A calm and rational approach can be a disguise for an all-consuming fear. To eliminate the emotional perspective is to become numb to avoid paralysis and prescribe an alternative to retreat when one would be otherwise incapable. The human-animal intuitively detects the invisible eyes of distant predators, and to that intuition, we attribute something inherited and ancestral. Evolutionary biologists will tell you that the organism is a collection of relics, but nothing expensive is kept for long unless its function proves adaptive & encourages survival. This is elementary but necessary to remember when considering the perennial pleas of the conspiracy theorists about lizard-men & gray alien abductions.
When seeking a representation of our precocious position in the universe the aquatic world remains the most suitable for allegory. Bodies of water are periodically isolated and integrated, and "aliens" are frequently introduced to each other after millions of years of evolving separately. Due to a lack of such an inherited fear as previously mentioned the natives of the Atlantic ocean are left emotionally, & consequently physically defenseless against the Pacific beauty of the deadly Lionfish. Predator avoidance behavior is only partially learned, & at the rate at which the Lionfish consume, prey populations are being diminished quicker than they can adapt, the consequence of an incomplete model of what to fear. It is beyond lucky that some of us are gifted with incurable anxiety & flinch at shadows.
Lovecraft, tragically heroic in his fall, could only point with his eyes closed at the negative space that soaked the corners of his mind. He promised only madness from the attempt to grasp the Lionfish in our midst. I am the inheritor of the optimism that he discarded. We must closely reexamine what it is we see and don’t see when we look at the world we inhabit, trust in the uneasiness we feel about the safety of our environment & question if there are not invisible monsters already feeding on us in our very own homes.
Good post, I'd like to see this explored more