The Television is a Fish Tank

On the Animal Planet, God, a close facsimile (or at least a be-speckled, white-haired, man with a Lancaster accent), is talking about "sperm curds" and "the urge to spawn".  The imagery is graphic, a white stain on the surface of the water where the male herring have exerted their spasms of covetous milt.  This is like rain for the underwater garden of eggs.  The saturated bay will take care of the residue with tides and waves but, in the meantime, a wanton oil spill now thickens in the coves and along the jettees, carving out the coastline like Christo.

In the deep ocean, the squid, hideously attractive as they emerge, stir the light out of the water.  They are shy;  becoming murky visions (that slowly clear).  Now and again they appear in blossoming profusion: monsters, ballerinas, and these are all paratroopers, yet another planet, living in reverse.  There are thousands and thousands and thousands, male and female, wave on wave.  They rise out of the nocturnal sky, a kind of invasion.  They are rehearsed by science's improvisations and disciplined by instinct's generals.

Unsurprisingly,  there is the unsubtle magic as their tentacles tangle.  Underneath there is wiring hidden in dull gray skin so that when stimulated the tentacles ignite a bright lipstick red.  Their gelatin flesh is scorched for a moment; the cogent alarm is merely the blushing of pleasure, a shiver of goose flesh when the earlobe is lightly bitten.  The squid has a body electric and so do I.

There are associations or ideas in this briny opera that, stretched by imagination, might even be considered erotic.  However the lesson is elsewhere.  The impulse and imperative of two distinct schools of thought--I mean schools of fish--are variations on the zeal that drives on nature, compelling the planet through space, allowing the continents to drift and collide, and the instant agitation of the groin in its various phases, the hunger of skin for skin, that magnetism.