What fish feel,
birds feel, I don't know -
the year ending
- Basho
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| An ice-cold slab of mountain rainbow trout from a New Zealand stream after two days of trekking |
I still feel the first fish that struggled against my grip. The river was the Barwon, the gape of
its sandy mouth. I stood beside my
father, dangling stiff nylon lines and old fibreglass rods bridge-top into the
torrent below. This bridge was not
a suspension, yet when cars rolled by it rattled and shook. The rods belonged to my grandfather
who, by that time, was ravaged by Alzheimers, folded into a wheelchair, blowing
snot bubbles when he breathed. He
was an outdoors type who enjoyed camping.
When still in Finland, when the Soviets invaded, he was an army sniper,
killing many men and collecting their red stars. But he killed more redfin – European perch – in the lakes of
Finland, and continued chasing these fish in the lakes of central Victoria. A marine engineer, he would meticulously
take apart his fishing reels after each trip, greasing all the parts to make
them last. We never went angling
together, but to this day some of his old cane surf-rods are hanging from the
roof of my father’s shed.
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| Kakadu saratoga |
A fishing rod is much like a diviners stick, signalling to depths the
eyes can’t see, a thread strung tight unto another world somewhat stranger than
our ordinary. Imagination treads
this tightrope to the underworld: one reason why ‘the one that got away’
evermore resembles a plesiosaur as the factual memory of the event
recedes. Yet it is a rule that big
fish escape and small fish do not out-wrestle a line. On this day of my first caught fish I felt across my
fingertips the darting electricity of a creature that, after several violent
taps of the rod tip as it bit upon the bait, was hooked. A fishing hook is a cruel instrument
whose entire purpose is to rip into organic flesh and, once hooked, hold. Some people claim that a fish does not
experience much sensation. Yet
anyone who has struggled against a fish knows that fish do their best to resist
the line and hook that binds them to a rod and human hand. Despite the beauty of the locations
angling often calls a fisherman to, what makes angling exciting is the act of
and specific comportment towards fooling a fish, of fighting it into shore, of drawing
away from its liquid world a being that does not belong where the angler stands. The pleasure of catching a fish is
largely located in this primal cruelty, a bodily struggle between two beings,
however uneven this often seems.
Anglers call this struggle the
fight. For the first time I
felt this resistance on that bridge across the Barwon, a strange ichthyological
being direly struggling against me, fighting for its life against an
incomprehensible force. Hell for
fish lies not in the dark depths, but is upwards, in boats, on shore. A fish torn from water suffocates
slower than a human drowns, and for me there are few crueller scenes than a
waterless white bucket filled with the sporadic spasms and pouts of suffocating
fish, a scene that unfortunately occurs innumerably on piers and estuaries each
weekend.
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| A big brown trout from a New Zealand River |
I no longer kill any fish, releasing all I land unless a fellow angler,
looking desperate, asks for a fish I catch, or I cannot revive one I have
caught. My respect for wild
predatory fish and the long hours I have spent stalking them, watching them,
somewhat lessens the pleasure their flesh now provides my tongue. But that first fish I caught, a young
Australian Salmon, had its throat promptly slit, was gutted and bled, and an
hour later its flesh was firming beneath a holiday-house grill. In Istanbul, atop the Galata Bridge,
rod fishermen catch similarly small mackerel that are swiftly gutted, splayed,
grilled on the spot and sold on crunchy white rolls, bones still threading
through the flesh. My grandfather
cherished the taste of redfin, a fish native to Europe, a pest now in
Australia, brought here by the colonisers, like so many feral species, to make
them feel less homesick for the Midlands of England. Similarly, the appellation salmon, thrust upon the Australian namesake fish, is another
colonial import. The Australian
salmon is not a salmonoid, but a completely unrelated species, a fast and
powerful predator that frequents rock-hewn white-water and long surf
beaches. Pound for pound it is one
of Southern Australia’s best fighting fish. Some years ago I was on a pier when a school of kilo-plus
fish surrounded the pylons.
Anglers slaughtered them, hauling in great numbers, tiling the wooden
planks with fish. When the school
dispersed one of the fishermen asked me, with 30 noble salmon shimmering and
suffocating around his wet feet, what type of fish it was and whether it was
edible. They are a mainstay of the
pet food industry I told him, generally not noted for the delectable quality of
their flesh. Two nights past, on
another pier, a group of budding men, drunk and loud, caught a young shark, 40
centimetres long. They were
hyenas, cackling, dangerous, swinging the shark around by its tail. From a corner of the pier a thick accent
emerged, If you not eat the shark you put
it back to sea. The hyenas
hesitated, then the speaker stepped forth, an elderly Maltese man who looked
like he had spent his life on piers atop the sea: If you not eat the fish, you release him. Maybe it was the moon behind him, or the way his voice,
supported by the ocean wind, grew larger as it approached, but the man holding
the shark quickly flung it back into the water where, despite the violent whack
of the surface, it dove into the deep, its life regained.
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| A Darwin golden trevally |
The cruelty of hooking and fighting a wild fish is of a different order
to the cruelty that, reifying life into an object of utility, allows a fish to
slowly suffocate in a plastic bucket, or the remorseless industrial fishing
practices that are indiscriminately pillaging the sea so that seafood eaters
needn’t slice the living throats of the fish they eat and cat owners can buy
cheap tins of meat. At the
conclusion of Earnest Hemingway’s The Old
Man and the Sea, a bourgeois couple comment tritely upon the shark-ravaged
carcass of a proud billfish, as though it were these alienated gazes themselves
that had carved up the noble billfish, the latter a symbol of a less alienated
relation to the natural world.
They cannot see the epic struggle between the living fish and the old
fisherman, nor the pathos and respect the fisherman bears towards the deceased
billfish. They see an object, a
‘fish’, that is useless to them because sharks have eaten its flesh. At best it is a spectacle, a photo. The tragedy is lost on them. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his
essay The Gift, describes how, in
‘archaic’ societies, one could not simply take from nature in the way that the
term ‘natural resource’, in its
ordinary usage, suggests. The
latter term orientates us towards ‘the natural’ as a resource wholly at the
beck and call of utility. The German
existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger describes this orientation as enframing: enframing sets-up the natural world – it presents it by perspectivally
privileging a particular mode of revealing the natural world to us - as a mere
resource, a ‘standing-reserve’.
Heidegger argues that this mode of revealing the natural as a
standing-reserve, at hand and ready for human domination and exploitation, is a
revealing made possible by an outlook inherent in technology. Yet technology itself is not a bad
thing if one holds a creative or poetic relationship towards it and the way it
unveils an aspect of the natural, keeping in mind the danger inherent in its
outlook, the danger of reifying beings into mere number and use-value. For example, power produced through
fossil fuels discloses and bestows a very different relationship between humans
and the Earth than the relation set up by solar power. Similarly, the technology of an
industrial fishing vessel unveils the being of a fish in a manner vastly different
to that of the technologies of polarized lens sunglasses and the high-modulus
carbon fibre fly rod and reel of a fly-fisherman stalking a wild trout in an
alpine river. Returning to Mauss,
the ‘archaic’ societies he describes in The
Gift did not see the natural as a free resource, at-hand for mass
exploitation and domination, but as belonging to a cosmology wherein matters of
economy, environment, culture and religion were inseparable. What was taken from nature was in fact
a gift that had to be returned - often via forms of sacrifice – in order for
the relation between humans and nature to be kept in balance and thus able to
sustainably reproduce itself from year to year. One respected what was killed or taken from nature as a
being belonging to this total world, as something still mysterious,
participating in forces beyond human understanding. Objects and beings are no less ontologically mysterious
today. Yet rarely do we confront the mystery of how a thing is. Our secular world smoothly effaces the irreconcilable
difference inherent in things. For
this difference – in part pointed towards by the difference between the
signifier and the signified, the impossibility of congruence between the sign
and the thing – discloses both the arbitrariness of signification and the
precariousness of all we think we know.
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| A New Zealand lake |
Sometimes when I am angling it occurs to me that I am standing in a
mystery. I muster such an intense
concentration upon the act of casting and retrieving a lure, upon the
technologies of rod, reel, braided line and the way these sensitive instruments
disclose to me a certain terrain mostly hidden beneath a glowing, shifting
surface, that I am able to retrieve my senses from the secular familiarity
offered by signs and re-cognizable forms and see that which surrounds me as I
have never seen it before. For
indeed I have never seen it before, the ceaseless becoming of the glimmering
water, the reflections that grow and fade with the movement of the wind, clouds
and sun, and the quivering of leaves on overhanging trees, their branches
lazily swaying. A quiet rapture
sets in, focused on a rod, a lure and a potential fish. Generally I wear polarized sunglasses,
which disperse the most silver reflections, allowing me to see partly into the
deep until the water swallows up and holds to itself all reflected light. Sometimes I can see a fish following my
lure, an alien being in a foreign world, darting to and thro curiously,
mouthing the lure and then, my heart gasping, collapsing into itself, next unfolding
breathlessly, the fish attacks and is hooked. Though generally one cannot see the fish, and it is the
violent tweaks of the rod tip, at other times a sly and gentle twitch, that
tell me there is a fish down there preying upon my lure. This concentration is not unlike
meditation where one is wholly focussed upon ones breath. But with angling one is focussed upon a
technology and the world it reveals, in an environment that is often beautiful,
and I’ve spent thousands of dollars purchasing the lightest line, rods and
reels such that these technologies disappear into an accentuation of my own
senses, my nerves tenderly leaving my flesh and streaking into the water,
through the sky’s reflection, towards a fish. When I have hooked a fish the fight takes place as though inside me, as though I were the
lake or river and each flick of the fish’s dorsal or tail fin sends shockwaves
through my delicate banks. I sense
the fear of the fish as it struggles, yet also its pride and predatory
fierceness, its will to resist. I
use light line to give the fish a real chance of escape. I do not ignore the cruelty, but
experience it as tragedy, the affective excitement dividing the seconds into
years as, one moment, the fish takes a powerful run and seems destined to
escape; the next, I’ve gained some ground and am reaching for my net, then the
fish again makes a run and in a dash of light, with a fling of water streams
away from sight. I shake with
excitement, all the while respecting my opponent. When the fish is landed its living beauty outshines that of
any inanimate diamond, otherworldly, wild, surging with the very mystery of a
being that is, of its own accord, alive.
Then I let the fish
go.
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| A surface lure gobbling Siamese barb, Northern Thailand |
For what we may call human pre-history, that long brewing and over-fermenting
of the modern form whose records are kept in the bones and tools of those
ancestors unearthed by paleoanthropologists, humans hunted all the animals they
ate. Although the thoughts and
ideologies of humans are the fickle matter of changing histories, the flesh
that houses these phenomena takes much longer to change. In The
Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche traces the origin of bad
conscience to an anthropological leap in pre-history, from the long period of
hunting/gathering to settled, agrarian social groups. The human organism, its instincts shaped by the hunting/gathering style
of life, was used to expending its energy in hunting and pursuing prey, taking
long walks gathering, living from day to day. Such hunter/gatherers, when moved to agrarian conditions,
would be akin to placing a free and wild dingo into a suburban backyard. The instincts useful to hunting and
gathering of course, taking countless millennia to perfect, could not adjust
quickly to agrarian lifestyles, even though consciousness could. Hence Nietzsche contends that these
unexpended instincts turned inwards, hunting the very human organism itself,
creating a conscience to hunt consciousness. Indeed, one need merely consider the degree of cruelty upon
oneself and others that the moral religious conscience takes pleasure in. There are forms of cruelty that affirm
life and forms that degrade life: cruelty has a way of orientating us towards
other beings, opening their being to us in a unique manner. For cruelty is a force subjugating
another force, taking pleasure in this subjugation, and the more equal these
forces are the more fully one force must disclose and give recognition to that
which struggles against it. Hence
the Hegelian master cannot recognise himself in the slave whom he subjugates,
the slave giving no resistance. To
give ‘recognition to’ is to acknowledge the independence of another. Hence those forces which most resist
each other are most independent in their beings, yet this independence can only
be recognised by the intimate contiguity of struggle with the most equal. Cruelty gives the least recognition of
the independence of a thing’s being when the relation between a subjugating and
subjugated force are most utterly unequal. For an industrial fishing vessel, each fish is merely a
market value, a commodity, the independent being of a fish hardly recognised as
anything other than an economic resource.
The stakes between boat, long line and fish are hideously unequal, and
the ‘consumer’, eating dinner after another long day sitting in the office, is
completely alienated from the living being of the fish and its death. On the other hand the catch and release
angler, using finesse fishing tackle, has an intimate relation with his or her
quarry, just as humans have for most of history when hunting. The technology the angler uses only
makes the fight between the angler and fish more dramatic, equal and intimately
experienced. Using lures means the
fish is caught whilst itself intent on consuming a smaller prey. It comes as no surprise that much
Japanese fishing tackle, the best designed in the world, carries connotations
of the Samurai tradition. Indeed,
one series of reels, designed by Yuki Ito, the founder of the aesthetically
orientated tackle brand Megabass, has etched into their spools the characters Ki Shu Bu Shin, which translate as Hand of the Devil, Buddha heart:
although this fishing tackle gives you the power of a devil’s hand, do not
forget your compassion.
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| Megabass Kirisame... JDM angling aesthetic ecstasy! |
The catch and release angler, without a bad conscience,
releases his or her fish as a sign of respect, an acknowledgment of the fish’s
life, its fight and its capacity to grow and breed. If a sacrifice takes place, it is the amount of money and
time expended upon an activity that, if one refuses to kill and keep fish,
provides no economic return, no causa
finalis subordinated to utility.
In this way the sports angler is not dissimilar to an artist, creating
aesthetic situations in beautiful locations where one can experience anew ones
relation to the world, nature and to the being of things that inhabit such
environments. But where they
differ is that, whilst the experience of the creative artist generally leads to
the memento-mori of a finished art object, the experience of the angler and his
prized quarry is, apart from a photo, mutable: it returns back into the mystery
of the Being that gave it birth just as the glimmer of a released fish returns
to a river’s depth, as lost to time and the clarity of memory as a wisp of
cloud reflected atop a babbling stream.
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| Just another New Zealand river... |
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| A lovely little brown trout from an Otways stream, Victoria |
