"They are beyond me..."

With the exception of the shark, fish have never been given any human attributes. No fish is as contented as a cow, sly as a fox, wise as an elephant or an owl, industrious as a bee, faithful as a turtledove, self-sacrificing as a pelican, or even as lowly as a worm. Aesop, though he came from a maritime culture, has only one talking fish in his hundreds of fables: an undersized pickerel who tries to persuade the fisherman to throw him back. Without any particular personality, it merely argues for its survival…

Lawrence, in a celebrated poem in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, writes: “Fish, oh Fish,/ So little matters!/…To be a fish!// So utterly without misgiving/…/ Loveless and so lively/…/…soundless, and out of contact./ They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger./ Not one touch./ Many suspended together, forever apart,/ Each one alone with the waters…”

The poem takes six pages to say: “They are beyond me, are fishes.”

. . .

A fish swims and eats, is pure movement and beauty. It inhabits a world we can only watch weightlessly, soundlessly, and behind glass. To watch fish is to not be oneself. Even in a magnificent landscape, we inhabit that landscape; it is full of smells and sounds and imagery that connect to countless thoughts, feelings, memories, artworks. Standing under a night sky inevitably leads to thoughts of one’s significance in the universe. But a fish neither reflects nor questions our existence. A fish is and we are: to become engrossed in watching fish is to forget that we are, but without, as mystics experience, becoming part of what we observe. The world is everything that is not the case. A laughing fish would not only be like us, it would care enough to laugh at us, a terrifying thing.

• Eliot Weinberger, Wildlife (link)