commodities, gifts, and beauty

My ideal for the blog is to keep returning to earlier posts in the light of later ones, and, in a manner analogous with digging compost into soil, improve the old patch of ground with new material. Today I'll go back to 'The River God' with yesterday's post on fishing tackle in mind. There I mentioned that fishing equipment is the object both of economic exchange and of aesthetic judgement, its status as a locus of wise conduct interacting with these other two characterisations in fairly complex ways.

This complex of material is relevant to reading 'The River God'. Early in the story, the narrator describes his younger self, out on a summer walk or picnic, curious about the fishing rod that his future uncle has brought with him: 'To the fisherman born there is nothing so provoking of curiosity as a fishing rod in a case.' His uncle-to-be lets him look and his response is strongly aesthetic:

I opened the flap, which contained a small grass spear in a wee pocket, and, pulling down the case a little, I admired the beauties of the cork butt, with its gun-metal ferrule and reel rings and the exquisite frail slenderness of the top two joints. 
'It's got two top-joints - two!' I exclaimed ecstatically.
'Of course,' said he. 'All good trout rods have two.'
I marvelled in silence at what seemed to me then a combination of extravagance and excellent precaution.

As they assemble the rod, the description is strongly sensual - the narrator remembers the 'faint, clear pop' made by the cork stoppers and the way the young man 'rubbed the ferrules against the side of his nose' to stop them sticking. The boy looks down the 'tunnel of sneck rings to the eyelet at the end', impressed, it is implied, by the precision of the alignment. Sight, touch, sound - the workmanship of the rod appeals directly to the senses. It is 'a lovely thing', 'a thing alive', 'a sceptre'.

Having recalled the beauty of the rod, however, the narrator turns to its status as an object of exchange. Surely such a beautiful piece of work must be expensive? 'Couple of guineas,' is the response of the uncle-to-be. 'A couple of guineas! And we were poor folk and the future was more rodless than ever.' The boy begins to work out how long it will take to save two guineas out of pocket-money paid at twopence a week: 'Two hundred and forty pennies to the pound, multiplied by two - four hundred and eighty - and then another twenty-four pennies - five hundred and four. Why it would take a lifetime.'

An alternative form of exchange becomes important at this point - that of gift-giving. The young uncle-to-be promises the boy a rod for his birthday but, when it arrives, it is no match for the two-guinea beauty - a 'tough and stringy' rod with a wooden reel that had 'neither check nor brake'. He tries to will it into something better than it is, telling everyone that it cost two guineas, a claim that elicits reverence from his mother, scepticism from his father, and open derision from one of the employees of the Welsh hotel, who insists that 'five shillings would be too much' to pay for it.

But, after the adventure with the salmon in which the Colonel helps the boy to land the beast that has broken his rod, the older man allows the boy to choose a new rod from his own collection: '[R]ummage among those. Take your time and see if you can find anything to suit you.' It's interesting that there is considerable variety in the equipment that the Colonel has with him: '"Now, here's a handy piece by Hardy - a light and useful tool - or if you fancy greenheart in preference to split bamboo -"'. In his introduction to coarse fishing, Paul Duffield notes that it used to be easier to make recommendations to beginners because there was simply less choice. But, it seems, at least from the Colonel's wooden tackle-box, that choice has long been available if you could pay for it. As Duffield implies, what has made this choice more widely available now is the affordability of the modern materials used in manufacturing equipment.

The fact that the rod is a gift transforms it in some subtle sense: 'I have the rod to this day, and I count it among my dearest treasures.' It is more than an expensive commodity - something rendered vital through its contact with the 'god'. And it is not the only thing that the old man bequeathed to the younger one - the connection extends to the gestures that constitute his very claim to be an angler: 'I have a flick of the wrist,' says the narrator, 'that was his [the Colonel's] legacy'.

This relates more to the comments on knots in the last post on 'The River God': 'There is a pride, in knots, of which the laity knows nothing'.

giard on learning

Reading Giard's text, 'Gesture Sequences', I feel that it is almost a little aphoristic. It is packed with interesting comment but the individual ideas are not always developed very far and you are quickly on to the next one. I shall start to pull out some points that I found interesting. Here, for example, is a comment about how 'gesture sequences' are learned:

The action of the gesture can be divided into an orderly series of basic actions, coordinated in sequences of variable duration according to the intensity of the effort required, organized on a model learned from others through imitation (someone showed me how to do it), reconstituted from memory (I saw it done this way), or established through trial and error based on similar actions (I ended up figuring out how to do it).

As I've said, I always enjoy a typology and this brief list of ways in which a skill can be acquired appeals to me. I'm interested in the subtle distinction between 'having someone show you' and simply 'seeing it done'. It reminds me of something I read about tool use in primates. I won't be able to lay hands on the reference now but I think the writer was talking about chimpanzees. The point was that the adults don't actually teach the young ones the techniques of tool use, but, because the adults routinely carry the babies around on their backs, the young animals have plenty of opportunity to see the relevant gestures being performed. The general nature of the care-giving makes that kind of learning viable.

It occurs to me that, for us, books can serve to set in motion a process of 'trial and error'. Giard is, of course, writing about cookery and I've certainly learned a number of cooking techniques by reading. However, and this is important, you don't come away with a body of knowledge derived entirely from the book. Instead, you acquire some basis to begin a process of trial and error. If you don't get it right first time, you might seek advice from someone who knows about these things. Or you might just try again on your own, following your intuitions about what is likely to work better. (Actually, my knowledge of cookery derives both from observing others and from reading followed by trial-and-error. In the former category an image springs to mind of trimming the excess pastry from a pie by holding the left hand palm up, curving the fingers upwards so that they form a kind of stand for the dish, and then running a vertical blade around the edge with the right hand. It's difficult to describe in words but I have a vivid recollection of seeing my mother doing it - the dish was white enamel, as I recall.) As Kate said in one of her comments, the fishing books in libraries seem to be borrowed very regularly and I suppose they provide a source of advice to people engaged in these processes of trial and error. Again, we'll have to talk to the anglers about it.

Giard then goes on to say something about adaptability: 'The skill at adapting the gesture to the conditions of execution and the quality of the obtained result constitute the test for putting a particular savoir fair into practice and foregrounding it.' This seems to me quite a rich observation. Certainly in cookery, to adapt the gesture to the present conditions is a real sign of a proper cook. If you rely on recipes, then you can't depart from their very rigid structures. But if you really understand food, then you have much more flexibility. Giard's insistence that 'gesture sequences' are both mental and physical also seems relevant here - the adaptation is sometimes made after a process of reasoning. But can it also 'come from' the body? Does the body itself take the decision at times?

I'm also fascinated by the term savoir faire, which, of course, literally means 'knowing how to do', but has a much more dense set of connotations than the English phrase. It seems to imply a sense of ease in the world which can extend beyond the practical into the handling of social relationships and human interactions.

Do you see what I mean? There is a suggestive weight to a lot of Giard's remarks but she doesn't always take them far herself. You have to ponder them to see why they strike you as telling (and, in our case, to decide whether they seem transferable from the kitchen to the banks of the pond).

Pie trimming in the 1930s.

gesture sequences

Writing here about wisdom and 'knowing how', I mentioned the idea of embodied knowledge. I was thinking about things like the ability to cast. (Not so long ago, I was talking to someone who does a lot of fly fishing and who said that, when he sees a beginner casting badly, he has to restrain himself physically from stepping in and 'helping'.) I suppose experienced anglers can explain good casting in words but, in the end, those words are a representation of knowledge that is not linguistically grounded - a sense of how the body should feel when the action is performed correctly. Actually, I'm open to the idea that sometimes you have to go against your instincts to perform an action skillfully - do something that feels counter-intuitive - but maybe that is a beginner's experience, something that happens when you are laying down new habits. I'd like to hear what Ken and Martin have to say about it.

Thinking about these things led me to a book I like a lot, The Practice of Everyday Life, and particularly volume 2, the second half of which is focused on cooking, an everyday practice that is simultaneously complex, creative, tedious, demanding, potentially pleasurable, highly gendered, and wrapped up with both the economic facts of life and the particular tastes and attitudes of those around one. Luce Giard (who wrote that section of the book) coins the term 'gesture sequences' to talk about the practice of cooking. She begins the chapter by talking about the difficulty of explaining in language what the experience of 'doing cooking' involves:

How can one find the right words, words that are rather simple, ordinary and precise, to recount these sequences of gestures, bound together over and over again, that weave the indeterminate cloth of culinary practices within the intimacy of kitchens? How can one choose words that are true, natural, and vibrant enough to make felt the weight of the body, the joyfulness or weariness, the tenderness or irritation that takes hold of you in the fact of this continually repeated task where the better the result (a stuffed chicken, a pear tart), the faster it is devoured, so that before the meal is completely over, one already has to think about the next. A succession of gestures and steps, repeated and required.

I rather like this paragraph - it begins by asking what words can possibly be used to 'recount these sequences of gestures' and finally returns to the term with which it began, 'gesture sequences', although moving on to nuance the term 'gesture' a little in subsequent pages. (Gesture in Giard's sense includes mental elements as well as physical ones - activities such as 'organizing', 'deciding', 'anticipating', 'memorizing', 'adapting', 'modifying', 'inventing', 'combining', and 'taking into consideration'.)

Of course, what I'm wondering is whether Giard's way of describing cooking has anything to offer as we talk about fishing - that notion of a 'sequence of gestures', bound together over and over to 'weave the indeterminate cloth of [angling practice]'. I think it might. It's that idea of a complex structure constructed out of 'sequences of gestures' that I like - gestural routines that are 'repeated and required' but also varied, adapted, and recombined.

One final point. I enjoy reading Giard's writing - I love the way she comes to cooking from a sort of respectful distance and analyses the complexity of the process involved in it. I do find it difficult to get to the heart of what she is saying, though. I sometimes come away from it feeling that I've read something beautiful but that I can't summarize exactly what she was getting at. This might be a good opportunity to take a close look at her account of 'gesture sequences' and I shall do a few more posts looking at specific aspects of her texts (interspersed with other odds and ends, just for variety).

http://www.discoverfishing.co.uk/guides/fly_fishing.htm