Siren and silent song : evolution and extinction in the submarine

In the opening lyrics and refrain of The Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever," John Lennon invites the listener to join a journey down to a place called Strawberry Fields. Each of these four invitations is to an otherworldly realm: reminiscence in a halcyon time of childhood wonder. This essay riffs on the ethos and milieu of Lennon's song, to take up his invitation to turn such reminiscence toward another otherworldly realm: the submarine. And, in turning our attention downward, this essay extends his invitation over the half century between now and the song's release. Taking up this invitation will take us through profound biophysical and cultural changes between the 1967 of Lennon's song and the world of today. We will explore the submarine/outer-space zeitgeist of now and its coming of age in the environmentalism contemporaneous with The Beatles. We will turn to the contemporary bands Radiohead and Beirut, to prefigure submarine sensibility in pop music today. Their music will be considered in terms of how it defines contemporary ideas of more-than-human and posthuman submarine realms. As marine species disappear en masse under the advent of The Sixth Extinction, this essay speculates on what evolution and extinction may come to be, when future sea shores engulf cities founded in the littoral zones of the early modern period.