An abundance of life forms
It was dark and blue. Deep blue. The whole of the marine world was gathered in this place. Not only the fish and sea mammals—seals, beluga whales, dolphins—but also crabs, shellfish and tiny microscopic organisms. Soshin’s remains would become part of the waters in which such creatures swam. The monk wanted to bear witness to the plenitude of Soshin’s life after death.
He was in the aquarium at Boat Harbour, sitting in the semi-dark of the great display rooms. Yugen now had a plan— visit the main offshore islands then decide. He felt more focused with a plan. The monk had slipped out of the familiar monastery routine that organised his days. No gongs announcing when to arise, eat, bathe, meditate. A plan contained him; was a track to determine his movements.
All around him was movement, great sweeping swims, f lickerings, mouths opening and closing. Tails, gills, f lippers, eyes. The weedy sea dragon’s gossamer-thin gills f luttered like rapid eye movements. Occasionally they blinked. The balletic moon jellyfish—Aurelia aurita, Yugen read on the signage—were translucent little lampshades. Blue jellyfish, Catostylus sp., pulsing champignons.
Was one of those old women in the sheds Soshin’s sea wife, or his sister? Yugen could have asked, but it was unlikely they would have known who he was talking about. Soshin was his monastery name. Yugen didn’t know who he had been before. Monks sometimes talked about their former lives but Soshin never did. He had been at the monastery for so long that everyone assumed he had always been there.
The monk observed his mind raking through early memories of Soshin, looking for clues. He knew that he should not give energy to who Soshin had been in the past. More important for Soshin now was the process of dissolving.
Baikal seals, Phoca sibirica, swam gracefully up and down, looking at the people on the other side of the glass, ghostly in the semi-darkness.
Sea otters lay on their backs, short arms resting on their chests as if they were snoozing. There was a pod of small but elegant Commerson’s dolphins, mainly white bodies, with black heads, fins and tail. Three of them in the tank, two swimming together. Yugen thought he saw a black squiggly protrusion, a penis perhaps.
Not only were the great oceans represented here, an Olympic Games of fish, but also freshwater species—archerfish, perch, clown loach, silver-flecked piranha, arapaimas the size of canoes. Pig-nose turtles, their f lippers moving up and down like birds’ wings.
The creatures seemed to be surviving in this replicated environment, artificially lit, artificially filtered, artificially everything. Each detail had to be carefully considered, the replication so complete that it provided the perfect conditions the creatures would never have in the wild. Instead of unpredictability there was routine in these safe crowded pastures. The exhibits didn’t eat each other; they no longer had to stay alert and wary. Mindful.
Every so often in this replicated Amazon it started raining on the fish. There were simulated birdcalls, the big-throated voice of the toucan, lilting twittery small bird sounds thronging. The rain stopped momentarily then started again. A rainbow appeared on the backdrop, and then it too faded. In this Amazon were huge lobsters so red and robust that they too looked simulated, even though they were real.
There was spirit in everything, every tree, animal, plant, rock. In the water, earth, the sky. A waterfall had a spirit. Rain. Did this replicated rain have less spirit than rain that fell naturally? It was still the falling of water from above, the moist drip of leaves. Everything in the aquarium was animate. Replications took on the spirit of the real.
Yugen left the rich dark Amazon and came to a room of open-sea fish—long-spine porcupine fish, red sea bream, crescent sweetlips, painted sweetlips, red stingray, sharpbeak terapon, greater amberjack, cobia, banded houndshark, star snapper, longtooth groper.
Spiny lobster. How perfectly well its mottled grey, browns and ochres matched the gravelly seabed.
In another room, in a simulation of wharves and piers, barnacle-encrusted posts, slimy seaweed and an old anchor, were gold-eye rockfish, dark-banded rockfish, cloudy catshark, blotchy swell shark. These fish did not look well. They were listless, lying on top of each other, some vertical, heads towards the surface.
The monk was the only human here with them, the crowds drawn to the more colourful displays. He sat on the bench in the middle of the room and gathered his compassion, let the fish swim in and out of his eyes, in and out of his breathing. He thought of the death that would inevitably come to them as it would to him, as it had already come to Soshin.
The individual fish that swam in the waters, the individual people who passed through these rooms, all were transient. If Yugen stayed here long enough he would see each of these fishes die. Everything was movement and change, but some changes were so slow—the birth and death of planets, the formation of rocks, the wearing down of mountains and the filling of valleys—that they were not perceptible in an individual lifetime. Even as he sat here Yugen knew that cells of his body were dying, some to be replaced, others not. Even as he sat here species were dying. How many were as bounteous in the wild ocean as they in the aquarium?
Giant Pacific octopus, fringed blenny, joyner stingfish, brocade perch, codling, snowy rockfish, longspine snipefish, blueberry roughy, orange roughy. Bastard halibut, Schlegel’s red bass, bar-tailed f lathead, striped jewfish, armourhead, slipper lobster, red crayfish, humpbacked shovel-nose lobster, striated hermit crab.
Bluefin tuna, great white shark, Patagonian toothfish, Murray cod, green turtle, humpback whale.