The Domestication of Aquaman

A Guy Named Dan Who Owned Two Very Large Aquariums

If Aquaboy hadn't been netted at the tender age of eight by a rather large fishing vessel off the coast of southern California where he was swimming in excess of 100 miles an hour communicating telepathically with the sea's inhabitants, he wouldn’t have been adopted by an upper class, white family whose biggest public dilemma was their daughter's nose ring, which she refused to relinquish before Sunday service, and their son's misdemeanor charge for late night defecations into surrounding suburban backyard pools. That day, for whatever reason, Aquaboy's life was drastically redirected.  He would never adorn the green tights and orange top, be inducted by Superman into the prestigious circle called, "Superfriends" or battle his evil nemesis, the Black Manta. He would be stuffed into the grid of modern schooling, two years behind the twins Janet and Jerad, eventually graduating from college as a hypermasculine, rational thinking, homo economicus ready to contribute his mind/body to a progressive, industrial, anthropocentric, mechanistic world model.

Modern culture is sometimes called hypermasculine because traits considered masculine - expansive, aggressive, competitive, rational and analytical are valued more than those considered feminine - contractive, conservative, responsive, cooperative, intuitive and synthesizing.  Rational thinking involves pure reason based on factual knowledge gained from observation or experience.  It is knowledge void of emotion, sensation or social construction. The term homo economicus stems from the belief that humans are essentially economic beings whose attention centers on material substance, manufacture and accumulation.   Mind/body is a belief that divides mind and body where the body is reduced to a vehicle to transport the brain.  Industrialism is the faith in a predatory mode of production to bring abundance and contentment. Industrialism is often associated with progressivism, a belief that the human condition is progressing towards an increasingly optimal state as the past is continually improved upon. An individual is considered anthropocentric if they believe humans are the most significant entity of the universe. Anthropocentrism is a belief often used to achieve desired ends by avoiding value judgments.  Mechanistic world model is the perception of the universe as a machine made up of a multitude of separate objects where everything can be explained by breaking it down to its smallest unit of composition without considering the interaction of parts or the creative behavior of the system as a whole.

At the age of twenty-four, "Aquaboy" was now just, "Dan", a guy living in the city who owned two very large aquariums. This was a terrible scenario because Dan wasn't supposed to be Dan. Dan was supposed to be Aquaman. Dan had undergone domestication through an alternative belief system for the first eight years of his life. As Aquaboy, Dan had grown up in an indigenous, oceanic culture where he flourished within ideologies privileging phenomena and inter-relatedness. He was taught to recognize his consciousness while experiencing the world. He learned to participate in the now by living in a reality that engaged the senses prior to assigning them meaning and to think with his whole body, not just his mind.  Swimming through a cloud of whale urine, Aquaboy didn't grimace with disgust. He slowed, felt the immediacy of its warmth and recognized the water circulating through him as a life force that sustained all living creatures.  With a body more dense than that of a normal human, he lived an aquatic lifestyle. He was able to explore great depths at awesome pressure and extreme temperatures. His time was spent exploring, experiencing, investigating and learning.

As Aquaboy, life was learned through observation. An encounter with seahorses blurred Aquaboy's knowledge of gender and mating behaviors. When seahorses reproduce, the male becomes pregnant and carries the fertilized eggs in a brood pouch nourishing the young until they are born. Sea horses practice faithful monogamy, mating exclusively with the same partner during their lifetime. They perform greeting dances every morning to confirm their bond and are slow to find a new mate if their partner dies. When he encountered a sea cucumber and pearl fish, Aquaboy witnessed symbiosis, the mutually advantageous relationship between two organisms that live in close association. The pearl living in the anus of the sea cucumber is given protection from predators and ample nourishment. Completely hidden inside the anus, the fish feasts on the cucumber's internal organs, which the cucumber regenerates.  For the sea cucumber, the pearl fish's presence aids in keeping its body parasite free. The dolphin's remarkable ability to communicate with clicks and whistles made them a fun bunch to play with. Aquaboy realized that dolphins spend 30% of their day touching, caressing or mating. Skin, our external nervous system and largest sensory organ of the human body, is the earliest to develop in the human embryo. Overlooked by humans, the sensation of touch is alive and well within the dolphin pods.

Aquaboy experienced biodiversity, newness, the unexpected and unexplainable, complexity and commonality sensately and subjectively on a daily basis. In the deep, life was lived in slow motion with stretches of silence filling empty space. For Aquaboy, the world was not cause and effect, black or white, good or evil.  It was a pearl fish living in the ass of a sea cucumber.

Did Aquaboy retain any of his childhood perceptions or did his domestication into objectivism completely override his once heavily subjective and sensorial realm of understanding? How would Aquaboy as Dan react to the surface world's perceptions of being? Was he truly reprogrammed and ready for absorption into capitalist America or did childhood perceptions lie dormant in his psyche mutating as they waited for the right circumstances to resurface?

Since childhood, we have unconsciously surrendered to a belief system instilled in us by generations past. Miguel Ruiz calls the process of surrendering, "the domestication of humans".  Society domesticates us as we domesticate animals, using a system of punishments and rewards. Money, attention and acceptance are the rewards we are given for surrendering our beliefs to family, society and religion.  We start pretending to be what we aren’t just to please others and keep receiving these rewards.  In the domestication process, intrinsic human qualities are lost.  We sever feelings that contradict what society deems, "male", "female", "successful", "religious" or "productive".  No matter how strong the urge may be to act upon normal tendencies we are too afraid.  The judgments by those we are so intent on pleasing, keeps us from exploring and acting upon certain innate emotional desires.

At the age of twenty-four, "Aquaboy" was no longer.  He was now just, "Dan", a guy living in the city who owned two very large aquariums. Dan was well on his way to a power position in a well-recognized corporate conglomerate. He ate land animals and communicated via new technologies. He appreciated temperature-controlled environments, sports and enjoyed old school, “rap music”. He even had a friend with the same name, Dan. However, abnormalities in Dan began to reveal themselves. For instance, on the night of an office party, Love Shack by the B-52's was bumpin', and Dan was walking around the dance floor rotating his arms pretending to swim. Clicking and rubbing up against people, Dan found himself back in his dolphin pod.  It was funny at first, people thought it was some weird dance or something, but when the music stopped, he didn't. Finally, Dan's friend who happened to also be named Dan, grabbed him and pulled him off the dance floor. Dan headed straight for the corner where he stuck his head into the greenery of a large potted plant. For the rest of the party he stood there hunched over, occasionally making sharp head movements to inspect intricacies of organic pattern and filter its low level fragrance. Obviously, Dan's essence, his connection to the past, had not been thoroughly displaced by the surface world.  It was clear that there were issues Dan would have to work through, but in the hands of the right doctor and with the aid of the right medication, it was believed Dan would be able to completely assimilate and maintain his status as a productive member of society.  Dan could fit in.

As Aquaboy, Dan had encountered a wide range of behaviors and languages exhibited by a myriad of species in an ever-changing environment. The water carried the voices and held the gestures of all its inhabitants, whose songs and dances Aquaboy interpreted not by dictionary definitions, but by the sensual dimension of experience.  The tonality, resonance and rhythms of sound gestures from ocean creatures as well as the ocean itself, gave voice to an aquatic landscape that reverberated and infused these melodic messages to create a larger orchestration of felt significance and a complex story of commonality between all living things.

In the Spell of the Sensuous, author David Abram highlights Merleau-Ponty's view of human language, the gesture is spontaneous and immediate.  "It is not an arbitrary sign that we mentally attach a particular emotion or feeling to; rather, the gesture is the bodying forth of that emotion into the world, it is that feeling of delight or of anguish in its tangible, visible aspect.  When we encounter such a spontaneous gesture, we do not first see it as a blank behavior, which we then mentally associate with a particular content or significance: rather the bodily gesture speaks directly to our own body, and is thereby understood without any interior reflection.  Active, living speech is just a gesture, a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape and the rhythm of the words."

In the ocean, sound was accompanied by gesture. Floating underwater with limbs spread, extended and flailing, cheeks full blown, eyes crossed, head jerking, vocal chords reverberating, Aquaboy expelled intestinal gas and exhibited discomfort to other sea life. Today, Dan was an aggressive communicator. He had to be given space when he spoke. Every word had a bodily gesture accompanying it. At times it was frightening. When excited, his body entered a frenzied state, twisting, turning, crouching, rising, hunching and straightening, sometimes shaking as he described in sing-song voice the girl he'd met in the elevator or the new smells from the lobby flower shop. If possible, he preferred to talk seated on his hands in a stationary chair.

The notion of an underlying common language composed of sound patterns was first suggested by Merleau-Ponty and maybe best summarized by James M. Edie, "Merleau-Ponty's first point is that words, even when they finally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly phonemic, level of affective meaning which is not translatable into their conceptual definitions.  There is, he argues, an affective tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought, beneath the level of the words themselves... which is contained in the words just insofar as they are patterned sounds, as just the sounds which this particular historical language uniquely uses, and which are much more like a melody - a 'singing of the world'- than fully translatable, conceptual thought."

After the office party, Dan attended weekly sessions with the company therapist. The therapist was puzzled by Dan's strange behavior.  One thing was clear, Dan was engaged in a stimulus struggle, but was the level of environmental input too weak or too strong?  Was he deprived of change and newness? It didn't seem possible. He confronted varying facial expressions of clients and their songs of desired growth. He constantly traveled encountering new contours, colors schemes and textured fabrics of various hotel chains. Dan's work involved emerging technologies. He perpetually reeducated himself, updated software and read owners' manuals. He was connected, linked and empowered with high-speed access. With a push of a button or click of a mouse, Dan could refresh his context and manipulate his condition. It wasn't until Dan confessed a reoccurring event that Dan's therapist reached his diagnosis.

Desmond Morris coined the term stimulus struggle and explains it as such, "The object of the struggle is to obtain the optimum amount of stimulation from the environment.  This does not mean the maximum amount.  It is possible to be over-stimulated as well as under stimulated.  The optimum (or happy medium) lies somewhere between these two extremes.  It is like adjusting the volume of music coming from a radio: too low and it makes no impact, too high and it causes pain.  At some point between the two there is the ideal level, and it is obtaining this level in relation to our whole existence that is the goal of the Stimulus Struggle."

Dan had a secret routine he'd perform in the late of night. Slipping on a pair of women's green tights and orange turtleneck he'd make his way to the public pool. Climbing over the fence, he'd slide beneath the dense pool covers and into the pitch-black deep end. Here he'd stay submerged, in a fetal position, weightless, uninterrupted, blind, still, simple, filtering the water that sustained him as child. Forgetting his past and his expectations and desires for the future, he slowed. Listening to his body, Dan remained in the deep end desperately trying to reconnect to primitive sensations of the deep ocean. The repeated long, low waves of sonar he released into the pool bounced rhythmically off the cement walls only to return empty and less energized.  Forgetting time and place, he'd stay until the chlorine irritated his innards or the guilt of urination set in.

For the therapist, Dan's make-believe story of an underwater childhood and his reoccurring trip to the public pool was a classic case. Here was an individual who, overcome by stimuli and in a state of anxiety filled frustration retreats to a quiet, simple environment in an attempt to find a semi-conscious state that allows escape from the stress associated with an increasing bombardment of stimuli.  The therapist saw the pool as an oversized uterus that cradled Dan's desire for a fetal mind-set and a simple existence. Dan was diagnosed with acute anxiety and panic disorder arising from future shock.  Change in Dan's life had occurred at too great a rate, generating an insurmountable amount of stimuli leading to mental incapacity and a sense of shame for an inability to multi-task. The therapist saw Dan as one of those, "back to nature types." He prescribed medication, handed Dan a pamphlet on breathing techniques and recommended a popular campsite with electricity and running water about an hour drive from the city, depending on traffic.

Alvin Toffler termed the human response to over stimulation as future shock. "We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and it's decision-making process.... these symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy.  Its victims often manifest erratic swings in interest and life style, followed by an effort to "crawl into their shells" through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal.  They feel continually "bugged" or harassed, and want desperately to reduce the number of decisions they must make."

At the age of twenty-four, "Aquaboy" was no longer.  He was now just, "Dan", a guy living in the city who owned two very large aquariums. Dan's weekend getaway was anxiety-filled. On his doctor's advice, he left his cell phone, laptop and palm pilot at home.  He felt naked and powerless. The technological tools that played such an active role in his suffering were now thoroughly missed. At one time, nature had provided Dan with a connection to something greater than himself.  Now, with an inevitable return to his urban tribe, nature evoked fears of doing nothing and being no one. 

As he drove across the bridge that would lead him out of the human zoo and to the doctor's recommended campsite, Dan began trembling as symptoms of separation anxiety set in. The city, his domesticator and invisible nemesis called to him. The cultivating center of consumer needs filled Dan with increased purchasing power and artificial goods as he grew. At times the city overloaded him with stimuli, but it always kept him busy.  With the saying, "idle hands are the devil's hands", on repeat play, Dan questioned his decision for leaving his enclosure.

Desmond Morris suggests replacing the popular term concrete jungle with human zoo a term he describes in the following, "Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists,..commit murder.  Among city-dwellers, needless to say, all of these things occur.  Does this, then, reveal a basic difference between the human species and other animals? At first glance it seems to do so.  But this is deceptive.  Other animals do behave in these ways under certain circumstances, namely when they are confined in unnatural conditions of captivity.... Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. Wakefield Kennel defines separation anxiety in dogs, "A dog with separation anxiety is usually calm and well behaved around the person (or people) to whom they are most attached, but when left alone, the dog exhibits signs of anxiety such as: destruction (chewing, digging), socializing (urination, defecation), vocalization, (barking, whining).  A dog with this disorder may follow you from room to room, become visibly upset when you get ready to leave, and greet you over-enthusiastically when you return."

Pulling into the campsite, Dan turned off the engine and sat frozen in the driver's seat. Thoughts of doing nothing for two full days triggered perspiration. He had seen areas like the campsite before on television.  It looked just like the place in his favorite beer ad. All was quiet except for the call of a white-breasted nuthatch muted by the car window.  Dan began whining and felt a tightening in his chest. He dug his fingers into the steering wheel.  Everything outside the car seemed still. The void of commotion was haunting. The very thing that drove him out of the city was about to pull him back in.  If Dan could just turn off the car's temperature control and roll down the window, his repressed sensorial system would be powered back on. The natural habitat of the surface world waited to be explored, experienced, investigated and learned.  But, the lack of stimulus from inside the car proved to be too much and separation from the comforts of the city too horrific.  With a frown on his face, Dan looked down between his legs to the urine soaked seat. As the white-breasted nuthatch spread its wings to be carried by the wind from its branch, Dan demonstrated the effectiveness of power steering by quickly turning the car around and heading for home.

In the field guide, "Birds of North America", the White-Breasted Nuthatch is described as, "Common in deciduous woodlands. Except for the white throat, it resembles chickadee in plumage, though not in shape and actions. Note the white face and solid black cap of male (gray in female).  Call, a low yank-yank. Song, 5-15 low rapid notes, given 6-15/min. The encyclopedia Britannica defines power steering as, "a system to aid the steering of an automobile by use of a hydraulic device (driven from the engine) that amplifies the turning moment, or torque, applied to the steering wheel by the driver.  To make steering easy for the driver without using high steering ratios, power steering devices were introduced in the early 1930's. Most modern power steering systems consist of hydraulic boosts applied to either the steering linkage or the steering gear.  Rotation of the steering wheel activates a valve that directs oil, pressurized by a pump driven by the engine, to act on a piston.  The hydraulic boost acts only while the steering wheel is moving."

The weekend ended. The workweek began. Dan was back to his routine. He took steps to create a less stressful environment. He reorganized, refreshed, readjusted and rejuvenated, but no matter how much time, energy and money was put into creating a more hospitable setting, his expanding nemesis left him increasingly confined in the artificial and trivial. The growing barriers of the city were the barriers to self-discovery that laid in the organic, sensate stimuli from which he evolved. Only in returning to the wild would he be able to look through and beyond nature to discover his location and role in a symbiotic relationship with the surface culture he had assimilated. For the time being, Dan was a pearl fish living in the ass of a high rise.

As a result of his dislocation, episodes continued. Dan could be spotted pressing his bare chest against the office window during direct hours of sunlight. He would suddenly disconnect at the sound of the bubbling water cooler. He often burst with spontaneous sounds and gestures. During a company's charity fundraiser at the public golf course, Dan sneaked away to spend the day in the pond of the 9th green. As the symptoms kept surfacing, Dan became more accustomed to his impulses. His two large aquariums provided water for soaking rituals in which he aggressively rubbed fish food on his legs, buried his feet beneath the bottom gravel and allowed the aquarium life to feed. Dan unconsciously scheduled other needs into his daily routines. He paid more attention to his behaviors and self-diagnosed himself as suffering from three of the more common cultural syndromes of road rage, carpal tunnel and seasonal affective disorder. It became increasingly clear that his previous years of water living had decreased his ability to adapt to his urban habitat. The cultural syndromes he was experiencing were much more severe than those of the surface dwellers, who had spent their entire lives adjusting to their fabricated environment. The absence of nature had developed certain beliefs on land that contradicted everything Dan had learned as Aquaboy.

In a pilot study conducted for the AAA Foundation, conducted by Daniel B. Rathbone, Ph.D. and Jorg C. Huckbee, MSCE, road rage is defined as, "an incident in which an angry or impatient motorist or passenger intentionally injures or kills another motorist, passenger or pedestrian." Yahoo Health defines carpal tunnel syndrome as, "a condition that results from compression of the median nerve at the wrist." The National Mental Health Association diagnoses people suffering from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) as, "having symptoms of depression during the winter months, with symptoms subsiding spring the spring and summer months.  SAD is a mood disorder associated with depression episodes and related to seasonal variations of light."

Deep down, Dan knew he didn't belong. The first eight years of his life had opened the door to sensual perceptions that were overlooked in the surface environment. Dan's ocean life was void of technology. On land, technology blossomed and change was set to fast forward. Dan saw surface dwellers in a transitional state. They resided somewhere between the purity of earth and purity of the artificial; unconsciously longing for the habitat they evolved from, but letting their egos drive them toward completely man-made surroundings. Dan rejoiced in the surface world's progressive attitude. The struggle towards greater awareness could only be achieved by realizing certain limitations. The 15-20 billion years of universal evolution was leading to a rather significant dead end for the surface dwellers, but it was the surface world's evolutionary track and not his own.

The following month Dan had another opportunity to abandon the torment of the city and reunite with nature where he truly belonged. On one of the first well-weathered Fridays of the summer, several people in his department decided to leave work early for a game of beach volleyball. Claiming he had forgotten how to swim, Dan told his co-workers he could not go near the water. Dragging Dan from the office, they squeezed into a car and made the hour's drive to the shore. Once again, Dan experienced emotions he'd repressed from childhood. They had left the city's rigid uniform structure. The synthetic sounds and textures vanished as the car motored parallel to his former ocean home. With his hands and face pressed against the glass, Dan sat silently fogging up the back window. The automobile stopped. The engine turned off. The car doors opened. Passengers exited, but Dan remained paralyzed against the glass with a fixed gaze toward the pounding surf. Entering the backseat, Dan, Dan's friend took on the role of obstetrician. Placing a hand on Dan's shoulder and arm, he gently tugged  and encouraged his friend to enter the biosphere. After a few seconds Dan began to respond to his guidance and slowly positioned his head towards the open door. A sudden sea breeze into the car sparked a final contraction and sent Dan stumbling from the backseat into the surrounding bio diversity. The four door Volkswagen had just given birth to Aquaman. Dan's first breath shot his eyes wide open and ignited a sensorial fire storm. He sounded low whale moans as a sprint to the beach ensued.

Sliding onto the beach, Dan rubbed the varied textures of sand onto his face. Sobbing, he grabbed a fist full of earth. Rising, sand trickled between his fingers and into his pants as he massaged the tiny grains against his flabby, sun-deprived chest. Between the tears and laughter, he pissed his pants as he responded to the seagulls and absorbed the sound of crashing waves. With his lightly starched button down now a white cap flapping behind him, he sprang into the ocean, releasing his bowels and purging himself of processed foods.  Saltwater never tasted so good.

Written by T. Becker, 2001 as a MFA graduate at CCA after having left four years of cubicle work at a law firm in San Francisco, CA.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alsop, Iii, Birds of North America: Western Region. London: Dorling Kindersley Ltd, 2001.

Abram, David. The Spell of The Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Morris, Desmond. The Human Zoo. New York: Delta Boook, 1969.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Ruiz, Don Miguel. The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997.

Spretnak, Charlene. The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place In A Hypermodern World. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1970.