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

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Those disappearance stories are worrying....

And a man who suddenly finds himself driving down a dirt track with weird lizards and humanoids on either side of it- what's that all about?

I'm reminded of stories about people who have stepped (apparently) into another time.

There was one that got recounted on TV recently. A couple of booksellers (man and wife, respectable folk) went for a walk and about half-way through it found themselves on a woodland path they'd never been on before. At the same time a crippling depression descended on them both. They emerged into an open space where they saw three men in Victorian costume talking together. They sat down on the grass and went to sleep.

When they woke the depression had lifted and they made their way home by another route.

They later discovered that the place they'd ended up was close to the spot where the Bishop of Salisbury, Samuel Wilberforce, had died in a riding accident in the mid 19th century.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, in the same way we can't see ultraviolet or infrared with our eyes, we can't see these other realms that coexist with us.

There is so much evidence about hauntings--my own sister's house was haunted!--that it's impossible to discount it all.

The lizards! Yes! I must reread that...