I dove the wreck of the SS Conch (1903) off the coast of Hikkaduwa. The Conch was an oil tanker that either sunk or was dynamited; either way, it's on the bottom now. Despite my general terror of the ocean, I swam inside the hull of this slain beast and suddenly felt a great sense of awe come over me. The Conch was huge and here its ribs towered over me, like a cathedral of modernity. But the only ministers were fishes and the only sermon was complete disinterest. As the poet said, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And so I did.

I am part of the same hypocrisy as the Conch, I am addicted to the same black drug, glugging out of tanks bigger and smaller. How much diesel did I burn to get to the wreck, and how much to run the compressor that filled my lungs? Seeing the wreck of the Conch was like seeing the wreck of the titanic industrial civilization I was still happily cruising in up above. Clinking ice in our drinks as we head for the iceberg. Flying business class into a cliff while the economy class burns. Seeing the wreck of the Conch and then swimming away was like attending my own funeral yet finding the coffin empty. A taste of the sublime, which is a cocktail of terror and getting away with it

Edmund Burke described the sublime as, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” That is, I suppose, what I was feeling. I am honestly terrified of the ocean and diving. During the refresher course I was overconfident and just three feet of ocean made me pay for it. We have to ‘lose’ the regulator (what you breathe through) as part of the retraining, and when I put it back, I forgot to exhale first. Instead, I inhaled a bunch of seawater and panicked. I stood up sputtering and scared. I really got the feeling that you cannot breathe down there, and that diving is just delayed drowning.

Wreck diving is just destiny deferred, it's a tour of the termination of all things. Every ship from the 1900s has sunk, fallen apart, or been consumed for parts already. The Conch is not unusual in that sense, it just got there first. When I nervously I cleared the wreckage and entered the hull, I could see it like a reflection. The ribs of the Leviathan stretched out before me, fish swimming around like they were feeding on a corpse. I had the thought that this is a temple to modernity and also where is your god now?

All the oil all the spoils, where did it go, where will it go for us all? All of our Gross Domestic Product is all garbage in the end, most consumer products within a year. All of the oil goes up in smoke, leaving just waste and waste heat as a legacy. We call them fossil fuels but we're all fossils in the long run. The term ‘fossil fuels’ describes a destination as well as a source.

I thought this as I dove past the oil drums, giant cylinders lying next to an equally giant propeller, now lying on the ocean floor. I thought it as I pushed off the iron hull, now rusting into the earth's crust. Industrial civilization is certainly very big and very impressive, but to whom? The fish don't give a fuck. My cat doesn't. Everything we consider so impressive is at best an obscure mating dance within a species, at worst a terror to all species (including us), and in most cases just ignored (by most specimens).

Diving a wreck is like walking through the ruins of ancient cities like Anuradhapura or Polonnaruwa. Signboard aside, none of the current inhabitants give a fuck. Those great cities are primarily occupied by monkeys now. And the great vessels are just giant fish toys. The meek have inherited the earth many times before, what makes us think modernity will be different? Pride, certainly, but you know where that goes. Today we just build cathedrals to goods, and call ourselves gods.

Walk around any modern city, which is just ancient city that doesn't know it. A giant mall/hotel towers above the Kaaba in Mecca, the poverty in Bodhgaya would still shock the Buddha into Buddhahood. If you walk into any major city and look up, you can see what people worship now. It's bank towers, it's corporations, it's money above all. And where does that lead? It's just a hallucination of value, and the sum of a billion illusions does not a reality make. Buddha knows we're still asleep, perchance to dream as the Bard said. And that dream is/was modernity.

You can see it, diving through the already ruined cathedrals of modernity, like all the shipwrecks dotted around the coast of Sri Lanka. Though the diesel/money pump can still fill our tanks for just a little longer, surviving, like diving, is just drowning slowly.

Like the Conch was either dynamited or just sunk, whether this industrial civilization dies of fossil fuels or runs out of them first is geologically immaterial. As Ozymandias said to a traveler from an antique land, gazing upon the visage of a wreck unplanned, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And as the poet Shelly said, despairing, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.”