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)
Ah Alan Sillitoe. he writes so well! Here, in your blog post the reading seeps into writing in an interesting way.I am immersed in De Certeau on reading, which you reminded me of. He describes reading as 'to constitute a secret scene, a place one can enter and leave when one wishes'. There is something exciting about this secrecy of reading, but also creative 'the reader produces gardens that miniaturize and collate a world'.(P. 172) More anon.
ReplyDeleteThese De Certeau comments are interesting with regards to current discussions on Video Games as art and also an article I read about Deleuzian concepts and Super Mario Galaxy. Currently there are discussions about what criteria to use to view video games as art and there are various criteria from the realms of literature, visual art and film applied to games to do this. The thing that people cannot agree on is the fact that games are a form of practice, part of play in many ways, and that there is an interface between you and the game. You cannot be the reader who 'produces gardens that miniaturize and collate a world' but you can decide how you will interact with a 'garden' that has been created for you. Cremin has a concept called the 'ludo-diagram' to describe video games as a series of multimodal sensations and representations. In the Cremin article I read on Mario and Deleuze looks at the role of the creator of the game Shigeru Miyamoto:
ReplyDelete'The ludo-creator invites the ludo-apprentice to embark upon a hopeless quest to recover a lost object in order to realize the art of the video game. The ludo- apprentice brings to life the figure of Mario—abecoming-Mario—and renders visible the art of Miyamoto the ludo-creator. The ludo-apprentice is Miyamoto’s double and also doubles up as an artist and appreciator: she appreciates the design but also the affective force of play on her body (see Dovey & Kennedy, 2006 on affect). Miyamoto has created a canvas upon which the ludo-apprentice applies details.' (Cremin 2012: 78)
The reason I am going on about this is because of the role of fishing in Miyamoto's Legend of Zelda games where catching the biggest fish results in you receiving a fantastic treasure that you can't get anywhere else, but the whole fishing experience privileges patience. Within a fantasy environment the practices and contemplative aspects of fishing are recreated as part of a game.
Legend of Zelda fishing pond
I was really struck by your comment, Hugh, because I've been thinking about games in a slightly different context - as practices where chance and skill interact in a wide range of different ways. There's a book by the French sociologist, Roger Caillois - published in French in 1958 as *Les jeux et les hommes* and in English in 1961 as *Man, Play, and Games*. Caillois produces a typology of games with four categories:
ReplyDeleteAGON (competition)
ALEA (chance)
MIMESIS (mimicry)
ILINX (vertigo - sensory change produced by e.g. spinning round until dizzy)
Although, the first category is 'competition' and not 'skill', the idea of being better at the game than someone else does *imply* skill and so the intersection of the first two categories is analogous with the interaction between 'effort' and 'chance' that we've been talking about with respect to fishing. Maybe a blog-post on games and play is called for?
This are great criteria. I am wondering how fishing fits into the game criteria or how we can even see it as a game. though many of the aspects of games come into it: skill, chance, play, competition etc. I suppose the context of coarse fishing is a recreational activity which is different from fishing for subsidence?
ReplyDelete