INSANE STATEMENT!

This endless repititions of a non-singer is awesome?

It's tiring and horrible!

The (Less Than) Eternal Sea
The Poet’s Metaphor and the Styrofoaming of the Waters
By Lewis Lapham

Surely the sea was eternal, going on forever, its vast prodigious bulk 71% of the earth’s surface, not to be contained within the frame of history or chained to the oars of death and time. So it had been in the creation myths constructed in the languages of both art and science — the Sumerian goddess Nammu giving birth to heaven and earth, Homer’s “Ocean, who is the source of all,” Christendom emerging with Noah from the Flood, evolutionary theory evolving from the primordial, undifferentiated flux. So I thought it still was, T. S. Eliot’s “groundswell, that is and was from the beginning,” right there where it was supposed to be every summer, in sun or fog, 20 yards over the horizon of the beach club’s beach umbrellas.

Except it wasn’t, and it isn’t. The poetics stand corrected by the science. Contrary to the belief that man cannot mark the sea with ruin, it turns out that he has been doing so for the last two thousand years. If I had been slow to acknowledge the unwelcome fact, I was in distinguished company. Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s did not “associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.”...

We needn’t call upon an angry god to make the sea an object of no small terror. Every year we withdraw from it 160 million tons of fish, deposit in it 7 million tons of garbage. Poisonous chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico have formed a pool of dead water equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey; among the several hundred dead zones elsewhere in the world, one encircles the Chinese coastline.

If the sea levels continue to rise at their current rate, the day is not far off when Miami and Atlantic City become beds for oysters. The fishing in the sea that was once near the surface now is done by trawls the length of locomotives dropped to the depth of a mile and dragged across the bottom, reducing many thousands of square miles of the ocean floor to barren deserts no longer giving birth to the tiny organisms from which emerge the great chains of being that sustain the life of the planet.

Nothing in the sea lives by itself, nothing either on the earth or in the air or in the minds of men. To know the sea is mortal is to know that we are not apart from it. Man is nature creatively refashioning itself. The abyss is human, not divine, a work in progress, whether made with a poet’s metaphor or with a vast prodigious bulk of Styrofoam.
 

The original album version is much, much better.