The Futility of Fish
By: Sarah Olson Michel
Tags: Books, Mental Health, Review, Science, Nature

I picked up a copy of Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (Simon & Schuster, April 2020) by Lulu Miller during one of my shifts at the bookstore. Something to keep me busy while I waited at the register for the few customers allowed inside the store to make their way over with their purchases. One of them, noticing the book, mentioned he was a fisherman.

“I’m pretty sure that fish exist,” he said, his eyes crinkling, clearly smiling behind his mask. “But I suppose I’ll have to give it a read.”

The weird title had drawn me in as well. Author Lulu Miller is on a quest to understand a man named David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist born in 1851. In a world where Chaos reigns supreme, Jordan is the star taxonomist of his day, fighting to categorize species of fish as the universe seemingly conspires against him: He names them and categorizes them and tucks them neatly away inside formaldehyde-filled jars, carefully labeled and stacked on shelves. Then a fire consumes his lab. He starts again. Then the earthquake of 1906 hits. He begins once more, this time stitching name tags directly into the flesh of the preserved fish, desperate not to lose the order he’s brought to this world ruled by Chaos.

Chaos runs Miller’s world as well. In the pages of Jordan’s life’s work, she seeks answers with the desperation of someone hoping to find a reason to live. It was on page 38 that my eyes first fell on something that resonated deep within me, a quiet admittance by Miller in an almost offhand-remark: “I knew a sadness that powerful lurked inside me. I preferred to vent it by slicing little nicks into my skin, was all.”

As Miller describes an unfortunate experience with sleeping pills and a hospital trip during high school, my mind lingers over the idea of that powerful sadness. Because I know it, too. The dark, heavy thundercloud hanging just above my shoulders, raining down on me so hard I’m afraid I will drown.

In 2016, I almost did. The same year I decided I wanted to be a science writer was the year I dug a blade so deep into the skin of my wrist that a doctor later told my dad that my best chance of not having a prominent scar was to glue it closed, not stitch it, because surely no girl would want to be scarred. Today that patch of skin is painted with tattoo ink — an open book blooming with California poppies. Something beautiful to hide the horror.

Miller knew what that sadness, that shame, was like. And if she knew, then surely her efforts to try to understand David Starr Jordan’s confidence in his purpose and place in life mirrored my own quest. I had to know what she had learned — it kept my eyes glued to the book, turning page after page like a wounded animal seeking survival.

David Starr Jordan fought disaster with order, and I know that fight all too well. One of the symptoms of that powerful sadness I live with is an anxiety disorder that involves an obsession with neatness, with control. The worst manifestation of it is a focus on hair. It’s called trichotillomania, a nervous disorder involving hair pulling. But it’s more than that — it’s a pitiful attempt to bring order to Chaos.

I know this even as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and pick, pick, pick the hairs that are out of place according to my brain chemistry. But instead of order, it brings regret, despair, shame. Our bodies are wild, like the earth they come from, and they will do as they please. So I pick and pluck until there is nothing left, as if it will bring me salvation from Chaos. Because order is control.

David Starr Jordan, with his formaldehyde fish, was trying to control a random universe by categorizing everything into his preferred order. Man deciding Fate. A feeble fight against futility. As Miller documents throughout the book, he made great progress by naming thousands of fish. You could even say he was successful in his war on entropy.

But here’s the problem: fish don’t really exist.