The feat of the fish

Remember Bono’s “Fish Can Fly” t-shirt design, with a fish traversing the moonlit, starry sky?

The shirt was introduced in 2008 for the Hard Rock Cafe’s Signature 25 Series, is printed on EDUN shirts and benefits African farmers and wildlife habitats by sending 15% of the sale proceeds to the Conservation Cotton Initiative launched by The Wildlife Conservation Society.

Bono’s hope for the image was that people would get that “‘Fish Can Fly’ is more than just a phrase on a t-shirt. It’s the message that tomorrow can be better than today. And that change is happening right before our eyes.”

While doing some research into U2′s themes of hope, change, the future and, uh, space travel, I came across a great book from 1969 called Space: A New Direction for Mankind, by Edward B. Lindaman. We know, either by living through it or hearing about it, that a good deal of the Western world’s fascination with the possibilities the Space Age might unleash for the betterment of mankind reached mountaintop heights in the late 1960s. Lindaman explores these themes and makes a case for how going to space can help us imagine, then create, a better life here on earth.

With that in mind, check out these passages from the first chapter in Lindaman’s book, titled “The Feat of the Fish”:

Perhaps our species must go on into Space, or perhaps we must suppress our inner nature. A child in its cradle cannot lie there for a lifetime. A grub is snug in its cocoon, but when the appointed time comes it must break out, flex its new butterfly wings, and flutter away. It does not know why. But something within commands it, as something commands salmon to swim up waterfalls. Is that same evolutionary need commanding our species?

Imagine you are in your living room, watching three pet goldfish in a bowl. Suddenly they propel themselves out of their safe fishbowl, up into the air, out through a slightly open window, and away. Somehow they move at a most unfishy, bulletlike speed to a far-distant city. They tarry there a little while-not in water, but on the forbidden element of the land. Then they rise again into the alien air, find their way back to your window and into your living room and safely down again into the bowl-the single refuge known to them where warmth and food and equilibrium and something breathable are to be found.

Unbelievable? Obviously. From a cosmic viewpoint, humanity’s trips through Space are just as astounding, and for virtually the same reasons. (p. 10)

[Lindaman talks about the benefit of going to space is to see Earth, and our challenges on the ground, from a new perspective.]

… Our grievous shortcomings in the area of social institutions may be found also in a less familiar field: our treatment of Earth itself. Let us return for a moment to our allegorical fish. Having once attained the magical gift of travel through an alien element, they would surely keep using it (as we have done for some years now with our gift of Space flight), and in so doing they would just as surely change their way of thinking about their native element. Their fishbowl would look quite different from the outside. As Father John Culkin of Fordham says, ‘We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.’ We never really discovered Earth until we got outside it. (p. 14)

…. Once again, life is striving to make itself something better to see the mind-blinding Space beyond the sky. Although it can no more comprehend Space than a fish comprehends land, it has begun floundering up to it anyway. We must pray that the inventiveness and pluck that enabled man to make nature a servant instead of an enemy will enable him to do the same for his own nature. (p. 17)

Lindaman came to be known as a Futurist, as in someone who might belong to the World Future Society. Futurism, the 20th century artistic and social movement, has some bearing on this point too, with its tenets of belief in progress, speed, noise, cities and machines. All this to say, I’ve been wondering if part of U2′s thinking for leading with “Get On Your Boots” as the first single from NLOTH was to put the message of a Futurist like Lindaman at front and center for their audiences? At the time, their promo performances at awards shows, such as the ECHOs, the BRITs and the Grammys, used this vocal intro. to the song: “The future, the future, the future, the future … the future needs a big kiss!”

One last thing: one of the remixes of “Get On Your Boots” on Artificial Horizon is called the “Fish Out of Water” remix. Is this all unrelated to Lindaman’s book, or is there something to this?

I wonder if Bono has ever read Space: A New Direction for Mankind ? If he has not, I think he would like to.

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