POEM: STASIS

Stasis

That feeling—body feeling,

body sense.

And memories made more real

because they lay deep,

entwined with it.

But now they were rising, unexpected,

disturbing,

like blue-hued coelacanth

rising from depths seldom visited,

seldom observed.

But felt.

That ancient fish, so used to being,

it became unused to living

in the short time given to uncover its ways.

And when it reaches the surface,

how surprised it is to find itself netted and decked;

the hot sun streaming unfiltered

over its body,

salt drying along its scales,

and to see the silly gaped mouths

of the fishermen,

to feel the vibrations of their voices

and to wonder in its slow, primordial way
what it was they hadn't known, all along.

                                                                                        

I CALLED A POEM THAT I HAD WRITTEN ABOUT IN AN EARLIER POST an "odd duck” of a poem. This is certainly an 'odd fish' of one. I recall reading about a coelacanth being caught off the coast of Indonesia in 1998, though I read the story some years after that. It was a big deal at the time because it was the first recorded live catch of the deep water fish in that region of the Southern Oceans. Until the 1930s, the coelacanth was assumed to have been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs, some seventy million years ago. In 1938, a museum curator happened upon a specimen that a local fishing trawler had brought to the small port town of East London, north east of Capetown, South Africa. Checking her records, she noted the similarities between the fish and ancient fossil remains. After some to-and-fro with the nearby Rhodes University, the remains were authoritatively identified as the prehistoric fish. Since then, there have been other discoveries of the rare fish, including the Indonesian discovery, as well as more recent sightings.

     I started writing about this strange creature that existed for millions of years, presumably relatively unchanged, and what happened when it met up with ‘modernity’. That was the initial impetus of the poem—to capture things from its perspective. I use the coelacanth (pronounced SEE-la-kanth) as a metaphor for trapped or submerged emotions or memories that come to the surface in our lives, sometimes unexpectedly, and how we experience them.

Like the coelacanth, we’re surprised to find ourselves “decked” and exposed to the view of others, when emotions that are raw become evident too quickly, and our 'stasis' has been disrupted. It’s an interesting coincidence that I’ve used the words “body feeling/body sense” in the poem, because I’ve just been writing a journal page on this blog about depression and “mindfulness” training and there’s a resonance between the poem and some aspects of the psychological health program as described in the book I’m reviewing.

Be that as it may, my sense is that the fish experiences or feels the deep-seated emotions—some generated no doubt from memories—but without others around to “observe” it, it can’t understand them or articulate them. At least I think, that’s the general thrust of what I was getting at—that we need others in our lives in order to understand ourselves. True or not, I don’t know. (Do hermits or hilltop contemplatives understand themselves? Or are they just listening to the sounds reverberating inside their own ‘echo-chambers’? Good question.) 

     On the deck, the coelacanth does not seem afraid, though it must soon die; instead it is interested in the new sensations of the sun warming its flesh, of salt drying on its scales, and of the alien beings that are the fishermen, who stare in wonder at the strange catch in their net. Its final thoughts are about them, and what they seem not to understand. Whether the coelacanth, in the end, has acquired self-knowledge or understanding, or some new awareness, I’m not sure. This “primordial” fish may only see how unaware the humans are aboard the fishing vessel. Just what the humans are unaware of, and why they are unaware, are very good questions. The fish seems to have ancient knowledge, but again, whether it understands this knowledge or can articulate it, is another question. And, of course, just what this knowledge is exactly, is yet another question. And after millions of years, how does the coelacanth pass on its knowledge? Genetically? Perhaps the fish is like an appendix, at the dead-end of evolution, and maybe the knowledge it passes along, is not to other coelacanths, but to creatures like us.  
      Questionsquestionsquestions! Perhaps the things we learn—for good or ill—become 'buried' or 'lost in the depths', so to speak, but remain part of us, and still act to teach us, somehow. Well, with the average life span of most species of around a million years or so, humans (if we don't completely cock-it up) will have some time yet to pass along what we learn to our descendants, and perhaps to other creatures who share this world with us or who will come after us.

     As I said, this is an odd fish of a poem. Well, this is a catch and release program I've got going here, folks. So haul it in or toss it back!

[I suspect one of the reasons coelacanth have existed for so long is that they apparently taste gawd-awful!]

Cheers, Jake