letters to the editor

I've been reading the latest issue of Improve Your Coarse Fishing, 'Britain's best selling fishing monthly', and particularly enjoying the letters to the editor. There's one from Malcolm Wiltshire, who reports using some of the tactics recommended in the magazine and landing 'a blood-warming catch of 40lb, including seven bream to 5lb and dozens of roach to a pound.' The editor responds by congratulating him on the catch and adds, 'It goes to show you can never be absolutely sure what your day holds'.

I wrote here about the trope of the 'day of fishing' (not the morning or afternoon or couple of hours in the evening) and here it is again - the day seems the natural unit for these pithy comments about the character of the sport. And I'm also interested that the moral of the story is taken as being 'you never know'. I suppose that's one way to read the original letter. It was a very cold day in the middle of winter and no one thought the writer of the letter would land anything at all, but, in fact, he pulled out a catch that was enough to 'warm the blood'. Isn't it a matter of skill to know which bait to use, though? Certainly, the letter was offered in gratitude for good advice. Yet Kev, the editor, has turned it into a kind of hymn to fortune. Tyche is at work here in the fishing venues of Sussex.

In another letter, Les Major tells a story that also feels familiar. He describes the process that the angler goes through to prepare:

You spend hundreds of pounds on fishing gear, read the fishing magazines, learn all about how to use the best baits, what depth to fish at and whether to try the Method or hair-rig a bait. Then you sit there and wait, and wait and wait. Not even a knock.

But then, as he tells it, a group of 'youngsters' show up. They have only one rod, no hook - they borrow his, no bait - they borrow his, and a strange technique - they do odd things with the float. But they hook a fish immediately and have to borrow his net to land it. This sounds a lot like the incident in Washington Irving's story, 'The Angler', when the narrator and his friends go fishing in the Upper Hudson Valley and are completely out-classed by an 'urchin' with an earthworm as bait and a bent pin as a hook.

Actually, the two versions of the trope aren't told for the same reasons. Irving's story has more to do with the lack of worldliness shown by the narrator and his friends. Everything they know, they know from books and, in fact, the narrator himself prefers to retreat back into reading after just half an hour on the river. But the letter in the magazine, although it does include a reference to reading - 'you ... read the fishing magazines' - seems not so much about self-satire as a comment on the mysterious matter of fishing itself. He ends the letter with the question, 'Should I ask these lads how to do it?', and Kev doesn't offer a reply, although the letter has been given the title 'Lucky Blighters'. It is, once again, a story about fortune.

There are other kinds of letters in the magazine. One discusses the reintroduction of otters into British rivers. Another talks about the system for administering fishing licenses. And a third raises the question of whether artificial baits are harmful to fish. Collectively they examine questions about the ethics and regulation of fishing. But it's interesting to me that they are mixed in with that other type of letter - those 'tales from the water's edge' that remake what are quite traditional stories to reaffirm some more fundamental sense of what fishing is really like.

Head of the goddess Fortuna by Skopas Minor (F l a n k e r) [CC-BY-3.0 (http: //creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.]

salted fish and flattery

Today some Roman history ... told by a Greek and involving fishing rods.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, Caesar's ally, Marc Antony, played a central role in the military campaign against the assassins and then began to consolidate his own power base. He formed an alliance with Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt and subsequently became her lover, spending the winter of 41-40 BC with her in Alexandria. The Greek historian, Plutarch, describes Marc Antony's stay in Egypt as a time of play and folly. Cleopatra tried to entertain her lover and keep him happy: 'Were [he] serious or disposed to mirth, she had at any moment some new delight or charm to meet his wishes.' (The translation is Dryden's.)

They played dice. They drank. They hunted. When he exercised, she went along to watch. They would go out at night disguised as servants 'to disturb and torment people at their doors and windows'. (Plutarch tells us that 'from these expeditions he often came home very scurvily answered, and sometimes beaten severely, though most people guessed who it was.') But one of the most striking of these 'follies' took place in the context of a fishing trip:

He went out one day to angle with Cleopatra, and, being so unfortunate as to catch nothing in the presence of his mistress, he gave secret orders to the fishermen to dive under water, and put fishes that had already been taken upon his hooks, and these he drew so fast that the Egyptian perceived it.

This tale is reminiscent of others in which the rich and powerful demand continuous flattery, their delusions of competence - and even brilliance - perpetually reinforced. Clever advisers must lose to them at chess and athletic bodyguards at tennis. Terrible paintings must be admired and dire poetry wondered at. The entourage must slouch so that the tiny man looks bigger. Reality must be reshaped so that the leader seems wiser, stronger, taller, wittier, better-looking, more discerning, more noble, and more astute than could ever in fact be the case.

There are two sides to this dynamic. Presented in serious mode, the vanity of the leader is the sign of an unstable and frightening world in which there is no real justice, where talent goes unrewarded, and where experience unfolds in a capricious, cruel, and arbitrary fashion.  Seen in comic mode, however, the trope communicates a much more reassuring message concerning the equality of persons, the hollowness of power, and the fragile condition of the dictator's authority. Perhaps there is a dialectical relationship between these moments or a characteristic alternation, the horror of capricious power interacting with the absurdity of pretension.

In Plutarch's account of the fishing trip, the trick is - in fact - revealed:

[F]eigning great admiration, [Cleopatra] told everybody how dexterous Antony was, and invited them next day to come and see him again. So, when a number of them had come on board the fishing-boats, as soon as he had let down his hook, one of her servants was beforehand with his divers and fixed upon his hook a salted fish from Pontus. Antony, feeling his line give, drew up the prey, and [...], as may be imagined, great laughter ensued.

But Cleopatra turns her trick once again toward the flattery of Antony, suggesting that his lack of skill in fishing is almost a sign of his strength in other areas of life:

'Leave,' said Cleopatra, 'the fishing rod, general, to us poor sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus; your game is cities, provinces, and kingdoms.'

And, in fact, Plutarch also tells us that the population of Alexandria in general regarded Antony's 'follies' in this way: '[They said] they were much obliged to Antony for acting his tragic parts at Rome, and keeping comedy for them.'

So this is a story about the interaction of the trivial and the weighty - the question of whether the 'greatness' of the 'great' is visible in every area of life or in their very neglect of the ordinary for that which is worthy of their attention. And it raises the question of whether fishing itself is a metonymic image of life as a whole or rather an interlude in the relentless march of days - a moment of respite when something different can happen and the the balance of life might be restored.

A packet of salted fish. [Image by David [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.]

grandeur and vulgarity

Does the presence of an angler enhance the beauty of a rural landscape or detract from it? Should a painter add the figures of fishermen to scenes of pastoral beauty or omit them if they are actually there in reality? Strange though these questions may be, they did in fact receive discussion in previous eras and that's what I want to write about today.

In 1786, William Gilpin - the great theorist of the 'picturesque' - published a two-volume work with the title Observations relative chiefly to picturesque beauty made in the year 1772 on several parts of England particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland. The work is essentially a travel narrative but, as he goes along, Gilpin comments continuously on the extent to which particular locations and vistas can offer an experience of picturesque beauty to the observer.

His account of this aesthetic category is complex - it is not entirely a property of a landscape but arises in the interaction between the human observer and the external prospect. In particular, it involves a certain kind of experience of pleasure in the act of looking. And, since nature is not always 'properly' picturesque, it may require some enhancement when it is translated into imagery by the artist or text by the poet.

Heading south past Great and Little Mell Fell towards the north shore of Ullswater, Gilpin observes that the area is 'well inhabited':

It was about the time of a statute-fair; when the young people of the country leave their old services, and go to their new: and we were not a little entertained with the simplicity, and variety of the several groups and figures we met, both on horseback, and on foot.

He is prepared to see these figures as picturesque enhancements to the landscape. But he balks at seeing labourers with the tools of their trades - 'the spade, the scythe, and the rake' - as appropriate elements in a composition that aspires to any grandeur. He remarks that that which gives moral pleasure - scenes of 'cultivation', for example - do not give aesthetic pleasure, for 'the picturesque eye [...] ranges after nature untamed by art, and bursting wildly into all its irregular forms'. The same, he adds, applies to human figures:

In a moral view, the industrious mechanic is a more pleasing object, that the loitering peasant. But in a picturesque light, it is otherwise. The arts of industry are rejected; and even idleness, if I may so speak, adds dignity to a character. Thus the lazy cow-herd resting on his pole; or the peasant lolling on a rock, may be allowed in the grandest scenes; while the laborious mechanic, with his impliments [sic] of labour, would be repulsed.

 This leads Gilpin on to consider the representation of anglers in paintings:

The fisherman, it is true, may follow his calling upon the lake: but he is indebted for this privilege, not to his art; but to the picturesque apparatus of it - his boat, and his nets, which qualify his art. They are the objects: he is but an appendage. Place him on the shore, as a single figure, with his rod, and line; and his art would ruin him. In a chearful glade, along a purling brook, near some mill, or cottage, let him angle, if he please: in such a scene the picturesque eye takes no offence. But let him take care not to introduce the vulgarity of his employment in a scene of grandeur.

There is clearly a politics to the judgements that are made here, a point that has been much discussed in contemporary scholarship on the picturesque. For Gilpin, economic activity has to be erased from the landscape in order to preserve its aesthetic qualities and the working people of the region are welcome only if they leave their tools at home and, ideally, dress in 'long folding draperies' or as 'gypsies, bandittit, and soldiers, - not in modern regimentals, but as Virgil paints them, "- longis adnixi hastis, et scuta tenentes"' (i.e. 'learning on spears and bearing shields').

But how do work, leisure, and the aesthetics of the countryside interact in our own perceptions of fishing? I came across an ethnographic study by Massimiliano Mollona - Made in Sheffield - which argues that 'fishing is an act of working-class appropriation of nature and urban spaces against speculations, relocations, diversions and enclosures by capitalists, aristocrats, bureaucrats and middle-class environmentalists'. And he points to a kind of aesthetic judgement on the part of 'middle-class anglers' for whom 'coarse fishing is a debasing sport because it is practised collectively in domesticated places (artificial ponds, urban canals and redeveloped "brownfields") with domesticated fish.'

I don't know if middle-class anglers really do see coarse fishing as a 'debasing' sport but the aesthetic conflict implicit in this political division does seem recognisable - the 'artificial pond' with its 'domesticated fish' set against the romantic image of the sparkling trout stream or the 'noble salmon' with its strange and heroic ways of living and dying. The mention of the 'urban canal' as the site of a 'working-class appropriation' reminds me of my walks out east through the old industrial areas on the edge of the city centre and of another type of nature - 'modern nature'? - that contrasts with the 'romantic nature' associated by Derek Jarman with the Kent of Constable and Palmer.

This work by the 19th-century US painter Thomas Moran depicts the 17th-century artist, Salvator Rosa, sketching a group of banditti. Shortly after mentioning bandits as adding to the character of 'a scene of grandeur', Gilpin refers to Rosa as one whose works were a 'model' of how to incorporate the human figure into a landscape.

mucus

The slipperiness of a fish arises largely from the fact that 'single-celled glands in [its] epidermis' produce a fibrous secretion, which 'swells up in water to form a thick layer of viscous mucus'. This mucus has a range of different functions - protecting the animal from 'infections and parasites', lessening 'the danger of damage to the skin through collisions', allowing the fish 'to escape the grasp of predators', 'seal[ing] the body' to prevent the exchange of ions and water', and 'reduc[ing] frictional drag during locomotion'. (All these quotations come from John J. Videler's book, Fish Swimming.)

The parrot-fish even wears a 'nightgown' of mucus, a kind of transparent 'garment' which it takes half an hour to produce, starting at its mouth and incorporating a flap at either end. The New Scientist in January 1960 reported that the fish 'spins the nightgown while leaning against coral or hiding inside conch shells' and added '[e]xperiments have proved that the gelatinous feel of the garment discourages the appetite of the moray eel.' On waking up, the parrot-fish swims away and leaves the garment behind it in the water.

Some fish produce no mucus. Others produce vast quantities of it, the hagfish, for example, which generates the stuff in prodigious quantities:















To be slimy is to be strange ... but to be slippery is useful. (Turkish wrestlers cover themselves with oil to make it more difficult for their opponents.) I need to produce some psychological mucus to stop people getting hold of me...

contemplation 1

The full title of Izaak Walton's book is The Compleat Angler; or, the Contemplative Man's Recreation, and, in associating angling with the cultivation of wisdom, I think we tend to see the contemplative aspects of the sport as an essential aspect of that process. Perhaps then it would be useful to think more actively about contemplation, and, with that in mind, I shall write some posts on the subject, beginning with one on the diversity of contemplative practice.

This is on my mind because recently I've been reading two different texts that provide guidance on the subject of contemplation - the Buddhist work known as the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta, which I mentioned here, and the Spiritual Exercises of St Francis Loyola. The first originated in the 5th century BC and was  transmitted orally until it was written down in the late 1st century BC. It describes the foundational practices through which the bikkhu (or monk) cultivates sati (or mindfulness). The latter dates from the 1520s and consists of a cycle of prayers and meditations that are completed over a four-week period and take the practitioner through a number of scriptural topics including Sin, the Life of Jesus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. What interests me here is that, although both are - I think fairly obviously - concerned with contemplation, they are very different in the specific nature of the contemplative practice they recommend. 

The Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta describes the cultivation of a state in which one is fully grounded in the present - wholly focused in the here and now. The text examines four objects of contemplation that are involved in this process - body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities.  But at the basis of them all is the continuous awareness of one’s own breathing.

There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out.

Practitioners do not attempt to exercise control over their breathing. They simply direct their attention to it:

Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’

The awareness of breathing constitutes a kind of ground against which bodily sensations and mental events become visible. It provides a means by which those events can be watched as if from a position separate from them - not directly involved with them. As those events occur, they interrupt the focused consciousness of breathing and hence become objects to be observed rather than states with which the subject identifies.

The Spiritual Exercises, by contrast, do not lead practitioners to watch their own bodily sensations and mental processes as if from a distance. They employ the imagination in the production of objects of contemplation. So, for example, after the preparatory prayer which begins each exercise, the retreatant works on the 'first prelude' which involves ‘the construction of the place’ against which the object of contemplation is set:

[I]n every meditation or contemplation about a bodily thing, as for example about Christ, we must form, according to a certain imaginary vision, a bodily place representing what we contemplate; as the temple, or a mountain, in which we may find Christ Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, and the other things which concern the subject of our contemplation. 

But it may be that the object of contemplation is not ‘a bodily thing’:

[I]f the subject of meditation be an incorporeal thing, as is the consideration of sins [the subject of the first exercise], the construction of place may be such as if by imagination we see our soul in this corruptible body, as confined in a prison; and man himself, in this vale of misery, an exile among brute animals.

And so the practice begins with the exercise of the imagination in evoking a place, either literal or figurative, as the ground against which the meditation may take place.

 Following the prayer and first prelude, retreatants come to the second prelude, which involves the emotions. And, again, rather than watching any emotions that arise (as recommended in the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta), they work on evoking the emotions appropriate to that day's object of contemplation.

[I]f I am to meditate concerning the Resurrection of Christ, I must ask for joy wherewith I may rejoice together with Christ rejoicing: but if concerning the Passion, let me ask tears, pains, and anguish, in order that I may suffer together with Christ suffering. 

Crucially, retreatants do not try to arouse such as feelings as joy or anguish for themselves. Rather, they request that the appropriate emotion be present to them - that it be bestowed upon them as they contemplate the particular scriptural episode occuring in the place that they have 'constructed'.

I've outlined these two approaches to 'contemplation' because I think there's a slight danger of our assuming that we already know what we mean by this term. But 'contemplation' is, in fact, an umbrella term for a wide range of practices, all of which involve some kind of disciplining of the attention but which vary considerably in terms of where that attention is directed and how it is manifest. It can be a focus on something immediate and present. It can involve the observation of the self from some 'deeper' place or some 'distant' point. It can be built upon the imaginative 'construction' of a place and a scene in the mind's eye. It can manifest as a focused request for some kind of experience or condition.

What then do we mean when we say that fishing is contemplative? What do those engaged in that practice contemplate? And what mental resources do they use in the act of contemplation?

This image has nothing to do with either the  Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta or St Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. It is a sculpture from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, dating from about 460 BC, and it is often known as the 'Contemplative Athena'. See page for author [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

dear to hermes

A quick post for the last day of my holiday - it's another quotation from Oppian's Halieutica and it describes the qualities that you need to fish successfully. All participants in the project must examine themselves carefully to see whether they have them:

First of all the fisher should have body and limbs both swift and strong, neither over fat nor lacking in flesh. For often he must fight with mighty fish in landing them — which have exceeding strength so long as they circle and wheel in the arms of their mother sea. And lightly he must leap from a rock; and, when the toil of the sea is at its height, he must swiftly travel a long way and dive into the deepest depths and abide amongst the waves and remain labouring at such works as men upon the sea toil at with enduring heart. Cunning of wit too and wise should the fisher be, since many and various are the devices that fishes contrive, when they chance upon unthought-of snares. Daring also should he be and dauntless and temperate and he must not love satiety of sleep but must be keen of sight,wakeful of heart and open-eyed. He must bear well the wintry weather and the thirsty season of Sirius; he must be fond of labour and must love the sea. So shall he be successful in his fishing and dear to Hermes.

I'm quite good in the thirsty season of Sirius and could probably leap lightly from a rock. I don't know if I'm dauntless and temperate, though, and I do love a satiety of sleep.

Sirius A and B. [Image by NASA, ESA Credit: H. Bond (STScI) and M. Barstow (University of Leicester) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.]

cunning devices

Fishing involves trickery - baited hooks and artificial lures - but fish, it seems, use ruses too. In the second century AD the Greek poet, Oppian, wrote the Halieutica, a long work focused on the fisherman's art. Book III of the poem (which begins with an invocation to Hermes. the god of both tricks and fishing) emphasises exactly this point:

Fishes ... not only against one another employ cunning wit and deceitful craft but often also they deceive even the wise fishermen themselves and escape from the might of hooks and from the belly of the trawl when already caught in them, and outrun the wits of men, outdoing them in craft, and become a grief to fishermen.

The poem is mainly concerned with sea-fishing but it does talk about angling as well as fishing with nets. The following are tricks played by fish when caught with a hook and line:

      The Basse, when smitten by the point of the bent hook, leaps on high and incessantly presses its head violently on the line itself, till the wound becomes wider and it escapes destruction.
      The mighty Orcynus employ a similar device. For when they have seized the jaw of the guileful hook, swiftly they strain and rush to the nether depths, putting pressure on the hand of the fisher; and if they reach the bottom, straightway they beat their head against the ground and tear open the wound and spit out the barb.
      But when giant fishes swallow the landed hooks — such as the tribes of the Ox-ray and the Sea-sheep and the Skate or the sluggish race of the Hake — they will not yield to it but throwing their flat bodies in the sands they put all their weight upon the line and cause trouble to the fishermen, and often they get free from the hook and escape.
      The swift Amia and the Fox-sharks, when they are hooked, straightway hasten upward to forestall the fisher and speedily bite through with their teeth the middle of the line or the extreme hairs. Therefore for them the fishermen forge a longer socket on the hook, as a protection against their teeth.
      The Cramp-fish, moreover, forgets not its cunning in the pain of being struck, but straining in its agony it puts its flanks against the line, and straightway through the horse-hair and through the rod runs the pain which gives the fish its name and lights in the right hand of the fisher; and often the rod and the fishing-tackle escape from his palm. Such icy numbness straightway settles in his hand.

Apparently the 'Cramp-Fish' is what is now known as an electric ray  and, if you look hard, you can see one among the fish represented in this mosaic from a Roman villa in Catalunya (3rd century AD). (I've turned the contrast up a bit, so it's easier to see.)