The Existence of Cod

Of cod, blackfish, black sea bass, winter in Montauk, One Million Years B.C., Christmas, and Susan Sontag:

I was watching a documentary about Susan Sontag the other night, an extraordinary woman very much of her time in the ’60s, a feminist, philosopher, and essayist with what were, and to some still are, radical views. As it happened, I had caught the last half of “One Million Years B.C.” starring Rachel Welch on the Turner Classic Movies channel earlier in the day. It was one of those cold rainy days last week, so perhaps I can be forgiven.

“One Million Years,” which hit the screen in 1966, was fascinating in that the dialogue consisted of what sounded like gobbledygook — grunts and growls meant to represent the lingua franca in cave days. Of course, Rachel is Rachel by any other name, and the plot, one tribe fighting the other, dodging dinosaurs, and Rachel’s tribe surviving a volcanic apocalypse at the end, needed no spoken or written explanation.

With this depiction of early man still in mind, I watched the Sontag documentary that evening. Her famous quote, “If there were no speaking or writing there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is,” seemed absurd (literally) beyond words. “No truth?” “Only be?” Like the world in all its glory does not exist unless humans talk about it? I’m getting to the cod, blackfish, and black sea bass and Christmas.

It’s the same problem I have with the atheist who seems blinded to what is, by blabbing about what isn’t, a self-fulfilling prophecy to my way of thinking. If “God” did not create the world, then it created itself, an accomplishment, you will agree, beyond words to describe it. Ultimately, Yahweh, the terrible/wonderful force of creation and its opposite, the entity that cannot be named, exists, as the Old Testament hints, beyond words, beyond humankind’s blathering about it.

I ask you, is it so difficult to consider a world without people? Is it possible that some of us believe the world would not exist without us? Okay, now the cod, blackfish, and black sea bass.

Capt. Michael Potts has been running the charter boat Breakwater from Salivar’s Dock in Montauk these days. On Monday afternoon we met up at the Montauk I.G.A. Don’t we all? As we left, he reached into his truck and gave me two blackfish fillets, an early Christmas gift.

He said the fishing had been productive for blackfish, a k a  tautog, and especially for sea bass, both bottom dwellers. Captain Potts said his anglers were even catching a fair amount of cod, whose numbers have plummeted in traditional grounds Down East to the extent that federal managers are considering banning their harvest there for at least six months. “It could happen here,” he said. Scientists say the absence of cod is likely due to a general warming trend in the northwest Atlantic.

“On Monday, I had people who had already been blackfishing with me three or four times. I thought we’d try for cod. We wound up with 23. We tried crabs [green crab bait] and caught more blackfish. It’s been an excellent blackfish season and excellent sea bass season. On an average day for the last month we limited out on blackfish and sea bass,” the veteran charterman said.

He added that he’d not heard of a rod-and-reel-caught striped bass since late October or early November, and that the smattering of herring schools were not being attacked, as usual in late summer and early fall by stripers. He said schools of medium-size bluefin tuna had been recently spotted offshore around the Hudson Canyon, “but nobody’s trying for them.” Beautiful bluefin going about their business observed by only a few witnesses. The existence of cod, blackfish, black sea bass proved by baited hooks, witnessed by a few of us, otherwise unseen, unspoken about.

I believe it’s easier for people who spend a good part of their lives at sea to imagine a world that exists beyond words. Those who walk a long stretch of empty beach in winter too. I was asked the other day if I believed the story of Christmas. Did I think it was the true? Was Jesus a real person, the son of God, who made blind men see, turned water into wine, and rose again from the dead?

I grew up singing “Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee,” so I like the story, not because I think it’s true, but because for me it serves as a guide to understanding the truth beyond its words.