An extract from "One Fish, True Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," publication date July 2009, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in the second week of January.
1: Blueshift.
In the beginning, there was nothing at all.
Before the seventh day, there were no numbers to express the idea that the seventh day would soon exist.
Then an empty universe came into being: empty with the exception of its colouration - one half red, and one half blue, the significant outcome of a dream in the vast mind of the Master Fisherman.
It is from here that we arrive at the notion of 'one' and 'two' and 'half.' When the red half and the blue half are accepted, we can become familiar with the even numbers: a red quarter and a blue one and a red quarter and a blue one give us 'four,' and the arrangement is not impossible to visualise, even in a dream.
The odd numbers are more problematic, and until we resolve them, the seventh day cannot be known as the seventh day. It requires the notion of an inequality, the blue four-sevenths bleeding into the red three-sevenths; the concept of something being stronger than something else. This was one of the outstanding achievements of the Master Fisherman: to accept that balance can sometimes be disrupted, and this was the sum total of the seventh day - to name itself four-sevenths blue and three-sevenths red.
The universe and all that is in it; the world and all that is in it, was created in seven days, in accordance with Judeo-Christian mythology. As long as there are no conscious entities, though, to appeal otherwise, a day can be as long as the Master Fisherman desires: the Planck time, 24 hours, or millennia. So the Lightning Rod took some time off, for he was very tired after inventing numbers, and dreamed about what dream-fragments he would like to realise on his re-emergence into his deepest sleep.
He had always been known as the Fisherman: the word resounded in his head during that longest of long nights, though he had never concerned himself with such earthly, uninteresting matters as investigating what movement and beauty lived behind its string of four letters. He dreamed that when he was just an apprentice fisherman, anyway, he picked up one of the dictionaries used by the Spanish humans, and they called 'pescado' what the English-speaking humans called 'fish.' He was sure, therefore, that pescado/fish was not a value judgment, just a convenient label. Only numbers, which he invented, remain the same across the puny radius of humanity; only they transmit value.
The Lightning Rod roared with loneliness and fury upon his awakening into deep sleep, clattering the red half of the universe and the blue half (parity had been restored) together like cymbals to occupy himself. The frantic coming-together of the partitioned halves bled red and blue together at the boundary where they struck, a quantity of a third colour squeezed out from the interior of the hemiverses. Long ago had the Master realised that sevenths could be added to quarters, and sixths to halves, but this mixing of colour hurt his eyes and made him blind, dazzling him into a long period of surface, uncreative rest. That was the sixth day.
On the fifth day, the sinusoidal curve of the Fisherman's intuition rose like a balloon again, and he fixed his wounded, dilated eye on the quantity of Third Colour - red flooding into blue, and blue flooding into red - that his agitation had produced. There was movement and beauty therein, pushing through the synthesis of red and blue, and displacing it upwards and outwards.
Eben - for that was the name of the Fisherman - wished to commute with the moving, lithe aptitude whose pressure parted the Third Colour in the places where its force moved, and felt the longing and passion for this otherness. Joyfully, he drilled his infinite brain through the proliferation of depth and colour and one and two, and delivered to himself an alive, breathing something which was the same as the blue half of the universe.
If I am a fisherman, concluded Eben, then what I have derived can be nothing other than a fish - made of the same substance as blue half of the universe, and therefore I shall call it 'blue fish.' Verily, I declare that the blue fish is the first form, and all other forms of life will stem from this. The blue fish comprises, and is a representation of, the dream-words 'beauty,' 'life,' 'movement,' and 'infinity.'
