the good fisherman

Here is Bruno de Querfort (974-1009), reporting St Romuald of Camaldoli's advice on meditation. (I found the quotation in Mary Carruthers' book, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400-1200).

Be seated within your cell as though in paradise; cast to the rear of your memory everything distracting, becoming alert and focussed on your thoughts as a good fisherman is on the fish. One pathway [to this state] is through reciting the Psalms; do not neglect this. If you cannot manage to get through them all [at one sitting] as you used to with the fervor of a novice, take pains to chant the psalms in your spirit, now [starting] from this place, now from that, and to interpret them in your mind.

Carruthers focuses on the role of memory in contemplative work. Indeed, she refers to the view of the Church Father, John Cassian, that 'the art of meditation is fundamentally an art of thinking with a well-furnished memory'. So the image of the fishermen figures a particular state of recollection - a focus on what is below the surface of the mind waiting to be pulled up out of the water.

Cella of Saint Romuald in Camaldoli monastery. Image by Bocachete (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

gentlemanly rules of conduct

Back here I posted about John Steinbeck's comments on the status of fishing in America. Immediately after those, he tells what he describes as 'the ideal British fishing story' and it goes like this:

Under a submerged log in a stream meandering through a beautiful meadow lies an ancient and brilliant trout which for years has outwitted the best that can be brought against him. The whole country knows him. He is called Old George. The fact that Old George has lived so long can be ascribed to the gentlemanly rules of conduct set up between trout and Englishmen. Under these rules, the fisherman must use improbable tackle and a fly Old George is known to find distasteful.

In our ideal fish story, the angler rereads Izaak Walton to brush up his philosophic background, smokes many pipes, reduces all language to grunts, and finally sets out of an evening to have a go at Old George.

He creeps near to the sunken log and drops his badly tied dry fly upstream so that it will float practically into Old George's mouth. This has been happening to Old George every summer evening for ten or fifteen years. But one evening perhaps Old George is bored. Then the fisherman, with tears streaming from his eyes, pulls poor Old George out on the grassy bank. There, with full military honors and a deep sense of sorrow from the whole community, Old George flops to his death. The fisherman eats George boiled with Brussels sprouts, sews a black band on his arm and gains the power of speech sufficiently to bore the hell out of the local pub for years to come.

I love the idea that sportsmanship requires the use of 'improbable tackle and a fly Old George is known to find distasteful'. The fish has to have sporting chance, after all - otherwise the chase would not be gentlemanly.

The perfect accompaniment for a much loved old trout. By Eric Hunt (own *work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/ fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

particular coasts

For the Greeks and Romans, an important aspect of the art of oratory was 'invention' - the process of identifying arguments to support a particular case. In the Institutes of Oratory, the first-century rhetorician Quintilian discusses the 'places' of argument - the locations, figuratively speaking, from which lines of reasoning can be derived: 'Let us now examine the places of arguments, [by which I mean] the seats of arguments in which they lie concealed and from which they must be drawn forth.' In developing this discussion, Quintilian makes use of an interesting metaphor - or rather an interesting cluster of metaphors:

[A]s all kinds of fruits are not produced in all countries, and as you will be unable to find a bird or beast if you are ignorant where it is usually produced or makes its abode, and as among the several kinds of fishes, some delight in a smooth and others in a rocky bed, while particular sorts are confined to particular regions or coasts, and you could not attract the ellops or scarus to our shores, so every kind of argument is not to be got from every place and is consequently not everywhere to be sought. [...] [I]f we ascertain where particular arguments offer themselves, we shall, when we come to the place where they lie, easily discern what is in it.

The orator is a fisherman who knows the habits of each individual species - the haunts that it frequents, the 'particular coasts'. To build a case is to read the water and identify exactly which fish can be pulled from it. It's fascinating to me that Quintilian compares argumentation to such a practical skill as if the identification of a line of reasoning can become, in the end, virtually instinctual - comparable to the hunter or fisherman's sixth sense for the presence of the prey.

Title page of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, edited by Pieter Burmann the Elder, Leiden, 1720.

an un-american thought

'I believe that certain national characteristics emerge in fishing' - this is John Steinbeck in the Weekly Sports Illustrated (4 Oct 1954). He underlines his point by comparing attitudes to angling in America, Britain, and France, and today I'll report on what he says about the US. 

Fishing, he suggests, is a compulsory aspect of American masculinity: '[A]ll Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother love or hating moonlight.' The sport must be taken seriously. Endless tackle must be purchased, vast distances covered, austerities practised. And it is all in the service of asserting one's supremacy over the fish:

The Yankee angler [...] endows the fish with great intelligence and fabulous strength, to the end that in defeating it he is even more intelligent and powerful. It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming, but this is a highly un-American thought. I hope I will not be denounced.

In a short paragraph not unlike something by Roland Barthes, he also comments on the political importance of the sport: 'No candidate would think of running for public office without first catching and being photographed with a fish'. I wonder what the equivalent is these days. Apparently Obama has a tradition of playing basketball on election days (although right now the internet is covered in videos of him missing a lot of hoops at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll).

Steinbeck characterises fishing as a sign of authenticity, dependability, and substance in American culture. But in Britain - he says - its meaning is rather different and I'll come to that in a future post...

still swimming

'Death is like a fisher who catches fish in his net and leaves them for a while in the water; the fish is still swimming but the net is around him, and the fisher will draw him up - when he thinks fit.'

(Turgenev, On The Eve)

the simple elements

Today a short quotation from The Determined Angler by Charles Bradford, a few lines on the beauty of the trout. I've been posting recently on the aesthetic dimensions of the landscape but here the fish is the focus of attention:

The Trout's Symmetry.—"Few humanly designed lines are more graceful than those of the yacht. The trout is made up of such lines. It is a submarine designed by the Almighty. It makes the most of the simple elements of artistic beauty—symmetry of line, suggestive of agile power, and delicately blended harmonies of rich color."—New York Evening Telegram, editorial page, July 17, 1915.

In view of the tensions between nature and industry in the discourse of landscape, there's something compelling about the comparison of fish to vessels such as yachts and submarines. The quotation is from 1915. Is this a modernist aesthetic - one in which industry is not subordinate to nature and a fish is beautiful to the extent that it approximates the lines of industrial design?

Schooner Eleonora (replica of Nathanael Greene Herreshoff design, 1910), pictured in the Channel Islands, 2010. Image by Impact from Wikimedia Commons. 

three fifths wordle

I've blogged for sixty days and need to blog for forty more to get to my goal of one hundred. Here's a wordle of everything so far.