#this is my longest writeup for this blog and it took me foreveeeeeeer

[librarynova-lette]

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life / Lulu Miller

Happy New Year! I think I speak for a lot of us when I say 2024 was a rough year, which was partially why I found Miller's book so deeply affecting. 2024 was my Chaos, and I am proud to say i am standing on the other side, bruised, but not broken. Nearly swallowed by the Chaos, but not quite.

But what is this Chaos? What did this book say to me to make it navigable?

"Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build. It's not if, it's when."

To put it bluntly, Chaos is the force by which your life is thrown out of order. 2024 for me, was the year of Chaos and its cohorts, a gauntlet of sheer disarray. I clung to whatever I had to make it through the haze okay, and I am forever grateful to those who were my guides, unknowing or not. Friends who bandaged the wounds Chaos left simply by being present. Who were beacons guiding me home from the ocean of Chaos I felt sure I would otherwise drown in.

(If any of you are reading this one, I am more thankful than I can ever express. Thank you for loving me through the drowning. Thank you for everything.)

To cope with her own mire of Chaos, Miller looks to a particular taxonomist, one David Starr Jordan - a man who was particularly devoted to the taxonomy of fish, among other, more questionable pursuits.

You see Jordan was deeply driven by a love of the natural world, of finding order within it, he collected more specimens and identified more species of fish than many other taxonomists. He is credited with being the reason we possess a great deal of ichthyological knowledge today. He wrote 650 articles and books! Six five zero! He was influential. Terribly so.

Miller looked to him for guidance through her Chaos, because his own life was steeped in it. A brother dying in the civil war - not in combat, but of typhus, children dying in childhood, a wife lost to illness, a son lost to a car accident. A life's work lost to the Chaos of it all, repeatedly. Specimens destroyed in fire, in quakes.

How, through all of it, this veritable nightmare of Chaos, did he trudge forward? Miller was desperate for answers. To be honest, so was I.

My life had gone to pieces. I felt like a preserved dead fish, exposed to oxygen for the first time in years, in a puddle of the ethanol that kept me safe, the name tag identifying me strewn among so many others like me. I felt barely alive, barely recognizable as myself.

So how in God's name did Jordan do it? How did he sift through us dead fish and put his life back together, time and time again?

Miller spends a long time desperate to understand the answer to this question herself, and I hung onto her every word, hoping for a salve to my own Chaos-addled heart. That there was some magic trick to look at the shattered pieces of my life, pull them all into my arms, and make them whole again. To stop stepping on broken glass, to no longer smell the ethanol and the beginnings of decay.

At first, I tried to take desperate comfort in the words of Miller's father.

"You don't matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. [...] While other people don't matter, either, treat them like they do."

I admit, it's a dour sentiment. I was beyond dour when I read those words, I was beyond believing in my own worth, and no amount of 'but you do matter' was going to pull me out of it, truly, I had felt that way long before my life was mired in Chaos. Truthfully, my inability to shake that feeling is likely why I was so consumed by it to begin with, why it was so pervasive. Why I imagine it happened at all.

Like Miller, I took those words and felt a different effect than their freeing intention, at first. Miller's response was to take the not mattering to heart, it would fuel her depression.

Unlike Miller, A wild sort of anarchism took hold in my heart, for a moment. An angry answer to the nihilism, that nothing had ever mattered and I was so, desperately, furiously tired of pretending like it ever had. I was tired of handing out platitudes and gentle assurances that I didn't believe in.

However, Miller and I's answer was the same. If nothing matters, why am I trying? Why do I not give in to the urge to let it go?

"[...] there were days the temptation was so great, I could not see past it"

It was insurmountable. At least, it seemed so. I was here looking for answers, and the only answer that had thus far been offered to me was to embrace the soul crushing thought that nothing truly mattered.

I felt angry, for the first time in years I was angry at my circumstances. I was trying so hard to find answers, to move forward. My legs were in the tar pit Chaos had opened under my feet, and every move to struggle was trapping me further in.

Why? Why would nothing matter?

"What words go here? Imagine seeing thirty years of your life undone in one instant. Imagine whatever it is you do all day, whatever it is you care about, whatever you foolishly pick and prod at each day, hoping, against all signs that suggest otherwise, that it matters. Imagine finding all the progress you have made on that endeavor smashed and eviscerated at your feet. Those words go here"

What to do? What to do when years of your life come crumbling down on you in an instant?

Well. If you're Jordan, you have colleagues douse the dead fish in water to stall the decay, and start sewing name tags into their flesh, while desperately trying to source new ethanol to preserve them once more.

But I suppose we don't all have Chaos spitting dead fish at our feet, now do we?

So what did I do, then?

Well. I wish I could say I was as swift and pragmatic as Jordan was. I fell apart for days, I barely ate, and I could not sleep without someone around me. I could not bear to be alone with the pieces of my life.

In some ways, the friends keeping me from being alone were the colleagues keeping my dead fish from decaying. My therapist brought me what I needed to preserve them back in their pretty little jars. It was up to me to give them their names back.

I believe that metaphor might have gotten away from me.

The point is, when Chaos strikes, we lean on each other. Chaos will be inevitable, unpredictable, and vicious. Nasty little bugger.

But together, we will move beyond it, survive its horrible horrible effects, and pick up our pieces. Jordan himself writes.

"For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates. [...] The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he stands outside of them and can build again."

I have buried the lede a little here. Intentionally so, for Miller did the same. Jordan cautions against this very way of thinking, of this sense of self importance.

See, Jordan believed that indolent behavior could cause the degeneration of a species, and he believed this was what he was witnessing when he went to Aosta, an Italian village serving as home and sanctuary for people with a myriad of mental and physical disabilities that left them shunned.

As a disabled person, I am often touched by stories of these sorts of settlements. Of people looking out for those who cannot do it themselves.

Jordan, on the other hand? Well. He called it a "veritable chamber of horrors."

The irony of a disabled person looking to his life for guidance from a mire of Chaos is not lost on me.

Jordan was a firm believer in eugenics, that with sterilization, criminality, disability, laziness, arrogance, any human flaw one could name, could be eradicated from our gene pool. He staunchly believed humans were degenerating, that this could be fixed.

He believed all this while cautioning against pseudoscience, even after he was proven wrong, he believed them. He believed them to his dying day.

He believed all of this, while lying to himself that man shaped fate, that we were uniquely able to rebuild after tragedy. The lie of importance. The very behavior he cautioned against, the hubris that led to degeneration.

A contradiction, necessary for his survival. His need for control drove this man to control the very laws and whims of nature in a misguided attempt to save mankind. He believed this evil mindset was righteous and true, all the while, he was the very thing he cautioned against.

I turned from Jordan to Miller, we were on this journey together, I felt. I wanted more, that surely we were not going to be forced to lie to ourselves that we were important, good, and righteous. That we were not going to become walking contradictions out of a need for survival.

Miller visits two victims of these eugenicist policies - and offers me, finally, the answers I have been desperate to hear.

She meets with two women named Anna and Mary, both having spent time in a colony for the 'unfit' - threats to humanity's future, unfit.

Unfit. What does it mean to be unfit? Unfit to have children? Unfit to make your own choices? Unfit to live a free life?

What makes any one man, woman, or child unfit?

It's a deeply troubling question that eugenics had even more horrifying answers to. Poverty, low scores on intelligence tests, criminality.

Not to mention the way this often intersected with race, gender, and sexuality. Unfit. Unfit, unfit, unfit.

What a horrible word.

She shows us Anna and Mary, and they are anything but unfit, as no human can truly be, unfit.

Their home is shared, they live together and call each other sisters, they bring each other comfort from their shared childhood in the colony. Anna did not escape sterilization, but Mary did, and Anna helped raise her son. Their home is bright, full of laughter. Their neighbors love them. The receptionist to their apartment building calls them her sweethearts. A lawyer helps Anna receive compensation for her forced sterilization, and takes no payment for his work.

"Slowly, it came into focus. This small web of people keeping one another afloat. All these miniscule interactions - a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up on a nylon cord - they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet."

Of course, of course, that's what it was. It made sense, and the necessity of the web truly set in. Perhaps even odder is that Jordan relied on his own web, his research depended on it. Yet eugenicists like him refused to understand that our webs are enriched by diversity. Diversity of ability, mental fortitude, of backgrounds. Your web is enriched by different perspectives and lives.

And your web insulates you in the event of Chaos. Pulls you from its depths.

"And that's when it hit me. That it was not a lie to say that Anna matters. Or that Mary matters. Or that - hold on to your seat - you matter, Reader. [...] To some people, a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it's a medicine - a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it's a pigment; to the hippie, a crown; a child, a wish."

A weed to some. So, so much more to others. I was not a dead fish desperate to be named and put back in a jar amid the Chaos. I was a dandelion.

A weed to some.

So much more to so many others. The glass was no longer at my feet, and my bedroom didn't smell of ethanol and decay. It was full of beautiful dandelions, and it felt light again.

A memory, to me. I remember wishing on dandelions in my grandmother's yard as a child. How pretty the yellows were, how magical the white puffs of seeds looked.

So much more than a weed.

A guide through the Chaos, finally. At long last.

My friends, their unmistakable acts of kindness.

My beautiful web of dandelions.

"In tangible, concrete ways human beings matter to this planet, to society, to one another. It was not a lie to say so. Not a sappy cop-out or a sin. It was Darwin's creed! It was, conversely, a lie to say only that we didn't matter and keep it at that. That was too gloomy. Too rigid. Too shortsighted. Dirtiest word of all: unscientific."

What of Chaos, then? We may be kind, we may be caring, but our world is not. It is indifferent to us, at best. An uncaring ruler whose whims care not for our happiness, for our webs.

Chaos still comes for Jordan, even after his death, and undoes his work, one more time, with a mind bendingly bizarre truth.

Fish don't exist.

Okay, okay, fish, as an object exist, yes. You can go to an aquarium, a pet store, the ocean or lake, your grocery store, and you can easily see a fish. An animal that lives and breathes in water.

But conceptually, as a clade, fish don't exist. It's a reductive category based on overtly simple observations of habitat.

Simply put, you cannot define fish in a way that excludes all other terrestrial animals, while including all 'fish'. Some fish are more closely related to us than they are to other fish!

Fish, as it stands, is not an arbitrary category, just not a very scientifically meaningful one. For scientists who made this their life's work, this was a devastating truth.

But devastating truths are often how we move forward, how we understand new and important things, how we change.

"She brought up, of all people, Copernicus. She spoke about how hard it must have been for people in his day to look up at the stars and fathom that the stars were not the ones moving. But still, it mattered, to talk about it, to think about it, to do the mental scrunching that allowed oneself to slowly let go of the idea of the stars as a celestial ceiling that rotated over one's head each night. Because, as she said: "When you give up the stars you get a universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?""

Giving up the stars for Miller was dizzying, despair inducing.

I thought of my own childhood, I had been scientific as a child, encouraged by my father to adopt a logical lens from the outset. I gave up the stars when I learned the moon was not following me, that the man in the moon was just a set of craters that sets off mass pareidollia.

I felt more grounded, but of course, childhood superiority based on intelligence is fleeting, and never lasts a lifetime. Instead you fall apart as you grow into an average adult.

As a teenager my father and I downloaded the same app, allowing us to take our phones up to the sky and see the stars as we never would in our light polluted city. To identify the planets in our skies and what few stars we could see.

For the briefest of moments, the stars, their whimsy and wonder, exchanged for a universe from my understanding and scientific curiosity.

"I'm sure giving up the stars has a different effect on a priest. A nomad. A baker. A candlestick maker. So too with the fish."

Miller describes everyone she has spoken to for the book, what it meant for them to give up the fish. For some it is frustrating, difficult. For others, it is the very thing they set out to do.

For some, a recognition of the self.

It made me think about what letting go of the fish would do for me.

Truth be told, not much.

I still eat fish. My mama still groans at the smell. I still think of it as the most decadent of foods regardless. (Sorry mama, I won't eat it in the house, promise.)

I still go to aquariums and I'm still delighted by the fish. I still think longingly about owning a well tended expensive fish tank I currently have neither the money nor the space for.

A fish exists, to me, but at the same time, it doesn't. Scientifically speaking, a fish is a simple categorization term, rather than a proper scientific name.

It's somewhere in between, then. Too ingrained to fully let go by those unconcerned, but necessary for progress to those in the field. To the layman, progress that will matter little. To those who have devoted their lives to the fish? Progress that will be at the cost of their entire basis of knowledge - needing to be rebuilt with a new fundamental understanding.

Progress that will be worth its cost.

So too, do I get this when I give up the fish.

An understanding of balance, of an understanding that I am allowed to turn over every stone, leaf, and layer of soil. I am however, allowed to let it be. Allowed to let others be.

To pursue what matters. To not care if I'm a fish. To believe my own assessment of myself and the words of those who matter to me.

I find myself loving the words of Miller's sister, I feel as though she took what I feel about this from my own mouth.

"My oldest sister had no problem letting go of the fish. She let the whole category slide right out of her hand. When I asked her why it was so easy for her, she said, "Because it's a fact of life. Humans get things wrong." She said people have been wrong about her, time and time again, for her whole life. She's been misdiagnosed by doctors, misunderstood by classmates, by neighbors, by our parents, by me. "Growing up," she told me, "is learning to stop believing people's words about you."

My heart beats, I bleed, I breathe, I sweat. My brain fires impulses down the whole of my body to move my fingers across my keys. I exist, and my assessment of myself comes back with assuredly alive- I exhale, feeling air brush past my lips, oxygen in, carbon dioxide out.

No longer just living. Alive.

Alive!! Living and alive, synonymous, but different.

Existing in a way that I want to exist in, happier, out from under crushing existential weight. The chaos is not behind me, make no mistake. It walks with me, and I with it. The chaos is not a friend, and it is not a foe. It is an ambivalent fact of life and nature. It will gut you, just as much as it will deliver you.

"Now when I lie in bed next to my emerald-eyed wife, and the gun comes - and it still comes, will probably always still come - I consider its offerings. The relief it could bring. The solution to that day's stresses and messes I have made. An end to shame. And then I consider the fish. The fact that fish don't exist. I picture a silvery fish dissolving in my hand. If fish don't exist, what else don't we know about our world? What other truths are waiting behind the lines we draw over nature? What other categories are about to cave in? Could clouds be animate? Who knows. On Neptune, it rains diamonds; it really does. Scientists figured that out just a few years ago. The longer we examine our world, the stranger it proves to be. Perhaps there will be a mother waiting inside a person deemed unfit. Perhaps there will be medicine inside a weed. Salvation inside the kind of person you had discounted."

I have survived the Chaos before, I have lived it. Sometimes the Chaos comes from within, other times not.

This is the first time I have looked at it and understood, wholly, that alive and living are different words for a reason. That my internal Chaos was livable, but that I was not alive.

I am grateful to the Chaos that tore me open, that I spilled so much of my Chaos down the drain.

I see now how to swim and enjoy the ride, rather than drown.

The gun still comes, and perhaps it always will. But I no longer want its offerings.

"Maybe there will be a friend waiting with a cigarette in her mouth, by the back door of the dace floor, who will laugh with you for years to come, who will transmute your shame into belonging"

Thank you for sticking with me on this one, I know it was longer than usual, but frankly i could not have pulled this book off my TBR shelf at a better time. I had a very difficult go of it mentally for a long time, and I think parts of this book really helped me understand some things. Letting go of my fish, so to speak. If you're still here at the end, I hope my words helped you at least a little, and I sincerely hope you'll give Miller's work a read, this is just a short summary and my personal feelings, the book is a wonderful journey from the beginning, and in its entirety.

Thank you to those who gave me a way to swim through the Chaos, you know who you are, and I love you with my whole heart.