It was 1958 and things were rapidly changing around us. Just the previous year, our arch enemies in the Cold War cast the first artificial, metal moon into a perpetual loop around our planet. Synthetic psychotropic chemicals were about to be unleashed into our collective psyches. And, soon, a profound sexual revolution would shake millennia of accepted and foundational human relationships.
The boy reached deep into the pocket of his red wool jacket and slowly, carefully, pulled out the mystery. He lifted it proudly before my eyes, as though he brought forth a rare treasure from the ancient secrecy of King Tutankhamen's tomb. He held it aloft between his thumb and first finger for several seconds, savoring the drama of the slowly unfolding revelation. In a single, smooth motion he transferred the object to the open palm of his other hand and slightly extended it toward me. Something told me he wasn't giving it to me, but inviting me to take a closer look. Swept into the drama myself, my eyes were fixed on the small object in his palm.
To a superficial view, it appeared nothing more than a common matchbox– a small, pocket-sized container of dark blue cardboard, its top displaying the familiar "Ohio Blue Tip" logo. This matchbox, while intrinsically cool, was obviously not the treasure itself, but merely the container– a prelude to the great secret within. Had this boy stolen this little box of matches from his parents' kitchen? Such a coup of purloined pyrotechnic power whetted the nascent masculine longings within me. Testosterone always engenders a primal affinity for firearms, fireworks, and everything associated with the raw power of fire– even at the tender age of eight.
Though I had been severely cautioned to "Never play with matches!" by parents, teachers, and Smokey The Bear himself, I could not contain the excitement brewing within. I barely breathed as I waited to see the motherlode of matches within.
After several more silent seconds, he glanced around the bus, half-full of kids, to make certain that no one was watching us. Finally, he began sliding open the little cardboard drawer from its box. With the opening to the drawer growing, I quickly discerned there were no matches within, and I felt disappointment rising inside– even embarrassment, that he had tricked me. But as it continued opening I saw inside the small box an even smaller, and entirely unexpected object. My pupils dilated to fully absorb the view of a tiny seahorse.
This was not a paper cutout of a seahorse, or even a realistic plastic model. Only an inch and a quarter long, it possessed all the exquisite detail that set it apart as the body of a real seahorse.
A seahorse, to all children, and to most adults as well, enrobes itself in fascination. Though an inhabitant of the sea and bearing a few fins, it hardly seems a fish. The long snout, reflexed neck and stout chest do, indeed, imbue this animal with the likeness of a horse. And in some strange way this fish seems to be wearing its skeleton on the outside– bony plates, rather than slippery skin and scales, encase it. This is truly an exotic and improbable animal– with a nearly mythological design.
Not only the physical appearance and structure astound. The animal's activity, behavior and society seem fiction. While nearly all other fish prefer to orient themselves horizontally in the water, the seahorse holds itself proudly in a vertical posture. The two eyes, like those of a chameleon, move independently, as if they possessed minds of their own. And, almost unique among the countless animal species on earth, only the masculine sex possesses the capacity for pregnancy. The female deposits her dozens to thousands of eggs into her mate's abdomen, where they implant into his tissues, nourished placenta-like from his circulating blood. The embryos develop and mature into nearly microscopic, but recognizable, baby seahorses, ready to be birthed into the dangers of life.
But the remarkable use of the seahorse's tail has always held hostage my attention. The broad-finned tails of normal fishes universally define their means of locomotion– propelling them efficiently through their fluid world. Yet the seahorse, to round out its resume of the absurd, possesses a tail much like that of a monkey, or opossum. Utterly without a terminating fin, the skewer of a tail tapers nearly to a point, and is composed internally by numerous flexible joints and dextrous muscles. The seahorse tail is entirely prehensile, and able to curl and latch onto whatever perch is near. Its sublime design is the envy of modern engineering.
Viewing this seahorse body up close, my mouth fell open and I quietly sucked in a breath. Once before, on a summer trip, I had seen a little dried, preserved seahorse like this– for sale at a souvenir shop. I remember thinking "this is the coolest thing I have ever seen," but knowing it was a frivolous luxury not available to me. And now, I actually knew someone who owned one.
The boy's own excitement finally overcame his stealth. He stuck his pudgy little thumb and forefinger into the box, grasped the prize with a pincer-grip and held it aloft for me to see. "I'm taking it home!" he announced triumphantly. As he held it mere inches from my eyes, I could see it in all its marvelous detail and glory. As breathtaking as this sight was, it could not have prepared me for what followed.
With my eyes locked onto the tiny remarkable form, and the boy's grinning face as the background, the tail of the seahorse very deliberately coiled, and then uncoiled. I could not breathe, and I felt that my heart seized momentarily in my chest. The tail tightly coiled and then uncoiled again, as if searching for some familiar perch or some safe place to hang onto. Far from being the dry, hardened and shellacked body of some long-dead seahorse bought at a novelty shop, this was a still living animal, clinging to what remained of its rapidly fading life.
The boy finally realized the public stir caused by his exuberance and he quickly thrust the poor animal into the dry and lint-filled secrecy of his jacket pocket. The matchbox and its little drawer clattered to the dirty floor of the bus.
The bus lurched to a stop in front of the boy's house. He jumped from his seat next to the window, hurriedly squeezed by me, and nearly ran to the front of the bus. He hopped down the steps of the bus, sprinted across the front yard, and disappeared through the front door of his house before the bus driver let out the clutch.
Thoughts, questions and emotions shot at me from all sides. What a rare and exotic possession– not only a seahorse, but a living one! Where had it come from, and why did he hide it?– He must have taken it from his classroom's aquarium. But why did he keep it in a matchbox– out of water?
My family had kept aquariums for years, so I knew well the critical importance of not only keeping the fish in water, but also keeping the water carefully regulated as to temperature and purity. Why doesn't he know these things? Doesn't he know that even a few minutes out of water will probably be fatal for such a delicate creature?– let alone the half-hour or more that it must already have suffered, away from its watery home. Will he even think enough to put the unfortunate animal into a glass of cold, chlorinated tap-water?– not that it will help much. Why didn't he just leave it where it belonged?– where it was meant to be?
Though I saw the seahorse for mere seconds, I mourned for the tiny creature. Confusion, anger, and sadness simultaneously battered my heart. Nearly sixty years later I remain haunted by the image– this desperate struggle for life by such a delicate treasure.
In the span of my own life, the exotic, priceless treasure of human sexuality has been ripped from its native environment, wherein it was created to thrive, and forced into a dry, alien ecology. The much praised sexual revolution promised to liberate human sexuality from the restrictions of traditional marriage, that has defined it for millennia. In fact, the revolution tore sexuality from the only context that gave it depth, richness, and life. Just as surely as the third-grade boy killed the seahorse in his zeal, we are killing the incredible gift and wonder that is sexuality.
My companion on the bus that day so desired to possess the object of his fascination, that he decided to free it from the confines of its home. He admired it to death. Though the seahorse had been designed and created to live in water of a certain temperature and salinity, and to gain nourishment from specific types of food, he felt that was too restrictive. Why should he be denied the pleasure of having such an amazing and wonderful toy, just because he lacked an aquarium with the proper environment? How narrow-minded!
And for much of a century now, we have subscribed to a similar myth, but to infinitely greater effect. In our headlong rush to loose ourselves from the encumbrance of tradition and biblical imperative, we now hold sexuality in our cultural pocket, where it gasps for the oxygenated waters and safety of its proper home– the life-length love and bond between one woman and one man. The glass walls of marriage not only hold in the life-giving waters of true intimacy, but they hold out predators, and the grubby hands of the overly curious.
On every side we are surrounded by more than ample evidence for the folly of rejecting the true home of sexuality– sexually transmitted disease, acceptability of adultery and divorce, fatherless children, routine abortion, gender confusion, and the stripping of innocence of children. Isn't this telling us something? And yet, our love affair with the sexual revolution rolls on. We refuse to believe the chaos rising around us and we continue to insist that total fidelity in traditional marriage is only one of countless venues where sexuality can be appropriately played out.
I attended college in the heady formative years of the sexual revolution and a brief, second-hand story stands out. A friend of ours managed to wangle a trip to Europe over the summer. He planned to hitchhike across the length and breadth of France, experiencing the culture while honing his French language skills. Just as some of us returned to school in the fall, one of his letters finally caught up to us from the summer.
His letter detailed much of where he traveled, what he ate, and who he met. On one occasion a truck driver picked him up as he thumbed his way through Bordeaux. He rode the bumpy old truck for a couple of hours, while the burly driver regaled him with stories of his highly diverse sexual appetites. Our friend, though certainly no prude, was disturbed by many of the stories, but most of all, when the man said of all the sex he'd had– "...with a chicken is undoubtedly the best."
Our friend immediately expressed doubt to the truck driver about the possibility of the story, and tried to laugh it off as an obvious joke. The dead-serious driver responded with a hushed and awestruck– "Il est magnifique!"
Sexual degradation is not unique to the culture of our time. Millennia have recorded the ubiquitous nature of this human stain. Our current dalliance with such freedom is only the most recent. Perhaps our most noteworthy contribution is our unabashed promotion and embrace of such counterfeit liberty, and our rejection of the authentic.
In the perfect innocence of the garden, God gave man and woman each other. Joyfully naked, and without shame, they fully enjoyed each other as they drank deeply of unhindered sexual union. They swam freely and intimately through life together, just as wild seahorses gallop freely through the seas of their birth.
But now, since the fall and after the entrance of sin into humankind, things are far different. Depravity, oppression, and affliction are not strangers to us in this present age, and they threaten to devour the beauty and intimacy of these most precious human relationships. Yet God continues to give us His grace in the "bonds of holy matrimony." Marriage is now His aquarium for us– a place of sexual sanctity for a humanity banished from its "ocean" paradise.
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>>> Unless otherwise attributed, all text and images are Copyright, Bill Brockmeier, 2015. All rights reserved.
Note: the particular image above is displayed under Fair Use Doctrine for illustrative purposes only
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