I listened to this audio while writing this post
I am in the fish section of my local grocery. Food Bazaar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Under the fluorescent lights I pull a plastic bag from the roll and look at the selection of fillets.
It is a large seafood section, a U-shaped aisle with wet tile floors and those industrial black rubber kitchen mats that remind me of wearing a chef coat and chef hat and chopping 50 pounds of onions. The entrance of the section is next to piles of cabbage and sweet potatoes. It begins with the fish fillets on ice – salmon, basa, tuna steaks, the most accessible choices, and then piles of shrimp, but as you walk deeper things get more unusual.
Live brown crabs about as big as my open hand, dazed, filling up a cardboard box. Some are moving slightly, which is the only way I can tell that they aren’t all dead. The box is open and filled to the brim, but none of the crabs attempt to climb out. Where would they go anyway, so far from their home?
Further back are the whole fish – red snapper, squid, octopus, even some large catfish with their smooth pale skin and fleshy whiskers. Further still is the place where customers don’t go, the invisible line behind which the man weighs the fish and prints the barcode stickers. There is no physical barrier to stop you from walking back there, but you wouldn’t. Behind him is a space that is sparse and factory-like. More men in rubber aprons and rubber boots work on the fish, but I can’t see their workstation. I can’t see the guts and blood and fish scales – there is a thin wall at chest height that blocks my view, but I can see their faces as they work.
A woman walks up and calls back into their workspace, asking for a container. They smile and greet her – they know her, and they give her a large metal bowl. She begins to fill it from a pile of large salmon heads on ice. She puts 8 salmon heads in the bowl. I wonder what she will make with them, and I almost ask her, but then she is gone.
A little boy with an oversized winter coat and hat with a pom pom on top studies the fish. For him, the fish are right at eye level, and they stare back at him.
I think back – when was the last time I caught a fish? I must have been a kid. I’m not much of a fisherman but I like the idea of it in a romanticized kind of way. Out on the water, back to nature, just harvesting from the sea like my fisherman ancestors. Before the industry of giant nets and hundreds of wriggling fish bodies all trapped together, choking on microplastics.
Fishing with Pop-Pop on a lake when I was, what, 8 years old? Was it the Poconos or the Adirondacks? In the canoe, just sitting and hoping as much as I had ever hoped for anything that a fish would bite. Looking at the surface of the water, murky below, but the surface was so pristine, a kind of rippling mirror. No way to know what was beneath the surface. The canoe was our vessel to access this other place, and the fishing lure was the only way to grasp blindly beneath the surface. And that little white and red bobber, unnaturally bright in this world of black, brown, and green.
Sitting and hoping, and then seeing new things in the water. Lily pads. That green algae that looks like those little styrofoam beads that stick to everything. Dead branches. Frog eyes peering above the surface. Pop-Pop’s nickname for me was “The Fastest Frog Catcher in the West”. And then the bobber dips into the water. Even now I can’t quite remember it. I can make it up, cobble together a scene of catching the fish, but if I’m being honest I can’t remember actually catching the fish.
The next thing I can remember is back at the cabins. In one of those cookout areas with picnic tables. One of the summer staff, a teenager – he must have been something like 16, but to me at the time it was impossible to imagine being that old. It was probably his summer job. He took the fish and showed me how to cut it open, take out the guts, and then cut the fillets.
The next thing I remember is inside the cabin, my dad cooks up the fish in a pan and makes a sandwich – just the cooked fillet on some toasted bread. I take a bite and it is disappointing. All that buildup and excitement and it tastes worse to me than a frozen fish stick. What happened to that shiny beautiful creature that I had caught?
When I close my eyes and really tap into that memory it makes me sad. So many things felt that way for me growing up. So often my imagination was more vivid than reality. I wished I could just live inside that fantasy. I couldn’t reconcile it back then. But now I smile. I begin to laugh. That’s really the secret, isn’t it? To bring that fantasy into reality, choosing to see it and embody it instead of waiting for it to appear.
But that’s right, there was another time I remember now. I must have been in college, or at least that is how the memory feels. Late teens, early twenties. One of those memories that has no context – just a collection of images that give me the impression of something real that happened, and not just a dream. I was staying with my uncle at their new beach house. Cape Cod, an old New England house. Me, my dad, and my cousin were all there helping renovate and repaint. I painted lazily, knowing that I had the ability to pay attention and do the detailing properly, but what I really wanted to do was splash paint across the wall and be done.
And then we were on a fishing boat. A small boat with just enough room for us to stand precariously around the edges as we held the rods. The captain sat at the back, looking at his fish finder device. It looked like a piece of technology from the nineties, and it probably was. He was a leathery man, and told us he knew exactly where to find the fish. And he was right, because suddenly we began pulling in fish.
Me and my cousin were catching one after the next – big, big fish. Ridiculously big. Huge striped bass. I was shocked. It was absurd, fish after fish, we just kept going. There was no technique, no mastery, at least nothing I was consciously aware of doing, but the fish kept biting. At one point I sat down because it all seemed like too much. Dozens of these huge fish. I would never be able to recreate this experience. I had had enough.
The captain threw each fish into a big icebox, and once it was full he gave us the signal. Then we were back at the docks, and the captain offered to fillet the fish for us. Something inside me caused me to speak up and say that I wanted to fillet one of them. Maybe it was me wanting to be the grownup now, to be the one to cut the fillet. It was a rite of passage I had created for myself. The captain looked skeptical but he laughed and gave me the knife. Everyone watched as I cut the fillets from the first fish, uneven and leaving too much meat on the bone, but now the experience felt complete. The captain gave me a hard time about my technique but I sensed some amount of respect in it. I had crossed the line from customer to worker, if only for a moment. But it was all part of the experience we signed up for, wasn’t it?
The captain tossed the fish carcass over the side, telling us that it was technically illegal to dump the fish bodies here, but as long as we didn’t say anything there wouldn’t be any problems. The butchered fish disappeared beneath the surface and was gone.
Back in the seafood section of the supermarket, I am waiting for the man in front of me to fill up his plastic bag with $3.99 per pound Basa fillets. He’s blocking the Salmon fillets, but I’m not in any rush. He keeps putting more and more into the bag, 10, 12, 15 fillets, and then he pulls out another bag and starts filling that one up.
He notices me waiting and smiles.
“Wow, that’s a lot of fish,” I said.
“Yeah, $3.99? You can’t beat the prices here. Much better than the distributor. Basa is better than Tilapia anyway, no weird flavor,” he says. He is a short man, bald, middle aged. He seems glad to take a break from bagging the fish and he motions for me to switch places with him.
“So you are shopping for a restaurant?” I ask.
“Yeah, a restaurant.”
“What kind of restaurant.”
“Italian.”
“Oh yeah? So this is for seafood pasta or something?”
“Yeah, seafood pasta. Whitefish. You know,” he trails off. He seems to be losing interest.
I finish bagging up my Salmon and nod to him, “Enjoy your day.”
I move through the rest of the grocery store. They have remodeled recently, and each time I come here now they have rearranged the refrigerated section into a new layout. They must be searching for the best new flow. I preferred it the way it was originally, just one big walk in refrigerator section with wire racks. You could see your breath in there. Now there are refrigerator shelf units taking up too much space and everyone’s shopping carts are blocking the way.
Fish, fish, fish. Full of omega 3 oils but also possibly full of mercury. A little dose of poison. But the poison is in the dosage, as they say. The same goes with melancholy, with diving into the underworld, with nostalgia. Make sure you stay tethered to the surface, or risk getting lost in the depths. It was never an option for me to only stay on the surface. I don’t think it really is for anyone. When I look back on the times I was at my darkest, my most nihilistic, it was because I lived too much in the depths and not enough in the present moment. I need both. We all do, don’t we? The greatest breakthrough has been balancing the two worlds and moving between them, not hiding from the present in the past and in fantasy. You can’t hide from yourself, even in the depths. You’re still right there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish. I remember ordering it when I was in film school and thinking it would reveal some kind of secret technique for creativity – that I would unlock something in my mind and have a revelation while reading it. I was a bit disappointed. Go into a state of meditation and let the ideas appear. The deeper you go, the bigger the fish. Okay but like, how do you make the fish… good? I would be able to find and capture scenes, memories, and symbols – but then what do you do with them?
Fifteen years later, being who I am now, having experienced what I have experienced, knowing what I know, I think I get it. You can sit in the boat and catch a beautiful fish. You can simply bear witness to the fish and remember it. You can take a picture of it and release it. You can bring it home and cook a beautiful meal with it. But if you don’t feel good about yourself, the memory of the fish will be negative. If you don’t know how to use the camera, the picture won’t turn out well. If you don’t know how to cook and don’t have people to enjoy the meal with, it won’t be a pleasant meal.
It’s a lot like David Lynch’s work itself – it is a mirror for your own state of mind. How you view yourself and the world around you.
Look into the depths, and you will see yourself staring back. Love yourself, and you can love the underworld. Love your own weird, unique, magical life, and you will discover the meaning in the weird, unique, magical experiences that appear all around you every day. The person you are while doing the fishing is just as important as the act of fishing itself.
So go out into the strange waters. Dive deep and search for the big fish.
Search with joy, curiosity, wonder, and gratitude, and you will find it all within you.
Thank you David.
Angelo Badalamenti talking about composing music with David Lynch