Dreams of Fish

by Mark Thomas

My obsession with fish has become pathological.

Driving in my car, I think every curve in the road must follow the contour of a trout stream and every flashing bit of industrial metal must be a waterfall. It doesn’t matter how often I am disappointed by geography. I assume fish are hiding nearby and will appear if I remain vigilant. The next urban ditch or sluiceway will teem with spawning salmon. Whitefish, expelled from sewers after a heavy rain, will slither across flooded pavement. Perch will flit through blue depressions in lush green lawns.

During work meetings, I make fish-shaped doodles in the margins of important memos and watch the presenters’ mouths open and close without hearing words.

At night, I dream of fishing and when I catch one, the creature judges me with black-marble philosopher’s eyes. Of course, angling is a form of ritualized torture and is indefensible, nothing likes to be dragged, gasping into an alien environment.

But love has always excused bad behaviour.

In my dreams, I often paddle my canoe through fairy tale landscapes full of bridges, castles, and ogres. I cast towards rippling movements, desperate to feel a living creature wriggling on the end of my line.

Water is supposed to be a symbol of the subconscious, because it has a thin surface skin that hides deep-dwelling demons and monsters. Dream psychology books say “fishing” represents an attempt to capture dark knowledge, to learn awkward, stubborn lessons that can only be retrieved with a hook in the throat.

It would be convenient if the subconscious communicated via clear text messages or itemized lists, but it refuses. It just sends fish.

Endless fish.

And I paddle my canoe through meandering switchbacks with surprising hidden ponds, where herons rise into the air like winged, squawking dinosaurs.

Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve. It’s a form of meditation and the varied properties of water are my focus.

Calm water is metal, and braided fishing line is a laser, slicing the reflective surface open. When a hooked fish rises, it feels like an act of creation because the fish materializes from nothingness, from chaos. A shadow-form simply separates from other shadows and is simultaneously light and dark, honest in its duality. Suspended in that strange murk-jelly world, fish are solemn and wise, able to feel the rotation of the planet and sense its trajectory around the sun.

But fish also dance in dangerous currents, invigorated by subtle barometric changes that presage storms. They congregate, siren-like, near submerged rocks and the hulks of scuttled boats, daring humans to follow.

Cast and retrieve.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I leave the fairy tale landscapes and fish near modern lodges. Those faux-rustic buildings are always full of incompetent dream-anglers, lounging on shore waiting for bad weather to break. They sit under covered porches, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee while guides untangle their line and ready the tackle.

I paddle through driving rain that threatens to liquify the air, and I float right in front of those clumsy hunters. I stare at them with black-marble eyes and inevitably experience an instant of pure happiness: a fish jumps at the end of my line, shakes its magnificent head, and flares armored gill plates like a creature from Revelations. The mouth yawns open, lips contort, and it tells everyone that it loves only me.

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Mark Thomas is an artist and writer living in St. Catharines, Canada. Check out his work HERE.

 

A Monument to Adam

creative nonfiction
by Mark Twain

Just for fun, we occasionally publish vintage pieces from historic authors.

Some one has revealed to the TRIBUNE that I once suggested to Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, of Elmira, New York, that we get up a monument to Adam, and that Mr. Beecher favored the project. There is more to it than that. The matter started as a joke, but it came somewhat near to materializing.

It is long ago--thirty years. Mr. Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN had been in print five or six years, and the storm of indignation raised by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals. In tracing the genesis of the human race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had left Adam out altogether. We had monkeys, and "missing links," and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam. Jesting with Mr. Beecher and other friends in Elmira, I said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the monkey, and that in the course of time Adam's very name would be forgotten in the earth; therefore this calamity ought to be averted; a monument would accomplish this, and Elmira ought not to waste this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favor and herself a credit.

Then the unexpected happened. Two bankers came forward and took hold of the matter--not for fun, not for sentiment, but because they saw in the monument certain commercial advantages for the town. The project had seemed gently humorous before--it was more than that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it. The bankers discussed the monument with me. We met several times. They proposed an indestructible memorial, to cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without any such help, would advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth-- and draw custom. It would be the only monument on the planet to Adam, and in the matter of interest and impressiveness could never have a rival until somebody should set up a monument to the Milky Way.

People would come from every corner of the globe and stop off to look at it, no tour of the world would be complete that left out Adam's monument. Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways; libraries would be written about the monument, every tourist would kodak it, models of it would be for sale everywhere in the earth, its form would become as familiar as the figure of Napoleon.

One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars, and I think the other one subscribed half as much, but I do not remember with certainty now whether that was the figure or not. We got designs made-- some of them came from Paris.

In the beginning--as a detail of the project when it was yet a joke-- I had framed a humble and beseeching and perfervid petition to Congress begging the government to built the monument, as a testimony of the Great Republic's gratitude to the Father of the Human Race and as a token of her loyalty to him in this dark day of humiliation when his older children were doubting and deserting him. It seemed to me that this petition ought to be presented, now--it would be widely and feelingly abused and ridiculed and cursed, and would advertise our scheme and make our ground-floor stock go off briskly. So I sent it to General Joseph R. Hawley, who was then in the House, and he said he would present it. But he did not do it. I think he explained that when he came to read it he was afraid of it: it was too serious, to gushy, too sentimental--the House might take it for earnest.

We ought to have carried out our monument scheme; we could have managed it without any great difficulty, and Elmira would now be the most celebrated town in the universe.

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Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 – 1910), often characterized as the greatest American humorist. In addition to innumerable stories and essays, he is remembered for his novels, including Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.