But whether my unconscious desired it or not, when those 21st Century assassins flew out of the September blue, they brought my personal tower of Babel down along with all those falling lives. Suddenly it was too late for vain fictions. Imagination was redundant, mute witness the only respectful response in a world raped by such brutal, apocalyptic reality. There was only one thing worth writing about, but nothing to be said.

A little self-centred to take such a cataclysm personally? Perhaps. But how else do we understand the events of the world but as metaphors significant to the stories of our own individual lives?

It is a deceit of writers to set ourselves outside the subjective experience of the world, to adopt a cynical posture that allows us to view the phenomenon of life detached, reduce its mad cruelty to flippant entertainment, its incomprehensible complexity of language and meaning to propaganda mouthed by crude ciphers. We build our own simplified universes bound within the limits of our imaginations, people them with sycophants, revel in false security.

And then some wild iconoclast wields his devastating pen and forces us to launch a whole new search for coherence. Well. Fuck. If that's what it takes.

That new coherent response to the world may not be easy to find. Everything changes, everything remains the same.

September 11 has come and gone again: somewhere between the dumb dust of disaster and the blind fog of war the Bloodbeast slipped its leash, and now the carrion birds are circling again hungry to gorge on guts.

Ground Zero: Year Zero. The world is in the grip of a bad ugly vision: What's left to do but talk about it; whine, opine, heckle pointlessly; flounder and drown in our swamp of free speech before the bastards drain and build a jail on it.

In the meantime, let's wind the clock back to a kinder, gentler time.

Sunday October 22, 2000

FISH VOODOO

It was around this time last year that the ugly spirit attacked and the big fish got sick.

A "ghost koi" mirror carp; I bought it ten years ago for my son to keep in his tank along with the goldfish he won at the fair when he was three. The carp grew as inexorably as my son. By 1994 the tank was too small to contain it. We dug a pond. The carp and other fish thrived. Some of them were content enough to breed. Frogs moved in. Hundreds of them. There would have been more, but each spring the fish gorged and fattened on the gelatinous protein of amphibian spawn.

For five years we enjoyed the pond. A simple pleasure. Somewhere to sit after dinner for a contemplative (as opposed to industrial) smoke and cup of coffee… conversing with one's partner… watching the swirl and eddy of the feeding fish, the big carp gliding in effortless equilibrium with gravity, bucket-mouth scooping down floating foodsticks with the appetite of a creature determined to live for a hundred years.

And then the big carp was not hungry anymore. At first it sulked on the bottom, denied buoyancy, clumsily hauling itself through the sediment with pectoral fins, like some Darwinian icon of life on the verge of leaving the seas for the land. A month later and it lost its balance. Now it spent most of it's time on its side, broad silver flanks and belly reflecting a waning silver moonlight up from the depths. After-dinner coffee became a hurried, guilty ritual… an avoidance of the bad spirit assailing our home, the crackling chaotic energy of adolescence that jangled our nerves and stretched our patience thin.

Don't get me wrong. Efforts were made. Fish diseases were researched, expensive remedies purchased and poured, libations to the piscine gods. But the big carp remained a waning submerged moon.

It would not eat. It rarely moved. But neither would it die.

I was tempted to kill it, "painlessly dispatch" it, as the text books advise is the professional treatment for incurable fish; but I was worried, unsure what kind of fish magic was here at work. Would the sacrifice of the big carp lift the curse of violence that circled our family, snarling from beyond the hearthlight… or was the fish in fact somehow holding the mayhem at bay, absorbing the potential destructive force with its own cold slow flesh? Perhaps spring would see it invigorated… sickness passed with the season of death. I held back from intervention… let nature take its course. The fish languished on: The beast of adolescence howled around the stockade, jangling our nerves; occasionally -- with a slavering and desperate scrabbling of claws -- clambering our stout stockade of reason, breathing the blood-breath on us and infecting us with rage.

Sometime in the summer it died. Examination of its carcass showed that the ugly spirit had devoured its innards, an angry ulcer blossomed red and raw on the metallic surface of its scales. We buried it. A Japanese anemone grew to mark the spot. Time passed. The rage of adolescence evolved into the mature hopeful anger of a man… but the fish ghost still shines in the depths at night when the moon is full, and the pleasures of the pond will never be innocent now.

JD