“NOTHING IS AS BEAUTIFUL AS INVOLUNTARY RESEMBLANCE”

Oxana Tennisracket

The fish’s unlimited limits make visible the cosmos’s abstract machinery. The fish is a positive example of the ontology of affirmation, the very model for becoming, bringing it from the bottom to the apex of the philosophical universe.

All schools are simultaneously collectives and individual beings. One fish makes itself a line in the water. All these lines fit together in an abstract, ever-changing puzzle. A single fish line is made by following other lines, and it is by fitting with others that fish’s worlds intersect transparently. Fishes belong to schools as we do to herds or packs.

Fish become imperceptible in water like cats in grass. The abstract marks on a fish’s skin resemble nothing but organized disorganization, and yet they are perfectly in sync with their universe of veined rocks, rippled sand, and plant fronds.

Each particle of matter contains a multitude, a garden, a sea full of life. Therefore, there is nowhere uncultivated, not on land nor in the sea. There is nothing dead; there is nowhere wild. No being is unworthy or lesser.

They inhabit another world that swirls alongside ours but is separated by a thin sheath, which is everything. We die when we plunge into their world. They die when they are pulled into ours. We look in this mirror and are terrified, so we choose to twist our fear into hatred.

The earth and seas warm because of an accumulation of gases that raise the temperature of the lower atmosphere. Heat is the transfer of internal kinetic energy; the total energy within a system remains constant. So, what we call heating is actually movement. Particles moving more and more rapidly. The accumulation of gases corresponds to our extraction of earth matter: oil, phosphorous, and precious metals. Our work extracts materials that heat up our world. This is not the work whales and fish do.

If everything on Earth were in harmony, we would not need self-consciousness. We could inhabit the land, and they the water. It is only because the system is untenable that our received wisdom must be torn apart. I would argue that our culture has condemned the sea because sea creatures resist the logic of accumulation. If we were happy and healthy in our living conditions, in our essence, we would not turn on those in the sea. Life would be as transparent as seawater.

However, we workers are not content. We feel our essence only because it is being destroyed. We are like fish who have realized we live in water only because that substance has been filled with poisons.

The uneasiness of a single creature in the world is a problem not only for that creature but also for the world itself, insofar as it has become unbearable. We with paws and claws scoff at the notion of a fish-led revolution. Yet we do not know if we can lead one either. We must trace a line we do not know the shape of; we must become this unknown line within our bodies.