Kintsugi: Mending Fish

Grey Triggerfish, Balistes capriscus, in a sea pool in Ireland

Kintsugi, or Kintsukuroi is the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, silver or platinum. The scars and seams are not hidden, but visible: a golden root system. Somehow the object becomes more valued, more artful than it was before it fell. This is what fish do: they solder their own wounds shut with a silverish joinery.
 
The first time I discovered this, I was swimming in the centre of a shoal of schooling Axillary Seabream, Pagellus acarne. Either I was herding them, or they were choreographing me. It wasn’t clear. I moved in their hundreds. Right in the centre of this thicket, was an injured fish. It was like seeing a semi-precious stone. The mending of silver caught the light - it shone more than the other fish, it looked like an abstract sculpture, with a crescent of its body missing from a large fish or seabird bite.
 
Unlike birds, fishes’ appearance don't differ so much between males and females, so schooling fish have a slight cloned affect. It looks very military, very shepherded, very surreal. The more you study them and return to the same place, the more you notice their differences. The school I was swimming with were quite young and mostly all male.
 
Gender roles are not so binary as they are in our species and many fish change sex, or are hermaphrodites. Like gulls, some fishes’ characteristics change as they age and you can ‘date’ them by these changes. For others, their size and shape indicates when they swap genders. One of the most dramatic transformations is that of Wrasse. They have a kind of light bulb moment, but the light bulb grows in the top of their head. They look partially inflated. Clownfish have a matriarchal system; when the top female dies, the most dominant male becomes a female in her place.
 
Fish are some of the trickiest things to identify; their size is distorted by the water, as is their colour depending on light, threat, depth, weather, time of day, age. When you’re learning to identify marine species and you do a search online, the images that come back are almost always of a hanging: their bodies held up, in a man’s arms, laid in ice, or on a plate. I had not anticipated this. I expected them to be alive and in water. It is as strange to me as it would be if all the images of Blackbirds, Robins and Goldfinches, were not of them in flight, or perched, but fried and bald, or swinging upside down with their beaks pierced. The words that comes up again and again, are not species, habitat, ecology; but game, restaurant, aquarium.
 
The colours of fish underwater are extraordinary, especially turquoise. Many fish have a current of electric, azure blue roped and zig-zagged around them. A new visitor to our waters is the Grey Triggerfish, Balistes capriscus. I got a close look at one earlier this summer when it tried one of my toes. It has a wonderful blue pointillist pattern.
 
Nothing is ever the same when you go underwater: one day all the crabs will be circumnavigating a buffet of rocks, the next starfish are splayed like drunk party guests; then the day after that, there is an underwater smog, so thick you can’t see anything. My most unusual experience, was the day thousands of small salp-like organisms were near the shore, floating around me like hollow planets. I am still trying to solve what they were.

I think the poets that often come to mind when I’m swimming in the sea, or studying fish are Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Norgate and H.D. And for abundance - for all their plurals and collective nouns, this poem, by Galway Kinnell.

Daybreak 

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

Galway Kinnell