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“A Blog a Day, a Book a Month and Poetry on the Side”
January 5th, 2010
Aquariums are great.
They might not be so great if you are a fish, I suppose. They say that fish are so mindless and have such a poor memory that every time they circle the fishbowl, they think it is the first time. They see the same fake castle and the same plastic diver again and again and they think it’s a new one each time. I’m not quite sure I buy that. First off, I don’t know how they tested it.
But I’m guessing that, as long as they have food to eat and freedom to move, albeit in a constricted sense, they don’t feel a deep, ancestral longing for the vast, non-glass bordered ocean.
I am not a sentimental animal rights type. I like animals. I appreciate them and think they shouldn’t be treated cruelly, but I eat them and wear the processed skin of their dead bodies to hold my pants up and keep my feet from getting dirty. And I have a fish tank. Aquarium is a nicer word, but it isn’t a really big one. It’s bigger than a fish bowl, though, and rectangular. So, it’s a fish tank.
I got one because I felt the classroom needed a little bit more color and I thought it would make a good conversation piece. It didn’t really. The more advanced students could easily say “You really should change the water in that” and most of the complete beginners, even, could say “water bad!” but it never led to probing conversations about the lives of fish and fantasies of living in a kingdom under the sea where everyone can swim elegantly through the water as easily and confidently as birds fly through the air.
We don’t all percieve things in the same way. I see an aquatic eco-system as something to look at for inspiration. It is a bit like lines in the sandbox in a Zen monastery, or the Tarot cards, or the laundry tumbling around in the washing machine, or the waves rolling in at the beach. It is always the same, but every time you look, you see something different. The world is as steady as a rock, it is our minds that keep changing.
Most people, however, I expect, look at an aquarium and think “Hmm…a fish tank. There is the fake castle. There is the plastic diver. I have seen this many times before.”
This proves two things.
- People are smarter than fish.
- Not by very much.
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