CHILEAN SEA BASS IS REALLY JUST PATAGONIAN TOOTHFISH
Charles Freeland
Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish Charles Freeland
Differentia Press Santa Maria, CA
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Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish Charles Freeland Copyright © 2010 All Rights Reserved. Published by Differentia Press Book Design by Felino A. Soriano Cover Art, courtesy of Duane Locke Except for the sole purpose for use in reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, without the written permission from the publisher or author. Differentia Press Santa Maria, CA 93458
Differentia Press Poetic Collections of the │Experimental Spectrum│ differentiapress.com
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Portions of this work first appeared in Otoliths and Counterexample Poetics.
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For Lisa Mahle-Grisez
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Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish
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The sounds of afternoon traffic are sufficient to get him in the mood to touch her. Even the sound of nothing happening at all will suffice. Sound itself, then, is the problem. If only we could harness it the way we harness mules when it’s time to bring the sugarcane to market. We’d know where to begin. We’d have the quarry laid out on a table. And have merely, then, to pick it apart -- turn it over and stick in the pins -- to mark out where one portion begins. And another one ends. Where the names of things suffice. And where they become a burden. Is this mean-spirited? Sure, but when have we accepted anything less? How often are the pantomimes transcended by juveniles asking all the wrong questions? Getting up from their seats and circulating about the room? They know something we don’t. The value of the atmosphere. The word play that gets the wisdom teeth aching thirty years
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and more after they’ve been removed. They serve as concrete stand-ins for the larger concept and as such ought to be commended. Ought to be given a day on the calendar. But there are always objections. And when we list these on a piece of paper, it takes twenty-five minutes just to get through those that start with the letter V. The drums suggest something we haven’t been able to formulate. The sound drops from the clouds like locusts, and seizes up. It becomes something you point at with your fingers. Something you taste on the tongue. The sun follows us through the fields, along the shortcut that occurs to us spontaneously, as if it were planted in our minds by something divine. Something with an agenda. The snow is high on all sides, towering above us in close approximation of actual topographical
realities.
Hillocks
and
other
deformations of the otherwise gentle earth. It is as if
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we have found the other part of the torn parchment. The key to the pronunciation of all terms. The explanation for the wavy lines and other additions obviously drawn on afterward by shaky hands. By people frightened of what they were doing. Maybe this means we won’t be hearing the trumpet come morning. Or maybe it just means we have protectors in high places but they don’t wish to make our acquaintance. They would prefer to be left alone. Which is our response precisely. We don’t care if there is some purported connection. We have no more use of portraits adorning the walls of our houses than we do of shoes with no heels on them. Or bread that has grown moldy because it was left on the kitchen counter, outside its plastic container, and every time the people in the house pass it, they assume someone else is responsible for repackaging the bread and putting it away. If only
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because someone else was responsible for removing it from the pantry and its package to begin with. Still, our minds are nothing if not pliable and our loved ones know just the right ploys. They learned them over the years spent in our company. The way we know not to jump up and down on the grate in the sidewalk simply by examining the definition of the word “grate�. And combining that with our inherent understanding of the way gravity works. Or at least the way it is supposed to work when you read about it in a magazine. The same, say, where we discover a mountain of oysters has appeared unexpectedly on the coast of some faraway country. As if placed there by someone who wishes to frighten the inhabitants without using any words. We suspect the image is supposed to say something anyway, pronounce it with the same audacity one finds in the cascading waterfall. Or the bar codes on
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unwrapped packages of liver. Several species of oyster, in fact, make up this mountain and the residents can have their pick. They can sort them by height or patterns on the fabric laid out on the ground so as to keep the shells from getting muddy. They can listen to someone lecture from seven o’clock in the evening until such time as everyone has stopped listening. Which usually amounts to ten minutes. Though occasionally someone arrives without a dossier, without so much as a piercing on her lip, and delivers the sort of paean to learning and excavation, to baring one’s shanks, that those in the audience have often dreamed about after consuming too much red wine. Once, I remember there was a heckler on the beams that run the length of the auditorium, and he wore a fool’s cap and kept ringing the bells at the end with the motion of his head. But this didn’t seem entirely intentional or
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even out of place. Just one of those things that happen because something else happened before it. And a chain was set up. In fact, the heckler seemed to think it was this chain itself that needed to be overhauled. Needed to disappear from the scene the way the mountain of oysters all but disappears from view when the sun sets directly behind it. In the sea. And the Babylonian worldview is replaced by any number of others less concerned with water. And how it comes to be both above and below us all at the same time. Falling, for instance, as rain from cracks in the glass dome overhead. Where the stars and the sun are expected to parade themselves from one end to the other every twelve hours or so. Though, if they were to miss a shift, who really would notice? Who would call out to their gods in lamentation? Probably we need to spend more time ourselves boning up on where everything should be
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at any given moment. And what we are supposed to do once we realize the eyeglasses on the end of our nose, say, are the wrong prescription. They make everything seem unnaturally vivid, both warm and cold. With the boundary between these states clearly visible. It slithers about like a snake. Or a belly dancer who herself has studied the locomotion of serpents. Has written a children’s book about it, in fact, and hopes some day to find an illustrator. Someone who will know how to capture complex movement in a very few brushstrokes. Without, of course, having to be told how to do it. Or that the loans will come due on the very day she is visiting the pyramids. We don’t know, of course, of the existence of the pyramids until after we visit, because they are mostly underground. It’s said you can see the very tip of one next to a rusted out silo, if you squint just right and if the sunlight is falling
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at a beneficial angle. If not, you can look at the drawings rendered by those who have seen something there and have even studied what it means. That they create that meaning themselves from line to line, that they interpret without ever realizing they do so, is something we’ll leave for the next round of discussion. In the meantime, enjoy your punch. Down the road, another group of attractive people is loitering around the back entrance to the one restaurant in town where you’re still allowed to smoke cigars. It’s unclear if they are expecting a handout or if there is an impromptu protest taking place. How odd that we can’t make up our minds about what we are seeing even as we are seeing it, about what constitutes the actual when only our sense organs are involved. These organs seem to have been composed of other, more primitive organs that themselves arose from still
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more primitive structures the function of which we can no longer determine. Maybe they had no function at all but were simply accumulations of matter that began to look like something vital the way clouds tend to look like human beings engaged in various activities even when there is no one present to observe them (the clouds, I mean, and not the people, though the distinction is not as important as it seems). Do they give a prize for brevity? What does it look like? I prefer the sand dunes, the tree trunks caught between them, their tops sheared off by whatever force shapes the landscape. Or laughs at it. Whatever force pretends we are of interest when in fact we only register when there is something amiss. When it feels threatened by our dirty words. We snake our way through valleys, trying to seem as inconspicuous as it is possible to be with ammunition belts on both
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shoulders and our volumes of Walpole sticking out of our vests. Please don’t inform me of any alternatives. I’ve been growing an inch or more every year since they started enriching the oats, started
cataloguing
the
frequency
of
the
thunderstorms as if they hoped to find there some pattern like that the geese follow when they are over the Upper Platte. Or that creature termed leviathan, cause of social sterility because it is identified with Egypt and Babylon. Just as if these places weren’t already desirable in themselves. Destinations one discovers while trolling the brochures at the truck stop. Before the evening meal of pancakes and ice water settles and you are off again, searching for whatever it is that makes us want to continue living even when it is more reasonable just to give in. To sink under the weight of our exoskeletons like diatoms. This is a common enough occurrence to
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have been given a special designation by those who study such phenomena. And so feel an almost irresistible need to make them up. To find the telling illustration in every street sign and garbage can they pass on their way to work. And every wink and sneeze and obscene gesture aimed their way once they get there. I take the envelope to where Eulalie is lounging on a deck chair, the sun tangled up in the trusses of her hair, bits of it at any rate, struggling to get free. She takes in elements as if they were junk food, redistributes them to the weaker parts of her skin. Wouldn’t we like to know how multiplication really works? How it takes one thing and turns it into something else right before our very eyes? As if the trick consisted in manipulating the wiring in our heads rather than simply recognizing the fundamental properties of the world. Eulalie has been raised to recite these, to
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list them like so many state capitals. It is a bravura performance, to be sure, and every time I try to goad her into performing, she puts out her hand instead. Reaches for those places on my person most likely to reciprocate. To find in contact a momentary resolution to the problem of evil. Though, to be honest, it’s not a problem I have been forced to face directly. Other than the occasional gastric discomfort. Or a feeling like my tongue is stuck in slow motion. How do we discern the truly essential
ingredients?
Are
we
supposed
to
understand that the big questions haven’t even occurred to us yet, despite all that time we spent in our twenties trying to impress the women who carry a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason around with them like a purse? Well, maybe there weren’t that many, but certainly Eulalie knows why I keep showing up here, my mouth full of cynical re-
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formulations of the things we hear on TV. She gets out of the chair, straightens the necklace that hangs from her neck, a sharp and intricate thing that always strikes me as potentially deadly. The kind of thing that people join secret organizations just to acquire and decode. And who knows, maybe Eulalie has another life I know nothing about. One where the sun is not the thing that settles on her skin like oil. But a human being perfectly capable of holding a rational conversation. Or, by turns, losing its mind entirely. Shouting incoherent oaths and accusations at people who are just trying to get to work. Temperatures range at that time of day with the attempts at logic. They begin low and stay that way until someone can answer five questions in a row. Without assistance. And with barely any food in his pocket. We wish to remain as impartial as possible, but there are always alliances cropping up
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just when we had begun to assume that no one was actually talking to anyone else. They get their feelings hurt and pout like sea bass. But this is just the first in a series of reversals noted for their almost supernatural character and timing. Uncanny things of the sort that induced Theophrastus once, in penning his portrait of the superstitious person, to describe a man coming across a snake. And calling on the god Sabazius if the serpent is red. While electing to erect a temple to it instead at the side of the road if the reptile turns out to be the “sacred snake�. Though no one is sure exactly which species was given that moniker. Probably we ought to liberate ourselves from all backsliding in our research and just deem everything sacred in one way or another. But there are rules against looking too closely at what might otherwise scare you to death. These rules were formulated for the
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protection of our psyches. But we weren’t consulted ahead of time and so resent them. How else can you explain the sarcasm? The parakeets? And the signs fashioned hastily with crayons and other forms of contaminant scraped up at the last minute when we were slogging our way through bogs just to arrive on time? When we were singing ballads composed in the dead ball era. Jaunty tunes with Honus Wagner as the hero, commentary on his penchant for raising chickens. At the expense of everything else. Who doesn’t love a myth like this that raises itself up from the mire by freeing first its elbows and then insisting that whoever discovers it must put his name to paper? Must sign his name in bold letters and take whatever consequences may then arrive. Four or five gorgeous women on the upper deck of a bus. Their parasols opening and closing in unison, like clams. Imagine those in the windows
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looking down on the scene from their rarely used studios, checking their own pulses, dabbing at their foreheads with rags smelling faintly of turpentine. I’m sure Eulalie knows what the soft part of the hand feels like when it is reaching for you beneath the covers. When the rain is beating against the window near the foot of the bed. And all you can remember about the previous day is the aroma of the stroganoff. The ingredients culled from the deck of the ship when nobody was looking. There are frogs with horns on the tops of their heads. If you push on these with a certain insistent pressure, taking care to injure neither yourself nor the amphibian, something remarkable starts to happen. If we were in the movies, it would be accompanied by the sound of a single piano. And a longish address that would start the process all over again. This suggests we don’t know why there is anything
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at the end of our fingertips. Why the world sounds sometimes like it was constructed with hammers. And left to fend for itself in a neighborhood where the streetlights are so distant and predictable, they might as well not be streetlights at all, but salmon. Or memos with no real information in them. Just empty pages passed from one hand to the next until something starts to rub off. This is why Eulalie rarely leaves the house without a bottle of syrup in her coat pocket. A miniature blackberry brand they give you for free sometimes at the restaurant. And you don’t know if you are supposed to swallow it right off. Or parcel out the contents over a matter of months. It couldn’t hurt to be frugal. Who knows? The injury to your neck might heal. And then everyone will know that you are not to be trifled with. They will see the potential repercussions ahead of time. Looming there like a stranger in the
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window. And they will ask themselves what have I done to deserve this? Why are there any choices at all? It took a while to see the joke in the same light we did. To understand what exactly was at stake. Squid discovered you can’t sing off-key and expect people to acknowledge your presence in the street the following day. Try telling that to the man who dresses as well as the rest. But isn’t allowed into the primary circle. He too probably has limbs, and even some organs, made in a factory somewhere. And his ideas are no more preposterous, ultimately, than are theirs. But it’s a matter of pride with him, really. This perpetual keeping to the side. It’s the same sort of thing that invites you to chase women when you know the result ahead of time. When they are so fleet of foot and phenomenologically-minded, not a single compliment from the store of such you keep written down and stacked in a trunk in the basement
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is apt to stop them in their tracks. Not an ice cream bar. Not even a telegraph set with the cobwebs knocked off for good measure. Eulalie puts her lipstick on in the morning, harkens back to her own days at the easel. A fire to be known, if not internationally, then at least in the neighborhood. She’d hike the twenty minutes each way to the liquor store. And pray all the while that someone would stick his head out a window of one of the apartments above the street. And ask her something that had been bothering him for weeks. She would know the answer immediately, without really having to think. The kind of thing that earns one grudging admiration. That causes people to fear you without their being able to express that fear in words. But, of course, no one lived in those apartments. And so no one accosted her from above. Some people waited until she was far enough away
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on the sidewalk to seem like one of those common mirages caused by convection. By the air rising in wraith-like patterns from off the surface of the earth. Even the beach has about it a feeling of grim business. Of turning one thing into another against its will. We find ourselves confronted with evidence of every conceivable shape and texture. Dimes and dried bits of seaweed scattered about almost too haphazardly. As if someone has arranged them with deception in mind. Wishes us to believe the hand of someone intelligent is wholly absent. To get at something like the truth, Squid suggests they swim out beyond the entrance to the bay. Look for something slightly untamed, a stretch where the current begins to address you directly in a foreign tongue. And the harder you try to avoid that conversation, the more insistent it becomes.
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