Some years ago, I found myself in a small town on the Pacific coast of Mexico, in the company of a friend recently returned to the pleasures of seafood. He was fixated on the idea of eating as many urchins, prolific in the surrounding waters, as possible, yet mystified as to why urchins did not seem to already be a prominent part of the local cuisine. For, generally, things edible get eaten, particularly in poor towns bordering the bounteous sea. And, for an area renowned for its pig-stomach soup, we couldn’t assume the absence was a matter of squeamishness.
I had my own mystery to contend with, and curiously, it was that of sympathy. I had recently read an essay in the 2006 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery entitled “More Than One Way to Crack an Urchin” that provided a brief culinary and historical-naturalist overview of the Echinoidea. Within a scant few paragraphs of the author’s statement that “The sea urchin is heartless, brainless, and otherwise lacking in organs that might inspire our empathy,” I found myself strangely emotionally interpellated by the descriptions of these quite otherworldly-seeming creatures. In fact, I was beginning to feel quite guilty about the thought of eating them, but for the life of me I had no idea why. Why this irruption of sympathy for something like an urchin, rather than for any of the much more morphologically familiar creatures I eat on a regular basis? Even the smug vegetarian slogan “I Don’t Eat Anything with a Face” excludes the urchin from serious consideration. Small wonder, for although it has something like a mouth—designated in still more strange-making language as “Aristotle’s Lantern”—the urchin more resembles an artifact of medieval materiel (such as a mace or caltrop) than anything else that would confront us with the ineffability of the “fellow living thing.” As such, it takes the Levinasian heteronomy of the Other into pretty far-flung ethical terrain.
And yet! I am suspicious that it may just be the wonderful strangeness of the urchin that excites this sympathy, some true sense of wonder at the alienness of its engineering—Five-fold-symmetry! An endoskeleton of crystalline plates! Transformation of aqueous CO2 into solid matter!—so that it seems a shame to destroy such a weird, tiny creature. If this is the case, then it is effectively exoticism doing the work, and that is poor stuff of which to make a moral engagement, although I am hardly the first to succumb to the aesthetic exciting the ethical. Additionally, with its intensely Lovecraftian manufacture, the urchin seems like a little emissary from an ancient age or arcane lineage, and one should well know not to meddle with peculiar and paradoxical-seeming artifacts, lest one open the Gate and invite some perception-bending Nameless Mist into one’s brain. Interestingly, this sense of the arcane and primordial is not at all universal among those who encounter the urchin; take, for instance, amateur naturalist W. N. P. Barbellion’s impressions on his dissection of the thing, from his 1919 Journal of a Disappointed Man:
Very excited over my first view of Aristotle’s Lantern. These complicated pieces of animal mechanism never smell of musty age—after aeons of evolution. When I open a sea urchin and see the Lantern, or dissect a lamprey and cast eyes on the branchial basket, such structures strike me as being as finished and exquisite as if they had just a moment before been tossed me fresh from the hands of the Creator. They are fresh, young, they smell new.
When my own time came, I too marvelled at the alien-seeming complexity of Aristotle’s Lantern, although there was not the same “scent of newness” that so captivated Barbellion. No less exciting, though, it remained as I had anticipated, ancient and perplexing, but also with the feeling that in cracking through that shell, breaking the carapace, one entered a world somehow untouched by the orders and organization of the surface world. The Kraken stirs, somewhere in the deep.
Maybe it is less the exoticism alone that touches me than the manner in which the urchin is dispatched, occasioned by the tragic ingenuity of its design: for fresh eating, what one has to do, basically, is stab the thing through the mouth (shattering Aristotle’s Lantern) and, this purchase gained, crack its shell apart. For the mouth is the only unprotected, relatively fleshy patch available amidst of a battery of prickly spikes. And so I brush aside the queerly grasping motile spines, the nascent ethical impingement, to fixate upon an anatomical oddity in isolation. From monstrous sympathies to monstrous indifference. An animal made by human hands into an artifact. There is something sad and sort of poignant in a creature so seemingly well-arrayed for its own defence, undone by the anatomical extravagance of having a mouth. Perhaps, absurdly, it is this that awakened my sympathy in the first place: a cold, bristly creature doomed by its mouth?