A man rose to his feet. He was in his mid-fifties, we guessed, with good teeth and an aura of culture lightly worn. “Let me begin at the beginning,” he said. He had been through a period of professional burn-out, arriving every day at his office exhausted. “Try to find some way to brighten up the place,” he told his secretary, handing her a blank check. The Orange Fish appeared the next day. Its effect had been instantaneous: on himself, his staff, and also on his clients. It was as though a bright banner had been raised. Orange, after all, was the color of celebration, and it is the act of celebration which has been crowded out of contemporary life.

The next speaker was cheered the moment he stood. He had, we discovered, traveled all the way from Japan, from the city of Kobe-making our little journey across the city seem trivial. As you can imagine, his accent was somewhat harsh and halting, but I believe we understood something of what he said. In the small house where he lives, he has hung The Orange Fish in the traditional tokonoma alcove, just above the black lacquered slab of wood on which rests a bowl of white flowers. The contrast between the sharp orange of the fish’s scales and the unearthly whiteness of the flowers’ petals reminds him daily of the contradictions that abound in the industrialized world. At this no one clapped louder than myself.

A fish is devoid of irony, someone else contributed in a brisk, cozy voice, and is therefore a reminder of our lost innocence, of the era which predated double meanings and trial balloons. But, at the same time, a fish is more and also less than its bodily weight.

A slim, dark-haired woman, hardly more than a girl, spoke for several minutes about the universality of fish. How three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered with water, and in this water leap fish by the millions. There are people in this world, she said, who have never seen a sheep or a cow, but there is no one who is not acquainted with the organic shape of the fish.

“We begin our life in water,” came a hoarse and boozey squawk from the back row, “and we yearn all our days to return to our natural element. In water we are free to move without effort, to be most truly ourselves.”

“The interior life of the fish is unknowable,” said the next speaker, who was Lois-Ann. “She swims continuously, and is as mute, as voiceless as a dahlia. She speaks at the level of gesture, in circling patterns revived and repeated. The purpose of her eye is to decode and rearrange the wordless world.”

“The orange fish,” said a voice which turned out to be my own, “will never grow old.”