A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

causing death. In “Brainfood,” for example, the young protagonist finds comfort and
confirmation in the ocean:
He had hated living on the other side of the island, but found that he loved living
on the windward side, because he had discovered the water, a lucky break caused
by an impulse buy of the fishing gear at a garage sale. He loved the water because
it held him inside himself. It was the one place where he felt an equilibrium, and
he wanted the same equilibrium on land too, but didn’t have it. It was as if the
dense medium of the ocean had proven to him that the thin medium of air was not
stable enough to allow him to feel in place, or simply situated comfortably. 595
In “Heart,” the ocean becomes a healing agent. The narrator is asked to help an old friend
who has turned fat, sick, and unhappy to go spear fishing one last time. Instead of dying
at sea from exhaustion or drowning as he had planned, he reemerges with renewed vigor.
With every trip into the water, the two men get fitter, happier, and more energetic. They
catch fish and eat it, and they enjoy the immense power of the ocean to rejuvenate and
reward. A different picture emerges from “The Rock,” which also features a spear fisher
who
churns along using more force than he needs to because he likes to resist the
gentle and powerful motions of the water, likes to challenge its vast, soft bulk.
There is something else – it is the quick and surrealistic, silent pastel brutality of
the ocean. Perpetually amazed by it, he regards himself as a humble alien in the
last real wilderness, moving in clumsy slow motion in an environment where
survival depends on absolute attention. 596
Looking for something beyond the idle shallowness that he makes his life out to be, he
heads far out, thinking: “It is not danger itself. It is something else. He has begun to think
of it as friction. Resistance. This is what he seeks in the surrealistic madness of the
ocean” (246). However, he is uneasily aware that his wanting to be a man on a quest
includes “a certain puerile and egotistical and boyish motivation” (249). Thus, he does
not learn anything from almost drowning in an underwater cave, and he will not learn
from the severe eel-bite he receives on his present trip. Having barely made it to shore
without the almost wished-for shark attack, he cherishes the blood emanating from his
595 MacMillan 1998: 38.
596 Ian MacMillan, “The Rock,” in Stanton 1997: 244-54, here 244.
236