One year in April, as a week of heavy rains finally yielded to some uncertain sunlight, I went out for a look at my pond. A little to the west of our house is a big berm that was shoved up by Caterpillars at some point, long before we owned this place. Now it dams in our acre or so of water, twelve feet deep at the deepest. At one end the berm creases into a little overflow channel, usually dry, that lets water trickle through the grass and into my wooded ravine, on its way to a bigger creek and eventually a river. Today the spillway channel was running briskly, climbing out of its narrow banks on its way down the slope. As I got there, I heard a sudden thrashing in the tall grass. Snake! I thought, or raccoon, groundhog, injured bird.
In fact it was none of these, but three of my wife’s koi, big orange and calico fish we had put into the pond two years before, as mere fingerlings then. I had expected them to die, out-competed by rougher, wilder catfish and bass and bluegill. Instead the gaudy immigrants had prospered, growing till the smallest of them was a good two feet long. And now here they were, roaming off over the lawn, in hardly enough water to keep their gills wet. At my approach, though, they turned around and thrashed back upslope, through the grass and weeds, back into the spillway and the safety of the pond. Crazy fish! If they had made it another five feet the way they were headed, they would have ended up stranded and dead.
What could have made them do it? In fact it’s not hard to see. Blind flight in flood season may not be reasonable fish behavior, exactly; but it makes good evolutionary sense, as in the end everything must. What’s the alternative, after all? Stay in your one-acre prison forever, filling it full of offspring maybe, but never sending your DNA out into the big world beyond. Your only chance to do that comes when drenching rains lift the pond, when your sensors instruct you that the water at one end has begun to trickle out.
Once that happens, why should you care that your chances of survival are one in ten thousand? You’re dead anyway in a few years. But that little outlet channel, so heart-stoppingly narrow, menaced on both sides by the terrifying dry lawn, just might connect to something: a stream, a river, another small pond at the least. There’s a chance you can migrate to a whole new world, a fishy Canaan where your descendants will outnumber the stars. The ditch is your one shot at immortality, and you take it.
Of course the fish could not explain their own behavior. What they know is just the fierce urgency and particularity of their desires: how after days of pattering rain overhead, the feathery brush of a new current fills them with an unanswerable urge to escape, this way, right now, with no idea what comes next. Poor fish, to be so mastered by a purpose not exactly their own, so brutally usurped, their big floppy bodies entirely hostage to the larger cause. And lucky fish, to be so caught up, so ecstatic, certain, heedless, at one with something larger than themselves. It’s possible to envy their single-mindedness, as Robert Lowell does in “Waking Early Sunday Morning”
O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.
But then, my koi did thrash and slither back to safety in the end. Even for them, it seems, there is still the problem of selfhood, of the poor single creature that wants to go on being what it is, never mind the grand species-purpose that throbs in and through it. Just like us, the individual fish must have fits of ambivalence as the mating urge takes hold, swamping the little boat of personality in its tsunami of desire.
Never an angler myself, I have heard several fishermen, including one licensed anesthesiologist, claim that “fish can’t feel pain.” Pretty clearly this is just a rationalization, aimed at portraying the fish as perfectly onboard with our human project of killing and eating them. The illusion lasts only until you have them up on the shore, thrashing around in self-evident agony. Then, even as you start to think about breading and frying them, you infallibly see that they want personal survival as much as you do, pretty much. Of course they feel pain.
They also seem to feel something like friendship. Those three on the slope that day were the same — identifiable by their distinctive coloring — that I always see hanging out together, sometimes joined by a smaller fourth that is a little darker and less mottled. The same is true of the grass carp I buy from the state every so often, licensed pond-cleaners that have been genetically engineered for maximum herbivoracity. The big lazy browsers always congregate in groups of three to six. In summer they like to rise to the surface around noon, and with the sun at that angle they are easy to see from the picture window in our kitchen up above. Often they line up and promenade all along the near shore, as if it were some kind of official event for them. Is their schooling a form of friendship, or just survival behavior? Is there even a difference? No one can say, but they certainly look like old friends as they float together in the sunny top-waters.
But passion is passion, and trumps mere friendship in both fish and humans. In The Selfish Gene, the biologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins explains how evolution can be seen as a drama in which individual organisms, fit or unfit, hardly matter: they are mere “vehicles” that DNA molecules, the real actors in the drama, build in order to secure their own continuance. With each generation these machines — the individual bodies of animals — get torn apart and rebuilt, their components freakishly recombined. But the genes themselves, meticulously transcribed and replicated, drive straight on through the mayhem, unchanged, effectively immortal. In this unsettling view of things, we are all essentially like our own gametes: mere seed packets of DNA, with no purpose but to deliver the essential chemicals to their fateful rendezvous.
Hence Eros, as everyone notices, has a crazed, thanatotic aspect, racing after life and death at once. This melancholy paradox seems to inhere in the basic math of genetics. Nature’s basic betting strategy — prize the genotype, despise the phenotype — has worked so often in the past that now all sexually reproducing organisms are cursed and blessed with it. Fin or fur, wings or legs, unconscious protocols worked out over the ages decree that you must wager your individual self, your little temporary body, against the slight but glorious prospect of Abrahamic returns.
If they were sentient, my fish would understand just where Dawkins is coming from. They know what it is to be mere vehicles, paying almost any price to move their DNA on down the hill. And I bet they would appreciate much of our high and low cultures. For what theme is more familiar, in all our songs and stories, than the assault of life-wrecking Eros against the merely personal?
My fish would get it. They would hum along appreciatively with songs like “Leader of the Pack,” “Teen Angel,” and “Last Kiss.” They would stand in line for tickets to West Side Story. They would sympathize with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. They would side uncritically with the hot-to-trot lover in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” as I did at age sixteen, overlooking broad hints that his girlfriend has good reasons for demurring. They would be uber fans of a lovely short poem by James Wright, “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,” that perfectly catches the glamor and pathos of self-transcending rut:
Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had the chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know. . . .
I used to read this poem with my Children’s Literature classes, remarking that the best poetry could find the beauty in anything, even roadkill. And by the way (I would add), notice that this is a perfect picture of the way teenagers really do think: if you don’t move, you’re dead; if that impulse you feel isn’t acted out instantly and to the letter, you will by-God explode. Once or twice I even ventured that this trademark recklessness of teens makes a kind of biological sense. For males and even females, it looks like an atavism that has worked well over the long run of evolution: a good strategy for propelling your genes into the next generation. You could argue that irresponsibility is actually a kind of higher responsibility, a debt paid to the species. Every cap-reversed, eyebrow-pierced, jeans-drooping wannabe gangbanger knows it is the risk-takers who are oftenest lucky.
It’s all there in the hormones, I wanted to say, that whole plunge into the drama and desperation of adolescence, after the relative peace and good sense of late childhood. Blame Nature — the basic chemistry, the daunting numbers — for the way life suddenly looks like an urgent competition you probably won’t win, the way crazy moods and impulses ambush you, the way that sometimes, in spite of everything, the darkling plain lights up with flashes of joy and uncanny beauty. It seems that a whole romantic sensibility, mystic and non-rational, is built into our basic breeding plan.
But none of this is quite right. What my fish and Wright’s frogs wouldn’t understand so well is the great fuss we humans make over mate selection and pair bonding, two refinements they mostly do without. The drama of mate selection that so absorbs mammals and birds might look a little creepy to my wife’s koi. If your procreative master plan features dumping large quantities of DNA in the shallows and decamping, then the long desperate struggle to find a promising site substitutes entirely for the rituals and ordeals that, in species like swans and wolves and our own, aim at matching the best DNA to the best other DNA, and then at arranging efficient child care. Fish don’t dream of the ideal mate, but of the ideal spot, since once they find it they will, ah, take all comers. If you will never know your mate, much less team up with her for an arduous course of child-rearing, there’s no need to be choosy. Like my maples, clogging my gutters with tassels every spring and helicopter seeds in the fall, fish can substitute quantity for quality. Don’t worry about making what is called “a good match” in Jane Austen novels: just get enough genetic material out there, and some of it will find its Darcy.
So fish write no sonnets and send no Valentine’s candy. They don’t go to bars where they fight pointless fights and dance dances that are, if you think about it, not just celebrations of life but advertisements for one’s DNA. (Here’s what this body design can do, Bub. Now what you got?) They don’t have slumber parties where some of them, in curlers around a kettle of popcorn, endlessly analyze the characters of others who are not present, because in fishworld the personality or even identity of one’s mate doesn’t matter.
Probably our koi wouldn’t like Romeo and Juliet after all. The way it fetishizes the pair bond, droning on about exclusivity and fidelity and merely individual beauty and virtue, might prove a desperate bore. When, they might demand, do we get to the real drama, the death and orgasm and more death? To the mortal journey ending, for the lucky few, with the fusion of DNA into all-new combinations? They might prefer a simple but rousing tale of a praying mantis or black widow spider: true romantics, those, who wager everything on a single cast, completely transcending selfhood with their first and last orgasms. By comparison to such true-blue lovers, all the rest of us look a little cheap: mere players, keeping an eye out for our long-term egotistical advantage even when we most claim to be mastered by passion, or when we actually are. That traditional mantra of the literary swain — “Sugar pie, honey bunch / Cain’t help myself” — does fine if you are a bug or a fish. But for humans, blessed and burdened with our long life spans and complex social connections, surrender to the moment is never the end of the story. There is always an and then, when you wake up in the motel with your slacks tossed over a misplaced desk chair, wondering what last night had to do with who you really are. You are back in the pond after all and will have to make the best of it somehow.
