Tracing Paths
No one can trace the path of the eels (Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us)
Their wanderings and meanderings are mysterious, inscrutable, as is their gender, resolutely indeterminate until the time when, driven by a force we still don’t fully understand, eels begin their journey back to the sea, to the place where they came from and where they will now be transformed, given a gender, finally, and a purpose, it becoming she, or he, how these are assigned is still not clear, though how could it be in the eel’s unruly world? Or unruly to us, with our need for borders and clear designations. What is this genderless, hybrid creature that twists and curls and slithers, eluding our gaze, trying to escape our need to divide and categorize, to place things neatly inside containers, so we can make sense of a world that resists our attempts to make sense, to give human meanings to things that lie beyond the human?
In my native language, Spanish, the genderless eel has always been gendered, always she, anguila. The language of my birth, whose pull — the force of the sounds, images, and inflections that first gave shape to my world — I can’t resist. Even if that world has undergone many transformations since, some things have become unchangeable, fossilized in the same structures that made the world — my world — open and possible — understandable — to my childish imagination. My first language. An irresistible force tugging at me, taking me back, showing me another world, or just reminding me that there are different ways of looking at the world, different ways of seeing, of being, that don’t exclude one another, other languages, like the language I’ve spoken for so many years now, my second language, the language I’ve chosen to live and write in, where anguilas can be genderless, where they can be eels, wandering and meandering in their own mysterious ways, until the day when, compelled by one of those irresistible forces we can’t comprehend, their gender finally assigned, they finally embark on a journey that is both a return to origins and their final destination, a perfect circle. Or so we’ve come to believe. In reality, we don’t really know — no one has traced the path of the eels. Yet.
Here are some of the inspirations for this short piece:
Francesca Woodman, Eel Series https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-untitled-from-eel-series-venice-italy-ar00348 (Her work is the source of continuous fascination for me)
New Yorker article about Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rachel-carsons-natural-histories
Patrick Svensson’s The Book of Eels , in Maria Popova’s beautiful blog The Marginalian https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/09/09/book-of-eel/
