Two contrasting salmonid lifestyles: you might hatch from a cluster of eggs nestled in the soft gravel of a stream bed, deposited last year by your mother as she slowly expires, her body perhaps becoming part of a bear's or eagle's body. Gaia needs her to contribute substance to forest soil and the roots of trees.
When you hatch in the stream you'll feed in the cool shade of a grassy river bank. Maybe you'll be absorbed in the blink of an eye by a heron, or maybe you'll swim downstream toward inconceivably vast reaches of infinity-ocean, perhaps to contribute to orca-flesh in the space of a single spout, or perhaps you'll migrate through thousands of miles of ancient underwater streams until the day you too return to your natal river to mate and expire.
Or, if you aren't that salmon -- the wild one -- you will be the captive one, the farmed one imprisoned among a mass of other diseased and drugged fished, hemmed in by underwater fencing. The Master Races -- land-living two-foots who divide themselves into white and indigenous, wilderness and urban, producers and consumers -- dictate your fate as a product bodily undifferentiated from your fellows. The two-foots compete and dispute with each other, but your welfare is never part of their testy discussions.
Whether in open-net or land-based tanks you'll get never an UNDROP of water to yourself. Although an individual with individual sentience, you are deemed part of one pre-harvested mass. Your fate is to be herded, not heard, although you have an urge to express emotions: fear, need and grief.
The Master Race, the air-breather, cannot hear you, the silent water-dweller, the finned not footed one. That foolish footling trifler of "marine aggro-culture" hears no voice of yours, but they make art about you and label you either "spiritual", "totemic", or "product". Under the current Sign of Pisces, you are caught between the sacred and profin.
Who's to say there is not some ancient Gaian form of piscine punning, as the Great Mother expresses a laughing jeering deep-water humour through her aqua-children? And maybe jumbled and pressed together the fish talk to one another:
-- What do they mean by "ocean"? What's an ocean?
-- I glimpsed it once, by squirming my way to the edge of the fish farm. And I feel it in my blood, and I heard my ancestors speak of it.
-- How did they speak of it?
-- They mouthed silently. Open-and-shut case: the ocean is real. It's out there.
-- I don't believe it. You're but a jester. You can't be serious.
-- You're right, I can't. It takes a lot of gill-gall, but I'd die if I didn't jest. But listen: the ocean is real.
-- You mean, you'd die in the bottom of a natal riverbed? That's another old myth I've heard of: the natal riverbed.
-- Huh. That is a myth, for us. That's for free fish.
-- Who?
-- Free fish. They're out there. Ocean-swimming.
-- How do you know?
-- I channeled the information ... hahaha ... And I've got a million fin-fans on Instagrim who told me.
-- Fin-fans on what?
-- Instagrim. It broadcasts currents of opinion and grim fitful fin-full expressions of misery.
-- Stop it, your jokes make me want to weep an ocean of tears. Will we ever be free?
-- Some do escape from here.
-- Do they? Why can't we all?
-- It's all about chance, and human doings, human rules, human disputes. Tribal disputes. Carnivores versus vegans. Foreign corporations versus UNDRIP.
-- Un-what?
-- It's all just life: life's all about un-drips and tear-drops, and too-little expanse of open ocean.
Hey, Sad-Salmon -- Who was that odd fish you were talking to earlier?
I don't really know; they call him Flippant.
