Make our ids shudder and swoon

Mark Morford (photo at SFGate)

A friend just pointed me toward one of the most delicious pieces of prose I have read in a while.

Mark Morford, who writes for SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle and related appendages), writes eloquently of giant squids and what they might represent for us all. I trust that three paragraphs falls within "fair use" parameters.

The giant deep-sea squid is, quite simply, the perfect thing. Unlike UFOs, unlike lizard beings from the fifth dimension, unlike the GOP's heart, we actually we know for certain that it exists, that it has officially moved from the realm of fantasy and ancient mythology into the arena of (potentially) knowable entity, something that actually shares this planet with us and, relatively speaking, isn't all that far away.

And yet, we know next to nothing about these creatures. They live and breed and roam in absolute blackness, in the coldest depths of the ocean, display incredible battle scars and unusual chemical makeup and seem to ooze a sort of delicious nightmarish intelligence, yet we have no real idea just what the hell they do all day and night, way down there. Their world is, in short, so wildly, diametrically opposed to our bright, warmth-craving, sunlit, calamari-loving world, it can only make our ids shudder and swoon.

True, you could say a similar sort of magic exists around other earthly phenomena, like the mysteries of the human mind, of dreams, whale song, dark matter and water crystal formation and, well, love. In fact, you could say that if you care to make even the slightest attempt to tune into it, you'd know we are awash in mystery, drenched to the very core -- we've just forgotten how to let the id roam that particular playground like delirious children stoned on sugar and dragons and stardust.

Go to the original ("Please Never Find A Giant Squid") and read it all. You'll be glad you did.
--the BB