Hook, Line...

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye

-Margaret Atwood, from "Power Politics"


"I followed the slow, pausing thread of his feet over a petrified landscape of immense blocks of stone, among which drifted and hovered shoals of fish. There were flat fish, silvered, aldermanic; slim, darting fish; palindromic fish that peered foully out of crevices; minute poised fish of electric blue, fluttering red-and-black fish, slinking azure-and-green fish. He showed me an underwater grotto, a light-shafted nave of pale-blue shadows, where the large wrasse floated as if in a trance. On the far side of the islet the rocks plunged precipitously away into a mesmeric blind indigo.

'I am going to fetch the boat. Stay here.'

I swam on. A shoal of hundred golden-grey fish followed me. I turned, they turned. I swam on, they followed, truly Greek in their obsessive curiosity. Then I lay over a great slab of rock which warmed the water almost to bath-heat. The shadow of the boat fell across it. Conchis led me a little way to a deep fissure between two boulders, and there suspended a piece of white cloth on the end of a line. I hung like a bird in the water overhead, watching for the octopus he was trying to entice. Soon a sinuous tentacle slipped out and groped the bait, then other swift tentacles, and he began skilfully to coax the octopus up. I had tried this myself and knew it was not nearly as simple as the village boys made it seem. The octopus came reluctantly but inevitably, slow-whirling, flesh of drowned sailors, its suckered arms stretching, reaching, searching. Conchis suddenly gaffed it into the boat, slashed its sac with a knife, turned it inside out in a moment. I levered myself aboard.

'I have caught a thousand in this place. Tonight another will move into that same hole. And let himself be caught as easily.'

'Poor thing.'

'You notice reality is not necessary. Even the octopus prefers the ideal.' A piece of white sheeting, from which he had torn his 'bait', lay beside him."

-from The Magus, by John Fowles