Mambu and the Tuna

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!

Fiat origo

"What's in a place? Or a piazza, for that matter? What takes place there? Auto da fe, a soccer game, the hosing down of leftover lettuce leaves after a long day of selling vegetables in the sun?" ...the first four sentences of a novel no agent will touch, sitting quietly in my flashdrive beside its nearly-completed sister-novel, the products of six month's (let's face it, delightful) work.

No more papers to grade, no more telling other people how to improve their writing or what they should know about the regions of the world, or what the terror threat of the future might be: it is time to put down the chalk, white-board marker and PowerPoint and see what can be done with fifty-three years of life, forty-six or -seven of it "writing on the side."

Like Lindsay Davis, I intended to "run away to write," and have begun to do it: there is a book of saint's stories already published, an online essay, a chapter in a scholarly collection. There will be essays from time abroad, there are these two orphaned novels, and there will be the Great UnAmerican Novel, an historical thing from the days of Herodes Attikos.

But only because someone is taking a chance on me, and "keeping" me. Writers starve, otherwise. I will cling to the coattails of academe and go where another's research takes him, something like a human microbe, but a microbe armed with a keen interest in place and home-place, in cosmopolis: a cultural geographer-classicist-microbe; something like a fighting naturalist?

In January, there will be four weeks in Montparnasse to chronicle, and perhaps a drive from the top to the bottom of France, along the Via Agrippa, the results of which should appear in that Great UnAmerican Novel. February will begin three months back in Sendai, Japan: long enough to catch the best of sakura-sakura-sakura, the cherry blossoms appearing last of all in this colder end of Honshu. Perhaps there will be a pondering over the character and nature of Date Masamune, the ambiguously fascinating founder of Sendai.

There have been weeks and months spent in Italy: in Rome, the hometown of my grimy soul, in Tuscany, in Veneto, in Campania... Something of all that may show up here.

And perhaps here, someone may read about these things, and wonder about the spaces around us and the places we make of them for ourselves, and for one another.