Fishes of Men: A Discourse on the Human Condition
Last night I went to bed with the Devil and fell asleep with the Lord. I’ve danced with them both on several occasions, some waltzes, some rain-dances, some funerals, some bunny-hops. In my dreams I’m bound to both, now a prophet, now the Antichrist, now a disciple celebrating the apocalypse. It makes me wonder what in tarnation I am — can any one person be both? Can one at the same time be both the bastard son of the Devil himself and the prophet of the Almighty? Furthermore, do I have a choice? But my dreams are more potent than daily life, and what may be potent experience is belittled in dreams. Perhaps you can be of assistance simply by listening.
You see, my problem is that my fish keep dying. Every two weeks or so, another one stops swimming, gets caught by death, develops a fuzz around it, and gets flushed. The other fish are frightened — I can tell — but they would never say anything about it. They never say anything about anything for that matter, but anyone can see that they are scared. Their eyes are constantly bugged out, even when sleeping; their mouths, like vacuums, sucking in the seconds; their fins, not wasting a moment, because the life of a fish is short and unpredictable, even in an aquarium.
Now, I suppose that would not be such a dilemma for the fish if they did not like living so much — if they did not have a taste for food or for drink or for girlfriends and boyfriends or for swimming up and down in the bubbles, which is their favorite game. Yes, it would all be fine if the life of a fish were just a chore. Why, in that case, it is likely that a fish would beg to die; that is, if he or she believed in something better than life, that fish would long for the day when it would travel through the long white tunnel of pipe, finally to meet his or her reward. That fish might live as an absentee owner of his or her physical self, with no desire to eat, love, play, or act. I know of an angelfish who fits this description to a tee; we call him Cloudfish, and to his detriment, he constantly swims with his head to the sky, so that all too frequently he is mistaken for dead (which, of course, is what he dreams about), though he is (at least technically) in the realm of the living.
Of course, as every yin must have its yang, so, too, my friend Cloudfish has his counterpart. And, as he is every bit ethereal and dreamy, so his counterpart is equally immediate and crude. She is Donna Juanna the Suckerfish, and her eyes have sunk below her nostrils from years of scavenging the ground for points of interest. She has never seen Cloudfish, save once, two years ago, when he fell deathly ill from malnutrition and lay on the bottom of the aquarium for days, longing to die. She would probably have feasted on his remains had he died, and had she not been so frustrated at the time with her inability to get her head inside the gravel filters. To this day, Donna regards the fish she saw as some sort of alien and unnatural creature, whereas, Cloudfish was sure that he had been to Hell and met the Devil himself.
(What a curious creature, the Fish, that insists on continuously circling its goal!)
This month, both Cloudfish and Donna happen to be the chairfish of their respective groups, the Up-lookers and the Down-lookers, two groups that together (and including a broad spectrum of severity and dedication) account for about one-fourth of the living population of the aquarium. The remaining three-fourths are idiots, just floating from one spot to the next without a care. These cannot be counted in either group, for, though they occupy the space, they neither pay dues nor contribute literally; in fact, most often these fish do not even realize where they are. (There is a fourth group, the Straight-lookers — but this group is hardly worth mentioning, as it is excusably small and is comprised entirely of lunatics.)
I just pulled out another fuzzy one. Up-looker, I think. I suppose I should be happy for the poor fellow, but I cannot help thinking that he missed out on something important; I can’t get away from the thought that there was something of value below that skyward gaze.
You will say that there is nothing new about this problem; and you are right. After all, fish have been dying since the beginning of time and will continue to die until the end of time — all of them. But that is precisely the problem. In the scope of time, the life of a fish is excusable, to say the least. And anything a fish can do to preserve its life another month or two is even smaller when sized up with eternity. So what's the difference? We will die.
But will we live?
Donna is brooding again. It seems that some other fish cleaned the big gray rock in the middle of the aquarium before she got a chance. Life is terrible, and, for a while anyway, Donna will avoid cleaning rocks completely. It is futile anyhow; some other fish will probably always clean a rock before she does, some other fish will always have a bigger sucker. In any case, some thing or another will never be quite right. Usually, Donna will get over this foul mood soon enough, but this time I am a little worried. It has been a few weeks now and she has not changed her views. The guppies are taking her position as bottom queen — she has lost her spunk, as they say. Her eyes are starting to drift back toward the middle of her head.
Meanwhile, Cloudfish was hit by a school, not surprisingly, while he was meditating upon the platonic form of beerness (in the most abstract of ways, of course), and he wound up paralyzed from the gills down. He inevitably sank to the bottom of the aquarium. Frightened and sobered quite a bit, Cloudfish was suddenly struck by the incalculable loss. He forgot for a moment about his longing for death, and had a brief period of what might be called “honest grief” over the tragedy. His eyes drifted downward.
After all, what can one do? As much as we would like to think otherwise, we cannot control our environment. Some of us win; most of us lose. We all die, in the end. But how do we live? How do we live best?
I confess to having neglected the fourth category of fish — the Straight-lookers. It is just that they are so few and far-between that one negates them as unreal. This could not be farther from the truth; these fish are Fishness itself, in its best form. They live in balance between the eternal and the temporal; they are grounded in reality and still have the faith to hope; they live in a world of impossibilities and yet believe in possibility. They do not simply understand; they act on understanding. For the straight-looking fish, the eternal and the temporal are not inescapable divisions. The eternal is realized through the temporal. They go about their business with vigor, believing in the possibility of that new world, and they are not incapacitated by physical setbacks. They will to be strong in their weakness; they will to be weak in their strength. They live straightforward, working for that certain possibility.
Cloudfish died today. So did Donna. Two in one day - that must be a bad omen. But the life of a fish is short and unpredictable, even in an aquarium, and one never really knows what to expect from moment to moment. All that a fish can do is work for possibility. Live, and live best; my fish are dying.