The Desert Fish

We’re living in … the absence … of presence itself.

Once there was a species of fish. Like all fish, they lived in the waters. Because the water was always there, they didn’t have the concept of water. At all. The weather? Yes, the felt the character of the water. Always.

But not the water itself.

For this they had no idea, no word, no concept.

Because, for these fish, the water was everything.

Many of you will have heard stories about such fish. The aphorism about a frog that’s in a pot where the water is slowly increasing in temperature… who cannot detect this, and falls into a sort of trance… and is boiled. But what I am talking about here is a property of our awareness, cognition, thought, and behavior. As human beings.

And one of the strangest features of our human experience relates to the problem of things that disappear.

One moment, it’s there, we seem to possess it…

and then… it’s gone.

And I would argue that most of what we think and do… orbits precisely this problem.

What happens when the familiar…

goes away.

But back to these fishes. They form ‘schools’, cohorts. Groups. And one of these groups gets sucked up into some kind of air-vortice. A hurricane, or something like this. Now the fish are literally floating around in the sky. The water is gone. Everything familiar is gone. Chaos ensues, and dominates.

And this, I would argue, is a good image of ‘what is going on’, in general, in our time. Chaos reigns, and ‘damn the torpedoes’, a phrase that might be meaningfully translated as “(x) you and the horse you rode in on.” becomes the slogan of the epoch. Other translations may prove more useful. ‘Your mileage may vary.’

So there are these fish. And the water is missing from their experience, suddenly, terrifyingly. After all, they cannot breathe outside the water.

If you cannot breathe, you will die very rapidly. Seconds. Minutes.

Imagine these fish, floating around, for the first time in the sky.

But the thing I really want you to imagine isn’t this. It’s something else. A problem in human cognition and semantics. A problem of minds, rather than fishes or water. And here’s its silhouette: we make concepts about that which has gone missing from our direct experience. And, sometimes, what’s gone missing is effectively everything.

Like the fish, sucked up into the maelstrom.

It was, for them, and most of their ancestors, impossible that the water could disappear.

( The existence of fishermen. Note this carefully. )

As it is for us.

In fifty ways we cannot yet see.

Because we have no words for it.

But time is out of joint.

And something has gone wrong…

in the between of us and life on Earth.

So the fish, in our story are sucked up into a vortex in the sky. This actually happens, by the way. Actual fish get vacuumed up into whirling wind phenomena. Just in case you’re a materialist.

It’s not pure make-believe.

But sometimes, as most of us know, make believe is more generative of insight that the other varieties of well-adopted nonsense on offer in the common market. Of ideas.

Or, perhaps…

of ways of seeing.

The fish are deposited, in this story, in the Sahara Desert. I chose that dessert for a simple reason: it’s enormous.

And there’s no water there at all. ( There are exceptions, actually, but not for these fish. )

“What fresh Hell is this?” I imagine these fishes as thinking.

Everything is catastrophically hot. Literally.

The one feature of their experience that was constant, literally, water, is gone. This is both unimaginable, and a terrifying insult. Instead, there’s this hot material that’s dry as literally: hell.

This is a bad day for these fish.

We humans bear a striking resemblance to the fish in our story. Because, for thousands of years, various aspects of the water in the between of us, has been first compromised, then occluded, then abstracted, then sold back to us. In endless forms. Radio. Television. Computers. Social Media. Bitcoin.

Abstractions of relational intimacy. All of them.

Representations.

Of something that went away as they arose in our common experience.

The water.

Literally and figuratively.

Now, the fish in our story aren’t merely fish. Nor are they merely a story. Because, in this story, there’s a secret antidote to the problems they’re having in the Sahara Desert.

These fish have the power to make water together.

But they never had to do this before.

The water was always there.

Then, one day… one hour… suddenly it was gone.

No explanation.

No narrative.

Just gone.

Our human circumstances undergo astonishing, inexplicable changes for which we have no language. No concepts. No models. And, most often, this phenomena occurs around features of the between of us. And, of the planet. The Sun. The moon. The living ecologies of Earth. If the water disappears … for we human fishes… we are disinclined to notice this at all. At least, for a few generations. While we attempt to acquire the language and concepts to describe… what went missing.

We feel the loss, but cannot make figures about it in language or thought…

And most of our language is about this. What went missing in our experience.

To refer to something is, in a sense, to be deprived of it. At least in language. In English. We mostly have words for that which we can safely ignore because ‘we know what it is’.

But what about all the features of our experience which we do not know what they are?

What happens when something we have not yet named, changes…

or disappears to our experience?

Covid. ‘Global Warming’. Terrorism. Economic Collapse. Environmental Collapse. Wealth Concentration/Inequality. Immigration. Racial/Gender Politics. War. Pestilence. Greed. Social Media. AI. Opinionation. ( The list is vastly longer than this. )

Propaganda and… programming. Of entire populations of human beings.

The water is disappearing. Rapidly.

We can all sense it, even though we may have different explanations or scapegoats… but many of these are misleading because they are not really about the water.

They’re replacements for something we never suspected could actually disappear.

What is that?

It’s the coherent signals of our most crucial and intimate relationships.

The between of us.

And this is what is compromised by those human technologies and behaviors. What we are and do, together. With and for … each other.

In our story about the fishes, some of them decide that they will die. So, effectively, this group’s perspective is that fish clearly cannot survive in the desert. And they’re right. It’s impossible.

But because this is a story and some degree of make-believe is involved… another group of fish realizes something astonishing. World-shattering. Which is this:

We can make water, together, between us. Even if we are about to die.

And these fishes begin making that water. Together.

The physical water is gone, but the relational water can arise in that void, and keep them alive… together.

If they merely agree.

Sometimes a change comes upon us which requires the unity of persons and lives to resolve. Sometimes, something so fundamental disappears from our common experience, that everything seems suspended in chaos — having been replaced by screens, dollars, images and numbers.

And this has happened to our people many times over thousands of lifetimes.

But when the water goes away, we must become it. Together.

With and for each other and the history and future of life on our world.

And life in our hearts.

We must learn to make the water that was once everywhere around us…

within us, and across the intervals that separate, divide, confuse…

and enslave us.

None of us expected that something so fundamental could disappear; but it’s absence isn’t a mystery. Over time, the human inclination to exchange representations for relationships was eating away at our minds and planet. Turning ecologies into factories. Ripping away the organs of a living world in order to stack cash in banks. In the 1950’s, the waters between us could survive this. In 2023, they are evaporating so rapidly that in a single year, half of what was left can disappear.

Something is wrong with time itself. But we have neither words nor concepts about such a quandary.

So we find ourselves ‘suspended’. In a relational void, an ecological void. The malware our ‘societies’ are running must either be ended… or it will proceed to end our species and planet.

But even in a crisis this dire, we can learn and remember… how to make and even become… together… all that has ‘gone missing’ in the greatest crime in human history.

The waters between us.

On which our lives and minds… depend.

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.

As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.

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