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

fish > people > fish

A shorter post today. (I wrote quite a lot this morning but it needs more mulling over before I put it before you, even in the form of a sketch.)

I took the train over to Cheshire this weekend to see my parents and my dad and I went to a second-hand book shop, where I spent half an hour or so wading through their stock of fishing manuals. I bought one that  includes a series of illustrated essays on each of the different fish that an angler might choose as a specialism, both game fish (salmon and trout) and coarse fish (the list is longer - barbel, bream, carp, chub, dace, eels, grayling, perch, pike, roach, rudd, tench, and zander). There is also a section on sea angling and one made up of miscellaneous thoughts on topics like 'catching big fish', 'the pleasures of dressing your own flies', and 'fish behaviour'.

I'm currently reading about all the individual coarse fish and something in Kenneth Seaman's essay on chub reminded me of this comment that Kate made on one of my early posts: 

There is something here about the notion of fish becoming people and people becoming fish. I return to my favourite book, borrowed from Rotherham Library, A Dream of Jewelled Fishes, and Chapter 8, 'A Confession of Carp': 

"The last time I picked up a carp fishing magazine in the newsagents I did not succeed in suppressing my laughter. The photos did it - identikit pictures of carp-fisher and carp - and I could not help but notice the curious symmetry between captor and captive, as if they had started mutually to evolve towards some ghastly hybrid. Shaven-headed fishermen with no neck but big bellies mirror carp with vast bloated flanks and expressions of benign indifference."

There is something both enormously funny and deeply serious about fishing.

Seaman's essay begins with a comparison between the habits of chub and the characters of those who pursue them:

I can recognise a keen chub angler instantly now. He moves distantly across the landscape, or sits invisible in some overgrown retreat. Occasionally, I see his rod arch, hear the urgent screech of his reel, but that is all. He does not bother me, nor I him. There is a quick instinctive appreciation of our mutual desire for solitude. Like the fish we seek, we prefer to remain hidden, shying away quickly from intruders.

Can it really be true? And in what order does the choice of quarry and the transformation of the angler take place? Do we seek out an object that resembles us or become like the object we seek?

Chub in an aquarium

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

proverbial 2

Another fishing proverb collected by Erasmus and included in the ninteenth-century work I mentioned here.

time's stream

This morning I feel tired. It's been a demanding week and the next one will be too. I haven't got anything to write about really because I've exhausted the stock of stories that I've been accumulating. Well, no - I have plenty more but I didn't have a chance to read through them last night and so now I'm sitting here, not wanting to let the practice of daily writing slide but not provided with a nice, neat tale to tell either.

I am thinking about time. It seems to elude me - it passes quickly, full of demands, the arrival of evening a relief, the morning approaching all too soon. I wish whole days away. 'How are you?' people ask. 'I'll be better when today is over.' Before you know it a week has gone, a month, another year. A horrible cliché!  But, still, it is relentless and demoralising.

To talk about time as a river is also a commonplace but exactly what image does the comparison evoke for you? In this dejected mood, I imagine myself thrown about on the violent water, waiting for the boat to capsize and the crew of one to perish. Occasionally I see myself watching from the bank in the knowledge that one day the stream will cease to run and the mud on the river bed will dry out and scatter in the wind. 'Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.' (This is Thoreau in Walden.) 'I drink at it, but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.' I love Thoreau. I would like to talk with him but it's possible we wouldn't get on.

The shallow stream: 'Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.' Thoreau writes passionately about time, and, a little later, talks about moments when he felt unwilling - 'could not afford', in fact - 'to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands'. On days like these, he would sit in his doorway all day long, 'in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted through the house.' Is this what it is to fish in time's stream or in the sky, whose bed is 'pebbly with stars'?

Right now I am tangled up in Thoreau's words, hopeful but sceptical, even a little perplexed. I  have no idea of how one fishes in time's stream. I cannot imagine myself sitting all day in the doorway. I am not convinced that I could tie the knots, cast the line, wait with the confident patience that is necessary for the angler-in-the-sky. Time is on my mind but rarely have I heard anyone speak about it in a way that means very much to me. The days are intractable and the idea of dropping a hook in and waiting seems a beautiful but difficult idea. Well, 'so it goes'. (A tag from a book about time but not one that speaks about fishing, I fear.)

Enough for this morning. Shower, shave, and wade out once again into the river.

Dry river bed. No fishing here!

the fish that first cometh up

Chapter 17 of the Gospel of Matthew describes a small incident that does not appear in any of the other three. Jesus and the disciplines come to Capernaum and are asked for the usual payment as a tribute to the temple. (Hendrik van der Loos points to the book of Exodus (30: 11-16) for the law that 'all male Israelites above the age of twenty were obliged to give half a shekel for the service in the tabernacle of the congregation'.) Jesus asks Peter: 'What thinkest thou, Simon? Of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? Of their children, or of strangers?' Peter says: 'Of strangers'. And Jesus concludes by saying, 'Then are the children free', which is often interpreted as meaning that, being children of heaven, the disciples are strangers to the authorities in Capernaum and hence have no obligation to them.

Then, however, Jesus takes a different line: '[L]est we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.' It's a rather strange detail. Although it is sometimes included among the miracles, we are not told that Peter did as he was told. No miraculous event is described as taking place. Some have rationalised it by saying that Peter is to catch a fish and sell it, thus raising money to pay the temple tribute. A fragment in Joseph Reuss' collection, Matthaus-Kommentare aus der griechischen Kirche, offers an allegorical account of the episode:

[T]he fish provides a type of the church: once [it was] held by the brine of faithlessness and superstition, submerged in the depths of the sea and swamped by the storms and distress of worldly pleasures. But now [it is] raised up by the apostles' hook of teaching and the fishing nets of the Word to the knowledge of God, of him 'who calls us from darkness to his amazing light'.

Thus, the episode is read as a reference to the status of the disciples as 'fishers of men' and we can add it to our collection of allegorical hooks - that of Mara (which catches those who have not managed to put aside sensual desire), that of the Christian God (which captures death through the bait that is Jesus), and that of the teaching used by the disciples to bring their listeners to 'knowledge of God'.

Some commentators see the story as borrowed from another tradition - a folkloric element that has cognates in all kinds of other places. It has been compared with a range of other stories. One appears in the Babylonian Talmud:

Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths had in his victory a certain gentile who owned much property. Soothsayers told him, 'Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths will consume all your property. — [So] he went, sold all his property, and bought a precious stone with the proceeds, which he set in his turban. As he was crossing a bridge the wind blew it off and cast it into the water, [and] a fish swallowed it. [Subsequently] it [the fish] was hauled up and brought [to market] on the Sabbath eve towards sunset. 'Who will buy now?' cried they. 'Go and take them to Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths,' they were told, 'as he is accustomed to buy.' So they took it to him. He bought it, opened it, found the jewel therein, and sold it for thirteen roomfuls of gold denarii.  A certain old man met him [and] said, 'He who lends to the Sabbath,  the Sabbath repays him.' [link]

Another appears in Herodotus' Histories in the story of the ring of Polycrates (which I might look at in another post). Both the Talmudic and the Herodotian stories are centred upon loss and restoration, a dynamic that is not so evident in the Gospel story. To lose something in the sea is to lose it more or less irrecoverably and so the rediscovery of the jewel and the ring are particularly striking signs of the virtue and good fortune of Joseph and Polycrates respectively.

I have to say that I like some of the stranger moments in the texts of the Gospels. (The cursing of the fig tree in both Mark and Matthew is another one.) There is something compelling about watching the commentators worry about the significance of the coin in the fish's mouth.

Augustin Tünger Facetiae Latinae et Germanicae, Konstanz 1486, Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. HB V 24a. - Illustration from the life of St. Peter: Saint Peter paying a fee by extracting coins from the mouth of a fish.

reading and doing

Washington Irving's short piece, 'The Angler', is part of a collection, The Sketch Book, published in 1819. It begins with some thoughts on how books inspire people to change their lives, sometimes recklessly - 'many an unlucky urchin' has run away to sea after reading Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote himself embarked on his curious adventures after reading books of chivalry. In much the same way, Irving's narrator - Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman - tells us that he and his friends took up angling as a result of reading Izaak Walton.

The first part of the essay follows their progress - or lack of it - with a gently satirical eye. One of the group 'had equalled' Don Quixote in the extravagance of his outfit:

He wore a broad-skirted fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes and leathern gaiters; a basket slung on one side for fish; a patent rod, a landing-net, and a score of other inconveniences, only to be found in the true angler's armoury. Thus harnessed for the field, he was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the country folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was the steel-clad hero of La Mancha among the goatherds of the Sierra Morena.

The landscape of the Upper Hudson Valley was delightfully picturesque but unsuitable for the techniques described in The Compleat Angler. Crayon himself gave up fairly quickly - 'I ... had not angled above half an hour before I had completely "satisfied the sentiment"' - and sat on the bank reading. But his friends 'were more persevering in their delusion' and spent the entire day fishing 'with scarcely any success', at which point, 'a lubberly country urchin came down from the hills with a rod made from a branch of a tree, a few yards of twine, and, as Heaven shall help! I believe a crooked pin for a hook, baited with a vile earthworm - and in half an hour caught more fish than we had nibbles throughout the day!' They ate their dinner under the trees while one of the group read Walton aloud and Crayon himself 'built castles in a bright pile of clouds, until [he] fell asleep'.

This description of an impulsive fishing expedition forms a prelude to an account of an angler that Crayon met while travelling in Britain - an old fellow whose 'face bore the marks of former storms' but who now 'had altogether the good-humoured air of a constitutional philosopher who was disposed to take the world as it came'. On the face of it, Crayon recalls the former episode as a result of the latter - it passes 'like a strain of music over [his] mind,' summoned up 'by an agreeable scene which [he] witnessed not long since'. But there is a complex relay between the two. The satire on those whose experience is mediated through books interacts trickily with the encomium to the practical old man in the second half. Is Crayon's perception of the angler itself rendered sentimental by his reading? Do his literary tastes prime him to find the virtue in the old fellow? The fisherman himself has also 'read Izaak Walton attentively'. He is not some simple illiterate who contrasts entirely with the narrator - a 'man of action' in contrast to the 'man of letters'. And readers of the 'sketch' are themselves engaging not with reality but with a literary work and should, perhaps, think twice before mocking Crayon for his romanticised reading of the fishing literature.

I've seen discussions of this work that present it as a meditation on the respective merits of direct engagement with the world and immersion in the the written word. I think I broadly agree with that perception of it but I think it's wrong to suggest that Irving (or his narrator) comes down firmly on one side or the other. It is, in a sense, a work about writing in which the angler's art operates both as material for the writer's craft and also as its foil. I came across the work in the anthology, Fisherman's Bounty, but I've found it very thought-provoking and might need to see what other scenes and experiences Irving deals with in The Sketch Book.

Washington Irving