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...?
But perhaps that is the point - the conflation is part of what we are looking at? I think there is a blurring of boundaries that happens when we stare into a pond, we become in a way, that pond and our sense of a boundaried self is dissolved into the water?
ReplyDeleteWell yes - I kind of agree with that. But you can only think about dissolving if you start with the idea there is both a solid and a solvent to dissolve it in.
ReplyDeleteThe categories I've been setting up (metaphorical v. metonymic views of the relationship between fishing and wisdom, the qualities needed to fish as aspects of wisdom v. the space opened up by fishing as an opportunity for contemplation, etc) do merge into each other and overlap, so I don't mind seeing them as different currents in the water (so to speak) rather than as totally separate things.
I think it's helpful to see that different texts (and I would count what the anglers actually say as texts here) have rather different dynamics. Maybe it's analogous with the way different stretches of river and different ponds have different dynamics although all are, in the end, water.
The demands made by fishing and the space it offers - this is precisely, I think, why Walton's book is so meaningful, it lives in this contradiction or dialectical tension and that is why it does not cease to give. I mentioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in another text; it seems to me that something similar is going on there. I want to draw this into the context of a discussion of philosophical materialism. indeed, the metaphorical, depth-psychological context is related but not the same as this aspect.
ReplyDeleteThe duality is also the duality of Martha and Mary that you started out with. How vita activa and vita contemplativa are related. Here the transformation of wisdom comes in, again: wisdom can't be only contemplative. How does fishing, its significance, relate to changing the self, changing the world - this is what I am now thinking of.