Indra's Web & Fishing Nets
The End of Memory in the Ocean and the Cosmos
This is a lament-memory, a reverberation that passes through lost schools of fish, torn nets of being, to the quantum threads of creation itself.
From here, the place of contaminated bones and forgotten tides, something is falling apart. The fish no longer dance the ancient paths of food, and the mothers of the ocean no longer know where to lay their eggs. The aquatic culture, the lived knowledge and body wisdom, shared and transmitted by scales, currents, and moons, has been interrupted, torn apart by the continuous drag of human fishing nets. Overfishing not only takes bodies but also erases relationships and cartographies. It erases the knowledge that knows the place, blurs the right time, and obscures memory. The fish memories dissolve at the water’s bottom because overfishing, as Wilson and Giske (2023) describe, dismantles populations and entire fish cultures.
Like humans, fish are not born knowing; they learn from each other where to feed, when to migrate, how to escape, and where to lay their eggs.
Overfishing removes the elders, the bearers of knowledge. And when these bodies disappear, what is lost is not just biomass, but memory, culture, and guidance. When the elders disappear, knowledge sinks, falls silent, and the group collapses, because culture does not live in the air; it lives in bodies, shared routes, and swum stories. When we extract the bodies, we silence the tales and forget the maps. The species loses its way and place, loses itself in time. A silent void opens up in the ocean.
This is not just biology. It is ontology and cosmology. Relational physics, as outlined by Zaghi in his studies on Indra's Net, points out that the universe is made up of relationships, not isolated entities. What exists are not things, but links, knots, and webs. Creation is a living network, and cutting the threads is unravelling reality. In the field of quantum physics, approaches such as Zaghi's (2023; 2025) resonate with this observation at the most fundamental level of reality: the universe is made up of relationships, not things. Through the metaphor of Indra's Net, an infinite interweaving of mirrored jewels, we are reminded that every being, every vibration, is a relationship that sustains the whole. Cutting off relationships with the sea, with our ancestors, with fish, with the rhythms of the Earth, is not just a cultural loss. It is a cosmological collapse.
To undo the relationship is to undo creation.
In Western modernity, we have also forgotten where to plant our feet and our hearts. The culture of separation has taught us to see the world as dead matter to be used, not as living kin to be cared for. We have lost the memory of the fundamental relationship and recreated a culture of separation and violence. Our hunger is not only for food, but for belonging. The memory of deep roots is eclipsed from this place, slipping through our fingers like water. Our feet cannot find the old stories, and our hands no longer gather fruit. Our stomachs rumble with hunger. A deep hunger for what has been lost. Because food is also the story and song of our roots.
This hunger is an echo of what we have lost, but it is also a guide. From here, from this place of contaminated bones, there is a search, a groping like someone who lost their way long ago.
When the relational compass shatters, confusion arises between true and false stories. Tyson Yunkaporta speaks of this with raw clarity: the wrong story is a story out of place, told with haste, fear, and control because it is no longer in relation to the context that could sustain it. For when relational memory dissolves, whether in the oceans or in human cultures, a vacuum sets in where there was once guidance. Tyson Yunkaporta calls this imprisonment in the wrong story. This story is not simply false, but misplaced, told out of time and out of place, fuelled by fear and urgency. It is the kind of narrative that emerges when we no longer know where we came from or with whom we are walking, when the living map, made up of bodies, cycles, landscapes, and bonds, has been lost. The wrong story runs with urgency, cries out lost and afraid, points fingers, and offers quick solutions. It tries to replace the fabric of relationships with artificial, linear, often violent structures of meaning. And so, in the absence of the right story, the one that is told slowly, with listening, in relationship, narratives proliferate that seem strong but are fragile because they are not anchored in the living ground. They tear life apart.
And as the webs of relationships unravel, in oceans, communities, or bodies, not only emptiness sets in, but also the logic of obedience. From confusion and the appeal to follow assertive and violent voices, because of the near extinction of those who knew the complexities of the place and the relationships. Extinction and monoculture pave the way to authoritarianism. Where once there was reciprocity, presence, listening, and care, rigidity emerges that demands submission. The profound relational amnesia that disrupts schools of fish by erasing ancestral feeding and reproduction routes echoes in human social structures as authoritarianism and fascism, extreme expressions of modern separability. In these systems, bonds are replaced by command, care by cruelty, and difference by exclusion. The relationship that once sustained worlds is transformed into a threat to be controlled. Thus, the relational cut-off of the waters, in fish cultures destroyed by overfishing, reverberates on land as regimes of power that instrumentalise bodies and suffocate life. Fascism does not appear out of nowhere, but springs from soil poisoned by the loss of listening, the refusal of interdependence, and the denial of the web.
Oblivion.
Silence.
How to listen again?
The embrace guides, and so does hunger.
We have learned to be with what has been lost. To be with collapse as one who tends an almost extinct fire, not to rekindle the same fire, but to warm what may still germinate. Because, after all, the map was other bodies-in-place. Cartographies breathed, hand in hand, on ground trodden by many feet. The path, the journey, lost its destinations when it forgot its roots. Let us dream it again, not alone, but in a web.
Can you hear the ground throbbing?
It cries out for you to remember, in commitment and listening.
References:
Wilson, J. A., & Giske, J. (2023). Does fishing dismantle fish culture and ecosystem structure? Questions about the implications of social learning among fish and fishers. Fish and Fisheries, 24, 889–895. https://doi. org/10.1111/faf.12755 14672979, 2023, 5.
BATALHA, Sofia. Ecology & Intertwining – Co-Creation Network. Wind and Water – Rhythms of the Earth, https://ventoeagua.com/revistas-online/revista-38/ecologia-entrelacamento-rede-de-co-criacao/, number 38, 2022 or
Relational Quantum Dynamics and Indra's Net: A non-dual understanding of quantum reality. Essentia Foundation. Zaghi.
Quantum Reality as Indra's Net: A Category-Theoretic Formalism for Relational Quantum Dynamics. 2025. Zaghi
Book Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Andreotti and ACT.
Book Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta.
Partially written during the last session of the Eco-Mythic Practices Cycle.
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