Notes from the Mariana Trench
The artists are always the first to invade. They will come carrying suitcases filled with crumpled tubes and bits of clay, forced – by poverty, by a sense of necessity or self-sacrifice – farther and farther away from the heart of their own civilization. If a place is impossible to live, the artists will flock there. So none of us hatchetfish was surprised that the first humans to set up shop on our ocean floor were squatters with overalls and narrow beards, white kids with dreadlocks, and girls who wore skirts and pants at the same time.
The artists were a little self-righteous. None of them had ever used natural camoflage or bioluminescence to trap a meal. They wrote poems about everything. Their overt displays of humility barely masked their deeply-held sense of entitlement. But still, they seemed pretty harmless, and were content to make art on the bottom of the sea.
They were still artists though, and more than anything they craved external validation. So the hangers-on and well-wishers came, to tell the artists what a great job they were doing. They stayed close to the artists by building their shanty-towns on top of tubeworm beds. And they touched everything. They stepped on anemones, and even pried starfish from the rocks to examine their thousands of tiny feet.
The hatchetfish watched from darker waters, and we feared the worst.
Soon the more powerful humans came, because they didn't want to miss anything. They remodeled the shanty-towns and moved in, so the artists felt betrayed and disillusioned. They were hurt because the newcomers didn't respect their undersea sanctuary, and the artists moved miles away to escape the place that now represented their latest existential wounding.
So the hangers-on and well-wishers moved out to be near them, and they built new shanty-towns. Those who came next displaced everyone again, and the artists inched further into the seediest parts of the ocean.
Meanwhile, the sea serpents and mermaids and giant squid all crept into murkier depths to stay clear of the artists, never affording those wandering eyes more than a glimpse of their shimmering, monolothic bodies. As more and more humans took to the saltwater, all the fantastic beasts of the sea landed here in the Mariana Trench – the deepest, coldest, blackest hole in the ocean, because it was the only place left to go. But already we are not alone.
The artists trickled in slowly at first, acclimating themselves to the pressure, learning to ply their crafts by the occasional light of fishes with phosphorescent lures or other luminous qualities. But now they're coming by scores, pushing the indigenous population back into the dankest crannies of the earth. Oils and solvents leak from their cans as trembling spheres of poison, soaring constantly upward through our black waters like bullets, surrounding and suffocating us. Our remains drift down to the bottom to be buried in the muck, where the artists' drawing tablets have decomposed into thick grey clouds of pulp.
If legs and lungs could carry us out onto the land – to be free of these doodlers and their sycophants – we would leave and find a new home. But I fear that our path was set, the moment the first artists arrived. Every environment touched by an artist must inevitably be warped to satisfy their endless needs. Needs for food, shelter, approval, art supplies, and access to fringe political literature. I hardly recognize the Mariana Trench anymore.
Some of us have fled to shallower waters, and perished in the low pressure. Others are talking about following the mermaids and sea serpents into the hollow earth, which the artists have yet to discover. Sometimes, I think the zooplankton had the right idea all along; artists ruin everything, but they never just float in open water. Not the live ones, anyway.