3/26/2023 0 Comments Lulu millerIn his care, a snake was also a fish a turtle, a fish and one morning as we opened the window to let an April breeze roll through the apartment, the potted banana palm became a fish, her fins suddenly paddling the air.Īs our world was closing in, his seemed to be exploding. Sheesh, sheesh, sheesh, he would point his little scepter-finger, stunning the former confusion into mastery. Fish in the windows of the shuttered nursery school on Clark. Fish inside the library books we could no longer return. Fish along the mosaicked wall of the pedestrian underpass to Lake Shore Drive, now barricaded with yellow tape to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Over the next few weeks, he revealed to me that fish were everywhere in the city of Chicago. “Yes!” I squealed in the highest octave I could reach, cementing the mistake with my glee. “Sheesh.” A mottled blue coelacanth, fleshy and finned. I pulled up a photograph of a goldfish on my phone. I should have squeezed my palm to his lips and pressed hard so no more words could spill out. His fall from grace in real time, his ejection from a Garden of Eden I had just spent a decade trying to hack a path back into. The reward, as I promise in the book, is a more expansive world, “a wilder place,” where nothing is what it seems, where “each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.”Īnd so, as the word “fish” rolled off my son’s tongue for the very first time, I should have felt that hot burst of fricative air as a puncturing of his innocence- sheeesh. My book, in large part, is a plea to approach the world with more doubt-more doubt in our categories, more doubt in our words, more curiosity about the organisms pinned beneath our language. But it’s a lie, this category of “fish,” a mistake, a meaningless group that hides incredible nuance and complexity.Īnd “fish” is just one glaring example of this thing we do all the time-group things together that do not belong under one label in the name of maintaining our convenience, comfort, power. And when you accept this fact you will see that the category of “fish” is a bum category-an act of gerrymandering we perform over nature to make it line up with our intuition. In short, scientists recently discovered that many of the creatures we typically think of as “fish” are in fact more closely related to us than to each other. I had just spent the last ten years of my life working on a book called Why Fish Don’t Exist, arguing that the word “fish” is symptomatic of our human inability to see the world as expansively as it is. I, of all people, should have sensed the danger in it. It should have been a tragic moment for me. He had dog and ball and duck and bubble and mama and (mysteriously in our lesbian household) dada and nana (for banana) and vroom vroom (for cars) and hah-hah (for hot) and (the root of so many of our evils) what’s dat? What’s dat? What’s dat? He looked at her, giving her a smile I will never get, and then pointed to the painting of a magenta fish on the wall. We were sitting in the bath, my year-and-a-half-old son and I. The views of Club speakers are their own and their participation does not constitute or imply endorsement or recommendation by The Commonwealth Club.The sky was a slate of electric indigo. Each year, we bring nearly 500 events on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy to our members and the public, both in-person and via extensive online and on-air listenership and viewership. The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. The leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation. Learn more about Lulu Miller’s new book, self-described as “part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure,” and join INFORUM as we get a better view of the intersection between psychology, entertainment and history. Miller makes use of her eclectic background to deliver a tale that is as enlightening as it is entertaining. This nonfiction piece tells the story of a scientist from the 19th century who experiences disaster after disaster yet continues to persevere, moving on when all seems to be lost. ![]() Miller continues this deep dive into incredible human phenomena with her new book, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. As the co-founder of the program, Lulu Miller influenced this unique focus on psychology and physiology with her experience in authoring books, teaching fiction at the University of Virginia and producing radio shows on a range of topics, including a story of a man who uses echolocation to navigate daily life and a glimpse into the research around musical hallucinations. The NPR series “Invisibilia” has always focused on the unusual, unseen influences on how humans behave.
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