In which the fish regards lost children

Marin.

My body healed up, days marched on, and nights reassuringly appeared as they always had.

After all, I am a fish, a strong fish, a winning fish.

Not such a fast fish perhaps, but a steady fish, a fish which goes the distance. A heads-down, fins-spinning sort of a fish, a fish who leaps at the starter’s gun and is capable of endless miles, full of baby or not.

I have trained furiously for the race in which I find myself, but even so, my cheeks are plum coloured and my lungs twin sacs of burning lace . It is a few kilometres long, this race, out over the kelp beds and out towards the dark playground of Bronze Whalers and the other darker, shyer sharks off Long Reef. Through the roiling surf and out and away, through numerous clouds of jellies which pulse mindlessly like small milky geometries, Tall orange buoys appear from time to time to guide me, for me to shoulder around in these abstract unmarked trails in the ocean. I have a need to win, a need to overcome something.

I pull myself through salt water, with my hands my feet, my fins. My chest heaves, my face burns and the cracking thump of my heart echoes into the bones of my head. Below me all is blue-inked shadow, above me sky glimpsed as I steal silver loaves of air from the sky and hold them hard in my chest then before exhaling them, fragmented, in molten blobs to spin in my wake.

I must win, but it’s such a long stretch of ocean, a long long distance. I am wearing my face like a mask. At the start it is all fragments of kelp in a turquoise toss of foam, and later, in the dark of the deep somebody is catching a free ride in my wake, touching my toes as I thunder along. I am unable to shake them off, but they disturb me, lurking there just behind, waiting to chase and pounce. I steady my breathing and try not to lose my rhythmic stroke-stroke-stroke, my lungs smouldering.

I have passed into another reality, one in which I am nothing but air and light and salt and movement.

As I look down in to the deep and watch the silver bubbles trail from my endlessly digging hands, I suddenly think of Marin, of silver light and lost pieces of love. Then suddenly, it seems, every one of her little extinguished heartbeats is with me, surging along on a cloud of light. In fact there are hundreds of them: all of those tiny lights, all the tiny souls who never made it into the bright light of day are now ere in my sea, like tiny fish, like beams of light, buoying me along. The sun catches them: fragments of light, tiny beating hearts, clouds of bubbles, a bouquet of air. I am swimming on a cloud of souls, here they all are, out here in the kingdom of salt and loneliness, in my aquatic domain: all the love and hope, the energy of all and everything. And I am here, amongst it, stroking the blue with long fingers and strong arms.

I put the love I had for Marin out into the world, although she never came to be, and like the light from far away stars in distant constellations, that love continues on. Love ends up somewhere, love ends up here, in the salty indigo depths. In the luminous foam of the waves, in the dancing currents, in the dip and swell of the open sea. In every sparkle on the ocean dwells the love and hope invested in those brief existences, and every one of them forms a deep bloom of happiness upon my heart.

Marin carried me, a mandala-shaped raft. A raft made from all those little silver specks of love, those beginnings of hope, those hearts now stilled, those tears.

I won the race. It didn’t matter.

In which the sky is sea, and the sea a basket of sticks.

Solidity.

There is no such thing.

Even our bones are merely clever things that seem to hold us up through sheer belief. Fluted columns as light as bird breath. Things which seemed solid become inevitably swept away, washed away by time. Even time itself seems completely abstract.

Nothing is forever.

When I was small I had such faith in things, in objects, in structures, in the slow and steady march of time. Now I just marvel at my own tenacity in hanging on to beliefs at all. Babies disappear and become complete other persons. Persons disappear altogether. A place evolves into somewhere unknown. Concrete things just melt away. Lose their meaning.

The sky is low today, and it showers at regular intervals in long wet breaths. The sea has pushed the sand into a hump, so that the beach stretches out a long way, rising in a long low incline then falling away steeply at the waters' edge. When the tide recedes, small lakes are left in the hollow of the sand. Here, small children sit and dig and play. I watch a father carefully construct a dam, his backside in the air, his small daughter, in four shades of pink, throws her spadeful of wet sand at the very moment he raises his head.

My daughter is on patrol. She watches the edge of the water with pale eyes, her hair in long wet strands from the wet air and the salt. The sea lifts itself up, and she narrows her eyes, watching and waiting. New lifeguards chatter excitedly around her; they have just passed their exam. There are so many of them, all eager to be watching, waiting, prowling at the edge of the ocean in brand-new yellow and red. They stand about with their hair in sheets, sand spattered on the backs of their legs. My daughter has removed her emergency toned lifeguard clothes, and hovers, pale skinned, in blue, silent and barely visible. Yet the small children follow in her shadow when she swims, then they follow her out again, like little doctor-fish. They sit nearby, cross legged. She moves, and they move with her. Looking at her in her blue club costume, I can almost glimpse her as a tiny girl, in the smaller version. Same colours, new girl.

It is warm and inky. Everyone sits on the rain-pocked sand happily, playing in the tidal puddles, in the strange light. I can smell the base note of salt and the wetness of the sand in the warm air.

The sea beats itself on the steep incline of sand at low tide, snarling in a froth of flung sand like a serpent flicking its tail in its sleep. Beyond this, it is smooth between the sets of waves. Knots of people negotiate the wild rhythms at the edge, reluctant to step into the deep.

I wonder about the things I hang onto, I wonder about the things that disappear and I dont even notice.

I count the things which remain as a constant, forming a rhythm to my life and thoughts. Something that bundles me together, me, creature of salt and blood and bones and hair, all too ready to wash away. Dissolve.

The hard sloping bank of sand is pleasant to walk on and the low sky like dark watercolour seeping into the air just above my head. I enter the water, bracing myself for the onslaught, trying to look nonchalant, my goggles around my neck.

I drop quickly to the sandy floor as a nasty cracking wave curls swiftly out of nowhere, and I am immediately blasted with sand. Before I have time to so much as brush it from my face, I am forced to commando-roll beneath another two before I escape along the bottom and dart out across the deep.

Still the waves dance their vigorous waltz.

It is so dark beneath the blanket of wet inky sky that the ocean floor is rendered a dark green. It is cloudy from the rains, and shapes shift beneath me, yet the water feels like soft warm silk: so seductive, so beautiful, achingly alluring. Out here I am washed clean of sand, am nervously eyeing the shadows far below where indistinct swarms of fish move about in the swirl. The summer sea is filled with small animalcules, little lively swimming things, blue sea lizards. Transparent, spent carapace, small, soft and shaped like clawed hands drift and float, wave like tiny fingers. Tiny unseen creatures hover and dance. Nestle near to my skin, preparing to leave their constellation of pink marks on my body. My own body, without a carapace, without a bunch of claws, without a cloudy bag of ink to expel.

All are netted into my swimming costume, a harvest of sorts. I move through this lively soup like a whale shark on Ningaloo, sifting the water. Only a thin skin separates my inner body from my outer, the sea as warm as my blood, too warm to seize my head by the temples and knock sense in to my brain. Too warm to enliven my slow and bedevilled dreams. I feel as if I move slowly and fill myself with a mad bevy of microscopic monsters.

It has rained so much that the lagoon has burst its banks, and leaves swirl past me. Casuarina needles poke at me, needle my arms. Large brown eucalyptus leaves flap past like huge moths in the dark green waters. The sea is laughing quietly to itself, like some demented thing, toying with folks at the edge and flinging them about. I keep silent and as still as possible, gliding through the depths, trying not to stare, pop-eyed at every thing that moves, trying not to shudder at the sensation of the clouds of casuarina needles, the flapping moth leaves. The dark indigo shadows

When the lagoon bursts into the ocean it carves a huge river into the sand. Out of the dark the water rushes, pale blue in the blackness of a rainy night, and empties into the sea. In the morning there are just the mudflats, inspected by a team of concerned pelican, walking seriously from puddle to puddle, inspecting the flat chocolatey silt with their beaks. All the lagoon dwellers have been expelled into the sea: tortoises, mullet, plovers, flushed from the rushes and the reeds at the foot of the casuarinas. Sometimes ducks and their ducklings, their striped fluff spiked by a sea-dunking, scooped up in cupped hands quickly and saved from the waves.

Along the shore lie reeds in bundles, a handful facing one way, the next another, all along. Tennis balls, odd shoes. Strange things knitted along the edge of the sea.

Now the sea has gathered everything, the lagoon contents, and fashioned a kind of floating raft of rushes, pointing this way and that, woven in between with small pieces of bark, pine needles, branches, and has placed me in the middle like some archetypal foundling. Jostled among the flotsam and the creepy jabbing reeds.

Enough, I say,

Not today.

And I make some mutter about summer water, how the soft silkiness of it is so beguiling, but just so unrewarding. And so populous. How I am bedecked with a tiny bestiary and a collection of lagoon items. How nasty the prickling of casuarina needles, the prickling of tiny things.

And I am unashamed to say it, and rush to the edge, prepared for by sandblasting, prepared to be knocked this way and that, to drop to my belly and let the nasty flapping curl of sand-filled water pass above me.

I can't bear you today.

I look up from my raft of rushes, poked this way and that incessantly by pieces of rush and reed, and the world has changed again, like the magic faraway tree. Folks have shifted, children have grown, the sky has fallen and there are trees in the sea.

There is only one constant in this world of flux, there is only one thing. Endless. Constantly changing, but always there. I shall enter its summer self, among the frenzy of seaweed bits and mad swarms of fish, its raft of needling rushes and the red sand which tosses in plumes beneath the sudden violet storms. I shall spread my arms and lie on my back, watch the cumulus clouds pile up on the horizon, and the sea will say

shh shh shh!

such utter nonsense you always speak:

shh shh shh!

and as it throw one last spray of sand on to the backs of my sorry legs it shouts again:

Nonsense!

Night Swimming: My Life as a Fish (excerpt)

 In the fish umwelt

Entering the lifeworld of the fish creates a necessity to defer to nonhuman modes of being.  Does “shoaling”, for example, create safety from predators? Moving in a way which minimises resistance and maximises propulsion, or of moving in a smooth, streamlined and considered way which does not communicate distress or fear, refusing the use of unaquatic movements such as thrashing and kicking. At night, the movement of the ocean is apprehended through the flashing of bioluminescence, indicating the presence of invisible animals and forces. The bioluminescence is visible, yet the animal or plant or tide causing it is not. A human way of seeing must be inverted, seeing movement rather than the cause.

One morning, swimming alone, I found myself above a shark, and followed it along for quite some time, focusing intensely upon its sense of being, on entering its umwelt. Its familiar, lithe, torpedo shaped body swayed hypnotically and rhythmically, its pectoral fins protruding like small arms. I followed it for some time and felt that I had become the shark. My limbs had transformed, my years of training as a competitive swimmer making a new kind of sense, I was overcome suddenly by the sensation of never being able to touch or carry objects, of now requiring an economy of force, an aerodynamic I do not possess. Overwhelmed by the intense sensation of submersion, of disconnection from an airy world, deprived of the power of hands—the experience was terrifying yet connective: the shark became my beloved.  Unable to reconceive myself as human, in this instant I fell far short as a shark. I had forgotten to be a person informed by the shark as signifier of other, of predator. I was fused, fluid, powerful; not human.

The popular image of sharks has been traditionally constructed within the narrative of beach as site of masculine hegemony, where females are passive, and victims of drowning. Reality TV shows such as Bondi Rescue promote and affirm this construct. As human, we see ourselves as the natural prey of sharks, and are culturally attuned to fear it.  Of Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which consists of a tiger shark preserved in a vitrine, Luke White says:

“The shark represents wickedness and hidden danger that lurks beneath the surface. It is an image of the sublime as it represents wild nature. Damien Hirst buys into the shark image, exploiting its commercial usage.” (White 2009)

Not all of my many encounters with sharks have been so peaceful. Prior to the amiable encounter just described, one morning before sunrise, I had been swimming alone, beyond the headland in the open wild ocean, preoccupied by the trails flowing from my fingers. Inexplicably, I glanced behind me, into my “blind spot”, where a large Bronze Whaler shark had positioned itself in order to trail me unseen. Effectively placed just below the surface and out of my line of sight, the shark was able to silently gaze upon me. Alone, and far from shore, my unconscious physical response was a kind of shutting down: the hot pricklings of fear which precede shock began to travel from my fingertips up my arms. I began to become numb, anaesthetised. The shark was between myself and the shore, more than four hundred metres away.