Voice of the fish, p.2
Voice of the Fish, page 2
I became increasingly uneasy in photographs. At fifteen, I shrank from cameras. Even in those few years between three and seven, my relationship to the world altered. After weeks of staring at the photograph of myself with the shark, I realised it was here, in eyes lit with electricity, here, at seven years old, that I already knew the danger of being seen, that my own body could be mobilised against me.
Looking at this photograph on the bus, in launderettes, in quiet drifts of empty time, I wondered if I might be able to write of my oldest obsessions: water, aquatic life. If I might let them glide, softly sweep and tide—an undercurrent to clear moments, to images hurled upwards, foaming across rocks. To feel at disjoint from one’s body. To not recognise it as one’s own. The photograph of myself at seven pulsed this book alive. Propelled me to write of the gulf between myself and my body—strange chasm that still snakes with life.
“In several country seats … fish eat out of the hand, but … at Helorus, a fortress of Sicily not far from Syracuse, and likewise in the spring of Jupiter of Labraynda, the eels even wear ear-rings.” —Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia
A religious shrine and pilgrimage site for the Karians, Labraynda sits on a mountainside overlooking modern-day Milas. A natural spring rushes from beneath a rock seemingly cleft in two by a lightning bolt—the shrine’s focal point and reason for being singled out as a place of worship.
In the 1940s, Swedish archaeologists excavated Labraynda. They unearthed a temple to Zeus, three andirons or male club buildings, two stoas, two Roman baths, priests’ lodgings, a nymphaeum, a stadium, and a potential treasury—all enclosed, at the site’s periphery, by tombs and sepulchres. Set apart from the banqueting halls and lodgings, archaeologists discovered what appears to be the fountain and pool of Pliny the Elder’s bejewelled eels. Adorned with gold earrings and necklaces, these fish were kept as oracular aids and used to decipher messages from the gods. And, so, as animals of hoof and hide were sacrificed at the annual five-day feast to Zeus, their bones and fat burnt as offerings; as men wrestled and ran in the stadium, pitting earthbound flesh against earthbound flesh; as servants butchered and cooked carcasses for the feast, the eels, just paces from this thick pulse of blood and fat and fur and mud, of gulped fetid air, the eels circled—untouched, uninterrupted—their watery world so much closer to the ether of the gods.
Even centuries later, as the Swedish archaeologists examined the far reaches of the site, one location remained unobtainable: the spring. The site’s origin point and likely location of its oldest artefacts, the spring proved impossible to excavate. Each time archaeologists dug around it, water rose up through the soil, rushed, flooded the trenches. I sometimes wonder whether the archaeologists ever saw the water whorl, the mud writhe, whether the land ever moved once more with glistening muscular life.
“Men tell of the moray belonging to Crassus the Roman, which had been adorned with earrings and small necklaces set with jewels, just like some lovely maiden; and when Crassus called it, it would recognise his voice and come swimming up, and whatever he offered it, it would eagerly and promptly take and eat. Now when this fish died Crassus, so I am told, actually mourned for it and buried it. And on one occasion when Domitius said to him ‘You fool, mourning for a dead moray!’ Crassus took him up with these words: ‘I mourned for a moray, but you never mourned for the three wives you buried.’” —Claudius Aelian, On the Nature of Animals
RECURRING DREAM: My body, sternum sawn in two.
Chest clamps, green linen, anemones—red, purple, ringed deep blue.
A chest of soft membranes—squirming, shining—recoils from the hum of strip lights.
A surgeon transfers the anemones to a steel dish.
That they not disturb the pike.
That they close my body.
That the light breaks, the room plunged beneath water—rush of a knifefish. Shock, white voltage.
That I sink, body into bull kelp, mud, into tides.
That my body tide.
As a child, I made lists of fishes. All kinds of lists: weights, speeds, historical facts. Some of those lists enumerated species that change sex as a matter of course: Maturing into an adult male, the ribbon eel takes on a bluish tint. But, when an adult male ribbon eel reaches full size, it changes gender, turning from blue-black to searing yellow.
Noting these aquatic bodies helped dissolve a world I found too hard, too strict in how it required me to live within it. These lists were never about me equating being trans to being less human. They were more an attempt to denaturalise the ways humans have bound up the parameters of our own species: the “normal,” the “natural,” the “scientifically justifiable,” the “real.” Being human has been, and always will be, filtered through essentialisms, dogma, ideologies, will always be caught between humanity’s capacity to love and hate.
CLOWN FISH: Born male, all clown fish live and die within a single gender, all except the most dominant male, who, reaching this position in the shoal, transitions to female.
It is a privilege of power and normativity—white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied—to proclaim oneself an animal. Scientifically speaking, we are exactly that, but its declaration toes a dangerous line, science having so often reserved the animalistic for those who fall outside of a society’s dominant ideologies. Slavery, segregation, genocide, slow dismembering by law and court: humanity and animality have always existed along fraught, fragile lines.
The majority’s humanity is never in doubt. And yet: “the majority”—slipperiest body of all. A gamble, on rank oil.
PARROTFISH: Highest in the social order of parrotfish is the adult “super-male,” a role fulfilled solely by the most dominant female of a mating group. Following the death of a “super-male,” the dominant female changes sex, the parrotfish now larger, markedly more vibrant than typical males.
My body a mass of fishes—to dredge these truths from my lungs, watch them contort in someone else’s mouth. I simply relented, plunged them back down. For years, I never wrote of my ease around water, of seeing myself, night after night: my body caught in a dark tide, rippling—caudal, dorsal, clouding sand, fronded kelp. I couldn’t find a way to honestly render this body—my experience or understanding of it—the fins, the gills, muzzle, hide. And yet, seeing how regularly sex cannot be reduced to a simple binary in other species—more rite of passage than destination, a threshold through which one may flicker back and fore—I feel so much more human. As if it were proof, reassurance from some disappeared god. As if Neptune roused himself, sent shimmering answer from lightless depth.
TURRITOPSIS DOHRNII: In the face of starvation, physical threat, or bodily impairment, the Turritopsis dohrnii species of jellyfish can revert to an embryonic state and reproduce asexually. During this process, the jellyfish’s cells transform entirely: muscle becomes nerve or sperm or egg; biological time reverses; and as for the body—supposedly singular thing—it shatters, multiplying.
When did the gods retire? Zeus, Hades, Neptune—where did they dive to no longer hear the growling earth?
I find solace in the world, in water and aquatic bodies—clams, Greenland sharks, bowheaded whales, sponges—lifespans of centuries, sometimes millennia. What must they witness during their slow pulse through the world? These entities that endure through innumerable lives. That guard, balance, keep rhythm amidst this frenetic slur of human life. Maybe this is the nearest we come to the divine?
I have wished to not be human, to slip from this world, turn saline—the rush of an ocean tide. For making sense of oneself and the world, reconciling to fear and love and hate, to a consistent lack of simplicity—this crux of being alive exhausts me.
But then I often feel my life is not my own, this body not my own—that this is all given to make something of, to fulfil, to repay—whom? A god? The gods? I do not know. Who does? Who on Earth truly understands what we are here for, what great drought and flood, what raining of plagues and reaching up, what earthquake and fire we are here to witness, to just, maybe, survive?
That Day the Haddock
It is said that the markings on either side of the haddock’s head were left by the finger and thumb of Saint Peter, who, holding the fish’s mouth agape, reached in and extracted a four-drachma coin from its gullet. That day, the haddock paid the temple tax of two men, which is to say, four days’ wages.
In ancient Greece, burial customs dictated that a single coin be placed in the mouth of the deceased. Commonly an obol or danake coin, each possessed a value equivalent to one-sixth of a drachma—the market price of a sea urchin in the city of Athens. The coin, paid to Kharon, ferryman to Hades, ensured safe passage across the rivers Acheron and Styx.
In May of the year 1927, an Icelandic fisherman broke the world record when he hauled a three-foot-nine-inch haddock from the sea. Describing the specimen in his General Features in the Biology of the Haddock (Gadus aeglefinus L.) in Icelandic Waters, Harold Thompson notes that the fish, thirteen to fourteen years in age, weighed an exceptional thirty-two pounds gutted. As the sale index of haddock hovered at half an Icelandic króna per pound, the fish held a market value of sixteen Icelandic króna. But its gullet—sliced across by a curved filleting knife—gaped coinless.
That day, unrivalled in size, the haddock paid but half the temple tax of one man, which is to say, seven crossings of the rivers Acheron and Styx, or, if one prefers, seven sea urchins smashed—slick, gelatinous, saline—from their casement of spines.
My Mother Photographs Me in a Bath of Dead Squid
My mother always wanted me to look dead. Even when a car slammed my body against concrete, skull ricocheting off the kerbstone. When I woke to paramedics—blood loss, suspected spinal, head blocks. When the ambulance doors swung open as we took a roundabout, a paramedic grasping the stretcher, equipment hurtling out the back. As I was rushed into the emergency ward, my mother photographed me strapped to the spinal board, blood matting my hair, drenching my once-white Le Coq windbreaker. “No, don’t wake up, look dead, Lars, look more dead.”
*
“Open your eyes.”
A mantle blurred into view. I sat up, gasped. The bathwater—littered with dead squid—veered, slapped soft bodies against ceramic. I blinked. “I can’t open my eyes underwater. It stings.”
“But I need you to look dead.”
I untangled a tentacle from the plug chain. The water carried it—slack, filmy—past my torso.
“Lars, darling, the photos won’t look right if you don’t look dead.”
“I’m cold.”
“I can’t add hot water. It’ll affect the squid. Look, get under there, hold your breath, open your eyes. Come on, I haven’t much film. And I can’t waste this, I spent good money at that fishmonger’s.”
A fine art teacher, my mother led a yearly trip to Aberystwyth, Wales. During one of these trips, in the communal bathroom of a seafront B&B that hadn’t seen an update since the fifties, my mother began a photography project that would span decades of my life. I have modelled in baths, glass cases, on beds, beaches, in forests. My body covered in dead fish, offal, dried flowers, ashes. My body cast, photographed, filmed, watched by gallery audience. My mother’s instructions always: Look dead, Lars, look more dead.
I peered over the rim of the jaundiced tub at the rotten cork linoleum. My mother adjusted her weight, checked the light balance on her Nikon. A rancid odour lapped up from the dead squid. I could barely detect the cloying mix of bleach and antiseptic that announced the bathroom’s cracked mirror and lacklustre tiling. I looked down at my legs, at the squid drifting against my shins. Look dead, Lars, look more dead. I inhaled, slipped below the water. Cold swallowed, blunted. I heard the muffled click of my mother photographing me, the squid. I waited one last moment, opened my eyes.
*
In the emergency ward, the nurse came in and saw my mother taking photos, telling me to open my eyes, close them again, look vacant, look dead. Dead, dead, dead.
“Do you want this woman escorted out?”
I lay on a stretcher in head blocks. The ceiling pulsed: “No, just the phone, get her to put the phone away.”
“Madam—the phone.”
“But I’m her mother.”
Always that: I’m her mother. In supermarket aisles, in the car, on the street: I shat you out my body like a melon, I can do what the fuck I want. And even when a doctor poked at the glass and grit in my face, pushing so roughly that I breathed sharp. When another doctor saw this and lost his shit, medics rushing to pull the first “doctor” away from my body. When the actual physician explained that a psych patient sometimes stole a white coat and walked A&E pretending to be staff, even then, how I groaned, began to laugh, how my mother and I laughed. Look more dead, Lars. Dead. Just look dead.
*
For her funeral, my mother wants a black carriage drawn by black horses to carry her coffin down the high street. She wants a jazz band to follow in her wake, play “When the Saints Go Marching In” under the banner: “Music to Die For.”
When I queried the cost and feasibility of the Victorian ceremony, my mother replied, “It is my dying wish.” (She is not dying.) “You must do it or live with the guilt, because I won’t be forgiving anyone. I’ll be dead.”
My mother recently said that she will have to record herself performing her own service, because no one else will do it with sufficient passion.
On this point, I am inclined to agree.
*
For the remainder of our time in Aberystwyth, no one used the bathroom my mother co-opted for the photo shoot. The stench of dead squid had anyone gagging barely two minutes into brushing their teeth. For the entire week, three floors of guests filed round the stairwell, waiting for a ten-minute spot in the establishment’s only other bathroom. Waiting there, towel flopped over her forearm, my mother decided to move the project outside of the B&B. The next three days, she photographed me in rock pools, lying face down on the sand. In one negative, molluscs line my back. In another, a severed salmon head rests beside my own.
*
In Sophie Calle’s Voir la mer / See the Sea, 2011, inhabitants of Istanbul who have never beheld an ocean are driven to the shores of the Black Sea. Calle films them from behind as they unmask their eyes to take in the shoreline. When they are ready, they turn around to face the camera: Eyes charged with the sight of wild water. Bodies seen and seeing. Tangled dynamic of artistic means and subject.
*
My mother drank hard, laughed hard, spoke hard. She spent money she didn’t have, said things she didn’t mean. She didn’t cook, swore by TV dinners, and most certainly did not think everything I did was wonderful. She preferred the phrase “What are you tit arsing around at?” to “How was your day, darling?” When I brought home school projects or “bits of twonky shite” as she referred to them, she did not pretend they deserved a place on any living room shelf, but simply took them off my hands, exclaiming, “God, what am I meant to do with this gobshite?” Quickly followed by: “I mean, darling, it’s lovely,” all uttered in the single movement of project to pedal bin.
My mother never wanted a homemade gift or a hand-drawn card: “Don’t be cheap, have the decency to buy me something that’s not an eyesore.”
She is not a conventionally “good” mother. But then, put like that, it sounds like a slow death sentence anyhow.
*
England, midwinter 2005. An unheated art studio. Modelling for a recumbent full-body plaster cast.
In the abandoned toilet block, snow obscured the awning window. My breath misted the mirror. A pipe dripped. The tube light—its plastic casement pitted with dead moths—flickered. The weather could not have been worse for a plaster cast. I snapped a swim cap over my hair and ears. I undressed. My feet settled upon cold, gritty tiling. Days before Christmas, the building stood empty, cavernous. I retrieved a tub of Vaseline from my bag and applied a layer to my face, arms, underarms, stomach, and groin. I smeared the Vaseline over my eyebrows and eyelashes, held on to the sink, blinked.
Prior to a plaster cast, bodily hair must be greased with petroleum jelly. The difficulty lies in never applying so much as to obscure the patterning of the skin—pores, scars, individual hairs—as this gives a high-quality finish and realism to the cast. But too little and the removal of the cast could turn into a slow, full-body wax.
The technician knocked on the toilet block door. “You ready?”
“Just the clingfilm to go.”
“I’ll wait, let me know if you need help.”
As a child, I always wore legging shorts for modesty when being cast. But as the fabric absorbs the liquid plaster, the shorts bind to the cast, meaning one has to be cut out of them. Unlike cotton underwear or shorts, clingfilm repels liquid plaster, preventing the removal of pubic hair or the irritation of sensitive skin.
Pulling a roll of Glad Wrap from my bag, I stretched it over my genitals and taped it in place. I opened the door. “Ready to party.”
*
Between the ages of four and nineteen, I modelled for:
Thirteen full-body casts: ten plaster, two Sellotape, one tissue.
Three performance pieces: bed, wake, autopsy table.
Four short films: one in which I sleep with eight others on a wall of scaffolding; a second that shows me surfacing from a bath of black water, gasping on repeat; another whereby I walk in wax shoes until they shatter underfoot; and another still in which I wear paper clothing as buckets of water are dumped over me.
