Fata Morgana by Lamorna Ash

I did not think the world had any color left to lose but by the afternoon, shades continued to leak from the sea and sky until they were  both the same void white, the line of the horizon disappearing with it. The sky spilled down into the water and I imagined the Filadelfia drawing up day stars in its hauls – or perhaps it was the sea that rose up into the air so that jellyfish, squid and rays dipped in and out of the constellations.

I looked out at my bleached cloud city, which had not budged all day, and then headed over to the bench in the wheelhouse to continue reading Arctic Dreams. The most extraordinary mirages seen by man are those that appear at sea or in colder regions like the Arctic – Fata Morganas, so-called superior images. Inferior images occur mostly in deserts, when the distant object is inverted and doubled below its actual location, creating the illusion that there is a body of water on the ground, reflecting the object in it. Fata Morganas are much rarer projections appearing above the original object. The materialize when the temperature of the air closest to the ground is colder than that which is above it. The cold dense air causes light rays to bend upwards, tricking our minds into believing an object is higher in the sky than it truly is. The Flying Dutchman ghost ship is thought to have originally been a Fata Morgana – an image of a distant ship projected upwards into the sky, from which there grew a great body of maritime folklore.

True mirages are not the works of the imagination, not fantastical new cities opening up above us, but merely a reflection of the known world – the ordinary raised up. These visions in the sky can sometimes be so vivid that whole land features – mountains, lakes, whole islands- end up drawn into explorer’s maps of the Arctic. Years later, when other explorers returned to follow the maps passed down to them, they found the scribbled-in landmarks had simply evaporated. ‘President’s Land”, “King Oscar Land’, ‘Petermann Land’, and the Croker Mountains, were later found to be nothing more than mirages.

On the Filadefia, too, islands erupted without warning from the water. On occasions, these were faint mirages, but more often than not it was my mind playing tricks on me, expanding to fill the vast canvas it was presented with. Newlyn fisherman-turned-artist Ben Gunn told me that when fishing up near the Arctic, he found that if you stared at the rice fields long enough, they would transform into any kind of shape you wanted: Churches, houses, wherever your imagination takes you, you’re in it. You flick your eyeballs and it’s changed again.’

The places hidden from us are the points from which or imaginations flow. We do not get to see what is behind the horizon or below the surface of the water, and so impose on these unknown spaces, those unreachable things which we desire: some fisherman who have lost friends or family at sea remain convinced they are still out there. Kyle throws bottles containing his number into the water, hoping they may be discovered one day by a being who will speak across the world, across time even, back to him. Lopez writes that sometimes nature seems so illusory, so indescribable, that we cannot help but let it merge with our own fictions. When he follows a bear’s tracks up to a hole in the ice, but finds no tracks coming out again, he says that one can start to understand the Eskimo’s belief that ‘ there are bears walking around on the bottom of the ocean.’ Our desires for storytelling and myology bleed into the sea, giving it a distinctly human hue. Like my imagined abolishing of the horizon line and the reconciling of sea and sky, fishermen must see themselves as becoming part of the world in which they spend half their lives, letting the water’s skin be their skin.

 

Before dinner Andrew took me up to the gutting station and hands me an incredibly sharp knife- ‘you’re on a roll now, Raymundo. It’s time for you learn how to fillet.’ He brought up a frosty monk, plaice, lemon and haddock from the fish room and slaps them down on our quasi-operating table,. When filleting, he explained to me, you have to feel gently for the  backbone of the fish as you cut through its flesh, letting your knowledge of its anatomy guide the knife trough. It is a world away from the harsh, staccato stabbing of gutting. Instead you make one, unbroken movement along the center of the fish, not a dot, but a line. Andrew started me off on a flat fish. The blade glides so easily through the plaice that if you jerk it up even a little bit, you lose half the fish. He taught me to caress the knife along the rough bumps of the bone, remaining attentive to the feel of it so as never to lose contact with the fish’s spine.

Despite his coaching, the fillets I drew from the plaice were rough and jagged. ‘Never Mind,’ he said, throwing the limp forms over the deck to the seabirds. He chucked me a monk instead –‘ much easier.’ To fillet a monk, you make a nick in the skin at the end of the tail and then pull it away from the flesh, like taking a sock off your foot. After feeling for the monkfish’s chunky bones, he instructed me to make a cleans wipe through the meaty white flesh first on one side of the central bone, then on the other, to create two equally thick fillets. We worked for a good hour, slicing through each fish and putting them into plastic bags for the crew to take home to their family and friends at the end of the trip. Just before we went back for dinner, Andrew dug around in one of thee boxes on deck and asked me if I’d ever eaten raw scallop. I shook my head and he broke one open with his knife, speared it and passed it over to me. Sweet and delicate in flavor, it tasted like the sea.

The late night haul around eleven is always the wildest. Outside is ‘as dark as a dog’s guts’, as Don put it. The sea seems to absorb all else into it. If I fell in, I thought, I would not hit the water but disappear without a sound into its depths. The bodies of fish, illuminated by the trawler’s lights, gleamed white. They stood in two large heaps, like treasure. Now and then, a roving fish eye was caught in the lights and flashed demonically .  .  .

Several gnarled spider crabs scuttled across the the Filadefia’s deck and I gave them a wide berth. Sea urchins rolled from left to right across the sodden wood, curled up into protective spheres dotted with spikes so sharp that they can pierce through gloves. And everywhere there were ye dismembered legs of starfish that found themselves tangled in the net and ripped apart. Alongside them were sea-beaten cans, pieces of plastic and hats. I was amazed by how many hats are pulled up by trawlers, mainly caps, but the odd beanie too- and once an old boot. The scene resembles the aftermath of a violent battle.

Beyond the detritus scattered across the deck are cuttlefish, writhing in their boxes and sending out sudden jets of black ink that add blood spatters to the scene of devastation. Andrew told me that you get to know by holding them exactly when they are about to squirt from the particular way their body tenses, ‘Like this’, he said, and demonstrates by pointing a cuttle at Kyle, drenching him a moment later in black ink. It streams down his face and he wipes it away with a glove, still grinning. On the gutting table tonight are also a couple of massive ling, once the most common fish caught by fishermen, but these days seen rarely and worth nothing. I decided they are my least favorite fish. Their long thrashing bodies are reminiscent of eels and, when they die, their innards come up through their mouths so it look as as if they had vomited bright pink sausage meat.

 

Before I headed down to bed, I looked out the wheel house window to check whether the loud city was still hanging there. I could just make it out in the night, looming above us, the bright stars piercing it lik lights from flats. I thought  of Newlyn. I thought of home. All of sudden it didn’t feel so far away anymore.

[ For Simone Weil, it is possible to move away from the spectral condition of modernity through resituating work at the spiritual core of life. In fishing, as you stand before the sea, the brackish waters spraying your face, gripping a small knife in a thick glove, slicing into  a twisting fish that has just come up from the water, you get that you are engaged in a kind of work that is truly real. In these moments, you feel you are the closest to being in the world that a person can be. We cannot attain this spirituality within work without first acknowledging the burdensome nature of work, the monotony that ‘hangs with an almost intolerable heaviness’. Once this monotonous ,dragging time is recognized, Weil believes  that we might ‘mount upwards’. For ,she suggests, ’monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a recognition of eternity – the most atrocious if it is a sign of unvarying perpetuity. Whether eternal or in perpetuity, Weil’s sense of monotony is somehow outside of or beyond time, and therein lies its potential for spirituality – for man to recognize that ‘through work he produces his own natural existence’ and therein accepts the endless cycle between work and rest. It is only when man sees himself clearly as a squirrel turning around and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.]


Dark Salt Clear; The Life of a Fishing Town by Lamorna Ash Bloomsbury, 2020

pages 260-263
page 140