proverbial 1

Writing about Bruegel made me think about proverbs, which are - after all - encapsulations of traditional wisdom that often draw on everyday activities like fishing for their figurative material.  I thought I'd post a few here when I found interesting ones and this one is from a 19th-century collection taken mostly from the Adagia (i.e. Adages) of the great Renaissance scholar, Erasmus. I hope to post some more, so I've called the post 'proverbial 1' in anticipation of others to come.

grotesquery

Today I'm offering you a text and an image, both concerned with fish swallowed whole.

Leonidas of Tarentum was a poet active in the roughly the same period as Theocritus, the 3rd century BC. He specialised in epigrammatic poetry and among his works are a number of epitaphs - short memorials to the dead. Among these is one to Parmis, the fisherman, who died when he accidentally swallowed a fish:

Shore-fisher Parmis, whom none could surpass,
Kallignotos's son, a spearer of wrasse
And furious perch that snatches up the bait
And fish that in hollow caves and deep rocks wait,
Once took his first catch from the sea and tried
To bite down on his deadly prey, and died.
For from his hand it, slimy, darted free
And wriggled down his narrow throat, and he
Rolled over, letting out his final breath,
And by his pole, fishhooks, and lines met death,
So filling up the final threads of doom.
The fisher Fischer made for him this tomb.

The slightly odd introduction of a fisher called Fischer is an attempt to capture a bit of word-play in the original Greek text, where Gripōn, the gripeus (fisherman) sets up the tombstone.

Jerry Clack (whose translation this is) comments on the story thus: 'Parmis is a victim of Tyche, that is of the unexpected, in this case the negative and irrational element which permeates everyday life'. The term tychē is quite common in Greek and means something like 'chance' or 'fortune'. It is also the name of the goddess who personifies those phenomena and - as I understand it - became more important in the post-classical period when both Theocritus and Leonidas were writing. We are, then, back in the presence of 'luck', where the slipperiness of the fish evokes the slipperiness of experience and the difficulty of 'getting hold of life'.

But there is a a comic flavour to this too - darkly, even nightmarishly, comic. It is the kind of story that makes you laugh out loud and then guiltily clap your hands over your mouth. One could express the capricious nature of tychē with a more dignified image than that of a fisherman choking to death when a fish jumps down his throat and the story feels like an expression of a bizarre, obsessive anxiety - 'I'm afraid that one day I'll die with a sea perch stuck in my gullet'.

To accompany the epitaph for Parmis, I've chosen a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the elder, which dates from 1556 and was engraved by Pieter van der Heyden the following year. The image illustrates a proverbial saying - what H. Arthur Klein calls a 'maxim of worldly wisdom' - namely, 'big fish eat little fish' (a text that appears at the bottom of the engraving in Latin and Flemish).

A huge fish lies on the shore with smaller fish pouring out of its mouth and smaller ones again emerging from those. At the same time, a stocky little figure with an enormous knife slices open the fish's belly and still more voracious creatures spill out on the ground before him. Klein points out that a whole array of Flemish proverbs are illustrated in the picture beyond the one that is explicitly mentioned: '"Little fish lure the big"; "One fish is caught by means of another"; "Fish are hooked through fish"; "They hang by their own gills" ( ... i.e., they are caught by their own weakness or vulnerability).'

But, just as Leonidas' poem illustrates the caprices of tychē through a particularly grotesque imaginative flourish - it must be imaginative, surely? can this really have happened to anyone? - so the visual rendering of these 'maxims of worldly wisdom' shows a wild, even nightmarish imagination at work. To quote Klein again:

We see the exuberant abundance of action and incident, the seven-ringed circus effects, the simultaneous variations on a given theme (often cryptic, seldom dull). This Bruegel is an abundant, repetitive, and extensive artist, an analogue in line to such outpouring geniuses as Rabelais and Shakespeare in literature. Yes, and even to the Melville of Moby Dick, to Mark Twain, and to Thomas Wolfe (prior to editorial pruning).

There is a crazy energy about the humans in the image as there often is in Bruegel's work more generally. And in both Leonidas' poem and Bruegel's drawing, the oddness of fish - so slimy! so voracious! - overwhelms the conventional lessons that the material teaches and takes us to a place both more ribald and more appalling.

A disturbing detail of Bruegel's image is the strange human-legged fish-creature that is proceeding out of frame to the right of the image, another fish hanging from its mouth. Where is it going? Does it live on the land? Humans and fish, it seems, are not so different after all.

buddhist sutras and videos for anglers

There is another image in the early Buddhist scriptures, which - while not strictly about fishing - seems relevant here. It recurs in a number of places and the instance I'm looking at now is in the Maha-Assapura Sutta, the Great Discourse at Assapura, in which the Buddha explains the practices that are necessary for contemplatives. Towards the end of the discourse, he describes the results of training oneself to watch one's own mental states from a more detached position. And, in doing this, he evokes the image of a clear mountain tarn:

Just as if there were a pool of water in a mountain glen - clear, limpid, and unsullied - where a man with good eyesight standing on the bank could see shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming about and resting, and it would occur to him, 'This pool of water is clear, limpid, and unsullied. Here are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.' In the same way - with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability - the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of the mental fermentations.

Through the practice of meditation, contemplatives learn to observe their own thoughts and emotions without attachment as if looking down at shoals of fish swimming in transparent water. There is no fisherman in this image because, of course, the Buddhist technique is not to intervene in the pool that is the mind - only to observe its operations from a distance until it becomes natural to see those operations not as the experiences of some coherent individual 'self' but as events in the world that come and go without any great consequence for the observer.

But this leads me on to think about the opacity of much of the water around us. The canals, ponds and rivers of South Yorkshire would not have worked so well to illustrate the process of watching one's own mental operations. And a point that emerged in the meeting in Rotherham was that visualising what is happening under the surface - an imaginative act that arises from the very murkiness of the water - is, for some, a part of the pleasure of fishing. Martin talked about films that are made by dropping a camera into the water with bait attached so that the fish gather round and their behaviour can be recorded. 'They don't do what you'd think,' he said. The world below the surface is not quite identical to the one that you imagine. To say that, though, you have to have spent time trying to visualise what might be going on. The interest of the film arises from the time expended previously on wondering.

Contrasting the Buddha's image of the transparent mind with Martin's enthusiasm for the underwater films has led me to think about how the hiddenness of the fishy otherworld contributes to the experience of angling. Lowering a hook into a place that you cannot see or enter. Inferring what is happening from tell-tale signs on the surface. Visualising how it might be. Imagining what might be going on at the other end of the line. Transparency and opacity. Seeing and inferring. Knowing through direct observation and knowing through logical inferences. In the end, it is all about how muddy the water is (and, in a way, a lot of life is the same, I think).

Fish in the clear water of the Plitvice Lakes, Croatia. Image by Aphex82 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

real

I was talking to my friend Jon yesterday and he was telling me about how his father used to take him fishing when he was a young lad. He talked in particular about the moment when you land a fish and have to grab hold of it, remove the hook, and return it to the water. 

In his introduction to coarse fishing, Paul Duffield offers a methodical account of this process. 'Be careful when unhooking fish,' he says, 'not to grip them too tightly, and only handle them with damp hands to prevent removal of slime.' It is relatively easy, if seems, to free a fish when the hook is in the lip, although to release a barbed hook you may need to shake it a little as you pull it out, and you might also need to use forceps 'if the fish is hooked deeper in the mouth and you cannot reach it with your fingers'. If the fish swallows the hook, you have to use a disgorger and Duffield emphasises the need to be able to lay hands on one quickly. You slide it onto the line, push it down until it reaches the hook and then a bit further so the hook comes free. Then you 'turn the disgorger by about 25 degrees and pull it back out of the fish'. This isn't difficult, he says, but you do need some practice. 

You also have to follow certain procedures in releasing the fish, not throwing it back but placing it into the water 'nose first' and letting it swim away. Some fish actually need to rest in the water for a moment, held in your hands until they are ready to head off into the river or pond.

Jon talked about the experience of seeing all this happen for the first time (or first few times). You have a responsibility at that moment and the suddenness of it, the need to act quickly, to treat the fish humanely, to get it all right has the potential to make a big impression on a child. As Jon put it, it all feels very real. 

Some moments do seem particularly real. Sitting in the corridor at the Hallamshire Hospital back in November, waiting to find out the status of the mole on the side of my nose, I experienced such a moment and that sense of reality receded again when I found that it was benign. Oddly, the realness of that moment arose from the sense of what might happen - something not yet real - and so the vividness of certain moments has quite a complex structure. I wonder if there is something of that with the child's reaction to the fish - the future crowding into the present as the creature fights for breath in front of you. For the moment, let's just imagine the young boy confronted with a fish on a line, reaching out with wet hands to take hold of it and set it free again.

Unhooking a salmon. Image adapted from a photograph by Des Colhoun [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

some favourite of poseidon

Theocritus was a Greek poet of the 3rd century BC. Originally from Syracuse in Sicily, he seems to have settled in Alexandria in the second quarter of the century. His residence in the greatest cosmopolitan city of the Greek world is the background against which his collection of poetry, The Idylls, needs to be read. Although various types of poetry are represented there, it is best known for its 'bucolics', which present scenes of idealised rural life and are populated by shepherds, poets, and lovers. Idyll XXI is the story of two fishermen who are spending the night in a hut on the seashore, surrounded by their tackle:

Near them lay the instruments of their toilsome craft: baskets and rods, hooks and weedy baits, lines and weels and pots of woven rush, cords and oars and an aged skiff upon its props, a bit of matting beneath the head, their clothes, their cups - such was their sole resource, such their wealth.

Unable to sleep, they begin to talk and one of them, Asphalion, describes a dream he has just had in which he caught a fish. ('Dogs in their sleep dream of their quarry and I of fish.') On landing the creature, he found that its scales were made of gold and, becoming worried that it might be 'some favourite ... of Poseidon or a treasure of sea-green Amphitrite', vowed that, although he would keep the booty, he would never go fishing again. Now, on waking, he is afraid at having sworn such an oath, even in his sleep. His friend advises him not to worry but to apply himself to searching for marvellous fish in reality and not in dreams.

The poem is, in some ways, quite mysterious. The text we have is very corrupt and A.S.F. Gow, whose commentary is standard reading for students of The Idylls, talks about various sections as being 'unintelligible', 'uncertain', 'desperately corrupt', or 'in hopeless condition'. What is more, it is generally thought not to be by Theocritus at all, but to have been absorbed into his collection along with one or two similarly suspect poems. Gow is rather dismissive of it, pointing out that the story is constructed 'with a certain clumsiness' to illustrate a moral stated in the first few lines - a moral that is, in truth, pretty commonplace: 'poverty is the fosterer of industry'.

But, in spite of this, I find the story quite haunting, although I'm not at all sure what an Alexandrian audience might have made of it. A lot depends, I suppose, on what conceptualisation of dreaming one brings to the work. Gow, who published his commentary in 1950, recommends reading Walter Headlam's comments on dreams in Greek literature but there is no doubt something fresher to look at on the topic. And, anyway, we come to the poem with our own understandings of dreaming, which may well transform it in significant ways. I like the complicated state of Asphalion's feelings - delighted at his wealth, afraid of the gods, and even more afraid, on waking, at the reckless vows he made while in the otherworld of the dream.

This fish isn't made of gold but was used as a weight to measure out quantities of gold dust. It comes from West Africa and its date is uncertain, either nineteenth or twentieth century. Image from the Brooklyn Museum [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

sturgeon under the ice

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

     

back on the hook

I posted here about the story of Hoderi and Howori, the two brothers in the Kojiki, one who 'finds his luck' in the mountains and the other on the sea. The crux of the story is that they exchange their 'luck' and, when Howori goes fishing with Hoderi's tackle, fails to catch any fish and loses the hook in the waves. When I first wrote about this, I found Hoderi's intransigence over the lost hook annoying. Howori breaks up his sword and makes five hundred hooks to replace the old one. But Hoderi is having none of it and insists on the return of the original. Since then, however, I've consulted a newer edition of the Kojiki - not 'new' exactly, just newer than Chamberlain's - and learned a little more about it.

First of all, more recent work on the phonology of Old Japanese apparently shows that the syllable which Chamberlain transcribes as 'ho' was actually pronounced 'po', so we should really call the brothers Po-deri and Po-wori. Second, there is some discussion in this newer edition of exactly why Po-deri is so insistent on the return of the hook:

The meaning of the word sati in this chapter is vital. Even today the word shachi, a divine blessing or magic power, is used among hunters to refer to luck in the hunt. This 'luck' can be gained and imparted by certain magic practices, and the magic is thought to dwell in the hunting implements - for the modern hunter, the rifle bullets, which are shachi-dama ('luck balls')

This point is underlined in a discussion of the folklore of hunting by the German scholar of Japan, Nelly Naumann. (Apologies for the rather stilted translation!)

The word shachi is often used in the language of hunting. We'll meet shachi-iwai or shachi-matsuri as a thanksgiving ceremony after the killing of wild game. The term shachi-ya means an arrow with which an animal was hit, while shachi-dama or shachi-maru is the bullet with which an animal was killed ... ; shachi-no-mi is venison. If a bullet kills an animal on the first shot, one says shachi ga mukaita, 'the shachi obliged'. However, if one has missed the target several times, one says sono mono no gu wa shachi no kiretari, 'the shachi of this gear is exhausted'. And if one doesn't shachi wo tsugu quickly - 'replace the shachi' - the equipment becomes useless.

Seen in this light Po-deri's demands seem more reasonable: 'The stubborn refusal of the elder brother to accept any but the original hook did not necessarily stem from perversity'. The hook is a talismanic object and 'separation from [it] might mean a complete loss of luck and economic ruin'. One's success at one's trade is closely bound up with the use of the tools that have served one well so far. And the luck is not transferable - your hook is lucky for you but will not be so for me.

I'm tempted to read this in relation to that tension between, on the one hand, what happens to you and, on the other, what you do for yourself. The focus on the hook is somehow emblematic of the need to pay attention to the detail of equipment, while acknowledging that these preparations set up the conditions to receive good fortune. What is perhaps rather shocking, though, is how this story continues. Things do not, in the end, go Po-deri's way. But I'll come to that another time!

     

     Angling in Modern Japan: Awaji Island