I posted here about Velasquez's painting of Mary and Martha, in which the more practical of the two is seen in the midst of preparing a meal, while her contemplative sister is visible through a window, engrossed in what her visitor has to say to her. On the table in Martha's kitchen are four shiny fish on a plate and this image came to mind yesterday when I read a poem from Reiner Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. It's the twentieth poem of the second section, 'Zwischen den Sternen, wie weit'. The sonnet speaks of the distances between people - between a child and another (ein Nächster, ein Zweiter) or between a girl and the boy she shuns and thinks of (meidet und meint). It ends with an image of fish on a plate - their faces odd - and some lines, quite strange themselves, about the silence of fish and its possible eloquence:
Alles ist weit -, und nirgends schließt sich der Kreis."See the plate on the gaily prepared table, / how uncommon the fish's face. / Fish are mute . . . , one once thought. Who knows? / But in the end, is there not a place where one, what for / fish would be language, without them speaks?" [There are lots of translations available but this one, which I found here, seems closer to the original than most.]
Sieh in der Schüssel, auf heiter bereitetem Tische,
seltsam der Fische Gesicht.
Fische sind stumm ..., meinte man einmal. Wer weiß?
Aber ist nicht am ende ein Ort, wo man das, was der Fische
Sprache wäre, ohne sie spricht?
While neither the image nor the text is really about fishing, there is something about the oddness of fish that seems important and that emerges in the circuits of energy connecting Velasquez's painting to Rilke's mysterious sonnet.
It is such a great picture it is worth putting in twice. I was thinking about Freud's concept of the Uncanny and how fish are in many ways very strange and uncanny creatures. Maybe they demand us to also do strange things - revisit pictures, and move oddly through water.
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