Eel

Chapter 5: Eel

page 70 salmon. Research published earlier this year showed that sockeye salmon remember magnetic values of geographic locations. They imprint their birth location on this map when they leave their freshwater home for the sea, and use it as a compass during their journey back several years later, successfully returning home to spawn.

page 76 zombies...climate change Here's a comment: What zombies tell us about climate change.

This is the sixth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication. 
 
Photo via Real Monstrosities

Eel

Eleventh in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 5: Eel...and other monsters

page 70 (marginal note): European eel...now critically endangered: see Will European Eel Survive Its Management?

page 74 Richard Jefferies: The ecstatic mood of this neglected writer is well represented in his late essay, The Pageant of Summer. Here is an extract:

As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the wood and hedges—green waves and billows—became full of fine atoms of summer.  Swept from notched hawthorn leaves, broad-topped oak-leaves, narrow ash sprays and oval willows; from vast elm cliffs and sharp-taloned brambles under; brushed from the waving grasses and stiffening corn, the dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed.  Steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing. It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind.  Fed thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the summer—to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow.

page 75: civilization rushing from all havens astern: see Tidings by Czeslaw Milosz.

page 77 locate the monstrous:  Posts on this site concerned with monsters listed here. In a chapter on the Kami in The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges reports:

the Jinshin-Uwo, or Earthquake Fish is an eel seven hundred miles long that holds Japan on its back. It runs from north to south, its head lying beneath Kyoto, and its tail beneath Awomori. Some logical thinkers have argued for the reverse of this order, for it is in the south of Japan that earthquakes are more frequent, and it is easier to equate this with the lashing of the eel's tail. the animal is not unlike the Bahamut of Moslem tradition or the Midgarðsormr of the Eddas.

Hatchet fish

'Like sightless eels'

In the cellar, the machine was cranking towards full power. Its gases and fluids agitated intensely, with a muffled cacophony of swishing and crashing sounds like ocean turbulence in a subterranean cavern. The smell was foul beyond belief, noxious gases and corrosive acids ripped apart and recombined in the magnetic flux. 'Factitious airs' -- gases that had never existed in nature -- hissed ominously into being, jets of pressure forcing them through tubes and valves, sending them out like sightless eels into their new world.

-- from The Influencing Machine by Mike Jay.

With the Air Loom, "Man had made a machine that could turn themselves into machines."

The eel

...firebrand, whiplash, shot

bolt of the earth's desire,

aimed, by these dried-up gullies and river-beds,

at the dark paradise of her spawning;

she is the green spirit looking for life

in the tight jaw of drought and desolation,

she is the spark which says

that all begins where all appears to end,

here, with this charred, half-buried stick

the quick rainbow

a twin to your own bright eyes:

shining out

among a generation mired in mud -

can you not see

that she is your sister?

-- a passage from Robin Robertson's version from Eugenio Montale's poem. [1]

Apparently there are more than fifty translations of this poem in English. Some analysis and food for thought via The Imaginary Museum.

To make a pedantic and unpoetic point, Montale was wrong to write that eels in Italian waters come from the Baltic (L’anguilla, la sirena/dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico/per giungere ai nostri mari...). They come from the Sargasso. If the poem was first published as late as 1956 he should have known that.

More importantly, after millennia of abundance the European eel is, as of 2008, critically endangered.


Footnote

[1] Swithering (2006). Robertson's next book is Leaving St Kilda.

Unheimlich

The Umbrella mouth gulper uses a whip-like tail for movement. The end of the tail bears a complex organ with numerous tentacles, which glows pink and gives off occasional bright red flashes. This is presumably a lure to attract prey, although its presence at the far end of the body from the mouth suggests that the eel may have to adopt an unusual posture to use it effectively...

It grows to about 1 metre (3.3 ft) in length and is found in all tropical and subtropical seas at depths ranging from 900 to 8,000 meters (3,000 to 26,200 feet).

(from Wikipedia)