The world needs more fables! There are so many goofy things happening in
the world today that a simple fable could have prevented, if only someone had
read one or told them to that person as a child or if they had read or sought
them out themselves! On our long drive
back home, Robin and I read the biography A.
Lincoln aloud to each other to keep awake, and learned that the self-taught
Lincoln memorized (among many other things) all of Aesop’s Fables, in which are crystallized (as those of you who have
read them will know) most of the social and political truths of humankind. Arnold Lobel, the great writer of children’s
books (Frog and Toad, and Mouse Tails to name but two) has
mastered the art of the modern fable, as in his masterpiece, Fables, from which the great fables of
“The Kangaroo’s Parents” and “The Crab and the Lobster” derive. Perhaps that is what I should be doing, rather
than trying to publish long novels, as the publishing world seems utterly
uninterested in long novels. The world
needs short, pithy things like the poems of Billy Collins or Tomas Transtromer,
my two current favorites. So here I will
offer you the fable of the Mambu and the Tuna, which perfectly encapsulates my
recent experience.
I am a rather unusual person. Yes, yes, I know: everyone
thinks she or he is unusual, but really, I rarely find another human being
who has studied at the Intercollegiate Center of Classical Studies in Rome,
missed being shot by terrorists in Beirut before the age of four, been an
exchange student to Japan, is trying to make a living as a writer and can’t
even get someone to consider her work, has been spat on by counter-racists and is
a classicist/geographer who thinks donkeys are really cool. I am sure they are out there somewhere, mind
you – kind of like the mambu.
“Mambu” is the tidy Japanese term
for the Ocean Sunfish, the most God-awful big fish you have ever seen. Ah!
You recognize it! (And there is a
photo with this blog, from a Monterey Aquarium postcard). The Ocean Sunfish has many names and
nick-names: “All-Head” being one of
them, in German, and “Millwheel” being another, in Latin (mola). They can get up to a
metric ton in weight, but have no real structure behind their gills except for
a sort of ruffle-and-flourish of cartilage, and their pair of fins stick
straight up and down, and yet must row them successfully in all
directions. They are the sole members of
their own genus (Mola mola) – and family, too, as far as I’ve learned –
and so it is hard to make up rules about them or any sorts of
generalization. They are tasty all over,
apparently, so parasites have colonized them extensively, requiring much
grooming by other fish glad of a parasite meal, and they like to bask flat on
the top of the ocean for birds to help them out, likewise, giving them their
name…but they also look rather like a sunken light-source, being almost round.
We became intrigued with these
creatures after Robin brought home another
postcard, from a seafood restaurant near Stanford called (inventively) The
Fish Market, which showed a photograph from the early 1900’s of a family of
fishermen, posing beside an ENORMOUS Sunfish they had (probably accidentally)
caught. The thing must have been ten
feet long/wide! So we commenced on some
wiki-research, and learned the above and more.
Naturally, when the family wanted to visit the Monterey Aquarium in
December, and we learned that they are one of the very few aquaria to own such
a creature, we made a bee-line for it, as soon as we paid our zillion-dollar
entry fee.
“Sorry” – we were told by the helpful
Information lady, when we asked “Where is the Ocean Sunfish?” – “the Sunfish
has been removed from the Open Sea tank, for re-training.” “Retraining???” “Yes, it is much slower than
the other fish, so we train each fish to come to the top of the tank to be fed
with a special signal, so that the others won’t crowd it out, and when it went
up to be fed recently, two Yellowfin Tunas crashed into it, and it was so upset
that it went to the bottom of the tank and refused to come up again, so we put
it in its own tank for awhile, and will train it to respond to a new signal –
it won’t come to the other signal any more.”
Who knew? I mean WHO KNEW that funny-looking slow
clunker-fish could have their feelings hurt by the guys driving the
Maseratis? Who knew that a fish could die of embarrassment?
Right away, I knew that fish was
for me! I have so often embarrassed
myself with my impulsive, unusual, bizarre notions, not suited to the world of
tunas, that I am subject to fits of bottom-sitting. Just this past week, faced with another week
of not knowing whether the editor who promised back in August to take a look at
my first-born novel “sometime in September, at the earliest,” will accept it
and thus validate efforts of long years and what I hope will someday be “what I
do,” should I live long enough and stop volunteering to do helpful things for
everyone else, as well as “what I have done,” namely the second novel in the
series and three follow-up novellas, not to mention the first two finished
chapters of the Big Historical Novel (at last)… I went to the bottom of my tank
and just got gloomy.
Maybe I should just write another
novel about what life was like in high
school or a screenplay for a blockbuster movie where a really buff guy runs around and escapes from/kills a bunch of other
buff guys in many new and unpleasant ways… maybe, in other words, I should
transform myself into a tuna!
I have just designed myself an
unemployed-writer “business” card that I like very much, using a beautiful pair
of kanji (Japanese-style Chinese
characters) meaning “riverbank” and the Latin word Riparia meaning “things to do with riverbanks,” as I do love places
with rivers running through them, and like to sit on the bank and consider the
passing parade, as it were, but was tempted this week to change it to the image
of a Mambu. If the kanji
lettering for mambu (the Japanese
only use their katakana to write it,
in a friendly, familiar but not graphically satisfying way, and the Chinese
characters expressing Ocean Sunfish
are many and fiendishly difficult) had been uncomplicated or attractive, I
would have used them. Ah, but nothing
about the mambu is uncomplicated or
attractive, so it doesn’t translate well into graphic design… Okay, I will come
back up to the top of the tank if someone promises to keep those tunas off my
back!
