Song of a Fish

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Dinesh ^club

. . this possibility that religion can provide reassurance, a kind of ideological Prozac for those disappointed with the circumstances of their current lives, combined with the doctrional equivalent to Xanax for those worried about their eventual death. The English Poet Rupert Brooke en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Brooke is best known for writing “If I should die, think only this of me / That there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. But for all this sentimentality, Brooke took a gimlet-eyed view of religion’s promise of a reassuring afterlife. Here is this cynical take of “Heaven,” as imagined by a fish:

. . . This life cannot be All, they swear,
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! -- Death eddies near --
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under the Almight Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Ow! Never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fairl
Fat caterpillars drift around
And Paradisal grubs are found
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish. ~ Page 235

3.3 years ago. Edited 3.3 years ago.

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California Days D 11/24/25. California Days D 11/24/25.

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