A fish, a glass of milk, and irrelevant territories
A disconcerting dream of complexity
The Dream
A few years ago (before covid!), I had a dream, and the dream’s image stayed with me until now, vividly, still reverberating. It was a simple dream, but I’m working through a powerful image since then. This archetypal image keeps popping up.
I dreamt that I was a small golden fish that lived in a glass of milk, so all I did was swim round and round and sometimes bump into the glass walls. All I could see was white — white blindness.
My reality as a small fish in a glass of milk was narrow. The white, opaque fluid enveloping me was all I knew, so I felt protected in its density but also captive and imprisoned by the invisible glass walls. It felt too tight. But this constraint of space was all I knew, so everything outside the glass of milk was irrelevant, for I could not see or sense beyond it. The opaque whiteness of the thick liquid and the invisible glass walls severely diminished my senses. And I felt bodily overwhelmed by the narrow constraint and the illusion of vastness and freedom. White blindness was my whole reality.
I still carry, feel and hold the vivid bodily sensation of being this fish in the glass of milk. It is still too real in my body/imagination, very much alive. It brings the paradox between the illusion of freedom, just because you do not see anything beyond the milk or the glass, so innocent and violent simultaneously. The slashing and neglecting of empathy for EVERYTHING outside the glass... and even inside it, because you just mistake blindness for security. Not being able to relate... because you feel too vulnerable all time —the paradox between neglecting Life and the illusion of protection.
Fish
When we think of fish, we get entangled with the ocean. Its depths, currents, underwater forests, tides, diverse ecosystems, shallow waters, abyssal darkness, tropical waters, or icy storms. Or we might connect to a lake or a river, with its freshwater flows, streams, and dynamic rhythms of the ancient wild waters.
Glass of milk
A glass of milk, well, that is another story. In the world's vast history, glass is a very modern thing. Glassmaking dates back to at least 3,600 BC in Mesopotamia, and the magic of glassmaking is made of sand, crystallized mineral salts molded through intense heat. So, a vessel such as glass has a memory of the fierce fire and air that shaped it. It also remembers being sand, a beach, or the ocean’s bottom. Before it was sand, it might have been part of a rock within a mountain, crumbling down by eroding forces after it's been generated by primal fire.
And then there is milk, a thick, nurturing liquid.
Irrelevant Territories
The Cambridge Dictionary defines irrelevancy as something unrelated to what is being discussed or considered unimportant. When we mostly unconsciously decide what is irrelevant within our identity and beliefs, we also decide on severance and rupture. Irrelevant things get unconnected, separate, and out of the picture. We break relations with something when we judge it outside our pattern of reality. It becomes foreign and unrelated.
We store un-relations, un-events, un-realities, un-emotions, and all these tangential vibrations we do not acknowledge in an irrelevant landscape. But because it is irrelevant, we do not have a map of this vast territory.
We tend to avoid it, but it keeps growing. It is a somewhat untidy and random place, like an attic or a basement, where we send all that doesn’t seem to fit or matter, so we can keep functioning. We may lose ourselves in it occasionally, for it is complex and wild.
The white-blinded fish is a metaphor for modernity
This fish living in a glass of milk calls me to the cultural constraints of perceived and accepted modern western reality. How narrow is our field of perception? How consequentially monstrous are our irrelevant landscapes? Being blind to the frontiers of culture makes us all fish in a glass of milk, finding solace in the tight walls around us.
In a systemic multi-layered reality, is there such thing as irrelevant things?
How can we venture in (re)connection to what is doomed irrelevant?
Are we willing to cross that frontier?
Sometimes, there are treasures hidden in irrelevant places. Remember that the opposite move of irrelevancy is to connect, join, and tether ourselves within an interweaved sense of reality. It’s the difference between being a small-domesticated fish in a glass of milk or a wild swimming critter potently journeying across the open sea. For a fish to swim fiercely across its environment, nothing is irrelevant. It responds to stimuli all around, swimming faster, changing course, going deeper, or hiding. Every inducement of the context is alive and permeates the live response of the finned critter. It responds and acts quickly from the whole body.
Once we are working on the liminalities of consensus reality, trying to find other ways to be in the world (redeeming alternatives for modernity’s utterly destructive challenges), we need to be aware of these irrelevant landscapes. What is irrelevant for humans could be utterly urgent for a tree or a river.
For now, still inside the glass, we can remember the vastness of the crystalline water, calling to mind the mountain that generated the sand and the glass. The fire that made everything possible. We thank milk as primordial food. As what connects and entangles is being awakened in the heart, we begin to move slowly through the irrelevance membrane that separates everything.
What is irrelevant to you? How can you connect with it? What treasures of connections can you find in your landscape of irrelevance?
