Sim, sim, ir do sustento

Jul 02, 2008 - 09:11 AM PST

The stars communicate with the sealife drifting in the open ocean. In the muffled layers, the rippling light from above mutates into information the slugs understand. Telling them where to find food, where to mate, when to molt, how to bud and sprout, and when to gather and rise up out of the sea as a thick gelatinous mass the size of a burly human arm.

Old sailors have seen the gelatinous sea arm on a moonless night. They fancied it a long-watch hallucination or perhaps some open ocean Lady of the Lake or some Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin hand drawing them ever onward -- guiding them or steering them off course, who could say?

It just so happens the discovery of America happened because of these slug slimearms. Columbus used to sit in his palatial cabin at the back of the Santa Maria and periodically look out the window at the ship's swirling wake, and often he would see the miniature ocean arms forming into hands which made strange signals back to the stars and which seemed to be waving him on, like, "Sim, sim, ir do sustento." ["Yes, yes, keep going."]