Eel Thoughts – Michael Malay
1. On the birth and death of eels
Eels are tiny when they are born, no bigger than a grain of rice, and completely transparent. If you were to look at them with a microscope, you would see into the world. But as they grow older they begin to absorb light, to bend and to capture it. Their skin darkens, their bodies lengthen, and their translucency is replaced by a brackish brown. Streaks of yellow run down their flanks, like bars of muddy gold, and their eyes grow more pronounced. The grain of rice has become a yellow eel.
But the transformations only continue, change following change. As they grow older, their yellow flanks darken, shade into umber, until, reaching full maturity, they take on the colours of a starry midnight. A slick, glossy black covers their top half, while their underbellies take on a silvery sheen. Glints of brown and green cover their back like flecks of mica. The yellow eel has become a silver eel.
Later, when they are ready to breed, eels will abandon their mud-holes in the river and turn their noses west, to the Sargasso Sea. It’s a place they hardly know, having left it when they were only a few days old. But it’s a region written into their bodies, and to which they return with unerring precision. During the day, they dive down to depths of two hundred metres, before moving upwards again at night. Their voyage thus describes a kind of sinewave, a diurnal dipping followed by a nocturnal surfacing: the arc of their homecoming.
The journey back is determinedly single-minded. Eels do not take a single morsel of food as they swim west, having already prepared for this voyage by storing up rich layers of fat. This is why they are rarely caught at sea. They are not returning for themselves but for the future, which makes itself felt as an itch in their bellies. After breeding, it is thought that adult eels simply perish and fall to the sea floor, where they turn into so much silt. But what survives them is instinct: millions of eggs floating up to the surface of the sea, like sparks from an unseen anvil. Each egg is a tiny plasma of light, each an eel waiting to be born.
And so they return east again, towards the rivers of Europe and North Africa: the Shannon, the Oued Sebaou, the Loire, the Elbe – and other points north, east and south.
2. Springtime
Elvers – the name for juvenile eels – arrive in Britain in the spring. And sometimes, in tidal rivers such as the Severn, they surge upstream on the spring tides of April and May. Part of the magic of elvers, then, part of their elvish charm, is how they unite the various meanings of spring. They leap into our world as the sap begins to rise, on the first spring tides of the year. (Spring: from the Old English springan, meaning an energetic leap or a sudden burst.)
As with the return of swallows, then, elvers help fetch the year to us; their entry into rivers is calendricallly precise. And if one could hover over the rivers of Britain, staying there patiently for days, for weeks, one would see what the kestrel sees: a greenness blooming as the elvers pass, an activating greenness that summons the ramsoms and bluebells of April, the cornflowers and dandelions of May…
3. Stenography
Eels are finding it harder to live here. After arriving in Britain, fresh from their Sargasso voyage, they meet with a series of strange hurdles: dams, sluice gates, tidal fences, barrages, weirs. Today, it is thought that there are more than one million man-made obstructions in rivers and streams across Europe.
The contradiction couldn’t be greater. On one hand, the hardness of concrete and the flushness of steel, and, on the other, this sinuous rope of changing life. Over its lifetime, an eel undergoes no fewer than four metamorphoses, as it transforms from being a leptocephalus to an elver, and then from yellow eel to a silver eel. It is an emissary from a world of alterations and flows, a creature of change and movement.
But what if eels are living letters sent from the Sargasso? If so, what messages might they carry?
What if, after looking into the water for weeks, we found ourselves surrounded by thoughts?
Sargasso Sisters from novadada on Vimeo.
A short meditative video-sonic piece celebrating and highlighting the habitats of the endangered European Eel (Anguilla anguilla).
Released for Fish Migration Day, 2020
Conceived and developed by Antony Lyons and Michael Malay.
Music contribution from The Fantasy Orchestra
fantasyorchestra.org
(excerpts from ‘Final Moments of the Universe’ by Richard Dawson)
Arranged and conducted by Jesse D Vernon
extra soundtrack audio by Antony Lyons
Filmed at loactions in Portugal, Ireland and the UK.
Recorded and edited by Antony Lyons
Some Ireland footage by Will O’Connor (ECOFACT)
Poem: ‘L’anguilla’ by Eugenio Montale
narrated by:
Manuela Castagna & Francesca Cozzolino
Translation based on a version by Paul Muldoon.
Additional text by Michael Malay
Produced with funding from Leverhulme Trust and University of Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities