From Granta #61, "Sea Burial" by James Hamilton-Paterson, p. 13
It is well known in these parts that fish choose not to speak, in order
to risk nothing worse at men's hands. Being wrenched from the depths
into thin and bitter light to drown slowly in air is bad, but not bad
enough to merit speech. Suffering put into words merely takes up an
additional burden of pathos. Even being laid alive on coals may induce
them to writhe but to utter only occasional squeaks of steam.
Hereabouts, people say fish are wise not to give tongue and express a
reasonable protest at such treatment. If they did, they would lose the
last refuge of dignity which stoicism confers: the right to die
unobserved by the faces poised over them, fanning and chatting and
waiting for their supper. To enter a mild reproach would excite their
captors' amazement and curiosity, so that henceforth the fishermen would
bring their catches to the point of speech in delighted competition to
see whose was the wittiest, whose the most touching. Sensibly, the fish
remain silent, lest men either patronize them or redouble their torture.
Nor do they mourn either themselves or their fellows. By such means, it
is said, they keep their spirits intact.
op.cit., p. 18
On the morning wind we seem to hear the creak of a million treadmills,
the squeak of rowing machines, the trilling and drilling of an endless
aerobics class. It is the dawn chorus of anxiety. A kind of insurance is
being enacted, that private/public investment in keeping fit and being
seen to be keeping fit. Apart from exacting its own toll in humourless
tedium, it turns ill health into a personal failure, so that death is
seen as just deserts for not having taken the trouble to be sufficiently
alive. The body as machine, the unread user's manual, the culpable lack
of maintenance: they all form a nexus of irresponsibility and downfall.
Someone fails to turn up at the gym as usual in their Lycra leotard.
After a few days their name escapes us. It is understood there was
always something more they might have done: another few yards' jogging a
day, many fewer beers and cigarettes, a further notch of health reached
in order to carry on being fit indefinitely. (What was it we failed to
grasp even as we hung punitively from wall bars? Does the mind rot atop
its splendid torso?)
In what pathetic fragments we move, believing ourselves whole! The
precious 'I' disappears for long stretches each day and entirely
vanishes during sleep. In one of our registers something never forgets
that in default of the ocean deeps, a refrigerator door is always
yawning for us as the prelude to spade or flames. Here, at least, the
old mythologies no longer work as they did. It is not possible to
envisage a private survival. There can be no magic left in prophecies of
paradise. That all life was held to have begun in a garden and-if we are
good will likewise end in one convinces hardly anyone. Soon, two-thirds
of the world's people will be town-dwellers, to whom rural metaphors are
no longer instinctive. Since most people who imagine life after death
think of their ordinary life transfigured, a townie would find the myth
of the celestial city more plausible than that of a garden paradise.
There is pathos in the way religions of the book have become immovably
beached on the littorals of far away and long ago.
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