About

This is the story behind the name of this blog.

When I clicked on WordPress and was confronted with coming up with a URL, I looked around my office to find some image or thing that resonated. I noticed the Tibetan thangka (a hanging painting of Buddhist images framed in fabric) which shows a holy guy covered in pictures and glyphs and radiant, blossoming, fully realized chakras; each foot is perched (as it were) on a fish; for the PETA people out there, the fish faces appear pretty relaxed, or maybe detached, possibly reconciled? If I ever become tech savvy enough to do so, I’ll download the image.

So, I noticed the dude was standing on fishes, thus the blog name.

Then I remembered a Rilke poem that ends with the words “standing on fishes” which, if memory served, I loved. So I googled “Rilke” and “standing on fishes” and got:

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

So I re-read and instantly re-liked the poem because I have an ongoing fascination with elegant articulations of the limits of language, such as No More I Love Yous (Annie Lennox) and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying (the protagonist, as well, of my bachelor’s thesis).
For me, Moving Forward is lush, not immediately comprehensible, yet somehow exhilarating.

The point of this blog is to talk about these sorts of connections that delight, well, me. There’s some small concern that it will not engage. That, like someone who insists on relating his dreams with the utmost attention to detail, it will point to that which distances me from, rather than connects me to, others. So that would suck.

Thanks for stopping by (if in fact you are able to — I don’t really get how all of this works just yet) to ponder my post-podcamp tribute to Social Media.