Andrea Sharp

The School

In pho­tog­ra­phy class,
we were uncon­scious­ly float­ing around the small room
like a sin­gle-mind­ed unit,
arrang­ing our­selves into an even­ly spaced pattern,
fac­ing a sin­gle direction,
stand­ing on our tip­toes to get a bet­ter look at the orange-sized orb,
and saying
“This is a fish-eye lens. You can let it hang down, like this—”
we dropped it like a yoyo,
“or you can point it up, like this, or out, this way.“
We jabbed the lens into the mid­dle of the clus­ter of us and
blinked at the flash and
heard the shut­ter click, and
we were pro­cess­ing the film from the cam­era that
cap­tures light via the sphere-shaped lens. We were
peer­ing down at the print,
anx­ious to see the image that emerged, submerged
in a watery mix of chem­i­cals. And,
stand­ing there with rust-col­ored skin under the rust-col­ored light:
we were see­ing every­thing as one at once.
We were,
at the moment the shut­ter opened, writ­ing sen­tences for an essay,
in room C‑9, teach­ing English,
where we hoped to fin­ish our assign­ment in class so we wouldn’t have home­work, when
G.B. Shaw revealed some of the absurdity
of English spelling by apply­ing its con­ven­tions in such a way that
“fish”
could be spelled “ghoti.” And
speak­ing of fish,
just when we snapped the shutter,
we were sit­ting in our biol­o­gy class reflect­ing how,
via the com­plex net of the earth’s waterways,
a fish
might in one life­time cir­cum­nav­i­gate the globe.
It might come to life in the North Sea,
trav­el down the Atlantic to pass under
Argentina and across the Bellingshausen Sea,
go north through the Pacific Ocean for a vis­it to the Bering Straits, and
even­tu­al­ly die in the waters south of China or even in the Indian Ocean.
It might, on its way,
swim into the mouths of glis­ten­ing rivers.
At which sec­ond, through the pho­to­prod­uct we’re call­ing a fish’s eye,
we saw we were seat­ed beside the Jordan,
that we were eager teach­ers learn­ing “Baptism is a sym­bol­ic ritual.
The bap­tized are fish,
the bap­tist is a fisher—
—an ordained priest.
His helpers are fishermen.”
And across the
court we were spin­ning a com­pass for
Architecture
and dis­cov­ered what Euclid called
the vesi­ca pis­cis, and
start­ed silent­ly sig­nal­ing assent
with the loop of a thumb and forefinger.
At that moment,
as per school schedule,
this les­son coin­ci­den­tal­ly coincided
with Western Civ where we were
“Fisher” Kings—Priest Kings—and
we were knights embark­ing on long bloody jour­neys between Europe and Jerusalem,
nev­er know­ing, nev­er forgetting
the Fisher King her­itage of the Holy Grail. And
mean­while, simultaneously,
we were stu­dents of Eastern Philosophy,
drop­ping smooth peb­bles one at a time onto two sides of a scale
as we asked our pupils to pon­der this:
“A bird doesn’t know air, a fish doesn’t know water, and you don’t know your­self.” And
just then,
as the shut­ter snapped,
we were in Archaeology and
the con­ti­nents split apart and
what had been dry land was flood­ed with new networks
of oceans and seas and rivers and waterways.
At that moment, as amoe­bae and trilo­bites and tad­poles and
so many wig­gling slip­pery lives,
we were teach­ing ourselves,
for a rea­son we would nev­er know,
to labor out of a watery mix of chemicals
so we might cast out the his­to­ry of a species that,
against the forces of entropy and gravity,
relent­less­ly and for­ev­er climbs upward.
Shares under­stand­ing of sym­bol and metaphor and so
com­mu­ni­cates, speaks, and writes.
Invents reli­gion. Circumnavigates the globe.
Tries to learn and under­stand; pre­tends to teach.
Peers through the fic­tion of a
fish-eye sphere
to imag­ine cap­tur­ing the flash of an idea that time is an illu­sion and all is one.