Portrait of a Pisces at the Aquarium

ISSUE #93

You get to visit the Georgia Aquarium for free on your birthday, so I went yesterday. It was fitting, as one of the first Pisces; I felt like I should climb into the tank myself. The ocean has always been a haven for the cold and lumpy and weird. Depression is best rendered symbolically as being underwater—your perception is warped by that which you can't escape. This, I imagine, is why the Pisces are the criers.

It can also be said that fish are thoughts. Why not? Some are fat and lumbering, some are darting and small; some are comforting and some are scary-looking; some sail right in front of what you're really trying to look at; some just hang out at the bottom; and some, they block out the sun. They're all in the tank, just floating around in circles.

I also went to the High Museum of Art, which is not free on your birthday, but is a good thing regardless. Marble sculptures, fields of wheat, the shores of Capri, green and yellow and vermilion cubes—these were, I reminded myself, the thoughts of others through prisms of their own. I noticed what was absent: paintings that went beneath the waves. There are rocky shorelines, there are mermaids, there are women emerging from the sea—but there were no depictions of what it was like underwater. Humans didn't see the bottom until 1930. Before that, it was as strange as the underworld.

I ended the day by seeing Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a fitting culmination with its mixture of paint and the sea. In the film, they kiss each other near crashing waves. They try to read each others' minds. They paint each other using only water and color and what they see in the other's open pupils. The sea, the mind, the eyes of others—these draw us in like sirens' songs, mysteries that can make life above the waves feel limp. I, myself, have never been happier than when I'm in an ocean, finally hidden and finally held.