Some Philosophical reflections on Fishing, Nature and Technology

What fish feel, 

birds feel, I don't know - 

the year ending

- Basho

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.  

Just another New Zealand river...

A lovely little brown trout from an Otways stream, Victoria