Eels Don’t Have Sex Until the Last Year of Their Life (Cento in Which Freud and Aristotle Make Love on a Riverbank and Then They Turn Into Eels)
by Maya Owen
Composed of sentences from this article by Steve Paulson, interviewing Patrik Svensson about The Book of Eels
1.
I think it’s very funny to think about.
It’s actually more a story about humans.
Mostly.
Freud went to Trieste to find the eel testicle.
He spent a month in Trieste and dissected over 400 eels.
And he’s far from alone in his obsession.
Aristotle studied the eel and tried to explain how they breed.
That was like the holy grail of natural science at the time.
He thought that the eel just came to life out of nothing, from the mud in the rivers
and the seas.
They barely talked as they set their fishing lines along the bank.
It was a magical place, surrounded by willow trees, with bats
swooping through the moonlight.
This was in the 1870s.
This is a very fluid sense of time.
And then it had a lot to do with … sexuality.
Freud was 19 years old,
“I always found it fascinating and a little scary,” he says.
And he’s far from alone in his obsession.
They barely talk …
Instead … they develop their sexual organs.
On summer nights … him … near …
This … fluid sense …
Then … they go through another metamorphosis.
Their eyes change, the way they swim changes.
And then they live for a very long time as yellow eels in freshwater.
Yes, that’s an amazing story.
That’s one of my favorite stories in the science history of the eel.
I think it’s very funny to think about.
There wasn’t any prestige in it. There was no money in it.
And both of them
live in a pond for 50 years and then they suddenly decide it’s time
they transform again and
return home to the place where they came from.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around how
they managed to transform … and then
find their way back
at the end …
2.
A boy caught an eel in the 1850s and put it in a well.
And this is a very strange creature.
It was bleak and small, but had enormous eyes.
You know …
If the story is true, it has lived for over 150 years in complete darkness.
It made me think, what’s really the difference between life and death?
Probably it has to do with the temperature, with the pressure and with the salinity of the water.
That’s still one of the mysteries.
3.
Later, the young
Johannes Schmidt went out on the ocean with a boat to find the birthplace of the
eel.
World War I broke out, so it was very dangerous to sail around the Atlantic
Ocean looking for eel larvae, but he just kept on going.
Yes, that’s an amazing story.
I think it’s very funny to think about.
What’s so special about the Sargasso Sea?
What makes a man sail around the Atlantic Ocean for 18 years just to know where the eel is born?
It’s actually more a story about humans.
Their final goal is to return home to the place where they came from.
But it’s a very long and difficult journey.
I always found it fascinating and a little scary …
How do they know where they are going?
Exactly.
About the Author:
Maya Owen writes, sings, and hopes to see a whale in real life. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in ANMLY, HAD, The Shallow Ends, Muzzle, Glass, Adroit, and elsewhere. She reads for Monstering, a magazine by and for disabled women and non-binary people, and works at Lesflicks, a platform for sapphic content. She is passionate about bad movies, space-hopper jousting, and the proper etiquette for transporting snails to safety after rain.
Image: Hokusai, Big Eels, c. 1840 (detail)
