothetical things that posed a hypothetical threat.

There are no cases on record- not recent cases anyway- of lake or sea monsters hurting anyone. The threat is purely metaphysical. I'm afraid of them (and love them) because they're uncanny.

Things half seen, of indeterminate size and shape, slip-sliding through the dark.

What do they symbolise? Is it something to do with sex? Is it something to do with God?

I can't quite grasp it.

There's a chap about to go down into Loch Ness with a state of the art submarine. Perhaps he'll come back with a long-necked seal on a leash.

I so hope he does.

I so hope he doesn't.

Comments

[silent-mouse.livejournal.com]

Makes me wonder what kind of monster lives in the depths of Dead Sea. A dead monster, maybe?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

The threat is purely metaphysical. I'm afraid of them (and love them) because they're uncanny.

I was saddened by the confession of the man who apparently faked the famous Loch Ness photograph, and I was saddened to find out that the famous film of the Ape Man Walking was also a fake.

But stuff keeps showing up. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen's moving account of his journey to Nepal's Crystal Mountain (with George Schaller, who was funded by the National Geographic Society), Matthiessen speaks at length about the Yeti, which is apparently seen high in the snowy mountains by the Buddhist monks who dwell there.

Almost every community can come up with a story about a local monster. Back in the late 1800s, near Bull Run creek, a creature was seen (and smelled) on several occasions. It was very tall, shaggy, and stank.

I've often wondered if there are areas of fluidity that allow connection between other, maybe parallel worlds.

There's a famous story about a farmer who disappeared in a field in front of his family, and they kept hearing his weak cries for help near the place where he'd disappeared.

Tantalizing, all of this. And so little real information.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Bull Run creek is about ten miles from my house and meanders all around the county.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I so hope he does.

I so hope he doesn't.

let me see, if he did it would prove there is a guardian. If he didn't, I think people like you (and I) will still know that there is a Nessie.

Where I went to college, there was a BIG pond out back. Big enough to be a lake, I've never been sure what the criteria was for the difference between a pond and a lake. Anyway, a friend of mine wrote a story about the monster that guarded the pond...it was very tongue in cheek.

But how do we know there isn't one?

I occasionally *see* something I can't identify, when I look out on the waters of Lake Ontario from the beach of my family cottage. I'm pretty familiar with The Lake, I've gone there every summer of my life since I was 14 (that nearly 40 years!) so I made up a "Lake Monster" and that's how I explain the unexplainable to myself.

Only...maybe I didn't make it up.

Thanks for this! Great fodder for imaginings on a cold, snowy dark day here.

[thewayupward.livejournal.com]

I used to be quite convinced, as a child, that one day I would go to Scotland and come back having seen the Loch Ness monster. It all seemed so rational to me! Didn't make sense for the dinosaurs to all have been wiped out, and I liked diplodoci best so I used to imagine a big diplodocus just wading about in the Loch Ness quite happily, and poking its head out to breathe or peek at tourists.

I like the way the Nessie legend evolved into the urban legend about a crocodile grown enormous from living on rubbish thrown down the drain, living in the sewers. Isn't it nifty?

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

My favourite Nessie theory - the one that makes most sense to me, though I don't necessarily subscribe to it, being something of a sceptic by nature - is that she is the ghost of a dinosaur. Occasionally seen, but never able to be detected by sonar etc.

[aint2nuts.livejournal.com]

They have investigated the Lockness Monster, to the point where I believe, if anything were there, they would have found it.

Not.

You just never know.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

There's a chap about to go down into Loch Ness with a state of the art submarine. Perhaps he'll come back with a long-necked seal on a leash.

I so hope he does.

I so hope he doesn't.

I hope he doesn't. I'm thinking of poor King Kong, who was brought to the New York stage in chains and who went mad.

What if he sent Nessie to Sea World, and attendents trained him to catch hoops with his long neck?

He'd go mad, too, and so would his mate and children, left alone in Loch Ness, hiding in their underwater cave...

And now I remember a long-ago visit to the Hutchinson, Kansas County Fair. My father paid a quarter, and we went inside a tent to see a Sea Monster.

It was lying in a box not two inches bigger than it was; the box was filled with water.

I looked at it with horror, not because it was a monster but because it couldn't even move!

Much later I recognized what I had seen: it was a sea lion, and it was slowly being tortured.

I hope Nessie is smart enough to take his family through the rift that will keep it safe in the other dimension--in their waterworld home.

[morrison-maiden.livejournal.com]

I also hope he doesn't. Nessie would be a fascinating find, but if they did find evidence of his existence, they'd never just leave him be.