The Last Fisherman

(click to see The real-life last fishermen)

Each knot of the net is another nobble in his history, swimming in his memory unwittingly; the moments where his father would come home, cold and wet, cracking the knuckles of his index fingers with his thumbs, standing in the threshold dripping & huffing while he warmed up to greet his family; those same beaten & burned fingers pointing out the carving at port, marked 1604, a crude picture of a boat, which the fisherman's own hands, a child's hands back then, traced out by the freezing beach. Unbeknownst to him, as he methodically counts knots, he counts the details of himself; the view he breathed in of the village from the slopes; walking past the huge Captain Mickey Morton to work on his boat, fresh-faced & wearing new boots; hauling his first catch, being coerced quickly to disentangle and release the young fish back into the ocean; the storm that overturned Morton's boat, sprawling the fisherman into the twilight depths while cruel waves swashed above. He tosses the net overboard.

The knots of the net scrape the deck as the net returns. Husks, shells, the odd wee fish, and a boatload of plastic. If only it were edible or useful... Ha! If only it were non-existent! He empties the net, folds it, ties it up, and puts it back in its place on deck, where it will never be touched again, save by the slime that will build up over time as neighbouring empires of microorganisms duel for the rich nutrients the net has captured from the sea.

When the ship comes ashore, it will sit upon the beach, giving way to splayed ribs, like all the other hundreds of boats already dwindling away; once, those ribs held together a vessel that clogged with barnacles and bumped with sharks. As the fisherman sees the dull glint of his village in the distance, he eases off the engine of the boat, allowing it to coast, and then finally be tugged dimly by the current. His mouth gaping with silence, he imagines his life from the moment he touches shore; his boat unfolding and rotting; the sea turning black, riddled with flotsam; his hobble-backed shuffles to pick up the dole; his face becoming blotchy and red as he wears out a seat in the pub, telling tales of storms, catches, fish and gulls, knots he once tied, an ocean that brought the village and himself into being.

Silently, amid the reel & writhe of the ocean, the great booming womb of the sea, robed with ice, carressed with sand while dancing with rocky cliffs, the last fisherman exhales, and falls over the side of the boat, leaving it to drift in fog at dusk, mooring itself alongside old fridges and washing machines on the rocks down the way.

Hurtling into the end times: How to do it properly, and maybe start again.

Everyone seems to have adopted a pretty nihilistic point of view towards the obvious collapse of the environment. We are falling deeper into the clutches of massive fetishistic disavowal, acknowledging & fearing the visible downfall of the world & all within, but blindly continuing to fuel that degradation; the phrase of the anthropocene era, a band of time revolving around the actions of humans, appears to be ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’

            Several times a week I hear people claim that ‘it’s all fucked,’ that we’re living in the end times, that the future is layered in ancient plastic and bones. Our media and fiction reflects this rather well; countless films come out every couple of years portraying an Earth literally tearing itself apart; a vast swathe of fiction, in no way new, consistently portrays the times after some catastrophe as bleak, unavoidable, and entirely our creation. Commercial news reels off imagery of socio-economic collapse alongside freak weather and quirks of environment, (saying this, one of the largest environmental disasters of our time, the Indonesian forest fires, has gone largely unnoticed, despite its immeasurable effect on people, animals, trees and the land, not to mention it’s origins in the illegal clearing of land by global businesses) encapturing us in a nervous chatter of doom, gloom, doom.

            This is all in spite of the fact that it is human mechanisms, completely within the control and minds of humans, that allow this sort of thing to continue. This appears to be contributed a fair amount (read: a huge amount) to by the workings of capitalist, materialist culture. The pressure to earn just enough to afford to live invokes people to choose the rashest, most damaging option; driving everywhere. Clearing land with petrol. Killing animals that endanger crop. Using harmful pesticides to guarantee crop survival. As well as this, the desire for an aesthetic product ignores the uselessness of wrapping and landfill sites awash with greasy swathes of indigestible plastic, settling on the surface of the sea, at the bottom of the seabed. Education plays a large part as well; people who don’t think to recycle or compost probably aren’t fully aware of the implications of their everyday actions; or, they are: see phrase ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’ This mindset appears to revolve around the idea that humans are big & clever.

            If that is the case, then why are we not saving ourselves? (saying this, we’ve caused enough problems among ourselves to start righteously declaring the environment ours to save.) The basic equations are thus: world ends. We are in world. No world = no us. A very reductive argument, but how do you convince someone that can’t be bothered to walk to the post office down the road or recycle small items that the planet, largely owned by bacteria and microorganisms, is worth saving?

            Whether or not everything is ‘fucked,’ we could at least give it a shot. Think of it this way; if the world is slowly ending then the best that we can do right now is alleviate universal suffering. We should take actions that solve environmental and human concerns; relieve the oceans of pollution and start fishing sustainably and the ocean recovers, and people will have access to fish for many more years to come, as well as an ocean environment that is not toxic. Solve issues of packaging & waste; people will be paying less for items, and the environment will not suffer more bulk waste. Encourage permaculture, organic farming & fair-trade; people will be working in healthier environments across the globe, they will be allowing natural habitats to flourish, avoiding the current cost from commercial farming, and the consumer will be healthier & better off. These are only a few examples that I, a mere literature final year student with a part time job and a broken pair of shoes have managed to fumble together. They’re probably not the best examples, but the technology for saving the planet is flourishing, the means and ideas are there, people just need kicking into gear. If we do solve universal suffering in the face of the end times, if the world is free from the burden of human stupidity, then there is a greater and greater chance that it will not simply be in preparation of entering the dark eras with a clean conscience, but that our actions will have a positive and rejuvenating impact on the planet at large. So the simple statement I’m driving at isn’t ‘why bother?’ but ‘why not?’

Green; Blue; Grey; Black

All photos taken in UK (largely Brighton & surrounds and Gloucestershire, from a period of 2010-2016. Camera used varies as does film.

Selected Dreams

8.07.2012

            I am walking home from work, and am very close to home, at the top of the hill after Gastrells School. A boom echoes across the valley, and I turn to my left; where usually there is a drive leading to an orchard and a few more houses, I have a clear view of Stroud & Stonehouse in the bottom of the valley, and a huge orange and black mushroom cloud emanating from there. I run home, tripping and struggling against the blast wave. When I get in, the house is bare wood, with rain coming through the roof, inevitably radioactive. My parents are slow and solemn. I look out the window at the field opposite my house, and see the sky turning orange, the mushroom cloud reaching the wood atop the hill there. A family from down the road are scaling the field to the woods, where they probably intended to survive. I racked my brain for somewhere to shelter, and conjured images into my dream of white painted tunnels and basements underneath the place I worked in at the time. I suggested this to my family, but they said there was no point; at best we could live a few weeks more here, at the bottom of the hill.

23.09.2012

            I am in an old sea town, all cobbled roads and old pubs. It is a secret place, and I immediately feel under threat as an outsider. I can’t remember how I got there, or how anyone could; I had a sense that it somehow existed underneath the sea. I tried to escape, and was apprehended by an enemy that I couldn’t see or grasp in the dark, but every now and then I’d feel my outstretched hand touch warm flesh. A larger threat froze me in suspense as it loomed out the water.

3.02.2013

            I am a Vietnam war veteran, struggling with Post-traumatic stress disorder. I stroll around my large garden, with an old war buddy, both of us smoking cigars, drinking brandy, wearing lumberjack shirts, blue jeans and pork-pie hats, rolled up sleeves.

            Later, at a ceremony or some event, I keep seeing things differently; dancers suddenly appear as a black man in an evening suit, perhaps an adversary or even comrade from the war. I have outburst and collapse. The whole event stops, with people staring. I am taken to hospital.

            This NHS hospital has green, peeling paint on the walls. I am upstairs, and look down on a street corner in Stroud I’ve known all my life, but know it looks like a 1700s German fairy-tale city, but somehow modern.

27.04.2014

            Maggots cover my glasses but I pour some potion over them to get rid of the maggots. There is a town in Turkey regularly visited by a troupe of giants, which has become a tourist attraction. It culminates in a ritual needing to be enacted to save the town, maybe even the world. The ritual is complete apart from the last part- an “open man.” Upon hearing this, a man stabs himself, and throws himself at the feet of a giantess. She picks up his corpse, and holds it to her face like a telephone, and she gains an expression of soft understanding. The giants leave.

12.05.2014

            A virus spreads across a seaside town. The infected go mad, and attack each other, spreading the virus more and more throughout the town, which is a mixture of St. Ives and Brighton. A fair few infected simply fall ill, and eventually die. I am in a hideaway with four ill women, trying to survive the entire ordeal.

            I have now travelled to the town pre-outbreak. I befriend a child, and remember some underlying mission I have, and discretely prick him with a needle without the child or anyone noticing, trying to hold back my obvious sadness; the needle contains the virus from whose results I was earlier hiding. Before this, the virus was caused by a wasp-like insect with slug-like larvae that came out of the sting.

31.06.2014

            A zombie-like creature follows me from room to room. At one point, most of his body is missing, leaving a bloody, gory hole. People call him Bob.

13.09.2014

            A horde of T-rex like creatures devour all life on an alien planet. I survive by hiding in my friend’s bathroom.

25.01.2016

            A very posh woman down on her luck in a musty, useless vintage shop on a cold and rusty beach creates short-lived and fanciful perfumes from animals. She assesses the animal almost hypnotically, automatically, the knife in her hand becoming more elaborate and long and beautiful, until she finally kills the animal slowly, as it lets a horrible, human scream cry out of the animal. The perfumes become more popular, and people queue up along the beach with unsuspecting animals to be sacrificed, the air filled with the constant screams of dying beasts.

05.04.2016

            I enter the black door of 10 Downing Street. Behind it is another black door, number 38; behind this one, a yellow door, number 68. These numbers appear logical and related to one another, multiplications of one another. I enter an L- shaped hall filled with pairs of people, the same person, a young self and old self, interacting, playing. I approach a pair that are me, young and old, but now there are three of me; a fourth version of myself enters, aged seventeen, confident and angry; I feel pathetic against the old, wise me, the child me, gleeful and innocent, and the younger self, cock-sure and coolly glazing over the world.