Friday, May 28, 2010

"LIVE FISH"


















I was driving along the interstate Thursday afternoon and I wound up stuck behind a big, white tanker truck painted with the words “LIVE FISH.” Traffic was heavy and I had a lot of time to wonder why someone felt the need to warn me that there was a tank full of live fish on the road. Should I fear the fish? Do they represent a hazard of some kind? Or maybe the supposed threat runs the other way and someone’s giving me a heads up so I don’t inadvertently transform the live fish to dead ones--though unless I steered my dinky car under the wheels of the mammoth truck, I’m not sure how I’d do that. And if I did tie it up with the truck, there would surely be more important casualties than a few hundred fish. At least one, or so I like to think.

All these questions aside, I marvel at the power of a simple phrase to conjure sense memories and associations. Even while I was obsessing over the intended message of “LIVE FISH,” I was smelling the scent of the lake where we used to go fishing when I was little, feeling the way the heat rose off the limestone bank and the way the handle of the pole dug into my palm--and, of course, shuddering slightly at the sensation of grabbing a doomed fish as it squirmed on the hook.

Actually, I was never an enthusiastic angler at all, and hardly ever fished when we went to the lake. I much preferred joining the fish in the water to hauling them out. It would make more sense if “LIVE FISH” made me think of Barry the pet goldfish who lived two weeks, or the koi in my grandmother’s garden pond, or the minnows that darted around my ankles when I went wading in the creek. But no, “LIVE FISH” made me think--fondly, nostalgically--of killing fish. Which I’m pretty sure is not what the author had in mind.


Big Fishes Eat Little Fishes, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1556

4 comments:

Tommasina said...

Are you sure there wasn't a comma, and perhaps even an exclamation point, missing? "LIVE, FISH!" would have produced a far different post.

BitterGrace said...

Ha! A commenter over at Facebook also felt that the fish author could use a take-charge editor. Where's Gordon Lish when you need him?

La Bonne Vivante said...

what a wild image! Where do you find such cool things? And you're right; fish invoke the most accurate scent memories, for better or worse.

BitterGrace said...

If there's one great thing about the Web, it's the awesomely wild, weird and gorgeous art you can see at the click of a mouse. I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I spend hours just cruising around finding this stuff...