Fish Garibaldi and the Blue Rumor

THE DAY was as lucent as Homer's verse. It was time to go to the Aquarium. Huntley, clutching a copy of Great Expectations which had passed his long subway ride, was excited because he had previously visited when the Big Tank was inoperative. We surfaced from Government Center, strolled past City Hall, which he lamented was bereft of plants, threaded through some markets, where Huntley priced artichokes, and finally arrived at the Aquarium. I bought a hot dog so impenetrable that I wondered if it weren't some subtle coral washed ashore and marketed by a humorless entrepreneur.

The building was spacious, rectangular, concrete, and dark. I hope darkness is good for the fish and solaces them with its successful simulation of the blackness of the deeps, for at times, especially when looking into the central pool (populated with rudimentary goldfish and long-shouted fellows who may have been Marlowe's "vile torpedo"), it seemed that the fish were a little too considerately shrouded in nostalgic midnight. The denizens were separated in numerous small tanks, in dramatic contrast to the Florida occanariums I had visited in which large and small, carnivorous and vegetarian, hostile and affable fish were promiscuously mixed in huge tanks with Spencerian vengeance. It enforced a certain startling realization of the multitudinousness of the sea: but fish which are not agitated by the threat of imminent engorgement are much more tractable to observation.

We started with the electric eels, only to discover that the large ??l had been replaced by a diminuitive imposter. Perhaps the former resident had rudely scorched an impetuous glass-thumper to ashes and been retired. The wave machine was impressive. For an awesome instant, impossible to determine, the emerald mass reverse curls and thrusts itself back over itself in mighty interference. But empty water quickly becomes tedious, so we hurried to the first fish of note, the orange Garibaldi. He bore little if any resemblance to the Italian nationalist, resembling rather a stationary section of antipasto. From Garibaldi we walked past "Oscar," who was gray, small, and obviously piqued at his home. Huntley told Oscar good-by, and asked me what this group of obscure hazel fish were. I answered "groupers," my universal name for all fish I cannot identify. The back wall of the Aquarium was ornamented with a florid neon wave. I kept waiting for the "Vacancy" sign to come on, an appropriate expectation because the Aquarium at present suffers from only one inadequacy-it does not have many fish. Besides, many of its tenants are regrettably ordinary, so a visit isn't like walking through an art museum which in its modesty could only exhibit two Picassos, half a dozen Klees, a Raphael, a Degas, and a Breughel, scattered among thirty rooms. In fact, I was becoming impatient as I looked at that garish wave, and demanded that Huntley lead me to the whales. So he pointed out the picture of a breaching blue whale.

A RIGHT turn brought us into the children's room. The open pool had been depopulated, drained and fenced, probably because the children, famished for fish, kept pocketing and removing them. On the fence were some letters from children. My favorite one read as follows:

Dear Aquarium,

I liked your fish very much. The octopus was nice too bad he died. When will you get another? I especially liked the infrared ray.

The glory of the Aquarium was here. It was the scarlet shrimp, its little transparent legs regretfully descending to the seabed, its filigree antennae brushing the tubular plants nearby; a miniature, delicate, barely perceptible glass sculpture, shyly animate. He was a tenuously fashioned creature, seemingly held together ?? his good nature and preserved from summary consumption by the sea's deference to his harmless beauty-too small and pure to cause jealousy. He was cheerful, diffident, rubicund, a gloryfish.

According to Melville there are fastfish and loosefish. I divide them up less metaphysically into ghastlyfish, indolentfish, tediousfish, and gloryfish. Then there are the crabs. The horseshoe crab, which has a hysterically catalytic effect on me, perversely flipped over on its back just as we reached him. I clutched my sides and staggered away. I would rather have fought a million basilisks, or Spiro Agnew, than seen this ghastly sea spider. Searching for air, we came into the Harbor Room, a pleasant glass corner suspended over the outside water. An Italian lady turned to her son, gestured toward one of the two ships on the bay, and said to the boy, "There's the boat that daddy's on."

Well, preliminaries over, we climbed the steps to the top of the Big Tank. I thought of the leaping dolphins in Florida, and was glad that there would be no commercial leap-feeding here. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, however, was a sleeping porpoise, stout and rapturous, casefully undulating to the surface every hundred or so seconds for a long inspiration, eyes closed, a wry smile across his shout. As he ??tely traced his profound way up to the to of the sea and down to first deep shadows, rising, lowering, weaving the sea whole, the bubbles of his late exhalation filtering up and out of the water like a shatter of immediate stars, the still point of the turning world at the center of the axletree seemed surely reached. After all the venerable cods, contemptible sharks, and immemorial turtles, I began to phantisize about the Big Tank.

I wanted to see something intense, something grandiose and mighty. I wanted to see a giant squid and a sperm whale battle chthonically and monumentally for the dominion of the oceans. The whale and squid engage and storm, the water froths and crupts in thundering contest-the spectators are driven back in awe and terror-the whale blasts away the roof, the squid uproots the Tank itself-the whale leaps up and down like a diving world, stunning the horrendous squid, who tires, submits, and is vanquished! In celebration of his victory the whale cannons his ghastly ordinance over the far edge of the earth, like the limbs of Osiris. As it was, the Big Tank encloses a sparse and ignoble pack of oddfish. One particularly obsequious fellow paused, and looked at us, finning himself constantly backward. I deci?? to call him the blue rumor.

HUNTLEY wanted to find the octopus. He found a braingray sac pressed into a corner of stone and glass, with a sad, small eye looking directly at him. The octopus looked like a corpulent ghost: but I suppose that a motionless, eight-handed beast isn't necessarily sad or pensive or dolorously malicious, and that for all I know-and I would much rather think so-he was bouyant with comatose hilarity, passing the time in genial mockery of this poor human being, hopelessly circumscribed with only a quarter of his arms. These thoughts prepared me for the seahorses. They were a fluttering gathering of sylphs, slowed by water, their backs fanning them along by fractions of an inch. They looked timorous and fragile, as if an unexpected particle of seaplant would, upon collision, mortally rend the ineffable curve of their minute bodies. Some glided, some rested, some seemed to fall helplessly, let us hope peacefully, upon the grains of sand, serene but bowed, dead in genuflection.

Last was a leopard shark, billeted in close quarters, looking bilious and rapacious. I watched him swim urgently into the wall, forced to close a circle despite his desire to strike out on a straight line; the passion for linearity, the fatality of circularity, the bleak, self-depleting alternation of ferocity and grim quiescence; above all, the constriction, the small diameter of the circle, with the glass portion of the circumference flashing ever changing, ever irrelevant glimpses of the other spectator strolling among the circles, always falling imperceptibly to his right; these thoughts passed through my mind. The circle and the line, female and male, continuity and transcendence, concussion and resilience, contiguity and interstice, the breaks and bridges of this life, comedy and parody.... But the large mouthed bass dispatched this comical revery. I had trouble leaving the large-mouthed bass, wanting to pluck him out and fry him. He judiciously kept to the back wall.

The Aquarium was enjoyable but perhaps a little too balmy, langorous, limped, odorless, visible, and spun into circles with glass sides. Perhaps I felt it was like pouring oil on the oil of the problems I carried in with me. Perhaps leaving clamorous, febrile Harvard Square to go to the slow and unguent Aquarium seemed like treading through Louisiana in the earliest morning, interrupting the scudding smokes of the rousing heat and resolute dry plants, with a newspaper tucked implacably, disharmoniously under arm. There should be a sign: "Leave your newspapers at the door. Don't soil the flowers with their bleeding ink." So I stepped out of the Aquarium onto the gentle and savage bottom of another ocean, shifting with colorful creatures, some moody, some violent. I was happy in the reflection that we had the sunlight to illumine the cathedral corals as well as the virulent, striving tangles of growths through which we jetted and lunged and circled and floated descending down to rest. Some of the creatures in the Aquarium were so beautiful, so diffident, and placid, that watching them dissolved the awareness of observation, and gently unburdened the day, without sentimentality or luxury, like a Bach Chorale-Prelude.

Take a child to the Aquarium. The Aquarium is best seen with another child.