# [D4:4M] Vision: [[Ixoye (Dog is a Fish)]] Hexagram: [[Fourth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Fourth Trial]] Symbols: #dog #one #two #three #four #apparition #teeth #city #sea #fish #river #jeep #erosion #snake #flies #mother #head #eye October 4th, 2004 I. During foggy mornings, walking Dog along the jellyfish-littered beach, elderly men with fishing poles materialized out of thin air and at equidistant intervals from one to the next.  One, two, three, four.  He loved the fishermen who never regarded him, and he beheld the perfection of emptiness in their presence.  He knew them as apparitions, and also himself as one, just as he pleased, and often yearned to join them.  Dog ate too many of the dried-up little jellyfish along the way. She became sick, and her stomach was pumped at the dentist’s office.  Soon, she would develop a rare muscle wasting disease, and become paralyzed everywhere but in her tail, which wagged to see him at every office visit, even as her body failed.   He euthanized Dog.  Her eyes closed and her teeth fell out as he held her.  He sobbed in a room for mourning while, outside, the dentist arranged the teeth on a decorative paten like crackers on a serving platter. II. The night Dog died, he dreamt he was walking along the beach again, but now without her.  In the dream, the fishermen were no longer dreamlike as they were in life, just retired men of fatuous leisure, unaware of his loss.  Menacing were the jellyfish strewn about the beach.  This beach, which, in reality, had been an enchanted world of its own, was, in the dream, pressed repugnantly against the sodium yellow city.  The sea wall collected garbage alongside it, and stank of sewage. Here the water was no longer real water, and the fish, for which the men threw out their lines, were not real fish. He could not any longer bear the beach. Nor hear it.  Silent went the surf. He yearned for real water, real fish, and made up his mind, beginning from the tributaries which spilled into the sea, to trace the river, against its current, until he found the real ones.  “This is not reality,” he said aloud.  He woke, and what woke him was his own voice. III. In the morning, he followed the river in his Jeep some distance until it veered too far from the road. He parked a little way down a dirt path leading from the shoulder.  Getting out, he had with him only a water bottle.  The day had grown hot. He proceeded down the path on foot beneath rows of cottonwoods until the dirt petered out into fly-infested mutton grass and snakeweed.  Soon he reached a canal but it was not the river itself.  Its water was not real and there were no fish.  Not a soul could be seen or heard and he was far from the city.  He swatted the flies away and grew depressed by their incessant buzzing. He felt empty without her. “I must be dreaming again,” he thought. He traced the canal back along the dirt banks, which were soon overgrown and too precipitous from erosion to walk comfortably.  He wiped sweat from his brow and could hear the whispering of snakes in the growth. From the slight elevation of the canal banks, he could see some distance into the eastern groves of fig trees.  He supposed he might find the river beyond the orchard. IV. Even before arriving he could hear the croaking of frogs through the haze of flies and knew them to be real and of a certain size.  He trampled his way through the thorn bushes and between two cottonwoods with branches bent above like an archway making a portal through which he could pass.  He came to the cattails and dragonflies and knew he’d found what was sought.   Bullfrogs as large as babies leapt into the water with a sound like dropping stones.  He looked down onto the mud floor of the river’s shallow edge at the four-pointed shadows of mudskippers floating over the ripples, and, just beyond, the flickering of fathead minnows.   They weren’t much to look at, a couple of inches apiece, but they were real and he knew it.  The river was wide and deep enough to hold carp and he figured this was a place where the fish of the river could assemble.   A little ways out, the slick shining head of Dog popped out of the water.  She had gills, and she sucked and puffed from them as though gagging in the middle of prayer. “The simplest pattern,” said Dog, “is the clearest.” When he woke again, it was still dark in his bedroom.  He turned on the lamp on the side table and found there the paten of teeth resting on top of his mother’s diary.  He was afraid.  He didn’t want to risk life, though it was life which presented the problem.  Something of a certain weight pressed down upon his feet.  Was that snoring he heard below?  Did he still mean to waste more years waiting?