chivalry

Refinement of Angling.—Angling is fishing governed by rules of chivalry—correct tackle, limit in the catch, and humane treatment of the game. (Charles Bradford, The Determined Angler)

change of pace

I've posted for seventy days straight and I'm going to slow the pace a bit. I still have to finish the other article I'm writing and posting here every two or three days will make that easier. I want to get up to one hundred days of posting but the final thirty won't be consecutive. (Actually, I might not be able to break the habit but we'll see...)

the sun's familiar

Here is Thoreau again but this passage is not from Walden but from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. An encounter with an angler reminds him of another fisherman he had met years before:

A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method - for youth and age then went a-fishing together - full of incommunicable thoughts perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoon haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar [...]. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.

There is some powerful writing here - 'so many sunny hours in an old man's life', 'almost grown to be the sun's familiar', 'a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world'. I find this passage strangely moving in its evocation of what seems to me a state of grace in old age - Insha'Allah, as they say.

The River Tyne at Hexham (Image by Darrin Antrobus [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.)

grandfather

Many anglers begin fishing in childhood and the sport is closely bound up with memories of early life. So, just by way of introducing something on memory into the blog, I'm going to quote Gao Xingjian's short story, 'Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather'. The text begins with the narrator walking past a shop and seeing 'a ten-piece fibreglass rod labelled "imported"', which reminds him of his grandfather:

I remember that if [he] heard someone was going to the provincial capital, he would be sure to ask the person to bring back fishing hooks for him, as if fish could only be caught with hooks bought in the big city. I also remember him mumbling that the rods sold in the city had reels. After casting the line, you could relax and have a smoke as you waited for the bell on the rod to tinkle. He wanted one of those so he'd have his hands free to roll his cigarettes.

As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that everything has changed since then and the river where the two of them went to fish is now dry:

I come to the riverbank. The sand underfoot crunches and sounds like my grandmother sighing. [...] This is the river where my grandfather used to take me, but now there is no water even in the gaps between the rocks. In the riverbed there are only big round unmoving rocks, like a flock of dumb sheep huddled close to one another, afraid that people will drive them away.

I'm making the text sound simple - warm memories and a cold present - but it's a strange and subtle story. Its evocation of the past is not sentimental and the image of fishing provides a complex link between the layers of time. Does it function like this among the anglers we know? How does angling mediate the passage of time?

peace and dignity

We have read John Steinbeck's account of fishing as practised in the USA and England. But at the end of his essay he comes to France and finds the angling there to be superior to that in both the other countries. He invites the reader to imagine the banks of the River Oise 'on a summer Sunday afternoon'. All the anglers have a fixed spot which is theirs and theirs only, so that one has even planted geraniums along his little stretch of water, so confident is he in his right to the place:

The fishing equipment is simple but invariable. The pole is of bamboo, not expensive but often adorned. On a hook about the size of a pinhead is fixed a tiny bread pellet. The Parisian is now ready for the fishing.
        Here is no sentiment, no contest, no grandeur, no economics. Most of the time there seems to be a courteous understanding by which fish and fisherman let each other strictly alone. Apparently there is also a rule about conversation. The fisherman's eyes get a dreaming look and he turns inward on his own thoughts, inspecting himself and his world in quiet. Because he is fishing, he is safe from interruption.

Steinbeck likes this approach to angling better than the others he describes. He characterises it as possessing a certain 'sanctity'. While engaged in it, he says, 'a man is alone with himself in dignity and peace', and afterwards may come away from it 'refreshed and in control of his own soul'. I'm interested in Steinbeck's choice of terms here. I think we're fairly used to the idea that fishing can be peaceful, refreshing, and so forth, but the idea that it confers a certain dignity upon one who practices seems important. Does this quality arise in the assertion of autonomy implied in the pursuit of such a solitary activity? From the absence of 'sentiment',  'contest' and 'grandeur'? Or from the insistence on the importance of recreation - simple and uncommodified - in the midst of the demands of the capitalist economy?

Where the Oise meets the Seine to the north-east of Paris.

the arid plain behind me

Today the briefest of quotations - the lines from the final part of 'The Wasteland' where the poetic voice speaks in the persona of the wounded king:

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

A good question to ask while the float is on the water. In the midst of the wasteland, can each of us find some trace of order? Is that at least attainable? Is that all we can hope for?

the strangest human fish

Part 4 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra ascending a mountain accompanied by his animals - a serpent and an eagle. '[T]ake care that I have honey ready to hand there,' he says, 'yellow, white, fine, ice-cool golden honey in the comb. For I intend to offer the honey offering.' When he reaches the summit, however, he sends the animals away, laughs, and says:

That I spoke of offerings and honey offerings was merely a ruse and, truly, a useful piece of folly! Up here I can speak more freely than before hermits' caves and hermits' pets.
Offer - what? I squander what is given me, I, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that - an offering!
And when I desired honey, I desired only bait and sweet syrup and gum, which even bears and strange, sullen, wicked birds are greedy for:
the finest bait, such as huntsmen and fishermen need. For although the world is like a dark animal-jungle and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather and preferably an unfathomable, rich sea,
a sea full of many-coloured fishes and crabs for which even the gods might long and become fishers and casters of nets: so rich is the world in strange things great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: now I cast my golden fishing-rod into it and say: Open up, human abyss!
Open up and throw me your fishes and glistening crabs! With my finest bait shall I bait today the strangest human fish!
My happiness itself shall I cast far and wide, between sunrise, noontide, and sunset, to see if many human fishes will not learn to kick and tug at my happiness,
until they, biting on my sharp, hidden hooks, have to come up to my height, the most multi-coloured groundlings of the abyss to the most wicked of all fishers of men,
For I am he, from the heart and from the beginning, drawing, drawing towards me, drawing up to me, raising up, a drawer, trainer, and taskmaker who once bade himself, and not in vain: 'Become what you are!'

A Honey-Offering [By Merdal at tr.wikipedia [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)], from Wikimedia Commons.

the good fisherman

Here is Bruno de Querfort (974-1009), reporting St Romuald of Camaldoli's advice on meditation. (I found the quotation in Mary Carruthers' book, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400-1200).

Be seated within your cell as though in paradise; cast to the rear of your memory everything distracting, becoming alert and focussed on your thoughts as a good fisherman is on the fish. One pathway [to this state] is through reciting the Psalms; do not neglect this. If you cannot manage to get through them all [at one sitting] as you used to with the fervor of a novice, take pains to chant the psalms in your spirit, now [starting] from this place, now from that, and to interpret them in your mind.

Carruthers focuses on the role of memory in contemplative work. Indeed, she refers to the view of the Church Father, John Cassian, that 'the art of meditation is fundamentally an art of thinking with a well-furnished memory'. So the image of the fishermen figures a particular state of recollection - a focus on what is below the surface of the mind waiting to be pulled up out of the water.

Cella of Saint Romuald in Camaldoli monastery. Image by Bocachete (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

gentlemanly rules of conduct

Back here I posted about John Steinbeck's comments on the status of fishing in America. Immediately after those, he tells what he describes as 'the ideal British fishing story' and it goes like this:

Under a submerged log in a stream meandering through a beautiful meadow lies an ancient and brilliant trout which for years has outwitted the best that can be brought against him. The whole country knows him. He is called Old George. The fact that Old George has lived so long can be ascribed to the gentlemanly rules of conduct set up between trout and Englishmen. Under these rules, the fisherman must use improbable tackle and a fly Old George is known to find distasteful.

In our ideal fish story, the angler rereads Izaak Walton to brush up his philosophic background, smokes many pipes, reduces all language to grunts, and finally sets out of an evening to have a go at Old George.

He creeps near to the sunken log and drops his badly tied dry fly upstream so that it will float practically into Old George's mouth. This has been happening to Old George every summer evening for ten or fifteen years. But one evening perhaps Old George is bored. Then the fisherman, with tears streaming from his eyes, pulls poor Old George out on the grassy bank. There, with full military honors and a deep sense of sorrow from the whole community, Old George flops to his death. The fisherman eats George boiled with Brussels sprouts, sews a black band on his arm and gains the power of speech sufficiently to bore the hell out of the local pub for years to come.

I love the idea that sportsmanship requires the use of 'improbable tackle and a fly Old George is known to find distasteful'. The fish has to have sporting chance, after all - otherwise the chase would not be gentlemanly.

The perfect accompaniment for a much loved old trout. By Eric Hunt (own *work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/ fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

particular coasts

For the Greeks and Romans, an important aspect of the art of oratory was 'invention' - the process of identifying arguments to support a particular case. In the Institutes of Oratory, the first-century rhetorician Quintilian discusses the 'places' of argument - the locations, figuratively speaking, from which lines of reasoning can be derived: 'Let us now examine the places of arguments, [by which I mean] the seats of arguments in which they lie concealed and from which they must be drawn forth.' In developing this discussion, Quintilian makes use of an interesting metaphor - or rather an interesting cluster of metaphors:

[A]s all kinds of fruits are not produced in all countries, and as you will be unable to find a bird or beast if you are ignorant where it is usually produced or makes its abode, and as among the several kinds of fishes, some delight in a smooth and others in a rocky bed, while particular sorts are confined to particular regions or coasts, and you could not attract the ellops or scarus to our shores, so every kind of argument is not to be got from every place and is consequently not everywhere to be sought. [...] [I]f we ascertain where particular arguments offer themselves, we shall, when we come to the place where they lie, easily discern what is in it.

The orator is a fisherman who knows the habits of each individual species - the haunts that it frequents, the 'particular coasts'. To build a case is to read the water and identify exactly which fish can be pulled from it. It's fascinating to me that Quintilian compares argumentation to such a practical skill as if the identification of a line of reasoning can become, in the end, virtually instinctual - comparable to the hunter or fisherman's sixth sense for the presence of the prey.

Title page of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, edited by Pieter Burmann the Elder, Leiden, 1720.

an un-american thought

'I believe that certain national characteristics emerge in fishing' - this is John Steinbeck in the Weekly Sports Illustrated (4 Oct 1954). He underlines his point by comparing attitudes to angling in America, Britain, and France, and today I'll report on what he says about the US. 

Fishing, he suggests, is a compulsory aspect of American masculinity: '[A]ll Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother love or hating moonlight.' The sport must be taken seriously. Endless tackle must be purchased, vast distances covered, austerities practised. And it is all in the service of asserting one's supremacy over the fish:

The Yankee angler [...] endows the fish with great intelligence and fabulous strength, to the end that in defeating it he is even more intelligent and powerful. It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming, but this is a highly un-American thought. I hope I will not be denounced.

In a short paragraph not unlike something by Roland Barthes, he also comments on the political importance of the sport: 'No candidate would think of running for public office without first catching and being photographed with a fish'. I wonder what the equivalent is these days. Apparently Obama has a tradition of playing basketball on election days (although right now the internet is covered in videos of him missing a lot of hoops at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll).

Steinbeck characterises fishing as a sign of authenticity, dependability, and substance in American culture. But in Britain - he says - its meaning is rather different and I'll come to that in a future post...

still swimming

'Death is like a fisher who catches fish in his net and leaves them for a while in the water; the fish is still swimming but the net is around him, and the fisher will draw him up - when he thinks fit.'

(Turgenev, On The Eve)

the simple elements

Today a short quotation from The Determined Angler by Charles Bradford, a few lines on the beauty of the trout. I've been posting recently on the aesthetic dimensions of the landscape but here the fish is the focus of attention:

The Trout's Symmetry.—"Few humanly designed lines are more graceful than those of the yacht. The trout is made up of such lines. It is a submarine designed by the Almighty. It makes the most of the simple elements of artistic beauty—symmetry of line, suggestive of agile power, and delicately blended harmonies of rich color."—New York Evening Telegram, editorial page, July 17, 1915.

In view of the tensions between nature and industry in the discourse of landscape, there's something compelling about the comparison of fish to vessels such as yachts and submarines. The quotation is from 1915. Is this a modernist aesthetic - one in which industry is not subordinate to nature and a fish is beautiful to the extent that it approximates the lines of industrial design?

Schooner Eleonora (replica of Nathanael Greene Herreshoff design, 1910), pictured in the Channel Islands, 2010. Image by Impact from Wikimedia Commons. 

three fifths wordle

I've blogged for sixty days and need to blog for forty more to get to my goal of one hundred. Here's a wordle of everything so far.

nature's façade of irrepressibility

So we've heard from Franklin on lowland waterways (including engineered systems such as canals and drains) and from Molona on 'domesticated places' (such as artificial ponds, canals again, and redeveloped 'brownfields'). Today I'm just going to quote Adorno on the asethetics of industrialised landscapes. (The passage comes from Aesthetic Theory.)

In naively condemning the ugliness of a landscape torn up by industry, the bourgeois mind zeroes in on the appearance of the domination of nature at the precise juncture where nature shows man a façade of irrepressibility. That bourgeois condemnation therefore is part of the ideology of domination. This kind of ugliness will vanish only when the relation between man and nature throws off its repressive character, which is a continuation rather than an antecedent of the repression of man. Chances for such a change lies in the pacification of technology, not in the idea of setting up enclaves in a world ravished by technology.

The aesthetic disparagement of the locations mentioned by Franklin and Molona is certainly to do with a sense of the 'ugliness of a landscape torn up by industry', or, in the case of drains at least, space made subservient to intensive economic exploitation. So is the 'bourgeois' impulse to disparage them motivated, as Adorno puts it, the corollary of an ideology of domination. Is the 'irrepressibility' of nature in these spaces at the root of this condemnation?

Back here, I wrote about Derek Jarman on 'modern nature' and now it strikes me that his garden in the shadow of the power station at Dungeness may be just the kind of space that resists the status of 'enclave' in a world 'ravished by technology' and implies - in Adorno's terms - a 'relation between man and nature' that has divested itself of its 'repressive character'. What I wonder, though, is whether these landscapes 'torn  up by industry' haven't undergone a romanticisation of their own or been reclaimed for a bourgeois mentality. I don't think this is the case with Jarman. He doesn't strike me as a bourgeois thinker. And it certainly doesn't seem to me the case with angling. After all, fishing is a form of engagement with this kind of aesthetically 'problematic' landscape that long predates the romanticisms of 'industrial heritage' and 'postindustrial melancholy'. I'm wading now in waters that - to me - feel quite deep. But I do think this stuff needs thinking about, especially since time spent with nature seems an important aspect of the perceived value of fishing and, what is more, a part of the way in which it might produce a quality of wisdom.

The route of the Sheffield to Keadby Canal as it pass sts through Tinsley. 

like a worm on the hook

I posted here about St Cyprian and the notion of Christ as the bait with which God lured death onto his hook. And I posted here about the image of God fishing for Leviathan in Herrad von Landsburg's Hortus Deliciarum. Since then I've found a fascinating article on 'divine deception' in the writing of the Church Fathers. It's by Nicholas P. Constas and it appeared in 2004.

As Constas shows, the image of the fishhook and the idea of the passion as a form of deception appear in a great many texts and were not conjured up from nowhere:

[They were] derived from a theologically consistent conflation of several biblical passages, including Job 40-41; Psalms 104:26 (LXX 103:26); and Isaiah 27:1, all of which are concerned with mocking the cosmic dragon and dragging him up from the depths of the sea on a fishhook. Moreover, one does not typically go fishing in mythopoetic ponds without a worm, and so Psalms 22:6 (LXX 21:6, "I am a worm and not a man") was granted a central place in this tradition. Tied to Psalm 22, the fishhook was thereby anchored to the center of the Passion Narrative itself, for when Christ cried out in dereliction from the cross, it was this psalm's first verse which he chose to give voice to his pain. Patristic exegetes were thus confronted with the striking image of the crucified Christ writhing like a worm on a hook.

Constas also quotes Pseudo-Chrysostom, who says:

[J]ust like a wise fisherman ,it was necessary that he place his flesh like a worm on the brilliantly shining fishhook of his divinity, and cast it into the depths of this world, and thus catch the dragon on a hook, so that what was written in Job might come to pass, 'Thou wilt catch the dragon with a fish hook' (Job 40:25)" (PG 64:23, l 20-32).

What an astonishing image and what a very different culture it evidently comes from. The idea of God as perpetrating a deception or a trick is difficult for the contemporary reader but to the Church Fathers was 'a corollary of the World's encryption in the flesh, the veiling of the unspeakable Name in the deceptive utterances of language'. There is a trickiness at the centre of the incarnation and it is figured in these strange, even shocking, images.

a special place

This quotation from David Franklin's book, Nature and Social Theory. discusses the landscapes - or waterscapes - associated with working-class angling:

[C]oarse fishing afforded working-class men [...] the opportunity to escape to the countryside to strips of land or water that were effectively theirs by dint of their own collective organisation. However, we can say more than this: the lakes, slow-moving rivers, canals, marshlands, fens and drains became a countryside, a particular form of countryside (Britain's lowland waterways) that they clearly dominated. As such this countryside with its associated natural history has a special place in working-class cultures and although it has not been immortalised in the same manner as the middle class's beloved upland brooks and chalk streams, we should not forget its profound place in the shaping of twentieth-century sensibilities and in particular the popularity of the notion of the countryside, conservation and nature.

Franklin doesn't quite say this but I think there is an aesthetic dimension to his comments - these 'lowland waterways' are not the prototypical spaces of the picturesque and suggest another type of beauty that has its own dynamic and its own advocates. I wrote here about William Gilpin's exclusion of working people from  'scenes of grandeur' and Massimiliano Mollona's discussion of the snobbery levelled at the 'domesticated places (artificial ponds, urban canals and redeveloped "brownfields")' in which modern coarse fishing takes place. This is something we should think about. The beauty of canals, the poetry of ponds, the charm of drains, and the sublime sight of the Don as it slides between the brick walls of old industrial buildings leaving the city and heading east. I'm interested in aesthetic categories. Which ones are in play here?

Regent's Canal, London, at dusk - image by  Caroline Ford (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http:// creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/3..0/) , via Wikimedia Commons.

saint monday

In his article, 'Brothers of the Angle: Coarse Fishing and Working Class Culture 1850-1914', John Lowerson provides a genuinely fascinating insight into the practice and meaning of fishing in the later nineteenth century. He has a lot to say about Sheffield, which 'was widely regarded as the key coarse fishing centre in terms of numbers, style and organization', and I'll post bits and pieces over the next week or two. One really interesting point is to do with the day on which working men typically went fishing:

In Sheffield and its areas, the sacrosanct day for fishing until 1914 was Monday, and the rapid spread of clubs and their affiliation actually reinforced pre-industrial work patterns rather than, as in such sports as football, tailoring an inherited popular form to fit changing disciplinary modes. While Saint Monday [a tradition of absenteeism at the start of the week] declined sharply in much of England after the 1870s, it stayed healthy in Sheffield. 'Of course Monday is the great day of the week, Sheffielders being great patrons of Saint Monday', the Fishing Gazette claimed in 1878 and this still held true 30 years later, despite the fact that the town had partly recognized new circumstances in naming one of its principal football clubs, Sheffield Wednesday, after its commercial half-day.

Isn't that interesting? Fishing became a site of resistance to industrial discipline, not on an atomised, individual level, but as a mass phenomenon. Because working-class fishing was so highly organised - the reason for this  originally being the need for collective negotiation over 'access to waters and travel concessions' - it was difficult for employers to press their claims to workers' time and 'even many of the larger works appear to have had to accept a compromise on this issue'.

Lowerson died in 2009 and you can read an obituary in The Independent. He was clearly an interesting man and a very significant figure in the social and cultural history of sport.

my schedule

I really have to finish an article I'm writing at the moment so this is just to say that I'll keep putting up something up each day but the posts are likely to err on the short side or present quotations that I've enjoyed reading. Hope this is still interesting. The article has to be done fairly soon and I'll try to write some longer pieces once it's completed :o)

loki

I've just been browsing through Lewis Hyde's book, Trickster Makes This World, which deals with how 'disruptive imagination creates culture'. There is lots there about trickster heroes in different mythologies and, quite early in the text, Hyde points to the way in which many of them are associated with fishing.

In one story, the Norse god, Loki, invents the fishing net. What is interesting, though, is that Loki is both fish and fisherman. He frequently turns himself into a salmon and invents the net while imagining how the other gods might go about catching him. He burns the net, so they can't see what he has come up with, but the ashes retain the original form so that they are able to copy it and pull him from the water.

As with the Maori fish-hook, which is also an image of the creature it traps, this trickster tale models the close relationship between hunter and hunted, predator and prey, the two converging into one single figure.

Loki and his fishing net from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript.

more on the fisher king

I've done a bit more reading on the story of the Fisher King and I also listened to an edition of In Our Time on the subject. (I've put the link at the end of this post.) I'm actually quite gratified to find that a few of things I said in my last post weren't entirely stupid.

First, I talked about my sense that fishing was the 'wrong' activity for a legendary king and, yes, it seems that in the medieval versions the king's wound quite obviously prevents him from taking part in the appropriate aristocratic pursuits, riding and hunting in particular. Fishing as the poor relation to hunting seems a familiar idea and we might think of the early sections of the The Compleat Angler, where Piscator, Venator, and Auceps debate the relative merits of their individual 'recreations'. The modesty of fishing is a part of its meaning here - stillness rather than movement, sitting on the bank and not on horseback.

Second, I also wrote about my sense of a connection with the story of the Salmon of Knowledge and, again, it seems that this has received a lot of attention. The Victorian period in particular saw an attempt to elucidate the relationship between the medieval poetry and the stuff of Celtic myth. But the tenor of the radio discussion was very much that, although the writer of the original medieval poem, Chrétien de Troyes, may well have had access to Celtic material, not least through contact with the culture of Brittany, it is almost impossible to establish the nature of the connection clearly. There are similarities with the story of Bran from the Welsh mythological source, the Mabinogi. But, as one of the contributors - Carolyne Larrington - said, the story of Bran is 'light on fishing', and, anyway, the Mabinogi itself has a fragmentary quality. There isn't really a monolithic corpus of myth to work from. The Victorians desperately wanted to find a relationship - and certainly the idea that fishing is in some way symbolic of the pursuit of wisdom does seem to be a line of connection. But the connections are dark and difficult to follow.

Third, I worried a little about the relationship between the Fisher King himself and Parsifal who is charged with healing him. Fishing seems to represent an attempt to change things - the pursuit of something hidden and elusive. But is is Parsifal who is destined to bring about that change - the king cannot do this on his own. The relationship is complex and it's interesting that in Eliot's poem, 'The Wasteland, there isn't really a Parsifal figure. The fisherman sits by the canal in the early lines of the 'Fire Sermon' and is still there as we come to the end of 'What The Thunder Said', although, during the radio programme, Stephen Knight referred to the three Sanskrit terms that appear just before the refrain of shantih, shantih, shantih. They are Datta (giving alms), Dayadhvam (self control), Damyata (compassion) and come from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. These, he suggested, are pretty much the qualities that Parsifal is expected to display.

All in all, I'm struck by how the elements of the tale - the king, the wound, the grail, the knight, the act of fishing, the state of the kingdom, and so on - fit together differently in each retelling and resist any very straightforward reading. The pieces enter into relationships that produce suggestions of meaning in excess of the rather simple interpretive frames we often want to bring to them. They are, dare I say it, like fish in the water and, as Johan said when we last met, you cannot keep fish in plain view and then bear down on them with a weapon. You have to create the conditions for them to come to you and ultimately catch themselves.

Parzival-Darstellung Washington (D.C.), Libr. of Congress, Rosenwald Collection, Ms. 3, Bl. 6v, beginning of the 15th century.

hei matau

In the mythology of Polynesia the tools and craft of fishing have an important place. Throughout the Pacific Islands, there are stories of the culture hero, Maui, who pulled the various island groups - Hawaii, Aotearoa, and Tonga - up from the sea with a hook.

The details vary from place to place. In Hawaii, for example, he goes fishing with his brothers and, every time his hook lodges in the seafloor, he urges them to row as fast as possible. They, of course, think he is pulling a series of enormous fish from the ocean but, as they row, the hook is in fact pulling up the seabed to create the islands of the Hawaiian group. In Tonga there is a different story in which Maui hears that the chief of Manuka in Samoa has a hook that he uses to pull up land. Maui goes to ask for the hook and Tui-Manuka, the chief, says that he can have it if he can identify it among the many fishhooks he has in his house. Maui has inside knowledge (from the wife of the chief) and knows that the hook he wants is the plainest and least ostentatious. He takes it and with it fishes up the islands of Tonga, which are named after the Samoan chief. (His personal name is Tonga Fusi Forua.) In Aotearoa, the north island is a fish that Maui hauled up using the jaw-bone of his grandmother, Muri Ranga Whenua, while the south island is Maui's canoe.

Hooks are of particular significance. In his book, Iconography of New Zealand Maori Religion, D.R. Simmons says:

The jade, greenstone ornament, the Hei Matau, is a very important form. It was worn by graduates of the highest leel of whare wananga [a sacred institution of learning]. The form of the book can vary from realistic to quite abstract. The name for the hook in Maori is matau which is also the word for knowledge. The hook is a spiral form which is light, the line is aho which is also breath or genealogy. At another level Hei Matau represents the hook with which Maui fished up the islands.

In Roger Keverne's book, Jade, there is an essay which discusses the Hei Matau, describing it as 'a superb example of Maori art in that it combines fish hook and fish motif in one simple design.' A graphic form that is both fish and hook seems to evoke so much of what we have said about the relationship between hunter and hunted. I wish I knew who had written the essay and, as soon as I find out, I'll look at more of what s/he has to say about this motif. In the meantime, perhaps it is enough to contemplate the beauty of the stylised hook-that-is-a-fish and the iconographic power that it wields.

This image is by Matt Biddulph and is used under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.  It appears on Flickr here: http:// www. flickr.com/ photos/ mbiddulph/ 3296237034.

the fisher king

I've been putting this off but it needs to be done. There is so much material on the legend of the Fisher King and it ranges so widely across historical periods and narrative genres that incorporating it into this discussion is a very daunting task. But, as I say, it needs to be done, so today I shall make a start by outlining the story and writing a little about what we should be looking for in the many incarnations of the legend.

The Fisher King is the keeper of the Grail but, like other keepers of legendary artefacts - Philoctetes, for example, on whom Heracles bestowed his mighty bow and arrows - he is also afflicted with a terrible wound, as if the gift must be counter-balanced by some powerful sense of suffering. And so the king goes out fishing while his kingdom falls apart - turns into a wasteland - around him. The hero chosen to heal the king is Percival - or Parsifal - although in later versions of the story he becomes the companion of Galahad, who now moves to centre stage. A great deal of work has gone into unpicking and interpreting the legend of the wounded king but, for the purposes of this project, I think we need to focus on what it means that the king is a fisherman. Is that itself of significance, and, if it is, then how is it to be understood?

This brings us in turn to the question of what the fish themselves signify, for - whatever it is - the king is characterised by his pursuit of it. There is, of course, no key that will unlock the symbolism and confer upon the legend a fixed and stable meaning. Each version has its own understanding of the king's pursuit and this is what we need to work with. But stucturally the act of fishing has a quality of doubleness. On the one had, it seems the wrong activity for a king - too small a pursuit - and it is a sign of his afflection that he is reduced 'merely' to catching fish. But, on the other hand, it gestures towards the search for that which will restore some sort of wholeness to the world of the king - it is the act that might mediate between the ruinous conditions of the present and the possibilities of the future.

As I write this, it strikes me that there is something very Blochian at work in the 'dark present' of the king's condition in which are contained the traces of future possibility. But what needs some thought is that fact that the king is both subject and object - agent and patient - in the story that unfolds around him: the subject or agent of whatever the pursuit of fish symbolises, but - in the end - the object or patient of Parsifal or Galahad's heroism. The story is resolved through the emergence of another hero (and here I feel shades of Finn and Finegas, although I hardly dare to think about it).

At any rate, there is a conundrum here that I'd like to look at and which I'll return to in a few days, perhaps with more to say.

I like this drawing of the Fisher King by William T. Ayton - I'm linking to the blog rather than posting it because it's copyright. Do go and have a look.

hauled aloft

Act IV, Sc 15 of Antony and Cleopatra presents particular problems of staging. In the previous scene, Antony, believing that Cleopatra has killed herself, falls on his own sword and - alive but dying - is carried to the monument where she has hidden herself. As scene 15 opens, Cleopatra and her attendants enter 'aloft' - that is on some area raised above the stage - and when Antony is brought in 'below', the directions specify that the attendants should 'heave' him up to join her

The direction is laconic and there has been much debate about how the scene might have been staged in the Elizabethan theatre. As Michael Neill says in his OUP edition of the play:

We must conclude either that the technical solutions were so self-evident that Shakespeare did not bother to elaborate his stage direction, or that he relied on the ingenuity of his colleagues to realize a scene that he had conceived in largely symbolic terms.

Neill cites an essay by Leslie Thomson which locates the symbolic importance of this physical movement in its reference to 'the related ideas of weight, bearing, drawing, rising, and falling that fill the play'. And he also points to the tension arising between the act as a symbol of 'tragic transcendence' and as 'a black-comic re-enactment of Cleopatra's fishing sport described in 2.5'.

This earlier scene recalls the anecdotes presented in Plutarch's Life of Antony and consists of a conversation between Cleopatra and her attendant, Charmian:

Cleopatra
Give me mine angle; we'll to the river: there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say 'Ah, ha! you're caught.'

Charmian
'Twas merry when
You wager'd on your angling; when your diver
Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he
With fervency drew up.

Cleopatra
That time,--O times!--
I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night
I laugh'd him into patience; and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan.

Cleopatra's speech about the 'tawny-finn'd fishes' immediately precedes the arrival of a messenger with news of Antony's marriage to Octavia, far away in Rome. And so that 'hauling aloft' of the dying man echoes the earlier hope of passion - of hooking the beloved and drawing him into one's own world. Indeed, in Peter Hall's 1987 production, Antony was hauled up in a net, like a hooked fish being landed.

I'm interested in this idea of the symbolism of the vertical line, the movement 'aloft' from 'below', the connection between lower and upper world. Is there a symbolism to the fish's elevation and, if so, what does the movement signify?

divers kinds of fishermen

I've been reading Confessions of a Carp Fisher by the enigmatically named 'B.B.'. It begins with a discussion of the types of people who go after particular fish. (We've seen comments on carp fishers and chub fishers already.) I'll quote a few of them here - he isn't equally polite about all of them. First, those who go after perch:

[T]he perch fisher [...] needs plenty of action and good bold bites - there is always something of the schoolboy about your blue-blooded perch fisher. The bite of the perch makes glad the heart of a boy - it is a determined, rather leisurely bite. Unlike the roach expert, the perch fisher will sometimes take his catch home and eat them and very good they are (so are roach for that matter, if you know how to cook them).

But, if perch fishers are boys at heart, those who specialise in pike are very much grown-ups:

[They are] a breezy, hardy, red-faced race of men, impervious to the wildest winter weather, fond of the ale house and jolly company. They too will eat what they catch. Successful pike fishers, are hearty rascals, full of exciting stories of battles with fabulous monsters. [...] [The pike fisher who uses live bait] is perhaps the hardiest of the tribe of Izaak. He fishes throughout the bitter winter day, sitting on his basket, or standing with up-turned coat collar, a trembling drop at the end of his nose.

 And finally let's talk about bream fishers:

The latter I am told are rather coarse fellows who like to catch their fish by the stone; I suspect there is something of the fishmonger and poulterer about bream fishers. [...] [They] are usually big, flat-footed men, retired constables and railwaymen and sometimes barbers by profession, men of little imagination. 

Men of little imagination? Harsh words. As it happens, my book on the different target species for coarse angling says that 'the bream is becoming more educated, demanding a greater sophistication in approach, bait, tackle, and techniques'. Takes a bit of imagination to catch them now!

'Fond of the ale house and jolly company...' [Image by Mike White [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.]

more slime

Suddenly hagfish slime is everywhere - it may be supplying our clothing needs before too long!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21954779

if you cannot hold a fish

A fishing story from an unlikely source. In 2001 the journalist Jon Ronson published a book with the title Them: Adventures With Extremists. The first chapter describes a period spent in the company of Omar Bakri Mohammed, the fundamentalist Islamist who was very much in the news in the late 1990s, operating out of the Finsbury Park Mosque and calling for jihad within the boundaries of the UK. 'I very much wanted to meet Omar Bakri,' says Ronson, 'and spend time with him while he attempted to overthrow democracy and transform Britain into an Islamic nation'.

As is Ronson's style, much of the piece is taken up with the incongruities between Omar Bakri's everyday life and the ideas he promoted. We see him watching the Lion King with his baby daughter. ('They call me the Lion,' he says.) We see him campaigning outside Holborn tube station. ('Be careful from homosexuality! It is not good for your tummy!') We see Ronson driving him to the cash and carry to pick up some novelty collection boxes for use in raising money for Hamas. Throughout all this, Ronson does what he is so good at and takes the reader through a comic deflation of the popular view of the notable figure before reviving the sense of unease right in the midst of the ordinariness he has described.

About two thirds of the way through the chapter Ronson tracks Omar Bakri down to a country house in the midlands where he and 'all of Britain's Islamic fundamentalist leaders' are attending 'a secret weekend social get-together' with the aim of healing some rifts within the movement. There is a fishpond there: 'It was a lovely rustic sight. A cluster of Islamic militants was gathered around fishing rods. For bait they were using sweet corn.' Omar Bakri is delighted to learn that his rival, the leader of Hizb-ut-Tahrir has not caught any fish and is triumphant when he pulls one out of the water. But once he has the fish, he doesn't know what to do with it:

'Pass me the green knife,' said a man to Omar's right, 'Quick! The green knife!'
In a panic, Omar reached for a tin opener.
'Not the tin opener! The knife! Hold the fish, Omar Bakri. Just hold the fish.'
'No,' said Omar, quietly, 'I cannot hold the fish.'
There was a silence.
'Hold the fish!'
'No. I cannot hold the fish. What do I do with a fish?'
'Oh, give it to me!'
'OK,' said Omar. 'You hold the fish.'
The other leaders glanced despairingly at Omar. And then one of them sighed, reached for the fish, and said, 'How do you expect to fight the Jihad, Omar Bakri, if you cannot hold a fish?'

Strangely enough, it's the kind of question that came up in Plutarch's life of Antony - how can you rule Rome if you have to employ divers to put fish on your hooks? Cleopatra's interpretation is that fishing and politics are not related - the one is simply a break from the other. But fishing can alternatively be seen as the microcosm in which the entire character is laid bare. And the incident is important for Ronson's story because of the uneasy quality of the comic moment. Omar Bakri, he says, didn't return his calls for some days afterwards.

attributes of the good angler

I posted here about Oppian's description of the traits necessary in one who wishes to fish and, if you haven't read Johan's comment on that post, you really must. Since then, I've found several other summaries of the  character traits necessary for the angler and there's a good one in A. St.J. Michaels' book, Circumventing The Mahseer and Other Sporting Fish in India and Burma, which was first published in 1948. (I have to admit that I came across it because it's quoted in Charles Rangeley-Wilson's also very interesting and much more easily accessible book, The Accidental Angler.)

The Attributes of the Good Angler: the patience of Job, the eye and observance of the eagle; the perseverance of the termite; the hands of the artificer; the touch of a musician; the temper of a saint; and, above all, an insatiable ambition to learn.

I'm reminded a little of the account of fishing that Charles Bradford includes in The Determined Angler and which I quoted here:

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 enjoy these attempts to describe things through collections of comparisons which sit aside each other rather strangely. The oddness of the picture they produce seems to hint at how difficult the object of the description actually is to capture.

From Augusta Stevenson, Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, Houghton Mifflin (Boston), 1909, by Illustrator unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

can the fish love the fisherman?

Here is a poem about the lack of wisdom that old age can show - it appears first in its original form and then in an English translation:

Scis te captari, scis hunc qui captat, avarum, 
et scis qui captat quid, Mariane, velit. 
tu tamen hunc tabulis heredem, stulte, supremis 
scribis et esse tuo vis, furiose, loco. 
"Munera magna tamen misit." sed misit in ha mo;
et piscatorem piscis amare potest? 
hicine deflebit vero tua fata dolore? 
si cupis, ut ploret, des, Mariane, nihil.

You you are angled for, you know this fellow who angles is greedy, and you know, Marianus, what your angler wants; yet you write him down your heir, you fool, by your last will, and are willing he should step - you madman! - into your shoes. "Yet the presents he sent me were magnificent." But he sent them on a hook; and can a fish love the fisherman? Will this man weep for your death with genuine grief? If you want him to lament, leave him, Marianus, nothing.

This is Martial (86-103 AD), the great author of epigrams whose short sharp poems skewer the failings of the urban culture of Rome under the emperors. As in the Buddhist text, the Balisika Sutta, wisdom lies in swimming past the baited hooks. But here the hooks are - at least in the opinion of Marianus' adviser - dropped by the ambitious young man who wants the old man's fortune. It's a familiar story: the older person who needs companionship and the younger one who needs money.

Can we trust the adviser himself, though? The little dialogue shows him in action, arguing with the old man's optimism: '"The presents he sent me were magnificent." But he sent them on a hook.' Is he himself a rival for Marianus' fortune? Another fisherman?

The epigram-within-an-epigram - can a fish love the fisherman? - is quoted by one of the well-wishers whose poems begin the fifth edition of The Compleat Angler, Christopher Harvey, who sees Walton's book as 'hooking' the reader into the contemplation of a wide range of significant maters. In that poem, the answer to the question is 'yes', the fish should love the fisherman. But I prefer the nastiness of Martial - the warning that behind the gifts lie hooks and my own suspicion that Marianus' adviser is seeing off the opposition.

Photograph by Retama (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.

proverbial 4

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. This well known saying is much reworked and reworded. Perhaps it's even something of a meme. Here, without comment, are two rewordings from different ends of the US political spectrum: