romantic nature and modern nature

I've been thinking about wisdom and tried to write about it yesterday. But I got a bit tangled up (like a novice caught up in a fishing line). I'm going to try to make sense of what's on my mind, so apologies if the discussion is laboured. Be patient with me while I think it through.

There is undoubtedly a lot of skill in angling - the ability to cast well, for example. And it also requires a great deal of knowledge - you need to know where and when you're likely to find perch receptive to your worms. But this project is concerned with wisdom, and skills and knowledge do not, in themselves, make a person wise. So, to adapt a saying of Steve's, when we look at the practice of angling, we need to ask ourselves: 'Where's the wisdom?' How exactly do we see it as arising? I've touched on this before and I suggested that we might think about the matter in terms of both metaphors and metonyms. Skill at casting and knowledge of the quarry might be metaphors for the ability to live well - to respond to the world with insight and judgement. But, conversely, angling might also constitute a space where certain aspects of wisdom can actually be developed - a part of the world that can stand in some way for the whole. 

I think what is on my mind is that many of the metonymic relationships are ones that are susceptible to being romanticised. Take, for example, the value of engaging with the natural world. I'd be the first to admit that external observers are at least as likely to valorise the encounter with nature as anglers themselves. Those who go fishing do, after all, have to deal with the cold and rain, with handling slimy creatures while pulling hooks from their mouths, with the fact that the English countryside is not always a pristine site of pastoral escape. But as someone who has a very ambivalent relationship with the rural landscape, having grown up in the midst of farmland myself, I sometimes find that the value of being 'in nature' is assumed in a way which, if I'm honest, I find a little hard to swallow. (Just as well, maybe, or we'd have to reach for the disgorger.)

Lest this sound cynical, let me stress that I completely accept that engaging with nature is a significant aspect of both life and fishing, but it's also susceptible to a rather uncritical reading, as - I suspect - are other aspects of the discourse of fishing-as-wisdom. So this is by way of a note-to-self. The devil's in the detail. (That's a bit of proverbial wisdom that I particularly love!) Nature is important but let's not generalise.

Living now not amidst agricultural land but in the centre of Sheffield, I often take a walk eastward along the River Don towards Attercliffe and pass by the anglers camped out at the water's edge. This is certainly not the Wye Valley. The river is lined with industrial buildings, some disused although others still working. At some points there are islands in the river, which - if this were a salmon stream - would be accumulations of pebbles but here have formed out of bricks and rubble. There is refuse on the banks and the whole area is thoroughly urban. But the practice of fishing allows for the discovery of something different in this space, where there is still flowing water, forests of underwater flora, and wild creatures that pass increasingly easily through the cityscape now the levels of pollution have come down. I'm reminded of the title of Derek Jarman's first volume of diaries - a phrase given to him by a friend. He tells the story early in the book and it is connected with the garden that he began to cultivate in the shadow of Dungeness Power Station after his diagnosis with HIV: 

Friday, 3 February, 1989

I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it. 
She said: 'Oh, you've finally discovered nature, Derek.'
'I don't think it's quite like that', I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer's Kent.
'Ah, I understand completely. You've discovered modern nature.'

So here, to finish, is Constable's image of a fisherman at the mill pond and a photograph of Jarman's garden at Dungeness - nature in its romantic and modern modes.

John Constable, A Mill

www.heterotopiastudies.com

benefactors

There are many different things crowding into my mind at the moment and it is becoming difficult to choose which to write about each day. Somewhat arbitrarily I've chosen this morning to return to the story of Finn and Finegas - the young hero and the wise old bard. I originally wrote about that story here - Finegas' repeated attempts to catch the salmon of knowledge, his success (seemingly contingent on Finn's arrival), and Finn's 'accidental' (but actually predestined) ingestion of the knowledge contained within the fish.

At the time I talked about how sad I felt for Finegas, who was denied what he wanted so much because Finn so casually took it from him. But this - rather obviously - is a modern, individualistic reading. In the context of the story itself, it is Finn's destiny to become the hero of the Fianna and Finegas' role is to help him on his journey. He is, in a sense, another of Jung's (and Marcus') 'wise old men'. Unlike others of his kind, however, he bestows the vital talisman on his protégé without initially knowing that he is doing so. His virtue is that he recognises the 'rightness' of what has happened and, at that point, encourages Finn to eat the rest of the fish. Thus, we have here a story about the role of the older, wiser figure in helping the hero on his journey.

We can read this in a number of ways. For Jung, as I have said (rather too often, maybe), both hero and wise old man are part of the self - these stories (if, indeed, Jung would classify this one along with his other tales of benefactors and talismans) dramatises the potential of the self to find its own wisdom. Or we can see the two characters as emblematic of the relationship between older more experienced people and younger ones whose abilities are still unexpressed - like the potential energy in a spring. In that case, the story is about the wisdom needed to support and nurture the young. (And we can, of course, trace both trajectories in the story simultaneously.)

Two more points:

First, it is crucial that the salmon in the story is the guardian of knowledge and not wisdom. (As it happens, the wikipedia entry for this story originally had the title 'the salmon of wisdom', prompting the following exchange:

Gronky -- I've never heard of this story being called the "Salmon of Wisdom". Is there a good reason for using this strange and rare name? Or should I rename the article to "Salmon of Knowledge"?
Alison -- I totally agree, and have gone ahead and moved it.

Finn's 'accident' deprives Finegas of knowledge not of wisdom - that he already has, as is evident in his calm acceptance of what his happened, his recognition of its 'rightness'.

Second, my original reading - my sadness for Finegas - is 'wrong' in the sense that the story has other things to say. But I don't want to forget about it entirely. I would like, as we now say, to 'own' it. It does require a rather anti-individualistic spirit to accept the role of 'benefactor to the hero' rather than clinging to the role of hero itself. (Or is that just me?!) The tension I felt in reading the story is part of what the story has to say to me now.

What brought all this to mind was my reading of Roland Pertwee's story, 'The River God', in which the nurturing of the (very) young angler by the older man is a sign of the latter's wisdom. And it is notable that the narrator makes the older man (with whom he only has contact for one month at the age of ten) into a mythological figure - a god who haunts the river bank. The two stories are not analogous in a close sense. In the myth, the catching of the fish sets up the conditions under which Finegas can display his wisdom, whereas in 'The River God' the Colonel's ability as an angler stands as a metonym for some larger conception of what it is to live well. At the same time both use fishing as a means to talk about that difficult topic of the role of the older person in guiding and nurturing younger ones.

 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

the river god

A break from Giard today. I've just bought an anthology of fishing stories published in the US under the title Fisherman's Bounty. It's an interesting collection and I started reading it last night. The first story is called 'The River God' and is by the actor and writer, Roland Pertwee (who was the father of John Pertwee and the second cousin of Bill Pertwee). An angler in his forties looks back on his first steps in fishing as a ten-year-old. Pertwee was born in 1885 and, although we  always need to be careful about identifying authors and narrators too closely, I think the story is probably set in the 1890s, the period of his own childhood, or shortly after.

The story examines in some detail the boy's emotional responses to the extraordinary world that he is discovering. It communicates the awe that he feels in handling a 'two-guinea' rod for the first time, opening a tin  full of flies and casts, standing on the edge of a salmon stream in Wales having spent two years casting in the garden without the opportunity to go near a river. There is an alternating sense of joy, fear, and despair, as well as an attention to the younger self's powerful determination to do things properly - his aspiration to be like a grown-up in this one compelling area of life. I'll just quote one section - a short reflective passage on the important of knots:

I have often wondered how I was able to control my fingers well enough to tie a figure-eight knot between the line and the cast. But I did, and I'm proud to be able to record it. Your true-born angler does not go blindly to work until he has first satisfied his conscience. There is a pride in knots of which the laity knows nothing, and if, through neglect to tie them rightly, failure and loss should result, pride may not be restored nor conscience salved by the plea of eagerness.

This reminds me of something Steve said in the meeting at the youth centre. You have to be confident that you've made your preparations properly - otherwise you'll sit there anxiously wondering if you made a mistake and eventually start reeling in to check.

I like the way the adult, narrating self expresses his approval of the younger, experiencing self - the boy's concern to get it right. And, in fact, a central element of the story is the way in which the child's resistance to the discouragement of many of the adults around him has stood the test of time and matured into a way of life:

'What do you want to do this afternoon, old man?' [my father] asked.  
'Fish,' I said.
'But you can't always fish,' he said.
I told him I could and I was right and have proved it for thirty years and more.
'Well, well,' he said, 'please yourself, but isn't it dull not catching anything?'
And I said, as I've said a thousand times since, 'As if it could be.'

The River God of the title is an old military man - a Colonel 'of the older order that takes a third of a century and a lot of Indian sun and Madras curry in the making.' He is the one adult who treats the boy with understanding and respect and the narrator says of their first meeting (on a family holiday in Wales): 'I had been talked to as a man by a man among men'.  The Colonel is presented, I think, as a figure of wisdom. He has an intuitive understanding of how the boy is feeling throughout the events of the narrative and finally helps him to land a salmon that has broken the lad's rather inadequate rod and made off with the hook still in its mouth. As the older narrating self implies, the Colonel forms a model of a life wholly and seriously committed to fishing, a life in the which the virtues of understanding, generosity, and kindness are also manifest.

At the end of the story we return to the narrator's present and he tells us that, although the Colonel, the last of the veterans of the Indian 'Mutiny', is now dead, he still 'meets' him on the river banks:

The banks of a river are frequented by a strange company and are full of mysterious and murmurous sounds - the cluck and laughter of water, the piping of birds, the hum of insects, and the whispering of wind in the willows. What should prevent a man in such a place having a word and speech with another who is not there? So much of fishing lies in the imagination, and mine needs little stretching to give my river god a living form.

And the man who lives on in the imagination continues to grow and change: 'He has begun to take an interest in dry-fly methods - that river god of mine, with his seven-league boots, his shaggy head, and the gaff across his back.'

There are lots of interesting elements to the story - the code of conduct that the narrator presents as underlying angling as an activity and which 'the laity' do not understand, the idea that one can - in childhood - realise that one is a 'born fisherman' and that fishing is one's calling, the figure of the wise older man who treats the hero with generosity and understanding.  (C.G. Jung springs to mind again.) I'm even interested in how the Colonel's life in India forms a background of violence to the pastoral scenes of the story itself. We are told early in the narrative that, coming upon a band of Indian soldiers 'conspiring mischief ... with a barrel of gunpowder', he had thrown the butt of his cheroot in so that 'presently they all went to hell'. How does fishing relate to these kinds of experience - the thirty years in the Indian sun that it takes to make a Colonel?

The Afon Lledr (River Lledr) at Pont-y-Pant, the setting of the story. Image by Eirian Evans [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

the demon fisherman

There is a Buddhist text called 'The Fisherman' - 'Balisika Sutta'. It is part of a collection of scriptures that originated early in the history of Buddhism and is written in Pali, a South Asian language close to that which the Buddha himself spoke. The sutta begins with an analogy:

[J]ust as if a fisherman were to cast a baited hook into a deep lake and a fish with its eye out for food would swallow it — so that the fish that had thus swallowed the fisherman's hook would fall into misfortune & disaster, and the fisherman could do with it as he will — in the same way, there are these six hooks in the world for the misfortune of beings, for the slaughter of those that breathe.

The six hooks turn out to be associated with the senses as they are conceptualised by the tradition. These include the five that we are familiar with - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell - as well as the intellect, which is conceived in Buddhist psychology as a six 'sense'.The text explains how each of the senses perceives the bait on a particular hook.The quotation below is what it says about sight - the comments on the other senses are similar. (In the earlier phase of Buddhism a lot of emphasis was placed on monasticism and this is why the sutta addresses and talks about the 'bikkhavo' or monks.) 

There are forms, monks, cognizable via the eye — agreeable, pleasing, charming, endearing, fostering desire, enticing. If a monk relishes them, welcomes them, & remains fastened to them, he is said to be a monk who has swallowed Mara's hook, who has fallen into misfortune & disaster. The Evil One can do with him as he will.

Mara is a demon who appears in a number of the suttas and famously tried to tempt the Buddha away from his contemplative practice. He is not exactly evil - more a symbol of the distraction that the sensory world offers to the anyone following the contemplative path. Rather than characterising the objects of the senses as the bait on Mara's hooks, other suttas depict them as the demon's beautiful daughters.

At the centre of Buddhist throught is the idea that dukkha, the suffering of life, is conquered by letting go of 'attachment' - desire, appetite, yearning, envy. We erroneously believe that the objects of our desire will bring us happiness (or, if we have them already, that our present happiness is conditional upon them). So, in a sense, they are like the bait on the demon's hooks. They seem to offer fufilment but, in reality, lure you into danger. The solution is ... well, the solution is complex but it includes contemplation, particularly meditation that trains us to be more fully present as life unfolds and not always away in hypothetical worlds where everything would be better - or would have been better - 'if only...'.

Image of Mara Demons (unfortunately without fishing rods). Picture by Anonymous 11th century artist. Digital image provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

two routes to wisdom

I keep conflating the different ways in which fishing might be thought to give rise to wisdom. I did it in yesterday's post and I do it in my head.  Of course we really need to talk to the anglers about this - I don't want to assume too much - but focusing on the direct, metonymic relationship between fishing and wisdom (as opposed to any metaphorical connections), there seem to me to be two possibilities to take into account.

First, fishing requires patience, application, stillness, an attuning of the senses to the environment, control of the emotions, and so forth. These qualities might well be seen as aspects of wisdom and of the capacity to respond wisely to the world. Thus fishing trains one in qualities that are part of being wise in a wider sense.

Second, because fishing - coarse fishing, at least - takes time and involves long periods of waiting in silence, it creates a space which might be used contemplatively. Here the point isn't so much what fishing itself teaches you as the opportunities it creates to enter a different kind of state. I guess the time spent waiting for the fish to bite doesn't have to be used for contemplation. But it might be and it seems that it quite often is.

I'm a typological kind of boy - when I'm thinking things through, I like to classify - and it's bothered me a little that I've been blurring these two categories together: qualities arising directly from the demands that fishing makes on the individual and experiences arising in the space that fishing creates for contemplation.

Aaaagh - now I'm thinking about  the phenomenology of waiting. Have we talked about that before...?

the life spiritual and the life primitive

Steve suggested that it might be interesting to look at Thoreau's Walden and, of course, he was right! There's an interesting - and complicated - discussion of fishing in the early part of the chapter called 'Higher Laws'. Here I'm going to post some long quotations from it along with a few comments of my own.

At the beginning of the chapter, Thoreau talks about finding two instincts in himself, one towards the 'higher' or 'spiritual' life and one towards a 'primitive' one, both of them objects of 'reverence' to him. Initially he associates fishing with the 'primitive' instinct:

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive, rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. 

For a while, though, his perspective moves and he suggests that fishermen, hunters, woodcutters, and so on have a particular and valuable view of nature because they do not come to it with the 'expectation' that philosophers and poets do:

Perhaps I have owed to this employment [fishing] and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. 

This leads into the claim that 'science' is most rewarding when it externalises what fishermen and so on know instinctively.  Incidentally, I think Thoreau is writing early enough for 'science' here to mean something like 'official knowledge' rather than having the more precise sense that we give it:

The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

But just as it seems that Thoreau is taking a typically Romantic view of fishing and hunting, he performs a sort of volte-face: 

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh.

His rejection of fishing is, in part, to do with his reservations about eating 'flesh'. I'm interested, though, that he sees his becoming 'less a fisherman' as not resulting in 'more humanity or even wisdom'. There are clearly tensions in his responses here!

Walden Pond in 1908

wisdom and knowing how

I'm going to do something different today. It's been interesting looking at the three stories - King Masoud, Finn and Finegas, Hoderi and Howori - and I realise that I'll need to go back to them because I've misrepresented them to a certain extent. Today, though, I want to pick up on something that Steve said in his comment on the last post, something about wisdom and skill. My ideas on this subject are not all that well worked out and I feel a bit exposed trying to formulate them in this rather public way. But that, as they say, is the gig. Having taken on this practice, I'm going to see it through! So...please read charitably and bear in mind that I'm writing this off the top of my head at 06.30 in the morning.

It is very common to talk about there being several kinds of knowledge, two important categories being 'knowing that' and 'knowing how to'. The former, 'knowing that', is also described as propositional knowledge and it constitutes awareness of facts of various kinds. The latter, 'knowing how to', is different. The much quoted example is knowing how to ride a bike. This doesn't involve knowing any facts (or just a few basic ones, anyway). It is much more to do with experience, with an ability to make judgements during the flow of events, with the body and its response to particular situations. Now, as I understand it - and this is something Johan will know much more about than I do - wisdom has more to do with 'knowing how to' than 'knowing that'. What distinguishes a wise person is not so much knowing lots of facts (although such a person may, in fact, be knowledgeable in this sense too). At the core of wisdom is a responsive capacity - an ability to make judgements by drawing on experience or practice, a capacity that may even feel as if it is held within the body in some sense.

Wisdom as a term has both ethical and epistemological dimensions. It is 'ethical' in the sense that it names a capacity to live well - to follow the 'good life', perhaps. And the term is also epistemological in the sense that it assumes this capacity to be something that arises from experience or self-cultivation, something responsive, practical, and so thoroughly assimilated that it seems instinctive and even embodied.

What strikes me again and again as I read is that wisdom and fishing stand in at least two different relationships and I want to hang on to that point.

(1) Because skill in fishing arises from experience, application, an acquired ability to read the river, to respond to present conditions, to make observations, fishing forms a useful METAPHOR for the process of cultivating wisdom. Some writers use images of fishing to talk about the getting of wisdom because the activity models the process of cultivating experience, judgement, patience, and insight so well. In short, the development of the skill of fishing mirrors the coming 'to know how' that we think of as wisdom.

(2) But there is another way to look at it, which is that fishing itself can be productive of wisdom. That is, it can be seen not just as a metaphor but as a possible concrete element in the process of becoming wise. The endless hours exercising patience, gazing at the water, visualising the world beneath the surface can be seen as contemplative exercises in their own right. Read like this, fishing has a METONYMIC rather than a metaphorical relationship with wisdom - an indexical relationship rather than a purely symbolic one.

When I write this, I am not suggesting that we need to choose which of these is the 'right' relationship. I think different texts use fishing in different ways.

I think I'll draw to a close soon but a couple of other points occur to me. First, the idea that an ethical quality like wisdom could be rooted in experience and self-training has not seemed entirely right to everyone. There is a sort of counter-argument that a skill acquired through experience cannot be as valuable as a well-worked out body of rationally derived principles. And so the practicality and responsive character of wisdom as I have sketched it in here has seemed to need some defence. Second, it is (I think) relatively unusual to hear the term 'skill' applied to ethics but, actually, one place where that happens is in the Buddhist tradition, where conduct in line with the Buddha's ethical teachings is seen as 'skillful' rather than 'good' or 'bad'. This is because it constitutes one of the techniques that are used to acquire insight.

Now I really shall stop. As I say, please read charitably. These are just my thoughts this morning...

(Photo: I, Mike Cline [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)], via Wikimedia Commons)