Wednesday, July 02, 2008

An Elegy

Well it's officially a fact: my goldfish has died.

Something akin to brain damage plagued it since Saturday night, and today morning, I found it lifeless on the bottom of the tank. There were two of them, but now one of them is gone.
That sort of illness was particularly brutal as my goldfish kept swivelling about, without any proper sense of direction. Its little body assumed the shape of a rainbow in such a grotesquely pitiful manner - I was pretty much helpless. Its appetite abruptly vanished, and though I tried force feeding it by shoving food right at (not right into it, of course) its mouth, hoping that it will be consumed, that was likewise to no avail either as all was simply vomited out again. Whatever treatments I poured into the tank, nothing could restore that little goldfish's élan vital, as it lay there paralysed; its body emaciated - the only glimmer of hope being the fact that it was still intaking oxygen, but in the end, the severity of the illness was simply too much to bear as its gills eventually ceased functioning. The rest was silence.

What caught my eye however was the other goldfish - the healthy one. Day and night, it huddled together with its dying comrade, ocassionally giving it the odd life-restoring nudge, but the terminally ill goldfish responded less and less to these as its state deteriorated in favour of complete resignation. That resignation was eventually followed by the all too imminent death.
However, the other goldfish was visibly sensing this and I somehow felt sorry both of them. But I have to admit - that healthy little fish, in spite of its all too natural simplicity and questionable intelligence, demonstrated such matchless solidarity, such a courageous readiness to do everything at its pathetic disposal to help its dying pal, that I almost felt guilty before it and I am sure that in its eyes, I was the culprit and the cause of its friend's demise. And perhaps I was -that itself I cannot myself tell.

If such simple little creatures could exhibit such a strong sense of togetherness and comradeship, where does that leave us, humans? Is our intelligence and certain tendency to over-think things through to blame?

For instance, the high rate of gang crime here in the country, and the recent spree of street stabbings in the city bears as its foremost cause the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time effect, i.e. the unfortunate nature of circumstances surrounding the case. But the fundamental reason simply has to be ineffective and plain bad upbringing. Indeed, parents are most to blame as they have unleashed upon the world creatures whose code of behaviour equates to instinctive baseness, disregarding to the full any sense of personal pride and dignity. It's not swimming with sharks that; it's swimming with piranhas, for they are the mindless pack of killers who would feast upon your helplessness, without any code of honour, tactics, or at least some form of intelligent stalking prior to attack. This is what you are up against when you're facing a bunch of ignoble cads: unprovoked, uncalculated, unfounded offensive against you, not as a person, but as an objectified victim.

In the end, that little mythically dumb goldfish ostensibly had in store more care and affection towards its damned friend, than many human parents living on council estates have towards their own children, and that's pretty much how the cookie crumbles nowadays.
In the meantime, the little goldfish is now somewhere on the shores of the river Styx, better known as the sewers, having been literary flushed down the bog. Those bastards thought, they are still living.

In honour of my dead goldfish and its comrade's valorous albeit vain attempts to resuscitate it, I shall watch Finding Nemo again!

1 Comments:

At 3 July 2008 at 01:14 , Blogger ¡Benjaminista! said...

And Cobain said, "It's okay to eat fish cause they don't have any feelings"!

 

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