The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

- H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of the Cthulhu

In 1997, one of the U. S. Navy's autonomous hydrophone arrays -- originally sunk to the oceanic depths in order to "listen" for Soviet submarines -- recorded a high-volume, low-frequency sound onomatopoetically nicknamed "bloop." No one has seen the source of this sound, but the specific variations in frequency strongly suggest bloop has a biological origin. And the magnitude of the sound suggests a creature of unheard of size. Most curiously, bloop was traced to 50° W, 100° S -- roughly the coordinates occult fabulist Lovecraft gave for the Cthulhu's cyclopean corpse-city R'lyeh.¹

As is the pattern in many Lovecraft stories, the Cthulhu -- a gigantic cephalopod-like monster so hideous its mere dreams drive men mad with terror -- is a secret that is best kept hidden from the world at large. Lovecraft was no stranger to the weird beasts that live in limbo between human knowledge and human imagination. When Lovecraft first described the Cthulhu in 1926, how much sprang forth from his macabre imagination and how much did he already know? Is bloop really the Cthulhu?

No one knows for sure what bloop is, but both bloop and Cthulhu come from a long line of distinguished sea monsters. Jorge Luis Borges boils the myth down to its basic ingredients, "There is a story that is told in all lands and throughout all history -- the story of sailors who go ashore on an unknown island that later sinks and drowns them, for the island is alive." The Cthulhu is Lovecraft's riff on the Norwegians' cephalopodan version of this nautical legend, the kraken The kraken, to modern Science's cold eyes, is the hyperbolic hysteria of sailors attacked by a giant squid, which have been reported to mistake ships for whales every now and then. Yet the kraken is just one culture's version of the man-devouring leviathan of the sea; Borges also includes entries for the zapatan and fastitocalon in his encyclopedia of mythical creatures, The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Before 1735, when Linnaeus's taxonomy systematized and organized human knowledge of the natural world, fantastical creatures populated medieval bestiaries in hordes. Some of these creatures have remained in the popular imagination, such as the phoenix or unicorn, though we know them to be fictions. Others, such as the salamander -- which either lives in fire or is so cold it can extinguish fire -- we know to exist, but have shed their magical aura. To the proto--scientific alchemists, a creature of the element fire seemed perfectly reasonable; there are creatures of water (fish), creatures of land (animals), creatures of air (sylphs). However, the rigor of the Linnaean system changed all that.

Borges's encyclopedia of imaginary beings (written with Margarita Guerro) is a unique entry in the bibliography of monsters because it draws its material from the pre-Linnaean bestiaries yet poses as a modern encyclopedia. Borges researches and describes imaginary being as if they really exist. But, by Borges' own admission, his encyclopedia contains only imaginary beings. The result: an encyclopedia that hovers between two contradictory poles, a work of reference and a mythological fiction, a fictional encyclopedia.

In the introduction, Borges tries to explain why some creatures, such as the kraken (or dragon), occur across cultures. "We do not know what the dragon means, . . . but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man's imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster, not some ephemeral and casual creature like the chimæra or the catoblepas." Though Borges often traces creatures to their etymological or literary roots, he rarely speculates on the necessities that gave rise to such a colorful menagerie.

Cryptozoologists attempt to find imaginary beings by less bibliocentric means. They are essentially naturalists and biologists willing to investigate rumor and hearsay in order to discover new species (or living examples of species previously believed to be extinct). However, some of the high profile cryptids, such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, give cryptozoologists a bad name among modern scientists.

Occasionally, cryptozoologists find animals that correspond to their mythologized counterparts. More often, careful historical research explains mythical creatures to be misidentifications. According to Dr. Neil Clark, paleontologist, Nessie was probably a circus elephant taking a dip in the loch. Reports of the monster first appeared around 1933, roughly the same time that the circus owner Bertram Mills catapulted the Loch Ness monster to fame by offering a £20,000 reward for its capture.

A similar story comes from Ming dynasty China. Explorer Zheng He returned from East Africa with a giraffe. The Somali word for giraffe, girin, was misheard for the Chinese word for unicorn, k'i-lin (kirin in Japanese). To this day, k'i-lin signifies both the ordinary giraffe and the beneficent mythical beast that appears only to the pure of spirit.²

Borges writes in his introduction, "a monster is nothing but a combination of elements taken from real creatures, and the combinatory possibilities border on the infinite." The k'i-lin is no exception; it is described as a mashup of other, more mundane animals -- deer, ox, cow, dragon, horse, goat -- depending on which account you read. Similarly, the mythical menagerie is full of half-breeds and hybrids -- the centaur, minotaur, chimaera, griffin, basilisk are better known; the bird-deer perytion of Atlantis and the ant-lion myrmecoleon are a bit more obscure.

The k'i-lin stands out from these other hybrids for being an object of awe instead of fear. Most creatures in Borges's encyclopedia and in medieval bestiaries can be qualified as monsters. A typology of terror could pair each monster to its specific human fear, though being eaten would be the most common fear. However, this collection of monsters shows how much of planet remained dark, unexplored, and terrifying to humans. Off the edges of the map strange creatures lurked, ready to snatch the hubristically intrepid explorer into oblivion.

Today, the blank spaces on that map are, for the most part, filled in. However, each year naturalists, archeologists, and cryptozoologists reveal startling discoveries. In recent years we have seen the first photographs of a living giant squid and the fossils of a miniature, troglodyte-like race of humans on the island of Flores, which might be an altogether new species of human. Lovecraft's occult creatures generally came from other worlds, dark planets beyond human perception, but mysteries lurk right under our noses, in the few corners of the planet that remain unexplored. After all, whatever goes "bloop" is still out there.

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1. The cynical Lovecraftophile might argue that a 26° difference in latitude is quite a distance, but I remind the reader that bloop might be a leviathan of unimaginable size. To a creature a mile long, 1070 nautical miles is a walk in the park..
2. And in Japan, to those drinking the beer Kirin Ichiban.

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