He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy's aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.
It's amazing how, when you read the same book over, you sometimes have a completely different experience. For example, I don't remember being struck by the sadness of this passage the last time I encountered it. Yet, just now, I reread it, and I think it's one of the saddest paragraphs ever written.
Loss can be small or big. You can grieve over the fact that your aunt didn't send you a birthday card, and that your sister died almost seven months ago in the hospital. Small and big. A bunch of little losses, over an extended period of time, can build up like the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam. Unless there are spillways to relieve the immense water pressure, it will crack or collapse the dam. Lake Mead will overflow. (I think I got the mechanical and geographic details of that description correct. If not, I will certainly here from one of my faithful disciples.)
I am still struggling with my blue funk. Writer Maggie Nelson says this about the color blue:
It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approach as the swell of a wave - a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.
I had a therapy appointment today, and I talked about my current state of blueness. Don't worry. I'm not about to fill my pockets with rocks and pull a Virginia Woolf. Yet, every time I feel like this, I am fascinated by how I reach this emotional/psychological state. Whether it's an asteroid splashing down in the Pacific, causing a catastrophic tsunami in my life, or just another drop from an eternally leaking faucet causing my bathtub to overflow. I guess that's the writer's curiosity in me. Or maybe it's just human curiosity.
Regardless, my therapist gave me some helpful suggestions about getting more sleep and eating healthy foods. Read more. Watch less TV. It seems that it's a bad thing to obsessively watch the same movie or read the same book, over and over, when you're in a blue state. Who knew? And I'm going to continue my practice of finding a single blessing to focus on each day.
Today's blessing: an outdoor concert at the library by a poet friend of mine. Music that lifted my spirits a great deal. Being around "shiny, happy people laughing," as the old R. E. M. song goes. (Fun fact: Michael Stipe, the lead singer from R. E. M. was best friends with River Phoenix.)
Saint Marty is now going to try not to watch a depressing movie before he goes to bed.
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