I wonder why it will not come to me

A rather less introspective post today! Thanks to my father, I've come across some lyrics collected from a Netsilik Inuit singer and published in the early 1930s by the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen. (Rasmussen was one of the first researchers to focus on Inuit cultures, and, after his death in 1933 a review article in American Anthropologist proclaimed that the Inuit had 'lost their best interpreter', while science had lost 'the leading student of a fascinating people'.)

One of these lyrics makes an explicit connection between the processes of composition and fishing. Both it implies, involve taking hold of something elusive - something that is there for the taking while being slippery and difficult to catch:

I wonder why
My song-to-be that I wish to use
My song-to-be that I wish to put together,
I wonder why it will not come to me.
At Sioraq it was at a fishing hole in the ice,
I could feel a little trout on the line
And then it was gone.
I stood jigging,
But why is it so difficult, I wonder?
When summer came and the waters opened,
It was then that catching became so hard:
I am not good at hunting!

Commenting on the text in the early 1960s, the classical scholar Maurice Bowra pointed to the lines about the particular difficulty of fishing in the open sea and interpreted this as being about the difficulty the singer faces in making a lyric 'when he has ... the whole range of possible subjects at his disposal'. In Bowra's reading, the ice hole - and I've posted on ice fishing here and here - represents the constraints on the creative process which critics sometimes see as particularly productive of artistic invention. The very difficulties put in place by those constraints may - in a number of ways - animate the creative process itself.

Another lyric compares composition to hunting rather than fishing and what drifts into my mind as I read it is the variable relationship between hunting and fishing in different texts and contexts. Sometimes the two are the terms of a cultural contrast. (Po-deri and Po-wori spring to mind.) But here they are aspects of a single life - analogous practices, both involving the effort to take something from an unrelenting world.

It is lovely to put together 
A bit of a song,
Avaya,
But I often do it badly, avaya!
It is lovely to hunt,
But I am seldom like a burning wick
On the ice, avaya!
It is lovely to have wishes fulfilled,
But they all slip past me!
It is all so difficult, avayaya!

I'm interested in the modesty of the sentiment and have no idea how to read it: 'I am not good at hunting', 'I seldom shine like a burning wick in the ice.' Is this conventional? Is it required of hunters - or of singers - that they show some humility in the face of the natural world? Is it personal? An expression of an individual viewpoint? Without more information, there is really no way of knowing. At the moment I only have these excerpts, although Rasmussen's books are available if one heads for the British Library. It occurs to me that my process of enquiry is itself  becoming rather like fishing - I keep casting the line and hoping to feel a bite.

Inuit fishing books in the National Museum in Copenhagen

sturgeon under the ice

More amazing images of ice fishing in Minnesota - we seem to be inside an ice shack again:

     

ice fishing

This isn't today's post - just a link to a photo that I came across online. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts invited Martin Parr to take photos of winter in Minnesota and this was one of the images he made. Click on it to enlarge it.

http://www2.artsmia.org/blogs/new-pictures/2012/04/13/new-pictures-6-martin-parr-opening-soon/usa-minnesota-minneapolis-winter-games-ice-fishing-2012/

I have a soft spot for Minnesota, having spent six weeks there in summer 2009. Never been there in winter, though.