There's a woman who has been suspended in my thoughts for the last few months - as is customary, though, I let events outside of us strangle our relationship at its very birth.
One of the cords which served to choke us was the wish to make us run before we could walk, and I take responsibility for this. In other words, one of us fired an arrow far into the future, before it was anything like appropriate to do so, and the full force of the arrow's impact was taken by a foetal partnership much too young to absorb it.
The second, no less significant, damage was done by these very pages, and the unending references to Bluefish. I feel that I should set the record straight about this now.
There was a time when 'Bluefish' referred to a particular woman, and the constellation of emotions which were derived from her. Distant and unknowable, Bluefish (the word, for it could be no more than a word) represented the intersection between an unfulfilled wish and the living, breathing woman who would one day be its embodiment.
Whenever we use a person's name, or whenever a person's name is replaced by something which later represents it, then the name (or its substitute) floats on a river of memories, or a river of future memories. Each drop of water is a moment in time past, or a moment yet to be experienced, and it so transpired that when I thrust my hand into the blackness, Bluefish emerged wriggling into the daylight of consciousness.
At one point, Bluefish stood for the overblown arrogance which declares it has smashed the pitiful existing tenets of human love, and re-written them in a new language. Later, of course, her name contained the defeat of this idea, and the return to earth from some improbable summit.
Remember, the author of this blog used to be a journalist. It might have been some years ago, but the main trick of the trade - the same one the mathematician uses, when writing an equation, that sees elaborate concepts crunched into an abbreviated series of letters and figures - dies hard.
It's more prevalent in the tabloid Press, and usually pejorative: scientists re-invented as the schoolyard insult 'boffin,' Members of the European Parliament reduced to 'Eurocrats,' and business owners called 'tycoons.' In this way, whole classes of people are given a stereotypical, easy label, which bobs about on its own semantic river.
For your author, now, 'Bluefish' is the same: it is a convention, a mechanism which dredges the bed of the past in the hope of finding something new, it is a set of parentheses of which the leftmost bracket starts in December 2008, and the closing bracket places itself in February or March 2010.
We talk about the Second World War, the Stone Age, and the Victorian era, and everyone knows approximately what we mean. Similarly, when I mention Bluefish, it is these days no more than a method of labelling time.
