“It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.”

John Locke

“The first excrescence did not pop. It was already some two foot six in diameter and still swelling fast.
“It must pop soon,” she muttered.
But still it did not. It kept on expanding until it must have been all of five feet in diameter. Then it stopped growing. It looked like a huge, repulsive bladder. A tremor and a shake passed through it. It shuddered jellywise, became detached, and wobbled into the air with the uncertainty of an overblown bubble.
In a lurching, amoebic way it ascended for ten feet or so. There it vacillated, steadying into a more stable sphere. Then, suddenly, something happened to it. It did not explode. Nor was there any sound. Rather, it seemed to slit open, as if it had been burst into instantaneous bloom by a vast number of white cilia which rayed out in all directions.”

John Wyndham ‘The Kraken Wakes’ 1953

“These nymphs, I would perpetuate them.
                                                                                So bright
Their crimson flesh that hovers there, light
In the air drowsy with dense slumbers.
                                                                           Did I love a dream?
My doubt, mass of ancient night, ends extreme
In many a subtle branch, that remaining the true
Woods themselves, proves, alas, that I too
Offered myself, alone, as triumph, the false ideal of roses.

Let’s see…”

Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘L’Apres-midi d’un Faune’ 1876
Translated by A. S. Kline

“Slowly, shakily, with unnatural and inhuman movements a human form, scarlet in the firelight, crawled out on to the floor of the cave. It was the Un-man, of course: dragging its broken leg and with its lower jaw sagging open like that of a corpse, it raised itself to a standing position. And then, close behind it, something else came up out of the hole. First came what looked like branches of trees, and then seven or eight spots of light, irregularly grouped like a constellation. Then a tubular mass which reflected the red glow as if it were polished. His heart gave a great leap as the branches suddenly resolved themselves into long wiry feelers and the dotted lights became the many eyes of a shell-helmeted head and the mass that followed it was revealed as a large roughly cylindrical body. Horrible things followed-angular, many jointed legs, and presently, when he thought the whole body was in sight, a second body came following it and after that a third. The thing was in three parts, united only by a kind of wasp’s waist structure- three parts that did not seem to be truly aligned and made it look as if it had been trodden on”.

Voyage to Venus (Perelandra) C. S. Lewis 1943

Not long after I started this project I came across this scene in one of the closed-up units opposite Brighton pier. The building that houses it is entirely glass-walled, somewhat reminiscent of a fish tank. I photographed it at the time and included it in my contact sheet for that day*.

A year later I’m looking at it again. Originally there were 5 chairs, now there is only one, but the newspaper hasn’t moved a millimetre. It still lies there, considerably more yellowed, and over time has become moulded to the round surface of the table; a fossilised exhibit in a fly-specked museum vitrine.

–

* ‘The Dark Side – Mon 16th Feb’ (2015)

And then there are other more commonplace ends of the world. Shorelines and on the edges of deserts of course, but also industrial estates on the peripheries of towns, the corners of warehouses, inside wardrobes in children’s rooms, beyond stage doors, behind curtains, and nestling by the lowest rungs of fire escapes. And in all these places things accumulate; not exactly rubbish but almost always without purpose, waiting for someone to remember what they were for.

Today, while prodding through the seaweed at the high-water mark in search of interesting things, I came across a small pile of perfectly preserved seashells. I was surprised to see such a hoard, given the slim chances of anything emerging unscathed from the pummelling of the recent storms. And my surprise grew when, on a closer inspection of the shells, I found that all of them seemed to come from the Philippine and East China seas. Clearly, one of the local mermaids has just returned from her holidays.