saturday night, sunday morning

Kate responded to my post on the Buddhist sutra about the Mara The Fisherman with a quotation from Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. As she says, 'The baited hook is the key metaphor at the end of [the novel] to indicate surrender to "everyday life".' I liked this so much I wanted to foreground it by putting it in a post.

He drank tea from the flask and ate a cheese sandwich, then sat back to watch the red and white float - up to its waist in water under the alder trees - and keep an eye always close to it for the sudden indication of a fortunate catch. For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren't were always on the way to it. (pp 216)

This is Ian McKellen performing the final soliloquy of the stage adaptation of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1964.

the hook of the godhead

Reading about brandlings made me think about the image of the baited hook. And that led me back into the more metaphorical space where religious texts express their conception of things with reference to the dynamics of fishing. In Aion (which has the subtitle, 'researches into the phenomenology of the self') C.G. Jung has much to say about fish as symbols and a little too about the activity of fishing. He talks about the 'primitive totemistic identity between hunter and prey', citing the examples of 'the Babylonian culture-hero Oannes', who 'was himself a fish', and the 'Christian Ichthys', who is 'a fisher of men par excellence'. Then, complicating the picture, he says of Christ-Ichthys, 'Symbologically, he is actually the hook or bait on God's fishing-rod with which the Leviathan - death or the devil - is caught'.

There is a slightly paradoxical quality to this image. Passiontide is a dark time in the Christian calendar but, nevertheless, the death of Christ is seen as needing to take place in order to bring about redemption. And so, in Jung's interpretation, God is characterised as offering Jesus as bait or as a lure to death and the devil so that - when they bite - they will be defeated. In a footnote to the text he cites St Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage:

Like a fish which darts at a baited hook, and not only does not lay hold of the bait along with it, but is itself hauled out of the sea; so he who had the power of death did indeed snatch away the body of Jesus unto death, but did not observe that the hook of the Godhead was concealed therein, until he had devoured it; and thereupon remained fixed thereto.

These kinds of comparisons work with particular aspects of the act of fishing in order to communicate specific points of religious thought. In this case the wisdom of God is seen as, in some sense, 'tricky', exploiting the avaricious, even voracious, quality of evil against itself. (In The Conference of the Birds, conversely, it was the quality of attentive waiting that I think became the figural centre of the teaching.)

I'd like to keep these more metaphorical texts in play, even while we engage with ones that are more 'literal' - more descriptive of fishing as experienced today - because these too work with the actuality of the act to speak about what wisdom is and does. Having looked at a Christian example today, I'll move on tomorrow to think about the meanings of baited hooks in the wisdom literature of Buddhism.

  

St Cyprian at the Water's Edge

worms

Today I'm going to do two short posts  instead of a single longer one.  Starting at page 92 of The Compleat Angler, Walton writes about bait, and he begins his discussion with worms. Among them he mentions the brandling, which is used in trout-fishing. 'The best of them,' he says, 'can be found in the bark of the Tanners which they cast up in heaps after they have used it about their leather.' (Piles of tanners' bark are no longer to be seen in British towns and villages, of course, and I wonder if the brandlings miss them.) In 1766, Richard Bowlker published another fishing manual under the title The Universal Angler, and his comments are similar, although perhaps a little more lyrical:

The Brandling is a very beautiful worm, streaked from head to tail in round ringlets, one streak being red and the other yellow. He is chiefly found in dunghills consisting of horse dung and hogs-dung mixed together, and you may sometimes find very large ones among the shavings of curriers leather mixed with a little earth: but hog's dung and horse dung mixed breeds the greatest quantity.

I'm struck by the idea that a worm can be 'very beautiful', and, in fact, the name of the creature also suggests close observation and an appreciation of its alternating red and yellow bands. A 'brand' is a 'piece of wood that is burning on the hearth'. (The word had the same form in Anglo-Saxon.) So a 'brandling' is a little piece of burning wood, just as a duckling is a little duck and a gosling a little goose. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't mention any uses of the term before the fishing manuals of the 1650s (although that doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't in use before - just that there isn't an extant written record).