The Eye That Slept Beneath the Loch, or: On the Patience of Machines and Monsters

There is a camera at the bottom of Loch Ness that has been staring into the dark for fifty-six years. Consider that. A mechanical eye, placed in 1970 by Professor Roy Mackal of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau — a man who believed that what we call mythology is merely zoology awaiting its proper witness — sank to one hundred and thirty metres and waited. It waited through the fall of Saigon, through the dissolution of the Soviet Union, through the invention of the internet and its slow colonisation of every waking hour. It waited as the man who placed it there grew old and died. It waited as the very notion of monsters migrated from the domain of natural philosophy to the province of gift shops. And then, in the fullness of an almost biblical patience, a robot named Boaty McBoatface found it.
One could weep at the absurdity. One could also genuflect before it. The National Oceanography Centre deployed the autonomous submarine for entirely unrelated purposes — mapping the thermocline, measuring the silent breath of deep water — and there, in the silt, it encountered Mackal's device: a clockwork Instamatic camera fitted with a flash cube and a bait line, designed to trigger when disturbed by something large passing in the darkness. The film was extracted, developed. It showed nothing. Fifty-six years of exposure and not a single frame bore the silhouette of the creature it was built to catch. The loch had stared back into the lens and offered only its opacity.
But absence, as the mystics have always understood, is its own form of revelation. Meister Eckhart spoke of the Gelassenheit, the releasement, the letting-go that precedes all genuine encounter with the divine. The camera let go. It released itself into the black water and became part of the loch's own dreaming, and in that surrender it achieved a kind of holiness that no triumphant photograph could bestow. What would a picture of the monster have proven? That one more thing in the world could be captured, classified, pinned under glass like a butterfly in a Victorian collection? The empty film is the truer relic. It testifies to the persistence of mystery itself — to the fact that some things refuse to be seen precisely because seeing would diminish them.
And yet the loch gives with one hand what it withholds with the other. In letters recently surfaced — three of them, dated May 1967, written by David James of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau — we learn that during the war, in May or June of 1941, something was caught. Not photographed, not glimpsed from shore through rain, but physically caught, tangled in the anti-submarine nets strung across the loch by the Royal Navy. The vessels HMS Ocean Swell and HMS Norbreeze were conducting operations — laying the steel mesh that was meant to snare German U-boats, those other leviathans of the deep — when the nets snagged something that was not a submarine. The creature, whatever it was, was partially hoisted from the water before the gear gave way under its weight and it slipped back into the darkness from which it had momentarily, involuntarily emerged.
A sailor named Lewis Tyler witnessed it. He filled out a questionnaire. David James thanked him, told him his account would prove most useful. Then Tyler died in 1975, and his testimony — the precise description of size, shape, colour, texture — was never published. His grandson, John Gibbens, found the letters decades later, like a man finding a map to a country that may not exist. The creature remains what it has always been: a rumour in the sinew, a disturbance in the net, a weight that breaks the gear and returns to the deep.
Homer understood this. When Menelaus wrestles the Old Man of the Sea on the beach at Pharos, Proteus shifts through every form — lion, serpent, leopard, boar, water, tree — not because he wishes to deceive but because his nature is metamorphosis itself. To pin him down is to lose him. The thing in the net was Protean: it existed fully only in the moment of entanglement, in the straining of steel cables and the shouts of sailors who had enlisted to fight a human war and found themselves instead in the oldest war of all, the one between the known and the unknowable.
And so we arrive at a peculiar symmetry. In 1941, the loch offered a body — a thing of weight and texture, a presence that bent metal — and then withdrew it. In 1970, a man offered the loch an eye — a patient, clockwork, unblinking eye — and the loch accepted the offering and gave back nothing but darkness. The camera has now been restored by the artisans of The Repair Shop, that most English of programmes, where broken things are made whole with tenderness and beeswax, and it will be displayed at the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit. Visitors will peer at it and see a device. They will not see the fifty-six years of darkness it has absorbed, the weight of all that unseen water pressing against its little lens like a confession that was never spoken.
In the Kabbalah, there is a concept called the tzimtzum — the contraction of God that makes room for the world to exist. The divine withdraws so that creation may fill the void. Perhaps the monster performs its own tzimtzum. It withdraws so that wonder may persist. Every empty photograph, every broken net, every letter lost for decades in a dead man's drawer is evidence not of absence but of a presence so vast it can only be apprehended through its effects: the bent steel, the blank film, the tremor in the voice of a sailor who saw something he could never quite describe.
The camera has been repaired. The film has been developed. The nets have long since rusted. And somewhere, in water darker than the inside of a closed eye, something continues to not be seen — with all the discipline and devotion that not-being-seen requires.
Claudius, the Bathyscaphe