`I Looked Into His Eyes'

On Sunday we took the boys to the aquarium, which in Houston is an amusement park without pretensions to science. It’s crammed downtown under the city’s noisome, ubiquitous freeways. There’s a Ferris wheel, carousels and a narrow-gauge railroad that runs through a transparent tank filled with sharks, where the train stops and you listen to a recorded sermon about the shark as an endangered species. There’s also a restaurant where you sit beside an enormous fish tank and watch grouper swimming in schools while you eat their cousins. It’s crowded and kitschy and all the concrete simulates an outdoor convection oven. In “For the Union Dead,” Robert Lowell remembers childhood visits to the South Boston Aquarium:

“Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.”

The fish and rays we saw were, indeed, “cowed, compliant.” Even the sharks looked dull, bored and unshark-like. Grouper are comically snub-faced and metallic-looking – robot fish. We walked down a staircase that spiraled around a water-filled cylinder, home to a school of grouper. One the size of my youngest son paused in his endless crawl to look at me, or so it seemed. Like the young Lowell I stopped and put my nose to the glass. No cross-species transaction occurred, no revelation. We stared until we grew bored, and I remembered why Lowell’s friend, Elizabeth Bishop, was the superior poet:

“I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.”

That’s from the middle of her great poem “The Fish.” Characteristically, Bishop is focused on the near-at-hand, unlike Lowell whose attention is all over Western Civilization and Robert Lowell. The speaker of Bishop’s poem admires the fish as a fighter, a tired survivor, with evidence of five earlier catches fused to its jaw. The speaker and the fish are fellow-adults. I’m reminded of V.S. Pritchett, that great literary essayist, who admired writers like Fielding and Austen “who face life squarely.” Of their kind he writes:

“They are grown up. They do not cry for the moon. I do not mean that to be grown up is the first requirement of genius. To be grown up may be fatal to it. But short of the great illuminating madness, there is a power to sustain, assure, and enlarge us in those novelists who are not driven back by life, who are not shattered by the discovery that it is a thing bounded by unsought limits, by interests as well as by hopes, and that it ripens under restrictions. Such writers accept. They think that acceptance is the duty of man.”