On the question, the song, the sea, and the two things whose source nobody can find
Aristotle thought eels came from mud. Pliny the Elder believed they rubbed against rocks and the scrapings came alive. For two thousand four hundred years, across every advance in optics, anatomy, marine biology, and satellite telemetry, nobody has witnessed a European eel reproduce. Nobody has found a fertilized egg in open water. Nobody has caught a sexually mature adult in the Atlantic Ocean. The entire reproductive cycle of one of the most common fish in European rivers is inferred from the size gradient of transparent larvae drifting on ocean currents. Twenty-four centuries and counting.
In 1876, a nineteen-year-old Sigmund Freud — before Vienna, before the unconscious, before the couch — spent a miserable summer in Trieste slicing open four hundred eels looking for testicles. He found nothing. That was his first published paper. The man who would build an entire theory of civilization on repressed sexuality began his career failing to find genitals on a fish.
These anguillae and their procreation
Have been the source of such frustration
Cause until Sigmund Freud did a mass-dissection
Their family jewels had escaped detection
A Danish oceanographer named Johannes Schmidt spent nineteen years — 1904 to 1923 — sailing the Atlantic catching progressively smaller eel larvae, triangulating backward by the principle that wherever the larvae are smallest, the spawning ground must be nearby. Nineteenth-century data science. Obsessive, elegant, and still basically all we have. He narrowed it to the Sargasso Sea. Nobody has improved on his answer.
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Rappers like Eminem and Nas dissect words and obsess about rhymes to the point of sleepless insanity. Tim Blais, multiplying himself into a twenty-five-part school of a cappella voices, mates Sabrina Carpenter's flirtatious me espresso with the Bermuda Triangle's vexatious sea Sargasso, and the offspring is a masterpiece of scientific parody that's also a testament to unrequited, fruitless curiosity, and a paean to eels.
He took every word out of Carpenter's song and replaced it while keeping every syllable. Twenty vocal parts, all him, alone in a room, layered into a grid where you can see all twenty versions of his face singing different lines about eel reproduction. The care is staggering — months of research, precise scansion, every substitution load-bearing.
I can't relate to desperation
becomes
These anguillae and their procreation
Same meter. Same stress pattern. Same feminine ending. But now the indifference belongs to the eels. The eels can't relate to desperation either. They just swim four thousand kilometers and die. Carpenter's song is about the power of not caring. Blais's version is about the powerlessness of caring too much. Schmidt spent nineteen years on a boat. Freud cut open four hundred eels. The eel never once looked back.
He uses the word telemetry. Four syllables, landing perfectly in the bridge, doing the work of an entire research paper in a single bar. He uses vitellogenesis. He rhymes "erythrocytes up in their gills" with "scared to hatch eels." He finds "pregnant fatso" for the final triumphant image. The melody teaches you the science the way Carpenter's melody teaches you the verb "to Mountain Dew."
Soft skin and I perfumed it for ya
(Yes) I know, I Mountain Dew it for ya
(Yes) that morning coffee, brewed it for ya
(Yes) one touch and I brand-newed it for ya
The density of invention per line is what makes Carpenter's lyrics work at the level of craft rather than catchiness. "Brewed it for ya" to "brand-newed it for ya" — a nonce word, a coinage that exists for exactly one bar and then vanishes, understood before your conscious mind parses it. Pop lyrics exploit the fact that music carries meaning faster than reading does, so you can put a word in there that doesn't exist yet and the melody will teach it to the listener in real time. Blais understood that this is what he had to match — the invention rate, not just the rhyme scheme.
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The Sargasso Sea is the only body of water on earth defined entirely by what surrounds it rather than what contains it. No land touches it. It sits in the middle of the North Atlantic, roughly between the Azores and the Bahamas, bounded on all sides by ocean currents — the Gulf Stream to the west, the North Atlantic Current to the north, the Canary Current to the east, the North Atlantic Equatorial Current to the south. The gyre spins clockwise and the water inside it stays. A lens of warm, clear, deeply blue water sitting on top of colder water, rotating slowly, going nowhere.
The clarity is extraordinary. Visibility down to seventy meters in places, because there's almost nothing in it. The gyre traps the surface water and the nutrients sink and don't come back. An oceanic desert. The surface is warm and bright and essentially barren, which is why the sargassum weed matters so much — it's the only structure in an otherwise featureless plain, a floating forest in a liquid Sahara. The weed supports an entire endemic ecosystem: sargassum fish that look exactly like the weed, sargassum crabs, sargassum shrimp, sargassum nudibranchs. Everything evolved to look like a piece of brown seaweed because there is nothing else to look like.
Telemetry
What does it show
That's that sea Sargasso
Columbus sailed through it in 1492 and his crew panicked. The weed was so thick they thought they were approaching land that wasn't there. The ships slowed. The wind dropped. The water was impossibly blue and impossibly still and covered in vegetation and there was no shore. For a crew already terrified of sailing off the edge of the world, the Sargasso must have looked like the world's margin — the place where ocean stopped being ocean and became something else. The Bermuda Triangle mythology is downstream of this. The Sargasso sits inside the Triangle. Ships becalmed in windless water, surrounded by weed, the compass behaving strangely because the Sargasso is one of two places on earth where magnetic north and true north align.
The depth underneath is vertiginous. The Nares Abyssal Plain at seven thousand meters. The eels swim thousands of kilometers from European rivers, their stomachs dissolving as they go because they will never eat again, to arrive at a place where the bottom is further away than most mountains are tall. They descend. They do the thing. They die. Their children drift back as transparent leaves on the current. The whole cycle takes a decade and the only evidence it happened is that new glass eels keep showing up at river mouths every spring.
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Columbus found the Sargasso looking for the edge of the world. Carpenter found the charts looking at nobody in particular. America kept going. The Mountain Dew followed.
Now he's thinkin' 'bout me every night, oh
Is it that sweet? I guess so
Say you can't sleep, baby, I know
That's that me espresso
The thing that almost makes you cry about the eel song is the tenderness. A man alone in a room singing all twenty parts of a song about a fish that won't let anyone watch it have sex, and the tenderness is in the care — the months of research, the twenty layered vocal tracks, the animations spliced between grids of his own face. The eel doesn't care. Blais cares enormously. That gap is the song. The same gap between Carpenter, who can't relate to desperation, and every boy she's not thinking about, who can't relate to anything else.
Blais is in love with the song the way a translator is in love with the original — inhabiting it, finding the places where its structure can hold completely different cargo without bending. "Move it up, down, left, right, oh / switch it up like Nintendo" maps perfectly onto eel migration patterns and leptocephalus drift because the song already had the kinematics in it. He just changed what was moving.
We can force eels to sexually mature in a lab by injecting them with human pregnancy hormones for months. The eggs are bad. The larvae mostly die. We are reproducing a species by violating it into fertility because we cannot figure out what the ocean does for free. Every eel farm on earth starts with wild-caught glass eels scooped from river mouths because nobody can close the breeding cycle in captivity. The ninety percent population decline is real. We are eating our way through a species whose sex life remains, after twenty-four centuries of investigation, essentially private.
Don't be afraid to hatch eels
Yolked up for their first fills
Jelly-like, no erythrocytes up in their gills no
We're mimicking their plankton poop meals
A GUT FULL O' ROTIFERS AND SHARK YOLK FOR ME
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Eels and thoughts are the two main entities whose existence is obvious but whose source is completely opaque. You are having a thought right now. Its existence is the most certain fact available to you — more certain than the chair, more certain than the screen, the only thing Descartes couldn't doubt. But where it comes from is as hidden as the Sargasso. The neuroscience is the scalpel, the plankton net, the satellite tag. Where the thought comes from — what it is like for the arrival to arrive — twenty-four centuries from Aristotle through Husserl through the hard problem of consciousness and nobody has seen the moment where the glass eel becomes a thought.
Patrik Svensson wrote The Gospel of the Eels about fishing with his father in Scania. Half science, half elegy. The eel as the animal that is fully present in your life — in your kitchen, in your smoker, in your river — while its origin and its destination remain completely opaque. You know the eel. You eat the eel. You have never once seen the eel do the thing that makes more eels.
You know the thought. You think the thought. You have never once seen the thought do the thing that makes it a thought.
Maybe the key
To a new dawn
On the sea Sargasso
The Sargasso keeps its secrets — warm, deep, full of weed, defined by currents — by being too large to search.