Look at Your Fish

In Look at Your Fish, Scudder recollects his experience looking and observing a haemulon fish. For days, all he did in the lab was look at the fish. If I had to look at an object for an extensive amount of time, I would think that I had seen everything there was to be seen with that object. This was true for Scudder in the beginning, but after the first day, every time he went back to the fish, he found something different. How was he able to find something new about an object that rarely changed?

Scudder did this by seeing the fish in a new way. The fish never really changed throughout the time he had observed it but his perspective and how he looked at the fish did. He drew the fish to find distinct characteristics he may have overlooked; he observed the fish without actually looking at it. Scudder figured out a way to actually observe and see the fish in detail versus just looking at a fish.

I kind of do this when watching movies. After watching a movie several times, the next time I see it I watch it differently. I tend to look past the main characters and focus on the background and what other people are doing or other situations that are happening. This sometimes leads me to understanding the movie better. When doing this, I also find irrelevant, but entertaining, things like someone falling or an item breaking in the back. When I have seen something or know something is going to happen at a specific moment, that is what I watch or look for.

I like the end when Scudder and his colleagues were drawing strange animals on the blackboard because all of the fish he drew were haemulons. I like how anytime he tries to draw a fish, it comes out as a haemulon. This makes sense to me. I would imagine that after seeing every detail there would be on a specific fish for eight months, those would be the features I would include when drawing a fish.

When I have noticed a distinct detail in anything, I usually never forget that detail. When I see a small hole on the wall, whenever I see that wall, that is the first thing I notice. I never knew how people could tell their pets apart when they all looked alike, especially fish. All fish looked the same to me. Then for Christmas my brother received two goldfish and after that, we bought more. After actually seeing the fish, and not just looking, each fish had there own unique characteristic that defined them. I realized that when I saw other people’s fish, or pets, I was looking at them but not actually seeing them. This has taught me that when I look at something, I should not only look at the object but also pay close attention and see the object.