What do we know that we do not know we know? Patrik Svensson comes as near to an answer as I have found: "maybe we subconsciously read our surroundings and come to conclusions we don't even understand ourselves."
From the first page, Svensson hooks the reader with his writing, that evocative imagery that whispers that one will learn of more than eels in these pages: "the Sargasso Sea is like a dream: you can rarely pinpoint the moment you enter or exit; all you know is that you've been there." Like the adept fisherman the reader will learn him to be, Svensson reels the line in slowly, the reader ever more gradually falling under his spell, realizing that the subject of the book is not eels at all, but life itself and the origins of life and the ever-elusive knowing that so many seek, so often without, well, knowing.
The Book of Eels is, in fact, a treatise to make any philosopher proud. Early and often Svensson reminds the reader that life is often first and foremost about waiting; yet "time is unreliable company and no matter how slowly the seconds tick by, life is over in the blink of an eye." Also unreliable: the mind and memory; what we think we know of who we are and where we come from, our whims. How else to explain the fact that humans will go to great lengths to free ourselves from fate, sometimes even succeed, only to realize "we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from."
Svensson is taken with the eel not only for sentimental reasons, but for the mysteries it offers; in that sense, the eel becomes a metaphor for life itself. The eel, even today, is widely accepted as one of science's last mysteries. As much as that may niggle, Svensson revels in the fact - the belief - that "even people who trust in science and an orderly natural world sometimes want to leave a small, small opening for the unknowable." It is the ambiguities that Svensson probes repeatedly, the question, for example, of where to draw the line between life and death, of needing to juxtapose the idea that "the person with patience is always awarded eventually" with the caution that "suddenly, one day, it's too late."
A friend likes to ask how much of our lives are the products of hard work, effort, and self-determination and how much is the product of pre-determination, of fate and destiny. I'm not foolish enough to attempt an answer to such a question, though I have long believed that what we need in life - whether books or ideas or people - comes to us when we need them. I heard an eerie echo of that sentiment in Svensson's own belief that "you find what you want to believe in when you need it."
My money, though, is that Svensson leans heavily toward pre-determination. Certainly, the eel's course, from the currents that will carry it to rivers and streams of Europe to the inexorable pull to return to the Sargasso, exists far beyond the eel's control. And of his father, whose work as a road paver offered a sense of fulfillment "from knowing there's a certain permanence to what you make and that other people value it," Svensson wrote, "he was a worker because something bigger and stronger than him had chosen that life for him. The course of his life was pre-determined."
Like the eel, and pre-determined or otherwise, we all must find our way in the world. We are, metaphorically speaking, each of us bound for the Sargasso Sea, each to encounter so many diversions, so many potential pitfalls, and as for the eel, time is shorter than we think. The sand must not course through the hourglass before we've embarked toward the sea. But must we go there, to this metaphorical, almost mystical, sea? Svensson argues persuasively for this outcome: "the origin of the eel and its long journey are, despite their strangeness, things we might relate to, even recognize: its protracted drifting on the ocean currents in an effort to leave home, and its even longer and more difficult way back - the things we are prepared to go through to return home."
As Svensson thinks of the scientists whose life's work was the eel - who undertook to find the needle in the haystack, even when the haystack was an entire ocean - he concludes: "Perhaps there are people who simply don't give up once they've set their minds to answering a question that arouses their curiosity, who forge ahead until they find what they seek, no matter how long it takes, how alone they are, or how hopeless things seem." It is easy to forgot whether he is speaking of scientists, for whom the search was their Sargasso, or the eels themselves. In either case, the sentiment is equal parts melancholy and hopeful, like an eel passing a century at the bottom of a well, persevering to see a thing through.
And why would an eel spend a century in a well? Because it cannot - will not - undergo its final metamorphosis to full maturity until it is ready and able to undertake the long and arduous journey back to the Sargasso. Which begs the question Svensson asks again and again: how does the eel knows when it's time? When is the eel ready - when are we ready - for the metamorphosis from which there can be no turning back? What kind of voices tells the eel when to forsake the comforts of its muddy home for the uncertain, and often unsuccessful, journey to the sea? What kind of voice tells us when it's time for a similar departure? When life doesn't turn out the way it was supposed to, an eel can put everything on hold, and postpone dying almost indefinitely. What are our options when life looks so very different from what we had imagined?
Through the power of Svensson's pen, the eels of The Book of Eels change shape as regularly as those that ply the earth's waters. In the Basque country and Northern Ireland, in the fish shanties that dot the coast of Sweden, the eel is a cultural heritage. Later it is an endangered species, an exemplar of man's meddling with nature, a canary in the coal mine of global warming. It is a centerpiece in regional cuisines and the holy grail of scientific knowledge; the object of literature, and the center of political disputes.
Always, though the eel is the representative of the great unknown and, by proxy, faith. No mature silver eel has ever been seen in the Sargasso, Svensson is keen to remind, but we take it as an article of faith that those waters are the spawning grounds. "When it comes to eels," Svensson writes, "not only are science and the eel itself suspect, you can't trust God either. Or God's interpreters. Or words." Svensson leaves it to the reader to infer the follow-up question: if God and words are not to be trusted in relation to the humble eel, in what other, larger circumstances can we not trust that which we think we understand?
We are, Svensson implies, more like the eel than we realize. Every eel seeks its place in the world without a guide, existentially alone. The eels may all aim for the same destination, but each journey is singularly unique. "And seeking a place in the world on one's own: Surely that is, at the end of the day, the most universal of all human experiences." On our own. We are borne into the world alone, and we are borne out of it alone and no matter how surrounded we are while we are here, our journey is also alone.
Just as we carry in our veins the "salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water," though generally without knowing it is thus, or giving the fact much thought, so we are, each of us, bound for our own Sargasso Sea, wittingly or otherwise. Perhaps it is just chance that tells us when it is time to stay or to leave, or perhaps it is part of what we know that we do not know we know. Like the eel, most of us may not make it, but that some do is evidenced by the quiet beauty of works such as this. Svensson has found the Sargasso Sea; The Book of Eels is his spawn. Were that I should find mine and the outcome should be half as magnificent.
No comments:
Post a Comment