I don't have a koi pond

My fish aren’t koi. They’re Carp. Not that I suppose there is anything wrong with koi, per se. I met a couple koi at the garden center this last summer and they were cute and friendly, and really, as creatures of privilege, why wouldn’t they be? Of course, one could say the same about the eventual owners of koi, and anyone else with the means to have a pond in their yard. But not all of them are.

I painted a house this last summer and talked to the woman who lived next door to it. She had koi in her pond. She just moved in and had had her house painted in an off white, off due to the addition of a pink tinge. The trim was bright, flat, purple. She kept promising to anyone who would listen that she would paint a mural on the wall facing where I was working. My employer, a former co-worker where I teach, and I shuddered. Mural woman fancied herself an artist, and the mural and her pond was part of her art as life as art programme. The pond was artistic but not aesthetic, I might want to put it. Nature in a frame. The koi weren’t fish anymore; they were art objects. It might remind me of poodles with the grooming where they’re shaved except for poofy spots on their heads and tail and feet, poor things.

At least it seemed to me that to her the koi weren’t koi anymore. How this seemed to the koi may be different. They probably had an easier time respecting themselves than a lot of poodles out there.

No, it’s not koi, but goldfish what’s in my pond. Twenty-three cent goldfish. At one time there were fifteen, then there were five survivors, now there are some ridiculous number. Not all the fellas were fellas. I need to find someone to give the newbies away to. Freecycle, maybe, when they get a little bigger and I can fish them out. I was afraid that the oxygen supply in the pond wouldn’t be great enough to support them all after it freezes over and they’d suffocate under the ice, but I checked with the pond guy at the garden store. It’s deep enough that they should all be fine.

It’s a bit difficult to describe this reason why I like the fact that my fish are plain carp, not fancy koi carp. Or at least the principle is inconsistent. A friend and I compare the respective worth of our fish, hers indoor in a tank and mine out in the mild wild of the yard. She’s appalled that I keep the fellas there in the winter, freezing with the garlic and shallots. I pretend outrage that she keeps hers locked up in a bowl with cats nearby, and I tell her she should bring her fish out for a swim. I like to think of the fellas as rugged, blue collar, Joe the Piscine sorts of guys. Like me. With a pond garden filled with irises and water lilies.

Mural woman’s pond isn’t deep, maybe eighteen inches. It was more shallow at one point in the summer when I put some water lettuce in it. The fish swam frantically en masse, almost like flopping on the beach, only occasionally finding the deep end. I guess Italy has banned giving away goldfish as prizes at fairs; it seems to be illegally cruel to suffocate them in plastic bags. I suspect mural women’s fish will die this winter, freeze their little fins off.


I wasn’t sure my fellas would live thru their first winter. I did buy them a heater, which melts a small hole in the ice to let toxic gasses out. I bought them a filter for living through the winter. It seemed like they deserved a reward, and I also developed new respect for them as fish. But I’m not trying to say I’m so far above letting fish die. I don’t want to sound too all crunchy, but life and death are all part of nature, after all, the eternal cycle and all that. Fish die all the time and it doesn’t so much bother me(*). I just think that if they’re going to die as part of nature, they should be able to do so as part of nature, not artistic ostentations. What’s the difference between a wolf starving to death because it can’t catch any more food, and a dog starving to death because its owner won’t spring for Alpo? What’s the difference between freezing to death climbing a mountain, and freezing to death in your home?



Unless of course the killing is part of the art.


(*) Unless it’s because of river pollution; that pisses me off. The fish frequently try to jump out of the water, it hurts them so bad. That is an interesting thing to think about: can you imagine not trying to jump into the water – another medium in which we can live – but out of the air, into some mystery element that will kill us? Jumping out of the air and into the fire to find relief?

The Iowa DNR on water monitoring

Iowa DNR on fish kill reporting

Iowa DNR on fish kill investigations

I don't have Koi Pond

I have an iPhone. I recently quit my years-long affiliation with Verizon – they being bastards – and took up with AT&T, they being iPhone purveyors. It’s okay as a phone, nothing special, somewhat unergonomic, being flat, and somewhat quiet, being shrouded in an after market protective silicone skin.

In the case that you don’t know, I’ll tell you that the cool thing about the iPhone is that one can download applications for it, some made perhaps by Apple but mostly by third parties. These applications run on the phone and vary from the ‘flashlight’ that makes the screen shine usefully, to tic-tac-toe, to sophisticated games, to file transfer programs, social networking interfaces, and translators, converters, and widgets of all manner. One such application is Koi Pond. It costs a dollar.

I don’t have Koi Pond

The application shows cute pictures of koi swimming around the screen. If one touches them, they wiggle and move away. The urge to poke the screen with the sort of force that would break it is hard to resist.

I never want to hit my goldfish. Our taunt them with worms on pointy hooks. So, what gives?

The thing is, I like electronics. Gadgets. Quad-core processors. On my iPhone, I have the TanZen application, a tangram program. It’s a puzzle in which simple shapes – triangles, a parallelogram, and a square, sized in clever mathematical relation – are used to fill out complex shapes. I play to help increase my visual literacy.

I remember other kids making wooden tangram puzzles, or something like them, in shop class twenty odd years ago. I never got into them. I like the game on the iPhone, tho, in the same why in which I still don’t care for Hangman, which I also have on my phone. The game seems natural.

What I wonder is why I don’t care about the tactile feel of the game. I work in wood, whenever I can: more construction than sculpture, with a preference for cabinet making and shop work. I’ve considered making a tangram puzzle out of exotic woods, rubbing the pieces with rare lustrous oils, French polishing them, rubbing with rottenstone, spraying them with urethane and buffing them out smoother glass before scootching them around on a velvet felt pad. I can’t seem to get much motivation to do it, tho. In fact, I down right don’t want to. It might be a nice shelf piece, something I could have given to my grandmother. I know I wouldn’t use it. Why would I? I have it on the phone.

I could have a pond on my phone.

It’s clearly not that I’m against non-embodiment or electronics. So what do I have against disembodied fish. That I don’t have against unembodied tans? That I don’t feel for polished craft art wooden tans. That I do for fish?