Stopping momentarily, I found myself thinking, “Mmmm a piece of fish might be nice”. So, off to the fish shop for lunch it was.
The fish shop window display is alluring, yet I don’t normally go in. But when I do, I wonder why I don’t visit more often. Waiting to be served, I am struck by the beauty and strangeness of the fish and sea creatures on offer on the beds of ice: the oyster that somehow generates its own home, rocky on the outside, suggestively smooth and polished within. For a moment, I contemplate the destiny of the sole, one of whose eyes has to migrate round its head on the path to maturity and the roughy whose huge, toothy mouth and puny body are repellent to look at but whose flesh is delicious when roasted and drizzled with olive oil.
They seem so alien. But – in a universe composed almost entirely of gas and rock circulating in the endless nothingness of space – we are their cousins, with whom we briefly cohabit the surface zones of Earth. In the recent history of the cosmos we shared common ancestors, whose progeny became diversely the octopus, the sea bream or evolved gradually into solicitors, artists, university lecturers, and graphic designers.
Imagine spending this thing called life embodied in a lobster, encountering the world through its tiny peppercorn eyes, which offer a field of vision much wider but less focused than ours. There would have been the momentous day one dug a burrow beneath a basalt rock in the soft mud of the sea floor in Moreton Bay. Then there would have been the drama of shedding our exoskeleton. Finally, there was the catastrophic curiosity that two days ago tempted us into a lobster pot.
The fish shop isn’t simply a place to pick up calamari rings or some cod steaks, it is also a place of re-enchantment. We suffer a fatally easy tendency to become jaded. Things that are familiar lose their power to entice the imagination. Then, looking into the eye of a mullet, or contemplating the internal architecture of a flathead fin, one is reconnected with the elegant and bizarre inventiveness of nature. We’ve been too hasty, we’ve overlooked almost everything. The world is full of fascination, there is so much to be explored. And we have been led to this renewed appetite by the head of a fish.
Each item has been gathered from the chambers of the sea, distant rivers, or prized from submerged rocks. The speckled trout were reared in a peculiar farm in Tasmania. The mackerel was caught by a trawler somewhere out amongst the islands in the bay. The reef fish was hauled onto the wooden pier somewhere and speeded in a refrigerated van down the highway with a brief halt in some warehouse on the other side of the city. And here they all are cleansed, gutted, chilled, artfully arranged.
Nature has been civilized and made attractive by ice, metal, glass, tiles, slabs of marble and by constant cold water and the sharpest knives. The fish shop hints at an ideal that we would like perhaps to pursue more broadly: the sense that trouble has been rinsed away, and the desirable good bit will be delivered into your life neatly wrapped in delicately glazed white paper.
Visiting the fish shop leads me to sketch little plans of moral reform on the lovely white paper down by the water: in another, slightly better, life, one would go there all the time. We’d become adept at preparing certain dishes. Being here, one makes fleeting, initial contact with a latent self who poaches salmon, tosses a lobster salad, drizzles olive oil and whose friends come round for a delightful meal. There is a potential future version of oneself – who starts to come to life in the fish shop – who lives on light, nutritious fishy meals and whose brain is bathed in their sympathetic briny fluids. Life as a whole will remain radically imperfect, one knows, but if one took slightly more care around eating, even if lots of bits of one’s life were bad, if one could come in here and get some sole wrapped up by the man in the blue apron and go home, and take the art of living more seriously, then one would be closer to being the person one should always have been.
The fish-shop pleasure originates in very small points of departure – the smell of the salt and water, the frigid air wafting from the beds of ice, the silvery skin of an Atlantic Salmon – and grows into a large idea: respect for civilizations that have more time for things that are simultaneously delightful and wholesome.
But then, back into the workshop, that piece of white wrapper with my scrawling’s on it with a couple of oily smudges, remains just a possibility…
