chivalry

Refinement of Angling.—Angling is fishing governed by rules of chivalry—correct tackle, limit in the catch, and humane treatment of the game. (Charles Bradford, The Determined Angler)

change of pace

I've posted for seventy days straight and I'm going to slow the pace a bit. I still have to finish the other article I'm writing and posting here every two or three days will make that easier. I want to get up to one hundred days of posting but the final thirty won't be consecutive. (Actually, I might not be able to break the habit but we'll see...)

the sun's familiar

Here is Thoreau again but this passage is not from Walden but from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. An encounter with an angler reminds him of another fisherman he had met years before:

A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method - for youth and age then went a-fishing together - full of incommunicable thoughts perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoon haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar [...]. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.

There is some powerful writing here - 'so many sunny hours in an old man's life', 'almost grown to be the sun's familiar', 'a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world'. I find this passage strangely moving in its evocation of what seems to me a state of grace in old age - Insha'Allah, as they say.

The River Tyne at Hexham (Image by Darrin Antrobus [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.)

grandfather

Many anglers begin fishing in childhood and the sport is closely bound up with memories of early life. So, just by way of introducing something on memory into the blog, I'm going to quote Gao Xingjian's short story, 'Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather'. The text begins with the narrator walking past a shop and seeing 'a ten-piece fibreglass rod labelled "imported"', which reminds him of his grandfather:

I remember that if [he] heard someone was going to the provincial capital, he would be sure to ask the person to bring back fishing hooks for him, as if fish could only be caught with hooks bought in the big city. I also remember him mumbling that the rods sold in the city had reels. After casting the line, you could relax and have a smoke as you waited for the bell on the rod to tinkle. He wanted one of those so he'd have his hands free to roll his cigarettes.

As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that everything has changed since then and the river where the two of them went to fish is now dry:

I come to the riverbank. The sand underfoot crunches and sounds like my grandmother sighing. [...] This is the river where my grandfather used to take me, but now there is no water even in the gaps between the rocks. In the riverbed there are only big round unmoving rocks, like a flock of dumb sheep huddled close to one another, afraid that people will drive them away.

I'm making the text sound simple - warm memories and a cold present - but it's a strange and subtle story. Its evocation of the past is not sentimental and the image of fishing provides a complex link between the layers of time. Does it function like this among the anglers we know? How does angling mediate the passage of time?

peace and dignity

We have read John Steinbeck's account of fishing as practised in the USA and England. But at the end of his essay he comes to France and finds the angling there to be superior to that in both the other countries. He invites the reader to imagine the banks of the River Oise 'on a summer Sunday afternoon'. All the anglers have a fixed spot which is theirs and theirs only, so that one has even planted geraniums along his little stretch of water, so confident is he in his right to the place:

The fishing equipment is simple but invariable. The pole is of bamboo, not expensive but often adorned. On a hook about the size of a pinhead is fixed a tiny bread pellet. The Parisian is now ready for the fishing.
        Here is no sentiment, no contest, no grandeur, no economics. Most of the time there seems to be a courteous understanding by which fish and fisherman let each other strictly alone. Apparently there is also a rule about conversation. The fisherman's eyes get a dreaming look and he turns inward on his own thoughts, inspecting himself and his world in quiet. Because he is fishing, he is safe from interruption.

Steinbeck likes this approach to angling better than the others he describes. He characterises it as possessing a certain 'sanctity'. While engaged in it, he says, 'a man is alone with himself in dignity and peace', and afterwards may come away from it 'refreshed and in control of his own soul'. I'm interested in Steinbeck's choice of terms here. I think we're fairly used to the idea that fishing can be peaceful, refreshing, and so forth, but the idea that it confers a certain dignity upon one who practices seems important. Does this quality arise in the assertion of autonomy implied in the pursuit of such a solitary activity? From the absence of 'sentiment',  'contest' and 'grandeur'? Or from the insistence on the importance of recreation - simple and uncommodified - in the midst of the demands of the capitalist economy?

Where the Oise meets the Seine to the north-east of Paris.

the arid plain behind me

Today the briefest of quotations - the lines from the final part of 'The Wasteland' where the poetic voice speaks in the persona of the wounded king:

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

A good question to ask while the float is on the water. In the midst of the wasteland, can each of us find some trace of order? Is that at least attainable? Is that all we can hope for?

the strangest human fish

Part 4 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra ascending a mountain accompanied by his animals - a serpent and an eagle. '[T]ake care that I have honey ready to hand there,' he says, 'yellow, white, fine, ice-cool golden honey in the comb. For I intend to offer the honey offering.' When he reaches the summit, however, he sends the animals away, laughs, and says:

That I spoke of offerings and honey offerings was merely a ruse and, truly, a useful piece of folly! Up here I can speak more freely than before hermits' caves and hermits' pets.
Offer - what? I squander what is given me, I, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that - an offering!
And when I desired honey, I desired only bait and sweet syrup and gum, which even bears and strange, sullen, wicked birds are greedy for:
the finest bait, such as huntsmen and fishermen need. For although the world is like a dark animal-jungle and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather and preferably an unfathomable, rich sea,
a sea full of many-coloured fishes and crabs for which even the gods might long and become fishers and casters of nets: so rich is the world in strange things great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: now I cast my golden fishing-rod into it and say: Open up, human abyss!
Open up and throw me your fishes and glistening crabs! With my finest bait shall I bait today the strangest human fish!
My happiness itself shall I cast far and wide, between sunrise, noontide, and sunset, to see if many human fishes will not learn to kick and tug at my happiness,
until they, biting on my sharp, hidden hooks, have to come up to my height, the most multi-coloured groundlings of the abyss to the most wicked of all fishers of men,
For I am he, from the heart and from the beginning, drawing, drawing towards me, drawing up to me, raising up, a drawer, trainer, and taskmaker who once bade himself, and not in vain: 'Become what you are!'

A Honey-Offering [By Merdal at tr.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.