On Sea Gulls, Turtles, and Dionysus

On Sea Gulls, Turtles, and Dionysus

In his book, The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner quotes Guy Murchie, who tells of watching sea gulls deliberately fly into the powerful air streams behind the propellers of the B-36s warming up for take off at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco. The gulls would disappear into the smoke and turbulence, being tossed and pummeled for several hundred yards until they reemerged into still air, and would then fly back to the B-36 to repeat the experience.

I saw turtles doing something similar. It was at an aquarium on the Yucatan coast, in a large shallow open pool, maybe two or three feet deep in the center. At one edge there was an underwater inlet pipe shooting water into the pool. The turtles would glide off of a rock right in front of the pipe, and the pressure of the hose would tumble them over and over for three or four feet. Then they would swim back around to the back of the line, awaiting their turn to do it again.

In Norman O. Brown’s system, we call that impulse “Dionysian.” And defy rationality.