fish > people > fish

A shorter post today. (I wrote quite a lot this morning but it needs more mulling over before I put it before you, even in the form of a sketch.)

I took the train over to Cheshire this weekend to see my parents and my dad and I went to a second-hand book shop, where I spent half an hour or so wading through their stock of fishing manuals. I bought one that  includes a series of illustrated essays on each of the different fish that an angler might choose as a specialism, both game fish (salmon and trout) and coarse fish (the list is longer - barbel, bream, carp, chub, dace, eels, grayling, perch, pike, roach, rudd, tench, and zander). There is also a section on sea angling and one made up of miscellaneous thoughts on topics like 'catching big fish', 'the pleasures of dressing your own flies', and 'fish behaviour'.

I'm currently reading about all the individual coarse fish and something in Kenneth Seaman's essay on chub reminded me of this comment that Kate made on one of my early posts: 

There is something here about the notion of fish becoming people and people becoming fish. I return to my favourite book, borrowed from Rotherham Library, A Dream of Jewelled Fishes, and Chapter 8, 'A Confession of Carp': 

"The last time I picked up a carp fishing magazine in the newsagents I did not succeed in suppressing my laughter. The photos did it - identikit pictures of carp-fisher and carp - and I could not help but notice the curious symmetry between captor and captive, as if they had started mutually to evolve towards some ghastly hybrid. Shaven-headed fishermen with no neck but big bellies mirror carp with vast bloated flanks and expressions of benign indifference."

There is something both enormously funny and deeply serious about fishing.

Seaman's essay begins with a comparison between the habits of chub and the characters of those who pursue them:

I can recognise a keen chub angler instantly now. He moves distantly across the landscape, or sits invisible in some overgrown retreat. Occasionally, I see his rod arch, hear the urgent screech of his reel, but that is all. He does not bother me, nor I him. There is a quick instinctive appreciation of our mutual desire for solitude. Like the fish we seek, we prefer to remain hidden, shying away quickly from intruders.

Can it really be true? And in what order does the choice of quarry and the transformation of the angler take place? Do we seek out an object that resembles us or become like the object we seek?

Chub in an aquarium