There are many stories about seaweeds fooling taxonomists. Since seaweeds are so plastic in form—able to vary their morphology according to the qualities of the ocean environment they have anchored to—it can sometimes be hard to tell whom is whom. Of these, perhaps the easiest seaweed to identify is giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), whose scientific name attest to its poetics of form, a large-bladdered seaweed (Macrocystis) spiraling up to the surface of the ocean like a plume of flame (pyrifera). This naming offers a striking thermal contrast between the evocation of fire and the cold waters where giant kelp grows best. What makes it uniquely distinctive are not only its large bladders, but also it the ruffled surface of its blades (the leaf-like part of the kelp, which is technically an algae, not a plant). Even though giant kelp can stretch its blades, or balloon its bladders to huge round orbs as I have seen underwater at Anacapa Island, these ruffles give it away—an adaptation that may help them spread out and flap in the water, increasing nutrient uptake and catching more sunlight.

As part of an interview in the cookbook Ocean Greens (2016), seaweed curator and taxonomist Kathy-Ann Miller encourages you to “think like a weed.” Even if you already know the species, it is helpful to imagine the environment of a specimen, including what kind of oceanic conditions may have influenced its morphology. This task of speculating what it is like to be giant kelp may benefit from a narrative form, like the second person voice. You might recall that the second person voice is one of the rarer narrative tenses, and used most frequently in cookbooks and how-to manuals (first you add a dash of salt… then you chill the soup…). While there are notable exceptions in fiction, such as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) and N.K. Jemisin’s stunning short story “Emergency Skin” (2019), it is more rarely found there. The second person voice is slippery—not unlike the feeling of running your hands over the surface of a giant kelp blade—because the pronoun “you” famously breaks the fourth wall. It might mean you the reader, or a hypothetical you, or a you (singular or plural?) directed to a character in the text. You float(s) between these possibilities.

Perhaps the first thing you experience is a self-awareness of your own posture. The sunlight is tasty. You pull yourself up towards the sun, your stipes twisted into a rope that is strong but flexible. As a vertebrate you find it easy to empathize with this vertical position and straighten your spine, perhaps a bit stiff from sitting. Your holdfast has gripped and grown around a rock anchor. It is a mesh that looks like roots, except that the division of labor that manifests in terrestrial plants (leaves photosynthesize, roots absorb nutrients from the soil) does not apply here. As a macroalgae, you absorb nutrients throughout your whole body. The whole ocean is your soil, and your holdfast “roots” are just the glue. Tiny nudibranchs like the purple and orange Spanish Shawl love to hang out here, like toe rings adorning your feet. Your many bladders also pull you towards the sun, little air-filled sacs that lift the column of your body. Unlike fish—who love the horizontal position—everything about you stretches up. Of course, you are also pulled back and forth by the lunar tides. Do you sway, or have sway? Round snails crawl up your column, taking up residence on your stipe (stem) as if they were extra bladders. You are a multi-story apartment complex, home to a variety of tenants that stick and glue and graft to your blades. No matter—you have plenty of space, you make space, you unfold and unfurl at each geometric growing tip—a beautiful calculus that sometimes makes it to the cover of mathematics textbooks.

Perhaps you made a bad choice of rock. Perhaps you selected too small a holdfast—or one day, the force of the tides caught you, and as you pulled, your rock fragment dislodged from the whole. If you hadn’t been tangled up with several neighbors into an accidental braid, you may have started the end of your life, that slow drift towards the shore. But now, here you are, balanced in perfectly neutral buoyancy, your body lifting up and a cluster of small rocks barely weighing you down. As a scuba diver approaches you with a fish-eye lens, she is surprised to encounter a science fictional scene: a cluster of rocks floating in front of her, as if escaped from gravity, as the plumes of your body spiral upwards.

In Japan, ukiyo-e means “the floating world,” a genre of woodblock art prints that portrayed many scenes of life, from history to landscapes, theater, and erotica in the 17th through 19th centuries. Hokusai’s famous “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” exemplifies this sense of suspension: a wave frozen at the moment of its break, just before it will bring foamy fingers crashing down on a slim boat. “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” anticipates what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson would later call the decisive moment, the perfectly timed click of a camera shutter that captures something on the cusp of change: for example, a man leaping over a puddle, momentarily hanging in the air, the water perfectly mirroring his shadow. Hokusai’s wave and Cartier-Bresson’s man are both about to fall—a decisive moment that is closely tied to the experience of gravity, just before it pulls the subject down.

You too are in a moment of balance, but you are not about to fall. Unless you braid yourself into another bundle of giant kelp nearby, more properly anchored, you are getting ready to rise—your body a shaggy yellow carpet caught in the current, inexorably pulled to shore. As you grow your newest bladders, you inch ever closer to being carried up and away, tiny balloons lifting you into an atmosphere of ocean.

But not yet, not yet. For now, you are still part of the floating world.

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Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke 2020) and co-editor (with Rafico Ruiz) of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke 2021). Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, Configurations, Media+Environment, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Resilience.

All images courtesy of Melody Jue 2021