s i s y p h u s . f i s h i n g

i saw a man fishing at the lake last sunday. as i was watching, he got a fairly big fish. he released it from the hook and let it go back to the lake at once. i realized that his way of fishing was just symbolic. 'fishing for fishing's sake'! he was not a serious fisherman, but a compassionate one!

but the young fish had a traumatic experience for a couple of minutes, which had made an imprint in its brain. a near death experience! rest of its life was going to be affected by it. its arousal mechanism was burned out by the extreme nature of this trauma. the threshold was crossed and the pleasure center had been affected by this. now on, it had to re-enact the same scenario to feel any pleasure again. seeds of attraction towards the ‘bad and the reckless’ behavior were planted. thus the possibility of one more aspiring 'misfit fish' was established.

for the man this was a time to get away from his household duties and sit in quietude with his beer and contemplate the whole morning. once in a while to break the silence, a fish will eat the bait for him to act upon and get into a moment of mild excitement. again he goes back to the stillness of the lake and the silence of the morning.

anything man does has a futility embedded in it. as death is real and life seems to be very short, humans do a lot of things to make some sense out of this absurdity; to be relevant. in the myth of sisyphus, as a punishment for his bad deeds, sisyphus is forced to roll a block of stone against a steep hill, which tumbles back down when he reaches the top. then the whole process starts again, lasting all eternity. his punishment was depicted on many Greek vases. he is represented as a naked man, or wearing a fur over his shoulders, pushing a boulder. interestingly enough, there is this exact legend in kerala(south india) folklore, the 'crazy naranath' does the same thing not as a curse, but as a daily routine. he laughs his hearts off as the stone tumbles down the hill! he does the same over again. here it is a funny thing he does to show the absurdity of all human endeavors. in another story, when the goddess kali appeared before naranath and asked for a wish, he said that if she was very particular about granting one, she could transfer the elephantitis on his left leg to the right one! dispassion of an absolutist!

photo: lake ray roberts / texas/ sebastian©2007