commodities, gifts, and beauty

My ideal for the blog is to keep returning to earlier posts in the light of later ones, and, in a manner analogous with digging compost into soil, improve the old patch of ground with new material. Today I'll go back to 'The River God' with yesterday's post on fishing tackle in mind. There I mentioned that fishing equipment is the object both of economic exchange and of aesthetic judgement, its status as a locus of wise conduct interacting with these other two characterisations in fairly complex ways.

This complex of material is relevant to reading 'The River God'. Early in the story, the narrator describes his younger self, out on a summer walk or picnic, curious about the fishing rod that his future uncle has brought with him: 'To the fisherman born there is nothing so provoking of curiosity as a fishing rod in a case.' His uncle-to-be lets him look and his response is strongly aesthetic:

I opened the flap, which contained a small grass spear in a wee pocket, and, pulling down the case a little, I admired the beauties of the cork butt, with its gun-metal ferrule and reel rings and the exquisite frail slenderness of the top two joints. 
'It's got two top-joints - two!' I exclaimed ecstatically.
'Of course,' said he. 'All good trout rods have two.'
I marvelled in silence at what seemed to me then a combination of extravagance and excellent precaution.

As they assemble the rod, the description is strongly sensual - the narrator remembers the 'faint, clear pop' made by the cork stoppers and the way the young man 'rubbed the ferrules against the side of his nose' to stop them sticking. The boy looks down the 'tunnel of sneck rings to the eyelet at the end', impressed, it is implied, by the precision of the alignment. Sight, touch, sound - the workmanship of the rod appeals directly to the senses. It is 'a lovely thing', 'a thing alive', 'a sceptre'.

Having recalled the beauty of the rod, however, the narrator turns to its status as an object of exchange. Surely such a beautiful piece of work must be expensive? 'Couple of guineas,' is the response of the uncle-to-be. 'A couple of guineas! And we were poor folk and the future was more rodless than ever.' The boy begins to work out how long it will take to save two guineas out of pocket-money paid at twopence a week: 'Two hundred and forty pennies to the pound, multiplied by two - four hundred and eighty - and then another twenty-four pennies - five hundred and four. Why it would take a lifetime.'

An alternative form of exchange becomes important at this point - that of gift-giving. The young uncle-to-be promises the boy a rod for his birthday but, when it arrives, it is no match for the two-guinea beauty - a 'tough and stringy' rod with a wooden reel that had 'neither check nor brake'. He tries to will it into something better than it is, telling everyone that it cost two guineas, a claim that elicits reverence from his mother, scepticism from his father, and open derision from one of the employees of the Welsh hotel, who insists that 'five shillings would be too much' to pay for it.

But, after the adventure with the salmon in which the Colonel helps the boy to land the beast that has broken his rod, the older man allows the boy to choose a new rod from his own collection: '[R]ummage among those. Take your time and see if you can find anything to suit you.' It's interesting that there is considerable variety in the equipment that the Colonel has with him: '"Now, here's a handy piece by Hardy - a light and useful tool - or if you fancy greenheart in preference to split bamboo -"'. In his introduction to coarse fishing, Paul Duffield notes that it used to be easier to make recommendations to beginners because there was simply less choice. But, it seems, at least from the Colonel's wooden tackle-box, that choice has long been available if you could pay for it. As Duffield implies, what has made this choice more widely available now is the affordability of the modern materials used in manufacturing equipment.

The fact that the rod is a gift transforms it in some subtle sense: 'I have the rod to this day, and I count it among my dearest treasures.' It is more than an expensive commodity - something rendered vital through its contact with the 'god'. And it is not the only thing that the old man bequeathed to the younger one - the connection extends to the gestures that constitute his very claim to be an angler: 'I have a flick of the wrist,' says the narrator, 'that was his [the Colonel's] legacy'.

This relates more to the comments on knots in the last post on 'The River God': 'There is a pride, in knots, of which the laity knows nothing'.

wordle of the blog so far

tackling tackle

I'd like to raise the topic of equipment, tackle, gear. At this point I'm only raising it, not trying to say anything very developed about it, and I don't want to move too far away from wisdom, which is - after all - the focusing concept in this exploration of fishing. (A history of tackle isn't what we need here.) But care of equipment, respect for it, the ability to handle it does have something to do with wisdom, I think, so to look at the angler's relationship with it seems important. This is interesting for me because I'm not one of those people who enjoys 'gear' very much and most of my interests can be pursued without much in the way of technical equipment. Until my knees started to protest, my great love was running, which doesn't really require anything other than a decent pair of shoes. But I do know people for whom the fascination of 'gear' is an important part of their interests - the kind of people who have a 'third-favourite piece of camping equipment' (true story) - and I sometimes wonder if I'm missing something by not getting more into that mind-set.

Just as a place-holder - a signal of the interest of this topic - I'm going to quote a couple of great little books that I bought for my Kindle: The Beginner's Guide to Coarse Fishing and Make Your Own Fishing Tackle, both by Paul Duffield. In the first one, the author says:

Years ago, before modern manufacturing methods allowed specialist items of tackle to be made inexpensively for very specific uses, fishing tackle was made to cover a wide range of fishing situations and only a short section of this guide would have been needed to cover most of the fishing tackle you could buy. The challenge today is to recommend a starter kit that will cover most angling situations without suggesting that you buy ten rods, five reels and a wide assortment of other equipment that it would be impossible to carry to the bank.

I don't want to talk about this at length this morning but in The Practice of Everyday Life, Luce Giard discusses how changes in the availability of  equipment have affected the gesture sequences that make up the complex textile of 'doing cooking'. It won't be useful to draw too close a parallel between what she says about the kitchen and these changes on the river bank (not least because she regards the availability of electric equipment as effectively 'deskilling' cooks, which is not, I think, what has happened in fishing, although, as usual, it would be interesting to see how the experienced anglers see it). The main point is really that the interaction between embodied knowledge and the types of equipment available, which is in turn an economic issue, ('tackle ... made inexpensively for very specific purposes') seems to me one that we should bear in mind.

In his second book, Duffield offers many ideas for making your own fishing tackle. The reason he gives for doing this is largely aesthetic. (I tend to harp on about the aesthetic judgements people make in everyday life and am gratified to find them in play here too!)

While modern fishing tackle is perfectly usable and efficient for its intended purpose, to many, modern plastics and other man made materials are less pleasing to the eye and seem out of place in a natural environment such as a river or tree lined lake.

However, there are a couple of very appreciative reviews of the book on Amazon and one of them introduces a more economic dimension into the discussion. It begins like this:

Books concerning DIY for fishing used to be all the rage about 40 to 50 years ago. Nowadays it is expected that the average angler will simply buy everything he/she wants (or what the tackle makers want them to think they want) off the tackle dealers' shelves. But what if that angler wants to turn back time and fish the way that his or her grandparents did?

Here DIY becomes a chance to break away from what manufacturers want you to think you need, a critical response to the way more or less everything has turned into a marketable commodity. I won't say any more about that now but, once again, I reckon there's lots there to think about.

The reviewer's comment about the vogue for DIY books rang bells with me. When I was a boy I used to leaf through a range of books that my father had collected and that were packed with instructions about making all kinds of things in your shed - not so much fishing tackle as toys and things like that. The illustration here is from a 1958 edition of The Practical Householder that Steve lent me. The idea that you might make your own spin drier as an enjoyable DIY project seems amazing to me but - from the instructions - it seems that it's perfectly feasible.

a few thoughts on writing

I've been writing here for two weeks now and last night I was pondering what exactly the writing is for. On previous collaborative projects I've often done a lot of reading and become quite excited by what I've found. But a lot of that material never got into the blood-stream of the projects. I just introduced bits and pieces during meetings, often without developing what I was saying very far, and - because talk isn't really my natural medium - I presented it in a way that I don't feel was always useful or clear.

Some people seem entirely amphibious - equally able to express themselves in speech and writing. But I think I'm less a salamander and more a ... well, what? Not a fish, because I don't expire completely when moved into the medium of talk. More like a seal, maybe - an animal that can happily spend time on land but is a bit ungainly out of the water and moves around awkwardly. Here I can share my reading in a medium that works better for me (and is also more convenient for you to look at). You don't have to like it, or agree with it, or even read it all. But at least it's getting an airing early enough in the timescale of the project to have some potential influence. By the way, please do keep commenting. No pressure to do it all the time or to write at length but connections appear and new possibilities occur to me when you respond, which I find interesting.

By M. Cameron [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

benefactors

There are many different things crowding into my mind at the moment and it is becoming difficult to choose which to write about each day. Somewhat arbitrarily I've chosen this morning to return to the story of Finn and Finegas - the young hero and the wise old bard. I originally wrote about that story here - Finegas' repeated attempts to catch the salmon of knowledge, his success (seemingly contingent on Finn's arrival), and Finn's 'accidental' (but actually predestined) ingestion of the knowledge contained within the fish.

At the time I talked about how sad I felt for Finegas, who was denied what he wanted so much because Finn so casually took it from him. But this - rather obviously - is a modern, individualistic reading. In the context of the story itself, it is Finn's destiny to become the hero of the Fianna and Finegas' role is to help him on his journey. He is, in a sense, another of Jung's (and Marcus') 'wise old men'. Unlike others of his kind, however, he bestows the vital talisman on his protégé without initially knowing that he is doing so. His virtue is that he recognises the 'rightness' of what has happened and, at that point, encourages Finn to eat the rest of the fish. Thus, we have here a story about the role of the older, wiser figure in helping the hero on his journey.

We can read this in a number of ways. For Jung, as I have said (rather too often, maybe), both hero and wise old man are part of the self - these stories (if, indeed, Jung would classify this one along with his other tales of benefactors and talismans) dramatises the potential of the self to find its own wisdom. Or we can see the two characters as emblematic of the relationship between older more experienced people and younger ones whose abilities are still unexpressed - like the potential energy in a spring. In that case, the story is about the wisdom needed to support and nurture the young. (And we can, of course, trace both trajectories in the story simultaneously.)

Two more points:

First, it is crucial that the salmon in the story is the guardian of knowledge and not wisdom. (As it happens, the wikipedia entry for this story originally had the title 'the salmon of wisdom', prompting the following exchange:

Gronky -- I've never heard of this story being called the "Salmon of Wisdom". Is there a good reason for using this strange and rare name? Or should I rename the article to "Salmon of Knowledge"?
Alison -- I totally agree, and have gone ahead and moved it.

Finn's 'accident' deprives Finegas of knowledge not of wisdom - that he already has, as is evident in his calm acceptance of what his happened, his recognition of its 'rightness'.

Second, my original reading - my sadness for Finegas - is 'wrong' in the sense that the story has other things to say. But I don't want to forget about it entirely. I would like, as we now say, to 'own' it. It does require a rather anti-individualistic spirit to accept the role of 'benefactor to the hero' rather than clinging to the role of hero itself. (Or is that just me?!) The tension I felt in reading the story is part of what the story has to say to me now.

What brought all this to mind was my reading of Roland Pertwee's story, 'The River God', in which the nurturing of the (very) young angler by the older man is a sign of the latter's wisdom. And it is notable that the narrator makes the older man (with whom he only has contact for one month at the age of ten) into a mythological figure - a god who haunts the river bank. The two stories are not analogous in a close sense. In the myth, the catching of the fish sets up the conditions under which Finegas can display his wisdom, whereas in 'The River God' the Colonel's ability as an angler stands as a metonym for some larger conception of what it is to live well. At the same time both use fishing as a means to talk about that difficult topic of the role of the older person in guiding and nurturing younger ones.

 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

the river god

A break from Giard today. I've just bought an anthology of fishing stories published in the US under the title Fisherman's Bounty. It's an interesting collection and I started reading it last night. The first story is called 'The River God' and is by the actor and writer, Roland Pertwee (who was the father of John Pertwee and the second cousin of Bill Pertwee). An angler in his forties looks back on his first steps in fishing as a ten-year-old. Pertwee was born in 1885 and, although we  always need to be careful about identifying authors and narrators too closely, I think the story is probably set in the 1890s, the period of his own childhood, or shortly after.

The story examines in some detail the boy's emotional responses to the extraordinary world that he is discovering. It communicates the awe that he feels in handling a 'two-guinea' rod for the first time, opening a tin  full of flies and casts, standing on the edge of a salmon stream in Wales having spent two years casting in the garden without the opportunity to go near a river. There is an alternating sense of joy, fear, and despair, as well as an attention to the younger self's powerful determination to do things properly - his aspiration to be like a grown-up in this one compelling area of life. I'll just quote one section - a short reflective passage on the important of knots:

I have often wondered how I was able to control my fingers well enough to tie a figure-eight knot between the line and the cast. But I did, and I'm proud to be able to record it. Your true-born angler does not go blindly to work until he has first satisfied his conscience. There is a pride in knots of which the laity knows nothing, and if, through neglect to tie them rightly, failure and loss should result, pride may not be restored nor conscience salved by the plea of eagerness.

This reminds me of something Steve said in the meeting at the youth centre. You have to be confident that you've made your preparations properly - otherwise you'll sit there anxiously wondering if you made a mistake and eventually start reeling in to check.

I like the way the adult, narrating self expresses his approval of the younger, experiencing self - the boy's concern to get it right. And, in fact, a central element of the story is the way in which the child's resistance to the discouragement of many of the adults around him has stood the test of time and matured into a way of life:

'What do you want to do this afternoon, old man?' [my father] asked.  
'Fish,' I said.
'But you can't always fish,' he said.
I told him I could and I was right and have proved it for thirty years and more.
'Well, well,' he said, 'please yourself, but isn't it dull not catching anything?'
And I said, as I've said a thousand times since, 'As if it could be.'

The River God of the title is an old military man - a Colonel 'of the older order that takes a third of a century and a lot of Indian sun and Madras curry in the making.' He is the one adult who treats the boy with understanding and respect and the narrator says of their first meeting (on a family holiday in Wales): 'I had been talked to as a man by a man among men'.  The Colonel is presented, I think, as a figure of wisdom. He has an intuitive understanding of how the boy is feeling throughout the events of the narrative and finally helps him to land a salmon that has broken the lad's rather inadequate rod and made off with the hook still in its mouth. As the older narrating self implies, the Colonel forms a model of a life wholly and seriously committed to fishing, a life in the which the virtues of understanding, generosity, and kindness are also manifest.

At the end of the story we return to the narrator's present and he tells us that, although the Colonel, the last of the veterans of the Indian 'Mutiny', is now dead, he still 'meets' him on the river banks:

The banks of a river are frequented by a strange company and are full of mysterious and murmurous sounds - the cluck and laughter of water, the piping of birds, the hum of insects, and the whispering of wind in the willows. What should prevent a man in such a place having a word and speech with another who is not there? So much of fishing lies in the imagination, and mine needs little stretching to give my river god a living form.

And the man who lives on in the imagination continues to grow and change: 'He has begun to take an interest in dry-fly methods - that river god of mine, with his seven-league boots, his shaggy head, and the gaff across his back.'

There are lots of interesting elements to the story - the code of conduct that the narrator presents as underlying angling as an activity and which 'the laity' do not understand, the idea that one can - in childhood - realise that one is a 'born fisherman' and that fishing is one's calling, the figure of the wise older man who treats the hero with generosity and understanding.  (C.G. Jung springs to mind again.) I'm even interested in how the Colonel's life in India forms a background of violence to the pastoral scenes of the story itself. We are told early in the narrative that, coming upon a band of Indian soldiers 'conspiring mischief ... with a barrel of gunpowder', he had thrown the butt of his cheroot in so that 'presently they all went to hell'. How does fishing relate to these kinds of experience - the thirty years in the Indian sun that it takes to make a Colonel?

The Afon Lledr (River Lledr) at Pont-y-Pant, the setting of the story. Image by Eirian Evans [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

saturday night, sunday morning

Kate responded to my post on the Buddhist sutra about the Mara The Fisherman with a quotation from Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. As she says, 'The baited hook is the key metaphor at the end of [the novel] to indicate surrender to "everyday life".' I liked this so much I wanted to foreground it by putting it in a post.

He drank tea from the flask and ate a cheese sandwich, then sat back to watch the red and white float - up to its waist in water under the alder trees - and keep an eye always close to it for the sudden indication of a fortunate catch. For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren't were always on the way to it. (pp 216)

This is Ian McKellen performing the final soliloquy of the stage adaptation of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1964.

giard on learning

Reading Giard's text, 'Gesture Sequences', I feel that it is almost a little aphoristic. It is packed with interesting comment but the individual ideas are not always developed very far and you are quickly on to the next one. I shall start to pull out some points that I found interesting. Here, for example, is a comment about how 'gesture sequences' are learned:

The action of the gesture can be divided into an orderly series of basic actions, coordinated in sequences of variable duration according to the intensity of the effort required, organized on a model learned from others through imitation (someone showed me how to do it), reconstituted from memory (I saw it done this way), or established through trial and error based on similar actions (I ended up figuring out how to do it).

As I've said, I always enjoy a typology and this brief list of ways in which a skill can be acquired appeals to me. I'm interested in the subtle distinction between 'having someone show you' and simply 'seeing it done'. It reminds me of something I read about tool use in primates. I won't be able to lay hands on the reference now but I think the writer was talking about chimpanzees. The point was that the adults don't actually teach the young ones the techniques of tool use, but, because the adults routinely carry the babies around on their backs, the young animals have plenty of opportunity to see the relevant gestures being performed. The general nature of the care-giving makes that kind of learning viable.

It occurs to me that, for us, books can serve to set in motion a process of 'trial and error'. Giard is, of course, writing about cookery and I've certainly learned a number of cooking techniques by reading. However, and this is important, you don't come away with a body of knowledge derived entirely from the book. Instead, you acquire some basis to begin a process of trial and error. If you don't get it right first time, you might seek advice from someone who knows about these things. Or you might just try again on your own, following your intuitions about what is likely to work better. (Actually, my knowledge of cookery derives both from observing others and from reading followed by trial-and-error. In the former category an image springs to mind of trimming the excess pastry from a pie by holding the left hand palm up, curving the fingers upwards so that they form a kind of stand for the dish, and then running a vertical blade around the edge with the right hand. It's difficult to describe in words but I have a vivid recollection of seeing my mother doing it - the dish was white enamel, as I recall.) As Kate said in one of her comments, the fishing books in libraries seem to be borrowed very regularly and I suppose they provide a source of advice to people engaged in these processes of trial and error. Again, we'll have to talk to the anglers about it.

Giard then goes on to say something about adaptability: 'The skill at adapting the gesture to the conditions of execution and the quality of the obtained result constitute the test for putting a particular savoir fair into practice and foregrounding it.' This seems to me quite a rich observation. Certainly in cookery, to adapt the gesture to the present conditions is a real sign of a proper cook. If you rely on recipes, then you can't depart from their very rigid structures. But if you really understand food, then you have much more flexibility. Giard's insistence that 'gesture sequences' are both mental and physical also seems relevant here - the adaptation is sometimes made after a process of reasoning. But can it also 'come from' the body? Does the body itself take the decision at times?

I'm also fascinated by the term savoir faire, which, of course, literally means 'knowing how to do', but has a much more dense set of connotations than the English phrase. It seems to imply a sense of ease in the world which can extend beyond the practical into the handling of social relationships and human interactions.

Do you see what I mean? There is a suggestive weight to a lot of Giard's remarks but she doesn't always take them far herself. You have to ponder them to see why they strike you as telling (and, in our case, to decide whether they seem transferable from the kitchen to the banks of the pond).

Pie trimming in the 1930s.

gesture sequences

Writing here about wisdom and 'knowing how', I mentioned the idea of embodied knowledge. I was thinking about things like the ability to cast. (Not so long ago, I was talking to someone who does a lot of fly fishing and who said that, when he sees a beginner casting badly, he has to restrain himself physically from stepping in and 'helping'.) I suppose experienced anglers can explain good casting in words but, in the end, those words are a representation of knowledge that is not linguistically grounded - a sense of how the body should feel when the action is performed correctly. Actually, I'm open to the idea that sometimes you have to go against your instincts to perform an action skillfully - do something that feels counter-intuitive - but maybe that is a beginner's experience, something that happens when you are laying down new habits. I'd like to hear what Ken and Martin have to say about it.

Thinking about these things led me to a book I like a lot, The Practice of Everyday Life, and particularly volume 2, the second half of which is focused on cooking, an everyday practice that is simultaneously complex, creative, tedious, demanding, potentially pleasurable, highly gendered, and wrapped up with both the economic facts of life and the particular tastes and attitudes of those around one. Luce Giard (who wrote that section of the book) coins the term 'gesture sequences' to talk about the practice of cooking. She begins the chapter by talking about the difficulty of explaining in language what the experience of 'doing cooking' involves:

How can one find the right words, words that are rather simple, ordinary and precise, to recount these sequences of gestures, bound together over and over again, that weave the indeterminate cloth of culinary practices within the intimacy of kitchens? How can one choose words that are true, natural, and vibrant enough to make felt the weight of the body, the joyfulness or weariness, the tenderness or irritation that takes hold of you in the fact of this continually repeated task where the better the result (a stuffed chicken, a pear tart), the faster it is devoured, so that before the meal is completely over, one already has to think about the next. A succession of gestures and steps, repeated and required.

I rather like this paragraph - it begins by asking what words can possibly be used to 'recount these sequences of gestures' and finally returns to the term with which it began, 'gesture sequences', although moving on to nuance the term 'gesture' a little in subsequent pages. (Gesture in Giard's sense includes mental elements as well as physical ones - activities such as 'organizing', 'deciding', 'anticipating', 'memorizing', 'adapting', 'modifying', 'inventing', 'combining', and 'taking into consideration'.)

Of course, what I'm wondering is whether Giard's way of describing cooking has anything to offer as we talk about fishing - that notion of a 'sequence of gestures', bound together over and over to 'weave the indeterminate cloth of [angling practice]'. I think it might. It's that idea of a complex structure constructed out of 'sequences of gestures' that I like - gestural routines that are 'repeated and required' but also varied, adapted, and recombined.

One final point. I enjoy reading Giard's writing - I love the way she comes to cooking from a sort of respectful distance and analyses the complexity of the process involved in it. I do find it difficult to get to the heart of what she is saying, though. I sometimes come away from it feeling that I've read something beautiful but that I can't summarize exactly what she was getting at. This might be a good opportunity to take a close look at her account of 'gesture sequences' and I shall do a few more posts looking at specific aspects of her texts (interspersed with other odds and ends, just for variety).

http://www.discoverfishing.co.uk/guides/fly_fishing.htm

the demon fisherman

There is a Buddhist text called 'The Fisherman' - 'Balisika Sutta'. It is part of a collection of scriptures that originated early in the history of Buddhism and is written in Pali, a South Asian language close to that which the Buddha himself spoke. The sutta begins with an analogy:

[J]ust as if a fisherman were to cast a baited hook into a deep lake and a fish with its eye out for food would swallow it — so that the fish that had thus swallowed the fisherman's hook would fall into misfortune & disaster, and the fisherman could do with it as he will — in the same way, there are these six hooks in the world for the misfortune of beings, for the slaughter of those that breathe.

The six hooks turn out to be associated with the senses as they are conceptualised by the tradition. These include the five that we are familiar with - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell - as well as the intellect, which is conceived in Buddhist psychology as a six 'sense'.The text explains how each of the senses perceives the bait on a particular hook.The quotation below is what it says about sight - the comments on the other senses are similar. (In the earlier phase of Buddhism a lot of emphasis was placed on monasticism and this is why the sutta addresses and talks about the 'bikkhavo' or monks.) 

There are forms, monks, cognizable via the eye — agreeable, pleasing, charming, endearing, fostering desire, enticing. If a monk relishes them, welcomes them, & remains fastened to them, he is said to be a monk who has swallowed Mara's hook, who has fallen into misfortune & disaster. The Evil One can do with him as he will.

Mara is a demon who appears in a number of the suttas and famously tried to tempt the Buddha away from his contemplative practice. He is not exactly evil - more a symbol of the distraction that the sensory world offers to the anyone following the contemplative path. Rather than characterising the objects of the senses as the bait on Mara's hooks, other suttas depict them as the demon's beautiful daughters.

At the centre of Buddhist throught is the idea that dukkha, the suffering of life, is conquered by letting go of 'attachment' - desire, appetite, yearning, envy. We erroneously believe that the objects of our desire will bring us happiness (or, if we have them already, that our present happiness is conditional upon them). So, in a sense, they are like the bait on the demon's hooks. They seem to offer fufilment but, in reality, lure you into danger. The solution is ... well, the solution is complex but it includes contemplation, particularly meditation that trains us to be more fully present as life unfolds and not always away in hypothetical worlds where everything would be better - or would have been better - 'if only...'.

Image of Mara Demons (unfortunately without fishing rods). Picture by Anonymous 11th century artist. Digital image provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

the hook of the godhead

Reading about brandlings made me think about the image of the baited hook. And that led me back into the more metaphorical space where religious texts express their conception of things with reference to the dynamics of fishing. In Aion (which has the subtitle, 'researches into the phenomenology of the self') C.G. Jung has much to say about fish as symbols and a little too about the activity of fishing. He talks about the 'primitive totemistic identity between hunter and prey', citing the examples of 'the Babylonian culture-hero Oannes', who 'was himself a fish', and the 'Christian Ichthys', who is 'a fisher of men par excellence'. Then, complicating the picture, he says of Christ-Ichthys, 'Symbologically, he is actually the hook or bait on God's fishing-rod with which the Leviathan - death or the devil - is caught'.

There is a slightly paradoxical quality to this image. Passiontide is a dark time in the Christian calendar but, nevertheless, the death of Christ is seen as needing to take place in order to bring about redemption. And so, in Jung's interpretation, God is characterised as offering Jesus as bait or as a lure to death and the devil so that - when they bite - they will be defeated. In a footnote to the text he cites St Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage:

Like a fish which darts at a baited hook, and not only does not lay hold of the bait along with it, but is itself hauled out of the sea; so he who had the power of death did indeed snatch away the body of Jesus unto death, but did not observe that the hook of the Godhead was concealed therein, until he had devoured it; and thereupon remained fixed thereto.

These kinds of comparisons work with particular aspects of the act of fishing in order to communicate specific points of religious thought. In this case the wisdom of God is seen as, in some sense, 'tricky', exploiting the avaricious, even voracious, quality of evil against itself. (In The Conference of the Birds, conversely, it was the quality of attentive waiting that I think became the figural centre of the teaching.)

I'd like to keep these more metaphorical texts in play, even while we engage with ones that are more 'literal' - more descriptive of fishing as experienced today - because these too work with the actuality of the act to speak about what wisdom is and does. Having looked at a Christian example today, I'll move on tomorrow to think about the meanings of baited hooks in the wisdom literature of Buddhism.

  

St Cyprian at the Water's Edge

ice fishing

This isn't today's post - just a link to a photo that I came across online. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts invited Martin Parr to take photos of winter in Minnesota and this was one of the images he made. Click on it to enlarge it.

http://www2.artsmia.org/blogs/new-pictures/2012/04/13/new-pictures-6-martin-parr-opening-soon/usa-minnesota-minneapolis-winter-games-ice-fishing-2012/

I have a soft spot for Minnesota, having spent six weeks there in summer 2009. Never been there in winter, though.

two routes to wisdom

I keep conflating the different ways in which fishing might be thought to give rise to wisdom. I did it in yesterday's post and I do it in my head.  Of course we really need to talk to the anglers about this - I don't want to assume too much - but focusing on the direct, metonymic relationship between fishing and wisdom (as opposed to any metaphorical connections), there seem to me to be two possibilities to take into account.

First, fishing requires patience, application, stillness, an attuning of the senses to the environment, control of the emotions, and so forth. These qualities might well be seen as aspects of wisdom and of the capacity to respond wisely to the world. Thus fishing trains one in qualities that are part of being wise in a wider sense.

Second, because fishing - coarse fishing, at least - takes time and involves long periods of waiting in silence, it creates a space which might be used contemplatively. Here the point isn't so much what fishing itself teaches you as the opportunities it creates to enter a different kind of state. I guess the time spent waiting for the fish to bite doesn't have to be used for contemplation. But it might be and it seems that it quite often is.

I'm a typological kind of boy - when I'm thinking things through, I like to classify - and it's bothered me a little that I've been blurring these two categories together: qualities arising directly from the demands that fishing makes on the individual and experiences arising in the space that fishing creates for contemplation.

Aaaagh - now I'm thinking about  the phenomenology of waiting. Have we talked about that before...?

worms

Today I'm going to do two short posts  instead of a single longer one.  Starting at page 92 of The Compleat Angler, Walton writes about bait, and he begins his discussion with worms. Among them he mentions the brandling, which is used in trout-fishing. 'The best of them,' he says, 'can be found in the bark of the Tanners which they cast up in heaps after they have used it about their leather.' (Piles of tanners' bark are no longer to be seen in British towns and villages, of course, and I wonder if the brandlings miss them.) In 1766, Richard Bowlker published another fishing manual under the title The Universal Angler, and his comments are similar, although perhaps a little more lyrical:

The Brandling is a very beautiful worm, streaked from head to tail in round ringlets, one streak being red and the other yellow. He is chiefly found in dunghills consisting of horse dung and hogs-dung mixed together, and you may sometimes find very large ones among the shavings of curriers leather mixed with a little earth: but hog's dung and horse dung mixed breeds the greatest quantity.

I'm struck by the idea that a worm can be 'very beautiful', and, in fact, the name of the creature also suggests close observation and an appreciation of its alternating red and yellow bands. A 'brand' is a 'piece of wood that is burning on the hearth'. (The word had the same form in Anglo-Saxon.) So a 'brandling' is a little piece of burning wood, just as a duckling is a little duck and a gosling a little goose. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't mention any uses of the term before the fishing manuals of the 1650s (although that doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't in use before - just that there isn't an extant written record).

the life spiritual and the life primitive

Steve suggested that it might be interesting to look at Thoreau's Walden and, of course, he was right! There's an interesting - and complicated - discussion of fishing in the early part of the chapter called 'Higher Laws'. Here I'm going to post some long quotations from it along with a few comments of my own.

At the beginning of the chapter, Thoreau talks about finding two instincts in himself, one towards the 'higher' or 'spiritual' life and one towards a 'primitive' one, both of them objects of 'reverence' to him. Initially he associates fishing with the 'primitive' instinct:

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive, rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. 

For a while, though, his perspective moves and he suggests that fishermen, hunters, woodcutters, and so on have a particular and valuable view of nature because they do not come to it with the 'expectation' that philosophers and poets do:

Perhaps I have owed to this employment [fishing] and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. 

This leads into the claim that 'science' is most rewarding when it externalises what fishermen and so on know instinctively.  Incidentally, I think Thoreau is writing early enough for 'science' here to mean something like 'official knowledge' rather than having the more precise sense that we give it:

The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

But just as it seems that Thoreau is taking a typically Romantic view of fishing and hunting, he performs a sort of volte-face: 

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh.

His rejection of fishing is, in part, to do with his reservations about eating 'flesh'. I'm interested, though, that he sees his becoming 'less a fisherman' as not resulting in 'more humanity or even wisdom'. There are clearly tensions in his responses here!

Walden Pond in 1908

wisdom and knowing how

I'm going to do something different today. It's been interesting looking at the three stories - King Masoud, Finn and Finegas, Hoderi and Howori - and I realise that I'll need to go back to them because I've misrepresented them to a certain extent. Today, though, I want to pick up on something that Steve said in his comment on the last post, something about wisdom and skill. My ideas on this subject are not all that well worked out and I feel a bit exposed trying to formulate them in this rather public way. But that, as they say, is the gig. Having taken on this practice, I'm going to see it through! So...please read charitably and bear in mind that I'm writing this off the top of my head at 06.30 in the morning.

It is very common to talk about there being several kinds of knowledge, two important categories being 'knowing that' and 'knowing how to'. The former, 'knowing that', is also described as propositional knowledge and it constitutes awareness of facts of various kinds. The latter, 'knowing how to', is different. The much quoted example is knowing how to ride a bike. This doesn't involve knowing any facts (or just a few basic ones, anyway). It is much more to do with experience, with an ability to make judgements during the flow of events, with the body and its response to particular situations. Now, as I understand it - and this is something Johan will know much more about than I do - wisdom has more to do with 'knowing how to' than 'knowing that'. What distinguishes a wise person is not so much knowing lots of facts (although such a person may, in fact, be knowledgeable in this sense too). At the core of wisdom is a responsive capacity - an ability to make judgements by drawing on experience or practice, a capacity that may even feel as if it is held within the body in some sense.

Wisdom as a term has both ethical and epistemological dimensions. It is 'ethical' in the sense that it names a capacity to live well - to follow the 'good life', perhaps. And the term is also epistemological in the sense that it assumes this capacity to be something that arises from experience or self-cultivation, something responsive, practical, and so thoroughly assimilated that it seems instinctive and even embodied.

What strikes me again and again as I read is that wisdom and fishing stand in at least two different relationships and I want to hang on to that point.

(1) Because skill in fishing arises from experience, application, an acquired ability to read the river, to respond to present conditions, to make observations, fishing forms a useful METAPHOR for the process of cultivating wisdom. Some writers use images of fishing to talk about the getting of wisdom because the activity models the process of cultivating experience, judgement, patience, and insight so well. In short, the development of the skill of fishing mirrors the coming 'to know how' that we think of as wisdom.

(2) But there is another way to look at it, which is that fishing itself can be productive of wisdom. That is, it can be seen not just as a metaphor but as a possible concrete element in the process of becoming wise. The endless hours exercising patience, gazing at the water, visualising the world beneath the surface can be seen as contemplative exercises in their own right. Read like this, fishing has a METONYMIC rather than a metaphorical relationship with wisdom - an indexical relationship rather than a purely symbolic one.

When I write this, I am not suggesting that we need to choose which of these is the 'right' relationship. I think different texts use fishing in different ways.

I think I'll draw to a close soon but a couple of other points occur to me. First, the idea that an ethical quality like wisdom could be rooted in experience and self-training has not seemed entirely right to everyone. There is a sort of counter-argument that a skill acquired through experience cannot be as valuable as a well-worked out body of rationally derived principles. And so the practicality and responsive character of wisdom as I have sketched it in here has seemed to need some defence. Second, it is (I think) relatively unusual to hear the term 'skill' applied to ethics but, actually, one place where that happens is in the Buddhist tradition, where conduct in line with the Buddha's ethical teachings is seen as 'skillful' rather than 'good' or 'bad'. This is because it constitutes one of the techniques that are used to acquire insight.

Now I really shall stop. As I say, please read charitably. These are just my thoughts this morning...

(Photo: I, Mike Cline [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)], via Wikimedia Commons)

luck on the sea, luck in the mountains

The Kojiki is a Shinto text - a compilation of mythological material assembled by imperial command in early 8th-century Japan. In volume I, section 39 we learn the story of two brothers, 'His Augustness Fire-Shine' (the elder one) and 'His Augustness Fire-Subside' (the younger). The first translator of the Kojiki, Basil Hall Chamberlain, chose these as translations of the Japanese names Ho-deri-no-mikoto and and Ho-wori-no-mikoto, so we can also call them Hoderi and Howori.

Chamberlain described the story as 'a very curious legend' and it is, indeed, hard to know how to read it. Hoderi and Howori have something in common with Walton's Piscator and Venator, in that the former is entirely committed to fishing and the latter to hunting. Chamberlain says that Hoderi 'got his luck on the sea' and Howori 'in the mountains', adding a little more about the term 'luck' in a footnote:

For the archaic Japanese word sachi, here rendered 'luck,' there is no satisfactory English equivalent. Its original and most usual significance is 'luck,' 'happiness;' then that which a man is lucky in or skillful at, - his 'forte;' and finally that which he procures by his luck or skill and the implements which he uses in procuring it.

The crux of the story is that Hoderi and Howori decide to swap their 'luck'. The idea comes from the younger brother, the hunter, and initially the fisherman, is reluctant. But in the end Howori prevails and goes down to the sea to see what he can catch. The text does not tell us how Hoderi got on in the mountains but Howori was a failure as a fisherman. He 'never got a single fish' and, what is more, 'he lost the fish hook in the sea'.

The elder brother, who now emerges as a rather austere figure, suggests that they end the experiment: 'A mountain-luck is a luck of its own and a sea-luck is a luck of its own. Let each of us now restore to the other his luck.' In another footnote, Chamberlain interprets this as an assertion of the need to accept what is naturally so and he glosses Hoderi's speech in a way that resembles the most stultifying bureaucratese: 'Some men are naturally good hunters and others naturally good fishermen. Let us therefore restore to each other the implements necessary to the successful following of our avocations.'  Howori is not, of course, in a position to return the implement necessary to the successful following of his brother's avocation because he has lost it in the waves. He tries to make amends by breaking up his sword and fashioning five hundred new fish hooks from it but Hoderi, who sounds increasingly priggish, insists that he wants the original.

The next section of the Kojiki explains how Howori managed to recover the hook and we'll come to that another time. But what have we gleaned from the story so far? Is it a tale about wisdom? A rather conservative tale perhaps? People should stick to the sphere that is ordained for them? Do not start fishing if you aren't a fisherman to start with? There must be some material on the story hidden away in the murky depths of the library - lost like Hoderi's hook. When I have a moment, I'll go down there and look for it.

bradán feasa

What to say about Finn and the 'salmon of knowledge'? I'm not much taken with portentous modern tellings of heroic tales. Better to let the originals speak for themselves. (Look here for W.T. Rolleston's translation of The High Deeds of Finn Mac Cumhail.) I shall just express a little sympathy for Finn's teacher, Finegas the Bard, with whom the young hero went to 'perfect himself' in 'wisdom and the art of poetry' before he took on the chieftainship of the Fianna.

Finegas made his home by the river because, as Rolleston says, 'It was a belief among the poets of Ireland that the place of the revealing of poetry is always by the margin of water'. And there, in a deep pool, lived the bradán feasa, a salmon in which was contained all the knowledge in the world so that the first person to eat its flesh would become the wisest of human beings. Finegas had spent many years trying to catch the salmon. But it was only when Finn came to live with him that he managed to land the fish.

I imagine he must already have felt misgivings - the elusive beast surrendering itself as soon as the boy wonder arrived. But Finegas still proceeded as if the knowledge was destined to be his. He told the young man to cook the salmon but not eat it - he wanted, of course, to be the first to taste it - and the worst of it is that Finn did exactly as he was told. This isn't a story about theft or deception or trickery. The boy cooked the fish and refrained from eating any. But he burned his thumb and, when he put it in his mouth to relieve the pain, the knowledge began to pass into him. No need to eat the flesh - the traces of grease from his fingers were enough.

How terrible for Finegas - to realise that he was never meant to have that learning. The daily work of contemplation, the assiduous routine of seeking wisdom, means little if a handsome young lad with a talent for sports can take it all from you without even trying. The old bard behaved well, it seems. 'Take the salmon and eat it, Finn, son of Cumhail,' he said, 'for to thee the prophecy is come. And now go home, for I can teach thee no more, and blessing and victory be thine.'

But I wonder how he felt as he watched his young protégé march off through the trees to meet his destiny. Did Finn scour the frying pan before he left?




Photograph by Wknight94 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

the king and the fisherboy

The Conference of the Birds (Mantiqu 't-Tayr) is a text from Islam's mystical tradition, Sufism. Among the poems that constitute it is one about catching fish.

Written in the 12th century by the Persian poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, the work as a whole depicts the spiritual leader of the birds, the hoopoe, urging his companions to find themselves a king - a quest that they fear will be long and hazardous. Much of it is taken up with the hoopoe's answers to their objections, answers that can also be read as responses to the sufi initiate's fears about following a path that leads ultimately to self-annihilation in a moment of union with Allah.

At one point, the hoopoe is asked a question concerning his own spiritual progress: 'How is it you surpass us in this search for Truth? ...We search and so do you - but you receive Truth's purity while we stand by and grieve.'  His answer - that his 'ignorance' vanished when Solomon 'bestow[ed] his glance' upon him - leads him on to discuss the question of how the beneficence of the divine is related to the work of prayer.  Solomon himself, it seems, must intervene to bestow knowledge upon the initiate. Thus, progress depends upon his generosity. But, for this to happen, the initiate must pray relentlessly and 'never for one moment cease'. And so, far from being presented as unnecessary, contemplative work becomes the very precondition of Solomon's intervention.

To illustrate the point, the hoopoe tells a story. A boy supports his mother and his six brothers and sisters by haunting the sea-shore, constantly casting his line, and pulling out the water's 'meagre harvest'. King Masoud, out riding, takes pity on the child and, casting the line for him, catches no less than a hundred fish, refusing to take any himself and adding as he rides away, 'Tomorrow when I fish you are the prey / A trophy I refuse to give away'. Next day the king sends for the boy and elevates him to the status of 'partner of [his] throne'. The courtiers are unhappy at the sudden arrival of this upstart but the newcomer has a simple answer: 'To every taunt the boy had one reply: "My sadness vanished when the king passed by."'

This story is, at heart, a drama about the mysterious relationship between human effort and divine benevolence. If the boy had not gone daily to the seashore, he would never have met King Masoud but it is Masoud's generosity and his bountiful nature that produce the change in the boy's condition. Many traditions reflect upon the interaction of these motive forces. (Examples are the debates concerning 'grace' and 'works' that arose in the Reformation or the tensions between tariki (other-power) and jiriki (own-power) that underlie the schools of Japanese Buddhism.) With its pair of images the hoopoe's narrative captures the relationship vividly - the boy scratching a living through daily toil and the king bestowing his bounty with a single cast of the line.
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Beautiful illustrations for The Conference of the Birds by the Czech artist, Peter Sís.

mary and martha

In Luke's Gospel (10:38-42), we find the famous story of Jesus' visit to Bethany and the house of the two sisters, Mary and Martha. The latter is a woman of great practicality, while the former embodies the more contemplative virtues, so that - when Jesus comes to them - Martha makes herself busy with preparations while Mary sits at the visitor's feet and listens to his teachings. Annoyed at Mary's neglect of the household chores, Martha complains that she has been left to do all the work. But Jesus rebukes her, saying: 'You are worried and upset by many things, but few things are needed - indeed, only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her' (Luke 10:41-42).

When Piscator, the emblematic fisherman of The Compleat Angler, speaks of the relative merits of contemplation and action, Walton has him allude to the story of Mary and Martha as he describes the arguments for valuing contemplation more:

[I]n ancient times a debate hath risen, and it remains yet unresolved, whether the happiness of man in this world doth consist more in contemplation or action? Concerning which, some have endeavoured to maintain their opinion of the first; by saying, that the nearer we mortals come to God by way of imitation, the more happy we are. And they say, that God enjoys himself only, by a contemplation of his own infiniteness, eternity, power, and goodness, and the like. And upon this ground, many cloisteral men of great learning and devotion, prefer contemplation before action. And many of the fathers seem to approve this opinion, as may appear in their commentaries upon the words of our Saviour to Martha. (Compleat Angler)

This passage is, in itself, very rich and interesting. In particular, I'm struck by the idea that contemplation is characteristic of God's own nature and so, by engaging in it, Christians imitate God. But what is on my mind this morning is Velasquez's painting, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (which he painted in 1618), not least because the ingredients laid out on the table in Martha's kitchen include garlic, chili ... and four fresh  fish arranged on a chipped black plate:

The painting gives rise to a number of interesting questions and perhaps I'll return to some of them later. For the moment, though, think about the symbolism of the plate of fish, a meal for Christ, who was himself associated with the symbol of the fish (because the initial letters of the phrase 'Iēsous Christos Theou Huios Sōtēr' spell the Greek word, ichthus), who promised to make Simon Peter and his brother Andrew 'fishers of men', and who fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes in the previous chapter of the same gospel.

I'd very much like to eat the meal that Martha is preparing in this picture. This is a Spanish kitchen, quite clearly, and a robust meal of fish with garlic and chili would be very welcome on these strange and wintery evenings.

contemplation as an exercise

In many traditions, I think, contemplation is viewed as something that must be developed in a fairly prosaic way - by completing daily exercises. Just as a child at school might do tasks to practise arithmetic or writing, so a regular return to contemplation is viewed as a foundational requirement in the incremental process of transforming the self. You should not expect to sit down on your first day of anapanasati meditation or on your first morning with Ignatius' spiritual exercises and witness the sky breaking open. Insight develops slowly, step by step, the result of a commitment to regular contemplative work.

Actually, different traditions vary in the extent to which they anticipate instantaneous results from practices of contemplation. In Buddhism, the possibility of sudden insight is countenanced more strongly in Mahayana than in Theravada thought. And some Christian traditions envision a spontaneous experience of ecstasy that is deep, immersive, and immanent in the practice.  Thus, for some, contemplation is like a process of planting seeds - a garden will grow but only very slowly.  For others, it may result in a spontaneous flash of insight - something sudden and immediate, arising in the moment. But flashes of insight are hard to sustain. There are moments when the world seems very clearly delineated: hard-edged and glittering in the winter sun. But these moments do not last and, five minutes later, one is once again listening to difficult people, engaged in circular conversations, struggling with the practicalities of everyday life. The work of contemplation perhaps lessens the duration between the the moments of insight or builds a vision that is always clear and well illuminated. Thus, every time the flame ignites, it can stay alive a little longer.

Quite often, then, contemplation is pictured not as some extraordinary or special experience but as a regular form of exercise or work, to engage in which is to cultivate the self in a quiet and systematic way - to engage in a process of alchemical experimentation that is hidden away in a workshop inside the head.

first post

I have a practice where I get up each morning, and, before doing anything else, sit down with a cup of coffee and write three sides of prose in long-hand. (Three sides of A4, that is.) Kate has convinced me that it would be a good idea if - for a while - I devoted one of those three pages to the fishing project. Today is the first day of that commitment.

The idea of the pages is that I simply write. The material is not carefully thought out or prepared in meticulous detail. In fact, the point is not to linger over it, not to re-read it, not to keep rewriting, but simply to put down something that is on my mind at the time. That being so, please accept my apologies if these paragraphs seem foolish or ill-formed. To me it is enough that they are here - something to read, to show you, to think about. Kate, in the meantime, is developing a complementary practice - that of reading whatever we advise her to read. My own suggestion is John Cage's collection of short texts: Indeterminacy. I'm not sure exactly how this is related to wisdom. Well, I have an inkling, but that is something for later, perhaps:

http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/