A 100 lb Salmon, Rumi, and God.
I woke up this Christmas morning dreaming of a 100 lb salmon. It wasn’t actually me who encountered the fish, but someone else. This man told me that he had encountered a true 100lb salmon, and had then lost it. He had a number of blurred photographs showing what appeared to be a humungous fish, nearly the size of a small shark. By a clever sleight of the unconscious, I then transferred this story onto me, and the next thing I knew, I was playing this enormous fish, and shouting to my friend, Michael Mann, that he must take a photograph of it when next it leaped. Thus go wish fulfilment fantasies. I had a lovely time fantasising about playing the fish, but didn’t actually have the metaphorical balls to land it. It wasn’t really my fish for a start, bearing in mind that I had seconded it from another - okay, let’s face it - aspect of myself. One might probably call this the ‘wannabe’ aspect.
I did once catch a 47 lb salmon on the Lochy, whilst conducting out-of-season broodstock fishing for the hatchery. The fish took me nearly an hour to get into the net, an event both witnessed and aided by fellow fisherman Humphrey Stone, who had the good sense and presence of mind to insist we measure the fish three times. So I do know what it feels like to have a mammoth fish on the end of one’s line, and then let it go. Being a sometime writer about dreams [The Watkins Dictionary of Dreams 2007], it also occurred to me that something must have triggered the dream. Then I remembered that at Christmas Eve dinner at Michael Mann’s house, I had briefly seen a book about super-large salmon - thus both his and the salmon’s appearance in my dream.
Fish, in dreams, also tend to have mystical connotations, and Michael and I had had a discussion, that same evening, about Ramesh Balsekar’s book, Enlightened States, and we had also read a number of poems to the room-at-large, which included Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Magi, Edward Thomas’s Roads, and Rumi’s quite extraordinary poem which starts ‘What can be done, O Believers, as I do not recognise myself…’. Add to that a visit to Midnight Mass in Tisbury Church, and it’s hardly surprising that my dream thoughts had veered towards the mystical. What was wonderful about Rumi’s poem was that it so perfectly echoed the way I feel about God. Namely that all dogmas are misleading - all theology flawed - all religions expedient. God, as Rumi says in another of his poems, is only in the heart ['Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.']. This tallies perfectly with my own religious convictions, that may be summed up in four simple words: ‘There is only God’. All the paraphernalia and brouhaha of organised religion seems to me a perfect way of distancing oneself from God. The Midnight Mass service was all very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But God is found in the heart and nowhere else. One doesn’t need church services to conjure him up. One simply needs to love and thank him. And my great fish, of course, was God.