Speechless Fish, I call it. Informally. Because sometimes the informal is all you’ve got when you’re dealing with theatrical ghosts that ancient, scraps of text that survived fires, floods, the general amnesia of civilization. This is part of something bigger, something I’m calling IOTA, which sounds either pretentious as hell or like the most honest thing I’ve ever attempted, depending on your tolerance for resurrecting dead Greek dramatists. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,the holy trinity of tragedy, most of whose work is just… gone. Vanished. And here I am, trying to breathe some kind of temporary life into what’s left.
The fish were dead. Obviously. Eight of them lined up on that fence like a jury that had already reached its verdict. They weren’t props, they were collaborators. Silent witnesses. The Greek chorus that couldn’t sing. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Sophocles, wherever he is in the cosmic void, gets a kick out of dead fish speaking his words through their very inability to speak. The irony is so thick you could choke on it.
Two and a half minutes. That’s all it took. That’s all it takes, really, to say something true about the human condition if you’re not padding it with bullshit. The ancient Greeks understood economy, they knew that sometimes the fragment is more powerful than the whole, that incompleteness can devastate you in ways that resolution never could.
And the audience? Three people. Three. One of them was… well, someone who had to be there. But the other two? Hell’s Angels. I’m not making this up. Two actual Hell’s Angels showed up to watch a performance of a lost Sophocles fragment involving dead fish on a fence in San Gregorio on a partly cloudy afternoon three days before Christmas.
You can’t plan for that kind of perfection. You can’t manufacture that collision of high culture and American outsider mythology. It just happens, or it doesn’t. This time, it did. And for two and a half minutes, under that indecisive sky, something ancient and something immediate existed in the same space, and nobody knew quite what to do with it except let it be what it was: strange, fleeting, and probably unrepeatable.
The Fragment…
A chorus of speechless fish made a din
saluting their dear mistress
with their tails
.
Fast forward through the Mexican era: the place becomes Rancho San Gregorio, named after Pope Gregory I, because why stop with one layer of Catholic nomenclature when you can pile on another?
By the 1850s, San Gregorio’s transformed into a resort town for wealthy San Franciscans who apparently had nothing better to do than take bone-rattling stagecoach rides to something called San Gregorio House for fishing, hunting, sea bathing, boat races, the full menu of Victorian leisure activities for people with disposable income and time to kill.
That building’s still standing. So is The General Store, operating since 1889, which means it’s been selling… whatever people needed… for over a century. Witness to everything.
What Crespi didn’t write about, what never makes it into the missionary diaries or the resort brochures, is the Chinese community that lived along the creek in the nineteenth century until heavy rains washed their buildings into oblivion. Erased. Just gone. As if they were never there.
By 1915, the community’s running seven cheese factories. Seven. From missionary outpost to resort destination to dairy hub in a hundred and fifty years. That’s the American trajectory in miniature: repurpose, reinvent, forget what came before, move on.
