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.
In the Old Man and the Sea the man and the fish become almost as one. At one point the old man says, 'I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it.' The fish seems calm and the old man realises that 'I must improvise to his because of his great size'. There is something about the closeness of man and fish out in the ocean that is very much like what you are describing
ReplyDeletethis puts the Christian equation of fish and men (parabel of the fish and bread; the apostles as fishers of men, the fish as shibboleth of the early christian communities) in a refreshing light.
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