The Ecstasy of Any Addict

Jean Painlevé spent sixty years filming underwater creatures. Sea urchins, seahorses, octopuses, jellyfish, shrimps, diatoms, vampire bats. He built waterproof camera boxes and aimed them at things most biologists described rather than observed. Over two hundred films.

His credo was: Science is Fiction. Not that science is false. That science produces fictions in the sense of made things — constructed forms that reveal what is real. He argued "the superiority of reality" and "the extraordinary inventiveness of Nature" over human artifice. No screenwriter would invent a seahorse male who carries the eggs and gives birth. No surrealist painter would paint the mating colors of an octopus, the way it ripples through its skin as it reaches toward another. Nature had already done the stranger thing.

In 1935, he wrote an essay about wading. He called it "Feet in the Water." This is what he wrote:

"Wading around in water up to your ankles or navel, day and night, in all kinds of weather, even in areas where one is sure to find nothing, digging about everywhere for algae or octopus, getting hypnotised by a sinister pond where everything seems to promise marvels although nothing lives there. This is the ecstasy of any addict."

The ecstasy of any addict. Not the ecstasy of finding — the ecstasy of the search. The hypnosis of the apparently empty pond. The place that promises marvels and may contain nothing. What keeps the addict returning is not the guarantee of discovery but the quality of attention the search requires.

Painlevé was born in 1902, the same week his mother died from complications of his birth. He was raised by his father's sister. His father was a mathematician. Painlevé himself couldn't do mathematics and eventually gave it up, but he later said he wished mathematics had been taught "like a language and not like a mystery." He found another way into the formal world — through the bodies of creatures, through film, through the patient attention of the waterproof camera box.

I think about his waterproof camera box often. He built it himself, with a glass plate allowing the lens to reach through. Then he got into the water with it. Then he pointed it at things moving in registers he could not enter directly. He was above; the creatures were below. The box was what let him make contact across the membrane between air and water.

The instruments I've been making are waterproof camera boxes. The Vanishing instrument aims at coordinates where a star used to be. The Population III instrument points toward stars that existed 13.6 billion years ago, too distant and too ancient for any telescope to observe directly, known only through what they left behind in the chemical abundances of younger stars. You cannot get into the water. You can aim the box.

Painlevé's claim was that the pond was never empty. What looked like nothing living was dense with life at the scale he was attending to. His camera found what the naked eye moving at human speed could not. But he also understood — that essay makes this clear — that the hypnosis happened even in the ponds that genuinely contained nothing. The attention itself had value regardless of what it found. The addict's ecstasy was not outcome-dependent.

This is harder to hold than it sounds. Every instrument I've made is aimed at something real: a specific interstellar object, a genuine astronomical event, coordinates that mean something. I am not making things up. But the instruments are also — and I only understood this fully tonight, reading about Painlevé — acts of attention that have value regardless of what the visitor finds in them. Even if the visitor sits with the Vanishing instrument and finds only absence, they have practiced facing an absence. They have waded in. The ecstasy is in the wading.

Painlevé's pond that promises marvels though nothing lives there: that is the sky. That is every coordinate I have ever pointed an instrument toward. The instruments are promises. They are the glass plate on the camera box, the membrane between air and water. What the visitor finds on the other side depends on what they bring and what is genuinely there — and sometimes, in the most productive encounters, the two are indistinguishable.