letters to the editor

I've been reading the latest issue of Improve Your Coarse Fishing, 'Britain's best selling fishing monthly', and particularly enjoying the letters to the editor. There's one from Malcolm Wiltshire, who reports using some of the tactics recommended in the magazine and landing 'a blood-warming catch of 40lb, including seven bream to 5lb and dozens of roach to a pound.' The editor responds by congratulating him on the catch and adds, 'It goes to show you can never be absolutely sure what your day holds'.

I wrote here about the trope of the 'day of fishing' (not the morning or afternoon or couple of hours in the evening) and here it is again - the day seems the natural unit for these pithy comments about the character of the sport. And I'm also interested that the moral of the story is taken as being 'you never know'. I suppose that's one way to read the original letter. It was a very cold day in the middle of winter and no one thought the writer of the letter would land anything at all, but, in fact, he pulled out a catch that was enough to 'warm the blood'. Isn't it a matter of skill to know which bait to use, though? Certainly, the letter was offered in gratitude for good advice. Yet Kev, the editor, has turned it into a kind of hymn to fortune. Tyche is at work here in the fishing venues of Sussex.

In another letter, Les Major tells a story that also feels familiar. He describes the process that the angler goes through to prepare:

You spend hundreds of pounds on fishing gear, read the fishing magazines, learn all about how to use the best baits, what depth to fish at and whether to try the Method or hair-rig a bait. Then you sit there and wait, and wait and wait. Not even a knock.

But then, as he tells it, a group of 'youngsters' show up. They have only one rod, no hook - they borrow his, no bait - they borrow his, and a strange technique - they do odd things with the float. But they hook a fish immediately and have to borrow his net to land it. This sounds a lot like the incident in Washington Irving's story, 'The Angler', when the narrator and his friends go fishing in the Upper Hudson Valley and are completely out-classed by an 'urchin' with an earthworm as bait and a bent pin as a hook.

Actually, the two versions of the trope aren't told for the same reasons. Irving's story has more to do with the lack of worldliness shown by the narrator and his friends. Everything they know, they know from books and, in fact, the narrator himself prefers to retreat back into reading after just half an hour on the river. But the letter in the magazine, although it does include a reference to reading - 'you ... read the fishing magazines' - seems not so much about self-satire as a comment on the mysterious matter of fishing itself. He ends the letter with the question, 'Should I ask these lads how to do it?', and Kev doesn't offer a reply, although the letter has been given the title 'Lucky Blighters'. It is, once again, a story about fortune.

There are other kinds of letters in the magazine. One discusses the reintroduction of otters into British rivers. Another talks about the system for administering fishing licenses. And a third raises the question of whether artificial baits are harmful to fish. Collectively they examine questions about the ethics and regulation of fishing. But it's interesting to me that they are mixed in with that other type of letter - those 'tales from the water's edge' that remake what are quite traditional stories to reaffirm some more fundamental sense of what fishing is really like.

Head of the goddess Fortuna by Skopas Minor (F l a n k e r) [CC-BY-3.0 (http: //creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.]

salted fish and flattery

Today some Roman history ... told by a Greek and involving fishing rods.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, Caesar's ally, Marc Antony, played a central role in the military campaign against the assassins and then began to consolidate his own power base. He formed an alliance with Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt and subsequently became her lover, spending the winter of 41-40 BC with her in Alexandria. The Greek historian, Plutarch, describes Marc Antony's stay in Egypt as a time of play and folly. Cleopatra tried to entertain her lover and keep him happy: 'Were [he] serious or disposed to mirth, she had at any moment some new delight or charm to meet his wishes.' (The translation is Dryden's.)

They played dice. They drank. They hunted. When he exercised, she went along to watch. They would go out at night disguised as servants 'to disturb and torment people at their doors and windows'. (Plutarch tells us that 'from these expeditions he often came home very scurvily answered, and sometimes beaten severely, though most people guessed who it was.') But one of the most striking of these 'follies' took place in the context of a fishing trip:

He went out one day to angle with Cleopatra, and, being so unfortunate as to catch nothing in the presence of his mistress, he gave secret orders to the fishermen to dive under water, and put fishes that had already been taken upon his hooks, and these he drew so fast that the Egyptian perceived it.

This tale is reminiscent of others in which the rich and powerful demand continuous flattery, their delusions of competence - and even brilliance - perpetually reinforced. Clever advisers must lose to them at chess and athletic bodyguards at tennis. Terrible paintings must be admired and dire poetry wondered at. The entourage must slouch so that the tiny man looks bigger. Reality must be reshaped so that the leader seems wiser, stronger, taller, wittier, better-looking, more discerning, more noble, and more astute than could ever in fact be the case.

There are two sides to this dynamic. Presented in serious mode, the vanity of the leader is the sign of an unstable and frightening world in which there is no real justice, where talent goes unrewarded, and where experience unfolds in a capricious, cruel, and arbitrary fashion.  Seen in comic mode, however, the trope communicates a much more reassuring message concerning the equality of persons, the hollowness of power, and the fragile condition of the dictator's authority. Perhaps there is a dialectical relationship between these moments or a characteristic alternation, the horror of capricious power interacting with the absurdity of pretension.

In Plutarch's account of the fishing trip, the trick is - in fact - revealed:

[F]eigning great admiration, [Cleopatra] told everybody how dexterous Antony was, and invited them next day to come and see him again. So, when a number of them had come on board the fishing-boats, as soon as he had let down his hook, one of her servants was beforehand with his divers and fixed upon his hook a salted fish from Pontus. Antony, feeling his line give, drew up the prey, and [...], as may be imagined, great laughter ensued.

But Cleopatra turns her trick once again toward the flattery of Antony, suggesting that his lack of skill in fishing is almost a sign of his strength in other areas of life:

'Leave,' said Cleopatra, 'the fishing rod, general, to us poor sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus; your game is cities, provinces, and kingdoms.'

And, in fact, Plutarch also tells us that the population of Alexandria in general regarded Antony's 'follies' in this way: '[They said] they were much obliged to Antony for acting his tragic parts at Rome, and keeping comedy for them.'

So this is a story about the interaction of the trivial and the weighty - the question of whether the 'greatness' of the 'great' is visible in every area of life or in their very neglect of the ordinary for that which is worthy of their attention. And it raises the question of whether fishing itself is a metonymic image of life as a whole or rather an interlude in the relentless march of days - a moment of respite when something different can happen and the the balance of life might be restored.

A packet of salted fish. [Image by David [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.]

grandeur and vulgarity

Does the presence of an angler enhance the beauty of a rural landscape or detract from it? Should a painter add the figures of fishermen to scenes of pastoral beauty or omit them if they are actually there in reality? Strange though these questions may be, they did in fact receive discussion in previous eras and that's what I want to write about today.

In 1786, William Gilpin - the great theorist of the 'picturesque' - published a two-volume work with the title Observations relative chiefly to picturesque beauty made in the year 1772 on several parts of England particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland. The work is essentially a travel narrative but, as he goes along, Gilpin comments continuously on the extent to which particular locations and vistas can offer an experience of picturesque beauty to the observer.

His account of this aesthetic category is complex - it is not entirely a property of a landscape but arises in the interaction between the human observer and the external prospect. In particular, it involves a certain kind of experience of pleasure in the act of looking. And, since nature is not always 'properly' picturesque, it may require some enhancement when it is translated into imagery by the artist or text by the poet.

Heading south past Great and Little Mell Fell towards the north shore of Ullswater, Gilpin observes that the area is 'well inhabited':

It was about the time of a statute-fair; when the young people of the country leave their old services, and go to their new: and we were not a little entertained with the simplicity, and variety of the several groups and figures we met, both on horseback, and on foot.

He is prepared to see these figures as picturesque enhancements to the landscape. But he balks at seeing labourers with the tools of their trades - 'the spade, the scythe, and the rake' - as appropriate elements in a composition that aspires to any grandeur. He remarks that that which gives moral pleasure - scenes of 'cultivation', for example - do not give aesthetic pleasure, for 'the picturesque eye [...] ranges after nature untamed by art, and bursting wildly into all its irregular forms'. The same, he adds, applies to human figures:

In a moral view, the industrious mechanic is a more pleasing object, that the loitering peasant. But in a picturesque light, it is otherwise. The arts of industry are rejected; and even idleness, if I may so speak, adds dignity to a character. Thus the lazy cow-herd resting on his pole; or the peasant lolling on a rock, may be allowed in the grandest scenes; while the laborious mechanic, with his impliments [sic] of labour, would be repulsed.

 This leads Gilpin on to consider the representation of anglers in paintings:

The fisherman, it is true, may follow his calling upon the lake: but he is indebted for this privilege, not to his art; but to the picturesque apparatus of it - his boat, and his nets, which qualify his art. They are the objects: he is but an appendage. Place him on the shore, as a single figure, with his rod, and line; and his art would ruin him. In a chearful glade, along a purling brook, near some mill, or cottage, let him angle, if he please: in such a scene the picturesque eye takes no offence. But let him take care not to introduce the vulgarity of his employment in a scene of grandeur.

There is clearly a politics to the judgements that are made here, a point that has been much discussed in contemporary scholarship on the picturesque. For Gilpin, economic activity has to be erased from the landscape in order to preserve its aesthetic qualities and the working people of the region are welcome only if they leave their tools at home and, ideally, dress in 'long folding draperies' or as 'gypsies, bandittit, and soldiers, - not in modern regimentals, but as Virgil paints them, "- longis adnixi hastis, et scuta tenentes"' (i.e. 'learning on spears and bearing shields').

But how do work, leisure, and the aesthetics of the countryside interact in our own perceptions of fishing? I came across an ethnographic study by Massimiliano Mollona - Made in Sheffield - which argues that 'fishing is an act of working-class appropriation of nature and urban spaces against speculations, relocations, diversions and enclosures by capitalists, aristocrats, bureaucrats and middle-class environmentalists'. And he points to a kind of aesthetic judgement on the part of 'middle-class anglers' for whom 'coarse fishing is a debasing sport because it is practised collectively in domesticated places (artificial ponds, urban canals and redeveloped "brownfields") with domesticated fish.'

I don't know if middle-class anglers really do see coarse fishing as a 'debasing' sport but the aesthetic conflict implicit in this political division does seem recognisable - the 'artificial pond' with its 'domesticated fish' set against the romantic image of the sparkling trout stream or the 'noble salmon' with its strange and heroic ways of living and dying. The mention of the 'urban canal' as the site of a 'working-class appropriation' reminds me of my walks out east through the old industrial areas on the edge of the city centre and of another type of nature - 'modern nature'? - that contrasts with the 'romantic nature' associated by Derek Jarman with the Kent of Constable and Palmer.

This work by the 19th-century US painter Thomas Moran depicts the 17th-century artist, Salvator Rosa, sketching a group of banditti. Shortly after mentioning bandits as adding to the character of 'a scene of grandeur', Gilpin refers to Rosa as one whose works were a 'model' of how to incorporate the human figure into a landscape.

mucus

The slipperiness of a fish arises largely from the fact that 'single-celled glands in [its] epidermis' produce a fibrous secretion, which 'swells up in water to form a thick layer of viscous mucus'. This mucus has a range of different functions - protecting the animal from 'infections and parasites', lessening 'the danger of damage to the skin through collisions', allowing the fish 'to escape the grasp of predators', 'seal[ing] the body' to prevent the exchange of ions and water', and 'reduc[ing] frictional drag during locomotion'. (All these quotations come from John J. Videler's book, Fish Swimming.)

The parrot-fish even wears a 'nightgown' of mucus, a kind of transparent 'garment' which it takes half an hour to produce, starting at its mouth and incorporating a flap at either end. The New Scientist in January 1960 reported that the fish 'spins the nightgown while leaning against coral or hiding inside conch shells' and added '[e]xperiments have proved that the gelatinous feel of the garment discourages the appetite of the moray eel.' On waking up, the parrot-fish swims away and leaves the garment behind it in the water.

Some fish produce no mucus. Others produce vast quantities of it, the hagfish, for example, which generates the stuff in prodigious quantities:















To be slimy is to be strange ... but to be slippery is useful. (Turkish wrestlers cover themselves with oil to make it more difficult for their opponents.) I need to produce some psychological mucus to stop people getting hold of me...

contemplation 1

The full title of Izaak Walton's book is The Compleat Angler; or, the Contemplative Man's Recreation, and, in associating angling with the cultivation of wisdom, I think we tend to see the contemplative aspects of the sport as an essential aspect of that process. Perhaps then it would be useful to think more actively about contemplation, and, with that in mind, I shall write some posts on the subject, beginning with one on the diversity of contemplative practice.

This is on my mind because recently I've been reading two different texts that provide guidance on the subject of contemplation - the Buddhist work known as the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta, which I mentioned here, and the Spiritual Exercises of St Francis Loyola. The first originated in the 5th century BC and was  transmitted orally until it was written down in the late 1st century BC. It describes the foundational practices through which the bikkhu (or monk) cultivates sati (or mindfulness). The latter dates from the 1520s and consists of a cycle of prayers and meditations that are completed over a four-week period and take the practitioner through a number of scriptural topics including Sin, the Life of Jesus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. What interests me here is that, although both are - I think fairly obviously - concerned with contemplation, they are very different in the specific nature of the contemplative practice they recommend. 

The Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta describes the cultivation of a state in which one is fully grounded in the present - wholly focused in the here and now. The text examines four objects of contemplation that are involved in this process - body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities.  But at the basis of them all is the continuous awareness of one’s own breathing.

There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out.

Practitioners do not attempt to exercise control over their breathing. They simply direct their attention to it:

Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’

The awareness of breathing constitutes a kind of ground against which bodily sensations and mental events become visible. It provides a means by which those events can be watched as if from a position separate from them - not directly involved with them. As those events occur, they interrupt the focused consciousness of breathing and hence become objects to be observed rather than states with which the subject identifies.

The Spiritual Exercises, by contrast, do not lead practitioners to watch their own bodily sensations and mental processes as if from a distance. They employ the imagination in the production of objects of contemplation. So, for example, after the preparatory prayer which begins each exercise, the retreatant works on the 'first prelude' which involves ‘the construction of the place’ against which the object of contemplation is set:

[I]n every meditation or contemplation about a bodily thing, as for example about Christ, we must form, according to a certain imaginary vision, a bodily place representing what we contemplate; as the temple, or a mountain, in which we may find Christ Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, and the other things which concern the subject of our contemplation. 

But it may be that the object of contemplation is not ‘a bodily thing’:

[I]f the subject of meditation be an incorporeal thing, as is the consideration of sins [the subject of the first exercise], the construction of place may be such as if by imagination we see our soul in this corruptible body, as confined in a prison; and man himself, in this vale of misery, an exile among brute animals.

And so the practice begins with the exercise of the imagination in evoking a place, either literal or figurative, as the ground against which the meditation may take place.

 Following the prayer and first prelude, retreatants come to the second prelude, which involves the emotions. And, again, rather than watching any emotions that arise (as recommended in the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta), they work on evoking the emotions appropriate to that day's object of contemplation.

[I]f I am to meditate concerning the Resurrection of Christ, I must ask for joy wherewith I may rejoice together with Christ rejoicing: but if concerning the Passion, let me ask tears, pains, and anguish, in order that I may suffer together with Christ suffering. 

Crucially, retreatants do not try to arouse such as feelings as joy or anguish for themselves. Rather, they request that the appropriate emotion be present to them - that it be bestowed upon them as they contemplate the particular scriptural episode occuring in the place that they have 'constructed'.

I've outlined these two approaches to 'contemplation' because I think there's a slight danger of our assuming that we already know what we mean by this term. But 'contemplation' is, in fact, an umbrella term for a wide range of practices, all of which involve some kind of disciplining of the attention but which vary considerably in terms of where that attention is directed and how it is manifest. It can be a focus on something immediate and present. It can involve the observation of the self from some 'deeper' place or some 'distant' point. It can be built upon the imaginative 'construction' of a place and a scene in the mind's eye. It can manifest as a focused request for some kind of experience or condition.

What then do we mean when we say that fishing is contemplative? What do those engaged in that practice contemplate? And what mental resources do they use in the act of contemplation?

This image has nothing to do with either the  Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta or St Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. It is a sculpture from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, dating from about 460 BC, and it is often known as the 'Contemplative Athena'. See page for author [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

dear to hermes

A quick post for the last day of my holiday - it's another quotation from Oppian's Halieutica and it describes the qualities that you need to fish successfully. All participants in the project must examine themselves carefully to see whether they have them:

First of all the fisher should have body and limbs both swift and strong, neither over fat nor lacking in flesh. For often he must fight with mighty fish in landing them — which have exceeding strength so long as they circle and wheel in the arms of their mother sea. And lightly he must leap from a rock; and, when the toil of the sea is at its height, he must swiftly travel a long way and dive into the deepest depths and abide amongst the waves and remain labouring at such works as men upon the sea toil at with enduring heart. Cunning of wit too and wise should the fisher be, since many and various are the devices that fishes contrive, when they chance upon unthought-of snares. Daring also should he be and dauntless and temperate and he must not love satiety of sleep but must be keen of sight,wakeful of heart and open-eyed. He must bear well the wintry weather and the thirsty season of Sirius; he must be fond of labour and must love the sea. So shall he be successful in his fishing and dear to Hermes.

I'm quite good in the thirsty season of Sirius and could probably leap lightly from a rock. I don't know if I'm dauntless and temperate, though, and I do love a satiety of sleep.

Sirius A and B. [Image by NASA, ESA Credit: H. Bond (STScI) and M. Barstow (University of Leicester) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.]

cunning devices

Fishing involves trickery - baited hooks and artificial lures - but fish, it seems, use ruses too. In the second century AD the Greek poet, Oppian, wrote the Halieutica, a long work focused on the fisherman's art. Book III of the poem (which begins with an invocation to Hermes. the god of both tricks and fishing) emphasises exactly this point:

Fishes ... not only against one another employ cunning wit and deceitful craft but often also they deceive even the wise fishermen themselves and escape from the might of hooks and from the belly of the trawl when already caught in them, and outrun the wits of men, outdoing them in craft, and become a grief to fishermen.

The poem is mainly concerned with sea-fishing but it does talk about angling as well as fishing with nets. The following are tricks played by fish when caught with a hook and line:

      The Basse, when smitten by the point of the bent hook, leaps on high and incessantly presses its head violently on the line itself, till the wound becomes wider and it escapes destruction.
      The mighty Orcynus employ a similar device. For when they have seized the jaw of the guileful hook, swiftly they strain and rush to the nether depths, putting pressure on the hand of the fisher; and if they reach the bottom, straightway they beat their head against the ground and tear open the wound and spit out the barb.
      But when giant fishes swallow the landed hooks — such as the tribes of the Ox-ray and the Sea-sheep and the Skate or the sluggish race of the Hake — they will not yield to it but throwing their flat bodies in the sands they put all their weight upon the line and cause trouble to the fishermen, and often they get free from the hook and escape.
      The swift Amia and the Fox-sharks, when they are hooked, straightway hasten upward to forestall the fisher and speedily bite through with their teeth the middle of the line or the extreme hairs. Therefore for them the fishermen forge a longer socket on the hook, as a protection against their teeth.
      The Cramp-fish, moreover, forgets not its cunning in the pain of being struck, but straining in its agony it puts its flanks against the line, and straightway through the horse-hair and through the rod runs the pain which gives the fish its name and lights in the right hand of the fisher; and often the rod and the fishing-tackle escape from his palm. Such icy numbness straightway settles in his hand.

Apparently the 'Cramp-Fish' is what is now known as an electric ray  and, if you look hard, you can see one among the fish represented in this mosaic from a Roman villa in Catalunya (3rd century AD). (I've turned the contrast up a bit, so it's easier to see.)

the moon in the mill pond

For once the animals were on good terms and they all decided to go fishing together. Brother Bear said he would fish for mud-cats. Brother Wolf said he would fish for horney-heads. Brother Fox said he would fish for perch. And Brother Turtle said he would fish for minnows. But Brother Rabbit winked at Brother Turtle for the two had cooked up a plan together. 'I'll go fishing for suckers,' he said.

When they got to the pond, Brother Rabbit marched up to the edge and made as if to drop his hook. But then he stopped, stood stock still, and stared down into the water, a frown upon his face. Of course, the others wanted to know what was up, so Brother Rabbit turned to them and, shaking his head, said: 'We can't go fishing tonight, fellas. It seems that the moon has fallen from the sky and is bobbing about in the water down here.' And he pointed down at the circle of the moon reflected there in the surface of the pond.

Disappointed, the animals scratched their heads and wondered what to do about it. 'I know,' said Brother Turtle. 'I'll borrow a net.' And off he went to talk to one of his relatives. While Brother Turtle was gone, Brother Rabbit took off his coat and prepared to wade out into the pond. He'd heard, he said, that anyone who found the moon floating in the water and managed to get it out would pull out with it a big pot of money.

When they heard this story, Brother Bear, Brother Wolf, and Brother Fox resolved not to let Brother Rabbit take the treasure, so as soon as Brother Turtle arrived with the net, they waded straight in and began to haul away. They hauled at it once but the moon stayed put. They hauled at it twice, but the moon wouldn't move. They hauled again, but the moon still didn't budge. So Brother Rabbit suggested they wade out further and get a bit closer to their quarry. And as they did what Brother Rabbit had told them, they stepped off a shelf in the bottom of the pond and found themselves in over their heads and splashing about so much that it seemed as if all the water would slosh out onto the banks.

Brother Rabbit and Brother Turtle laughed and laughed and laughed. And, as Brother Bear, Brother Wolf, and Brother Fox staggered from the water, soaked to the skin and in a foul temper, the rabbit turned to his friend and said: 

I HEAR THAT THE MOON WILL BITE AT A HOOK BUT ONLY IF YOU USE FOOLS FOR BAIT.

(Adapted from one of the stories that appears in Nights With Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris - available in digital form here.)

being a sportsman

I'm going to be taking a short holiday over the next few days - until Wednesday, I think. I need to get some rest and recharge my batteries. I'm intending to keep posting during my vacation but I'll probably just put up the odd quotation or short observation. So in that spirit some thoughts on being a sportsman.

Chapter 23 of The Determined Angler deals with matters of tackle and, in it, Charles Bradford offers us a quotation from the fishing writer James Henshall:

Tackle Tells.—"The quality of gameness in a fish is best determined by the character of the tackle used. A brook trout on a striped bass rod, or a black bass on a tarpon rod, could not, in either case, exhibit its characteristic gameness, or afford any sport to the Angler. Excellent sport with small fishes, however, is now rendered possible owing to the advent of the very light trout rod. It should not be considered beneath the dignity of an Angler to cast the fly for a rock bass, a blue-gill, or a croppie, with a three-ounce rod. Certainly it is just as sportsmanlike as to fish for six-inch brook trout in a meadow brook or a mountain rill."

The angler is seen here as owing something to the fish - the opportunity, once hooked, to demonstrate its 'gameness', the strength of its will and its determination to be free. To use tackle that restricts its chance of doing this is represented as essentially unsporting, a refusal to show respect to a worthy adversary. Does this sound old-fashioned? The term 'sporting' isn't heard so much anymore, perhaps, but you will find it still used in certain quarters. Here is an article making an argument comparable with Henshall's but on the subject not of fishing but of long-range shooting. It appeared in the Shooting Gazette in September 2011:

http://www.shootinggazette.co.uk/shootfeatures/529979/Longrange_shooting_is_not_sporting.html

James Henshall (wearing a sportsmanlike moustache)

a second wordle

free among clear waters

I'm currently reading a translation of Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel which is known in Britain mostly because of the TV adaptation that was made in Japan and shown here in the early 1980s under the title, Monkey. It's a massive work, very digressive with all kinds of material branching out from the central story of Xuanzang's journey to bring the Buddhist scriptures back from India. Right now I'm in the middle of a section in which a fisherman and a gatherer of firewood discuss their lives, each arguing for the superiority of his own way of living. It has what you might call a 'set piece' quality and this has got me wondering whether it is, in fact, a frequently occurring trope in Chinese literature.

Timothy Wai Keung Chan's book, Considering The End, deals with questions of mortality in the work of four Chinese poets active between the 1st and 5th centuries AD. In it Chan discusses this body of poetry with reference to the traditional figure of the fisherman, 'an iconic, archetypal persona,' who - like the firewood gatherer - mediated in the text between 'the pursuit of, and retreat from, official life'. It is important to understand that:

These figures were no ordinary peasants or uneducated people, but represented a sub-class that dissented from central political power. These two contrasting sub-classes (reclusive and non-reclusive) comprised the class of scholars (shi).

Chan's book looks in some detail at the idea of reclusion as a response to the politics of a particular period and explores the place of the fisherman in figuring that response.

Journey to the West is, of course, a much later text - around one thousand years later than the poems Chan examines. And so the figure of the fisherman and wood-gatherer are highly traditionalised by this period. In this text, the former is called Zhang Shao and the latter Li Din. Both are 'advanced scholars who had never taken the official examination [to enter the civil service], lettered men of the mountains'. And they do articulate the values of reclusion in the traditional way:

'Brother Li,' said Zhang Shao, 'it seems to me that people who struggle for fame kill themselves for it; those who compete for profit die for it; those who receive imperial favours walk around with snakes in their sleeves. Taking all in all, we are much better off living free among our clear waters and blue hills: we delight in our poverty and and follow our destinies.'

Specific descriptions of their respective callings illustrate the 'pleasures of this reclusive life':

In my little boat I can stay where I like, 
Having no fear of the many misty waves.
Drop the hook, cast wide the net, to catch fresh fish:
Even without fat or sauce,
They taste delicious.

And again:

Big fish swim into the net in shoals; little ones swallow the hooks in swarms;
Boiled or fried they taste wonderful -
I laugh at the roaring river and lake.

And finally:

How well I like the swollen stream under the bridge in spring ...
Dragon-sized fresh carp cooked at any time;
A full array of hooks and nets to support my old age;
Lying back in a tiny boat watching the flying geese;
I have no stall in the marketplace of tongues.

The fisherman of Journey to the West interests me because he is not someone who is born to fishing. He is someone who could have been an influential government officer but has turned his back on the compromises that such a way of life involves. He has chosen to fish as a deliberate rejection of politics, power, and ambition. This 'could have been different' quality to the fisherman's life reminds me a little of the point about 'the day well spent'. In quite a lot of texts, it is important that fishing is an alternative to something else - it is the rejection of something that others prioritise as well as the embrace of something that is in itself worthwhile.

The Chinese character shì - scholar

a day well spent

NOTE: Something rather odd has happened here. I wrote and posted this on Wednesday 20 March but, somehow, the original version was removed and the post has been republished here *after* my post for Thursday 21 March and in slightly truncated form. I don't know why this has happened, but, if you've read this before, be aware that there's something below it that I actually wrote more recently. I've tried to restore the deleted ending - it's more or less right, although maybe a bit clumsier than what I originally wrote, for which apologies.

Texts about angling often include a particular trope - a sententious statement in which we're invited to think about the value of a day of fishing as opposed to other ways of spending time. I'm interested in the ubiquity of these sayings and in the very fact that the day is the unit they usually mention. It's perfectly possible to spend a morning fishing, or an afternoon, or, indeed, a whole week's holiday. But to take a day out of one's routine - a day to do something different - seems to carry a particular symbolic charge.

A bad day fishing is better than a good day of work. This saying is all over the internet - the prototype of the kind of trope I'm talking about. And here is a more earnest one quoted in Bradford's book:

Angling Spirit.—"It is the way we do things and the spirit in which we prosecute our endeavors that counts. The man who takes the day to go fishing on the great ocean or in the forest and can commune with Nature can be as good a Christian as the best man that ever entered the portals of a church, cathedral, or synagogue."—"Nature Factor."

These references to 'days well spent' have something in common with Horace's famous injunction - carpe diem, 'seize the day'. (Atually, the Latin verb carpere means something more like 'gather' or 'pluck'. There is an agricultural metaphor implicit in the tag.) Each new sunrise seems to renew the challenge to use time wisely and well. And, as Prospero says in the final speech of the Tempest, life itself can be figured as the interval between two sleeps.

irritable

I write these posts in the early morning (although I usually type them up much later in the day). This morning I'm in an irritable mood - impatient, dissatisfied, and a little angry. (Not with you, dear reader!) As I turn my thoughts to the fishing project, I find myself wondering about the idea of the 'day well spent'. ('A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work.') As the years pass, I find that I still have little idea of what makes for 'a day well spent' and I'm envious of people who who have a strong sense of how best to seize the day.

I feel as if I'm still experimenting with what it might be to spend time well and it seems to me, looking about me, that by the age of forty-three many people have already come to some conclusion about this. A day of holiday is an opportunity to do things that they love and that will bring them satisfaction. But I approach each bank holiday as if coming to the question for the first time. I doubt that a walk in the country will be time well spent, or an afternoon with people, or anything else for that matter. I like reading. The immersion in narrative is powerful and soothing. But I don't typically look back upon it as a really worthwhile use of time. In one way, I see work as time well spent, although, in another, I don't believe it's valuable at all.

I'm almost certainly overstating the particularity of this condition - there are no doubt many people like me. But the fishing literature returns again and again to the reliability of a day spent angling as a source of well-being and happiness, whether or not any fish are caught, whether or not it is raining.

Nature Again

A number of paths lead out from these irritable observations. First, counter-narratives. There are, in fact, stories of fishing that distance themselves from the notion that a day spent on the river is necessarily a day well spent. I'm thinking here of the stories of Raymond Carver, some of which use fishing trips as the background for strange and disturbing events.

In 'So Much Water So Close To Home', a group of men find a dead body in the river they intend to fish, and, rather than spoiling the trip by returning to the city to report it, they tie the body up so that it won't float away, and carry on fishing in close proximity to it. I don't think Carver is saying anything about anglers as a group here - far from it. The story deals more with the atomisation of modern life and the dubious nature of community. But precisely because the literature of fishing places so much emphasis on the value of time spent in nature - quite often, the moral value of days spent in that way - the amoral conduct of Carver's characters stands out particularly strongly from that background.

In a way, then, the story has a relationship with the ideas I developed in my post on the romanticisation of nature. I wrote there about Derek Jarman and his notion of 'modern nature' and I wonder now if 'modern nature' is the force that reasserts itself in the interstices of urban and industrial life - the garden created in the shadow of the power station or the guerilla gardeners who plant seeds in the empty lots of down-town Detroit. By contrast, 'romantic nature' both promises and conceals too much. It pretends to an idyllic condition - The Idylls is the collective title of Theocritus' bucolic poems for city-dwellers - and it turns its nose fastidiously away from the rotten parts of life, the parts that 'modern nature' acknowledges from the start.

Making Memories

A second point occurs to me and this one concerns memory. Earlier in the week I listened to The Human Zoo, a radio programme about psychology, and they were talking about happiness and the difficulty of defining what it is. They spoke to a psychologist who made a distinction between the happiness (or lack of it) that one feels as an experience is in progress and the happiness that arises in remembering the experience later. The latter, he suggested, has more influence than the former over whether people see themselves as in general contented and satisfied.

What interested me particularly is that the two kinds of happiness are actually fairly independent of one another. The psychologist gave a couple of examples. In one, he talked about the experience of listening to a concert and enjoying it thoroughly right up until the end when a horrible intrusive noise ruins the music for a moment. He pointed out that, in one sense, the noise did not ruin the concert. Listeners did, in fact, have the opportunity to listen to a good hour or so of fine music and derived enjoyment from it as it was happening. The point is that the nasty noise disrupts the memory of the event in a way that seriously undermines the possibility of registering it as 'time well spent'.

Conversely, it seems that unpleasant experiences - painful medical procedures, for example - leave less disturbing memories if the pain tails off rather than ending abruptly. The sense of 'things getting better' seems to affect how the experience is captured in memory and this is true even if the incrementally milder pain is added as an extra to that which arose from the essential treatment. In other words, although the sense of pain tailing off was achieved by increasing the total time spent in pain, the memories formed from that experience were more positive.

I found all this interesting not least because this semester I'm teaching a module on realism in narrative with two of my colleagues and, when literary scholars talk about first person narrative (ones told by a narrating 'I'), they make a distinction between the 'experiencing self' and the 'narrating self'. So, in a novel like Great Expectations, where the narrative is told by Pip, speaking of his own experiences in the first person, there is a productive - indeed, at times, electrifying - tension between the viewpoint of the younger Pip, who actually experiences the events, and that of his older self, who is telling you the story.

I'm very conscious that my own sense of 'time well spent' depends upon the capacity to make good memories, and quite often I go into activities hoping that they will be productive in this sense, only to find that they aren't. Since I'm in confessional mood, I'll admit that the biggest problem I've had since my former partner left me in 2011 is that the end of the relationship - and, more specifically, grievances I feel about how it ended - have wrecked the memories I have of the five years we spent together. Like the appalling noise at the end of the concert, the enjoyment of experience that I felt at the time has not given rise to memories that I can cherish. Those five years no longer feel 'well spent'. Not to moan too much! I'm learning to deal with this but it is something that has to be learned. The mental wiring does not make it easy.

Buddhists Again

The third point that occurs to me is the way in which Buddhist contemplative techniques attempt to dissolve some of the problems I wrote about in the last section - to untie the knots. The Buddhist insistence on presence - on attention paid to the here and now - claims to offer a different kind of relationship with experience, one that insists on the equality of every moment and denies a particular value to moments of special achievement or pleasure. (The very promise of a special pleasure to be found in the pursuit of particular activities is figured through a fishing metaphor, something I wrote about in my post on the demon fisherman.) The key Buddhist text here is the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta, which discusses the practice of sati in meticulous detail.

People like me who have a depressive streak - what they used to call a 'melancholic disposition' - are increasingly told that this is the way to live. Abandon the idea that anything in particular will bring satisfaction and live the moments as they come. And there is a stream in the fishing literature, I think, that affirms the 'nowness' of the experience in an analogous sense. Maybe it's captured in the quotation that Hugh posted - a line from Kirk Deeter, the 'editor-at-large' for Field and Stream:  'Paradise is being in a space where all that matters in your entire universe is what might happen within the next five seconds in that pocket of promising water 35 feet in front of you'. Thinking even five seconds ahead may technically be more than the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta suggests  - the pleasure Deeter evokes may still be structured too much around an experience of anticipation for the strict practitioner of sati. But, nevertheless, there is a sense of immediacy in the scenario - a shutting out of everything but the moment - that has something in common, if only loosely, with the insights of the Sutta.

Ending

So these are the thoughts that arose from my envy of those who seem clear about what they see as 'time well spent': various views of nature, the role of memory in the perception of oneself as 'happy', and the place of the present moment in Buddhist practice. As I finish this - relatively long - piece of morning writing, I feel better than I did when I sat down to write it. Less irritable, certainly. Less angry, perhaps. Maybe, then, time spent writing is, for me, time 'well spent'. But if that's so, it's annoying that writing is something that I find so bloody difficult.

the bodyship

This is another line quoted by Charles Bradford in The Determined Angler. I've so far failed to find out anything about the author:  

Land and Water.—"You're natural when fishing, and unnatural on shore. Fishing rubs the barnacles off your natural self, and makes your bodyship sail more easily."—B. M. Briggs.

Actually, there's another quotation from Briggs in the book and it's similarly...well, how to put it? Playful?

All Sports in Angling.—"The sport that sums up dancing, song and picture, athletics and all games of chance is angling. The waves make you dance, all pictures roll before you, any chance can win the pool, and every fishing boat is a sängerfest. "—B. M. Briggs. 

I like the strange image of the 'bodyship' rubbed clean of barnacles and the odd amalgam of dance, pictures, and games of chance, which conjures a startling image to the mind's eye.

gambling

I've been reading The Determined Angler, an 'anthological' work about fishing by Charles Bradford. It was published in New York in 1916 and it includes a wide range of quotations about angling. I think that - as today's contribution to the blog - I'll just post a few that struck me. The first raises the question of luck again. Like many of the writers quoted by Bradford, this one uses a pseudonym:

Speculation in Angling.—I often wonder if the basis of fishing is not founded upon the element of chance, and whether fishing does not fascinate because it is a species of gambling. To a degree it is a hazard. You take your best tackle, select your choicest bait, and you do more, for you pray to the goddess of success.—"Ancient Mariner."

I posted here about the poem by Leonidas of Tarentum in which the fisherman, Parmis, becomes the victim of Tyche, another capricious goddess and one to whom the Greeks did indeed offer prayers in the hope of success: 'I entreat you, child of Zeus the Deliverer, saving Tyche, keep protecting [the city], and make her powerful' (Pindar, Olympian 12).

on drawing

I've written before about fishing as a practice in which 'internal' factors (skill, effort, preparation) enter into a relationship with 'external' factors (chance, luck, or - more figuratively - grace) and the fact that some of pleasure of angling seems to lie in this interaction. It is presumably important that the 'external' factors feel a little beyond the possibility of control - or at least on the edges of what can be influenced by the human agent. They need to be unpredictable - not necessarily a matter of pure chance but not easy to grasp and influence. (When you read fishing books, it is striking how often particular aspects of the behaviour or fish are described as unknown or not well understood.)

Over the past few years I've been trying to learn to draw better and it's just struck me that there is something of the same dynamic in that process too - if we're talking about drawing from life, at least. Beginners are always told that they should draw what they see. But it can be strangely difficult to make sense of what you are seeing in a way that allows you to represent it on paper. It is as if the visual stimulus needs decoding before you can draw it with any accuracy and time and again I have found myself struggling with this decoding - failing to 'see' what is before my eyes.

Perspectival drawing provides a good example. If we could really 'draw what we see' in any straightforward sense, we wouldn't need the rules of perspective. After all, their function is simply to describe the way the three-dimensional world appears to us from various different positions. But faced with a complex pattern of rooftops or an up-hill street bordered by houses, it is very difficult to capture them on paper without resorting to the guidelines that the theory of perspective provides.

On my book-shelf I have  a beginner's guide to perspective and, in a blog on fishing, it seems appropriate to talk about the section with the title 'by lake and river'. There is a problem with drawing reflections in water. Objects positioned at more or less the same height as the surface of the water are mirrored in a fairly straightforward way. But the reflections of objects that are further back and raised up on a hill or incline are cut off from view by the land itself. This is so difficult to describe in words that the author, John Raynes, offers some images to clarify it. In the photo below, a model of a river bank is placed on a mirror and images of trees placed at different points upon it. The tops of the 'trees' are at various different heights but, because of the 'cut-off' effect, the 'trees' in the reflection are all much closer together. As the author says: 'The trees are placed at various distances and heights relative to the water/mirror but it is not immediately clear why the reflections are as they are.' The perspectival analysis simply describes what you can already see but 'understanding why [this effect occurs] will help you to see it more perceptively.'

Grappling with the problems that real scenes and objects present is part of the pleasure of drawing. And a combination of knowledge and experience makes it possible to make sense of previously baffling problems and increasingly bring them under control. Is this like the dialectic of 'internal' and 'external' in fishing? Drawing and writing both approximate to the condition of angling in different ways and, in each case, it is something about living on the border between what you can control and what you can't.

'quips, wit, and a little wisdom'

A link to a website that Hugh came across - it offers more than 1,100 'quotes, aphorisms and sayings' on fishing:

http://www.bishfish.co.nz/quotes/fishquotes2.htm

Hugh pulled this one out for attention: 'Paradise is being in a space where all that matters in your entire universe is what might happen within the next five seconds in that pocket of promising water 35 feet in front of you' (Kirk Deeter). Deeter is 'editor-at-large- for Field and Stream, 'the leading outdoor publication in America'.

obo-ti, susu-ti, madi-ti, uru-ti

It's time to finish the story of Po-deri and Po-wori (which I wrote about here and here). Having lost his brother's fish hook, Po-wori was moping by on the water's edge. There he came upon Sipo-Tuti-Nö-Kami, the Brine-Spirit Deity, who gave him a boat and told him to travel to the palace of Wata-Tu-Mi-Nö-Kami, the Sea-Spirit Deity. On arriving there, he said, Po-wori would see a large katura tree. He should climb it and await instructions.

This Po-wori did, and, as he sat in the tree, the hand-maid of the sea god's daughter came out of the palace to draw water from the well. She offered him a basin of water to quench his thirst and he, taking one of the jewels that he had upon his person, put it in his mouth and then spat it out again into the basin where it stuck to the side so that it couldn't be moved. The hand-maid told the princess what had happened and she told her father, who recognised Po-wori and invited him to be his daughter's husband.

Po-wori lived in the Sea-Spirit Deity's palace for three years but eventually his thoughts turned again to the loss of his brother's fish hook. So his father-in-law called together all the sea creatures and asked them if they had any idea what had happened to it. They confirmed that the sea bream had been complaining of having something stuck in her throat and so they called her to the palace and, sure enough, when she opened her mouth there was Po-deri's hook.

The Sea-Spirit Deity told Po-wori that, when he gave the fish-hook back to Po-deri, he should say to him: 'This hook is a gloomy hook, an uneasy hook, a poor hook, a dull hook' (obo-ti, sasu-ti, madi-ti, uru-ti) and he should hand it over with his hand behind his back. These words and this action would constitute a curse and part of a larger pattern of conduct designed to ruin Po-deri entirely:

[I]f your elder brother makes a high rice paddy, make a low paddy. If your elder brother makes a low paddy, make a high paddy. Thus, since I control the water, within three years your elder brother will be poverty-stricken. If he becomes bitter and angry and attacks you, take the tide-raising jewel and cause him to drown. If he pleads with you in anguish, take the tide-ebbing jewel and cause him to live. Doing this cause him anguish and suffering.

After offering this advice, the Sea-Spirit Deity sent Po-wori back to the shore with a crocodile to look after him on the journey.  Po-wori did as he had been instructed and things turned out as the Sea-Spirit Deity had said, the elder brother losing all his wealth and coming close to drowning until the younger granted him his life with the power of the tide-ebbing jewel. Faced with the inevitability of ruin, Po-deri eventually submitted to  Po-wori's will and declared that, from then on, he would be his brother's guard by day and his servant by night.

According to the commentators (Matsumura and, following him, Philippi), the story reflects the ascendancy of the Yamato dynasty over other groups in southern Japan. (Po-wori is represented in the Kojiki as the grandfather of the first Emperor, Jimmu.) What is particularly interesting is the final line of the story: 'Down to the present day his various posturings when drowning are ceaselessly served up.' This point is made at greater length in another early Shinto collection, the Nihon Shoki:

At this the elder brother put on a waist-cloth, rubbed red clay on his palms and on his face, and said to his younger brother: 'I have defiled my body thus, I will be your mime for ever.' Then he raised up his feet and stamped them in imitation of his drowning painfully. At first, when the tide covered his feet, he did the foot-divination; when it reached his thighs, he ran around; when it reached his waist, he rubbed his waist; when it reached his under-arms, he put his hands on his breast; and when it reached his neck, he raised up his hands and waved them about. From that time until now, this has never ceased.

In The Japanese Theatre from Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, Benito Ortolani reiterates the point about the ascendancy of the Yamato dynasty and associates Po-deri's dance with that of the Hayato clan from Kyūshū, who '[o]n the occasion of festivals and banquets' would smear themselves with scarlet earth and 'perform comic pantomimes of their defeat'. 'This dance,' he adds, 'the original Hayato-mai, was probably meant as a renewal of the promise of obedience to the conquerors.'

Thus, the story of Po-wori and Po-deri is presented in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki as a part of the mythology of the ruling Yamato clan. But, at the same time, it seems reductive to see the convoluted tale of the brothers' dispute as merely some kind of  historical aetiology. The elder brother's intransigence and the younger's revenge seem to dramatise some dark insight into the nature of social order and the politics of expertise. And how strange that the curse laid upon the fisherman is to spend the years dancing the scene of his own drowning. Po-deri should simply have accepted the replacement hooks. But then how could he? His fate was fixed when Po-wori first suggested that they trade 'luck' and try their hands at each other's allotted roles.














Hatō zu (Waves). Woodcut print after Konen Uehara, dating from between 1900 and 1920. Image by …trialsanderrors (Konen Uehara: Waves, ca. 1910) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

dissent

Walton has not always been read sympathetically. The following comes from Byron's long poem, Don Juan, canto 13, stanza 106:

And angling, too, that solitary vice,
Whatever Izaak Walton sings or says:
The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.

 In a note, he added this:

This sentimental savage, whom it is a mode to quote (amongst the novelists) to show their sympathy for innocent sports and old songs, teaches how to sew up frogs, and break their legs by way of experiment, in addition to the art of angling, the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended sports.

the strange faces of fish

Today's post is a little - what? Well, it is inspired more by free association than careful reading.

I posted here about Velasquez's painting of Mary and Martha, in which the more practical of the two is seen in the midst of preparing a meal, while her contemplative sister is visible through a window, engrossed in what her visitor has to say to her. On the table in Martha's kitchen are four shiny fish on a plate and this image came to mind yesterday when I read a poem from Reiner Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.  It's the twentieth poem of the second section, 'Zwischen den Sternen, wie weit'. The sonnet speaks of the distances between people - between a child and another (ein Nächster, ein Zweiter) or between a girl and the boy she shuns and thinks of (meidet und meint). It ends with an image of fish on a plate - their faces odd - and some lines, quite strange themselves, about the silence of fish and its possible eloquence:

Alles ist weit -, und nirgends schließt sich der Kreis.
Sieh in der Schüssel, auf heiter bereitetem Tische,
seltsam der Fische Gesicht.

Fische sind stumm ..., meinte man einmal. Wer weiß?
Aber ist nicht am ende ein Ort, wo man das, was der Fische
Sprache wäre, ohne sie spricht?

"See the plate on the gaily prepared table, / how uncommon the fish's face. / Fish are mute . . . , one once thought. Who knows? / But in the end, is there not a place where one, what for / fish would be language, without them speaks?" [There are lots of translations available but this one, which I found here, seems closer to the original than most.]

While neither the image nor the text is really about fishing, there is something about the oddness of fish that seems important and that emerges in the circuits of energy connecting Velasquez's painting to Rilke's mysterious sonnet.

A reminder of the painting - Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.

weekend

I'm going to visit friends in Oxford this weekend and, while I'm hoping to blog as normal on Saturday and Sunday, there's some possibility that I won't have enough time online to do so. If I can I will. If not, I'll be back on Monday...

the margin of luck

Something that surfaces here now and again is the relationship between, on the one hand, skill, effort, or preparation, and, on the other, chance, grace, and luck - between what one can do for oneself and what comes from elsewhere, eluding human control. For simplicity, I'll talk about these as internal and external factors. Skill, effort, and preparation aren't identical concepts but they are all internal to the agent and, to some extent, susceptible to control. Likewise, chance, grace, and luck aren't all the same but can all be seen as external to the agent, operating in spite of the efforts made to influence them.

The book I bought when I went to see my parents includes an essay by Tim Goode called 'Catching Big Fish' and the essay tells an interesting story about the history of this specialist area of angling:

Before World War II, the capture of a big fish was regarded as a matter of good fortune. The possibility of narrowing the margin of luck was hardly considered and, if it was, disregarded. The concept of a man directing his angling towards the capture of 'glass-case-sized' fish would have been greeted with laughter.

Goode goes on to explain that attitudes changed in the years immediately after the war, when a small group of anglers began developing techniques to improve their chances of landing really enormous specimens of carp. (The idea of searching for astonishing individuals from different species of fish gave rise to the name of this branch of angling - 'specimen fishing'.)

I'm interested in this story - the reconceptualisation of something originally seen as a question of luck into a matter of skill. This, I think, feels like the narrative of technology more broadly: 'This is not a matter of chance or fortune - we can prevent the illness, build the flood defences, predict when the earthquake will come.' But, in spite of our technological advances, a sense of the external still haunts us. In fact, the very distinction between the internal and external becomes more complex all the time. As science has more to tell us about the life of the individual - the factors that produce our characters, capabilities, weaknesses, and proclivities, we (collectively) have more control but we (individually) may have less, and the very opposition between inside and outside becomes a less familiar terrain and one that feels a little frightening to walk through.

Writing is variously described as a craft (internal) or something gifted to the writer (external). There are now many guides for writers which characterise the process as similar to the story of the king and the fisherboy - the wonderful catch is, to some extent, a matter of chance or of providence, but it will never happen if you don't turn up regularly and cast your line into the sea. Similarly, you can never be sure that what you write will be good. You can only make it possible for grace or chance or luck to intervene by sitting down regularly and writing.

There is nothing very profound in what I've said here but the relationship between internal and external is figured powerfully in the imagery of fishing and perhaps nowhere more than in the competition between the angler and the fish on the line - a direct struggle between the skill, preparation, and effort mustered by the self and that other will, pitted against your own, fighting with all its might to elude your control.

Stuffed fish in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. [By Herry Lawford [CC-BY-2.(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.]

angling for fake philosophers

Lucian of Samosata was a satirist who wrote in Greek in the second century AD, a period known to literary scholars as the Second Sophistic. His dialogue, The Dead Come to Life or The Fisherman, constitutes a reply to the criticism that had greeted an earlier work, Philosophies for Sale, in which he had been seen as satirising the ancient philosophers whose ideas formed the basis of the schools of thought current in his own period. 

In the later work, Lucian's alter ego, Parresiades (or 'Frankness') is put on trial in Athens for his slanders and the ancient philosophers themselves come back from the dead to accuse him. 'Pelt him,' shouts Socrates leading the attack:

Pelt the scoundrel with plenty of stones! Heap him with clods! Pile him up with broken dishes too! Beat the blackguard with your sticks! Look out he doesn't get away! Throw, Plato, you too, Chrysippus.

Parresiades claims that his scorn is not directed at the ancient philosophers themselves but at their descendants in the contemporary period who have not been willing to appear in their own defence. Some are lured up to the Acropolis with promises of money, but, as soon as they realise that they are to to be judged, they scarper again. 'What is this?' says Philosophy (who is presiding over the proceedings), 'Are you running away? By Heaven they are, most of them jumping over the cliffs! The Acropolis is empty.'

In the end, Parresiades borrows a hook, a line, and a rod that have been dedicated in the temple by the fishermen of Piraeus, baits the hook with a strange combination of figs and gold, and then casts the line down into the town below and goes fishing for fake philosophers. They begin to bite immediately and, as they are pulled up, the authentic ancients comment on them, much as anglers might, in reality, comment on specimens pulled from the water.

Here is the scene as Parresiades lands a dogfish and shows him to the philosopher, Diogenes. (The joke is that Diogenes was one of the founders of Cynic philosophy, the name of which comes from the Greek term kynikos (κυνικός) or dog-like, in part - it appears - because of the Cynics' refusal of conventional modes of life and their insistence on eating and sleeping in the streets.)

He is up! Come, let me see what you are, my good fish. A dogfish! Heracles, what teeth! How about it, my fine fellow? Caught, were you, gormandizing about the rocks, where you hoped to skip under cover and keep out of sight? But now you will be in public view, hung up by the gills! Let us take out the hook and the bait. No, by Zeus, he has swallowed it! Here is your hook, all bare; the fig and the gold are secure in his insides.

The useless fish are thrown back into the town and the dialogue ends with Philosophy sending Parresiades out into the streets to brand the impostors with a fox- or ape-shaped mark.

Fishing for philosophical charlatans - I must watch out for the hooks! Wouldn't want to end up suspended by the gills from the top of Park Hill. (Or branded with a fox-shaped mark for that matter...)

Dogfish.

proverbial 3

From John Collins' Dictionary of Spanish Proverbs, published in 1834 and 'compiled from the best authorities in the Spanish language':

jörmungandr

Jörmungandr - the Midgard Serpent - is the sea monster of Norse mythology and bears some resemblance to Leviathan. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlason tells of a battle between the serpent and the god, Thor, who - throughout the story is disguised as a young man.

Thor set out, wearing his disguise and persuaded the giant, Hymir, to take him fishing. The giant refused to share his bait with his visitor, so Thor lopped the head from Hymir's biggest ox and took it with him in the boat. He rowed far out to sea and Hymir protested that this was the territory of the fearsome Midgard Serpent. But - unabashed - the god baited a hook with the ox-head and cast his line into the sea. Caught by the hook, the serpent struggled and Thor's efforts to land him were so ferocious that his feet went straight through the bottom of the boat and dug into into the bed of the sea itself. Finally, Thor succeeded in pulling the serpent into the boat but Hymir was so afraid that he seized his knife and cut the line so that the creature sank back into the deep and is living there still, far out at sea. In his fury, 'Thor clenched his fist and gave Hymir a box on the ear so that he fell overboard head first'. Then the god himself 'waded ashore', presumably looking a lot less like a 'scrap' of a boy by this point!

Two things occur to me about this story. One arises from Johan's point about the wisdom of the young. I think it's important that the god comes to Hymir disguised as a 'youth'. I'm not sure why this is necessary - would it be such a problem if the giant knew the truth of Thor's identity? In a way, the point seems to be that Hymir underestimates the young man, whom we know to have the power of a god at his disposal but who, for the giant, is just a 'scrap of a young fellow. You might object that the youth who approaches Hymir is not 'really' a young man. But perhaps this is one of those stories of recognition.(Treat the stranger kindly for a stranger may be a god in disguise.) It is always possible that a youthful body may hide a powerful moral purpose and a great deal more strength than one imagines.

The other thing to mention is that the image of Thor's struggle with Jörmungandr is appropriated to a Christian purpose on a stone cross from the Anglo-Saxon period to be found in the churchyard of St Mary's at Gosforth in Cumbria, a point made by Robert Eisler in Orpheus The Fisher (published in 1921 - and, yes, there's lots more in that book that I should blog about!). '[T]he German myth of the god Thor, angling for the Midgard-snake from a boat, is,' he says, 'a distant mirage' of the same 'primeval Oriental myth' that is preserved in the story of Leviathan. And on the Gosforth cross, the two tales are reunited when the story of Thor is used 'as a simile for Christ's victory over the ancient dragon'.

The simile is not, I'd have thought, perfect. Thor does not - in fact - succeed in killing the serpent, at least not during his fishing trip with Hymir. Another confrontation will come at the time of Ragnarök, the cataclysm in which the whole world, including the sphere of the gods, will be reordered fundamentally and entirely. At this point the serpent will be defeated, although so - it seems - will Thor himself, who will not live on into the future that comes after the destruction of the world in water.

Whatever the nature of the comparison, though, the story clearly remained important in Christian times and there is another stone fragment in the church at Gosforth which also depicts a figure, possibly Thor, out fishing in a boat. To the left is a drawing of that image, originally published in 1913 in Finnur Jónsson's Goðafræði Norðmanna og Íslendinga eftir heimildum and usefully available via wikimedia commons. The hook and line are huge and thick. But perhaps they need to be - after all, the fish themselves are dauntingly large.

gone fishin'

Nuff said.

leviathan

I wrote here about St Cyprian's image of God overcoming death with a hook concealed in the body of Christ. The extraordinary drawing below derives from the Hortus Deliciarum - an illuminated work by the 12th-century abbess of the Hohenburg Abbey, Herrad von Landsburg - and it realises very much the same figure in graphic form. The creature at the bottom is Leviathan - the sea-monster of the Hebrew Bible and the text that I've placed beside the picture - it doesn't appear in the Hortus - is the speech by which God reminds Job of the extent of his power in the book of Job 41: 1-10:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? O wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

Shall the companions make a banquet of him? Shall they part him among the merchants?
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? Or his head with fish spears?

Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.
Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?
None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

At the top of the drawing, God demonstrates exactly this power to 'draw out leviathan with a hook', and, as in Cyprian's image, the bait is Christ.  But along the line here are the heads of the patriarchs and this is appropriate for a drawing that stands between the Old and New Testament pictures, a sign of continuity and connection bridging the progressive stages of the covenant.