“The world is complex and contradictory.”.
This is one of the phrases that has been crossing my mind repeatedly lately. The deep human longing for everything to be logical and simple. And yet, if it were, life would probably feel quite barren. The incomprehensible complexity of life is, at least in my opinion, a kind of metaphysical “perpetuum mobile” that continuously spits out wonders. Be it friendships that, against all odds, suddenly “happen” (a warm wink goes out to Rhode Island) or seemingly trivial things like reflections or thoughts that travel through this miraculous complexity across the world, only to be rediscovered, expanded, altered, or even remixed over and over again.
The saying my this week’s blogpost is all about originates, so the story goes, in Central Russia in the mind of the author Andrei Platonovich Platonov. It comes from a dialogue in his utopian-philosophical book “Chevengur”, which revolves around two people talking about a fish. Years later it’s this passage that catches the attention of the controversial Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, who incorporates the thought of that dialogue into the lyrics of a song for the soundtrack of one of his more famous films. That song is sung by none other than Iggy Pop and finds its way into my head sometime in the mid-’90s, from where it now embarks on yet another journey through this blog post.
The phrase, the story, the dialogue, the lyrics goes as follows:
This is a film about a man and a fish…this is a film about dramatic relationship between man and fish…the man stands between life and death…the man thinks…the horse thinks…the sheep thinks…the cow thinks…the dog thinks
The fish doesn’t think…the fish is mute…expressionless
The fish doesn’t think…because the fish knows…everything
The fish knows… … everything.
PS. I’m no vegetarian. At least not yet.