The Toothpick Fish
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed. —Tennyson, In Memoriam |
The toothpick fish is found, as Burroughs puts it, “in certain rivers of ill-repute in the greater Amazon Basin.” It is only two inches long, colourless, and shaped like an elver. But to the natives, who call it the candiru, it is more fearsome than a whole shoal of piranhas.
It owes its reputation to the rather horrifying fact that it will, on occasion, wriggle into the urethra of an unfortunate bather. Following the scent of ammonia and urea emitted by the gills of breathing fish in whose gill cavities it typically feeds, but also found, by an unfortunate coincidence, in human urine, the slippery candiru darts through the water with startling speed and precision, hooks itself into place using an umbrellalike set of sharp spines, and then begins to gorge on the blood and tissue of its host. Once in place, it is said to be almost impossible to remove. There are reports in the medical literature of victims dying of secondary infections and it is not unheard of for men to perform autopenectomy to avoid a slow and excruciating death... If there is a nastier, more loathsome creature than this pestering the earth, I have not heard of it. I once read an article in a medical textbook about a huge tumor that grew teeth and hair. In a like case, the candiru utterly appalls and yet utterly fascinates me. In fact, I almost feel a strange admiration for the toothpick fish and for the God (presupposing his existence) that was capable of creating it. The lily, the lamb and the rose are all things conceived in the mind of God. But from that same abyssal mind vipers, scorpians and centipedes swarmed forth darkly and innumerably on the fifth day of Creation. Every fang, pincer and twittering mouthpart, every lamprey, locust and leech is an attribute of the same Godhead; the God whose gaze swept through the newly-created forests and oceans teeming with predators, parasites and viruses and “saw that it was good”; to whose ear reaches every scream and shriek of every soul suffering on earth and in hell and in whose mind this chorus of screams forms the background roar to His imperturbable equanimity. In his famous poem, The Tyger, William Blake appears to share my frightened awe of the reckless demiurge when he asks, |
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? |
The toothpick fish, like the tiger, is part of an insoluble theodicean paradox that is worthy of our fear and astonishment. It belongs to the dark God of Isaiah 45:7, who proclaims, “I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”
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