Below are some collected thoughts about the relationship between writing, drawing and fly fishing, bearing in mind Daniel’s findings about peat and pre-tools and our exploration of tool use. How do the tools we use influence the way we think—or, how do the tools we use influence the way we think about the way we think?
In dry-fly[i] fishing the artificial fly attracts the fish more by its movement than its plumage[ii]. With practised movements of the arm, wrist and fingertips[iii] the experienced angler can create on the surface of the water an imitation of life[iv] compelling enough to deceive the predator[v] lying beneath. The deception is most effective when the fly imitates the diet of the fish being courted[vi], according to season, time of day, and position in the water. Should the fish make an offer on the fly, the angler continues the performance for a few beats, allowing the fish to take the bait some way into its body[vii] before it realizes the trick too late and the hook is driven home[viii] in a single decisive tug. Once the fish is firmly hooked there is another kind of driving home, which anglers call the play,[ix] by which the fish is kept in the water as it grows exhausted trying to extract itself from the line. You tire it out,[x] gradually making it yours[xi], until it no longer belongs to the water[xii] but to you[xiii].
[i] dry-fly. Wet-fly fishing is another matter: “dry-fly fishing is beautiful, productive, and deeply satisfying, but it is child’s play compared with the subtle and deadly craft of fishing the sunk fly effectively. […] Put another way, the dry-fly man will catch fish when they are obviously feeding (on floating flies). The expert wet-fly man will take fish (if there are any at all takable) when they are not obviously feeding on anything at all.” Maurice Wiggin, Fly Fishing, 55.
[ii] plumage. It is not uncommon to use quills to make artificial flies. “Being light and hollow, quill floats well; wound in neat, touching turns up the hook shank, quill also gives a good effect of the segmentations of a natural insect’s body.” McCully, Fly-Fishing, 174.
When quills are used in calligraphy the plumage is trimmed and stripped away and the shaft is clipped so it balances well in the hand.
From a single feather I suppose you could make a pen and a handful of flies.
[iii] With practised movements of the arm, wrist and fingertips the experienced calligrapher can create on the surface of the page an imitation of life compelling enough to capture the predator lying beneath—no, not quite. But I imagine the calligrapher doing the same work as the fly fisher. The line is cast onto the surface of the page, and as it moves something is drawn out from the depths—but what depths? The depth of the stream into which Thought lets down its line? The depth of the unconscious, of the night-sea journey? The depth of the flood that plunged all of creation into a total sea? The white depth of fog of the empty page before the first pencil mark is dropped into it, like a fish into a tank? (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 5; Barth, Night-Sea Journey; Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, 42; Berger, On Drawing, 5.)
What kind of calligraphy would wet fly fishing be? The line passing through the surface and moving in the water in three dimensions, sometimes brushing a flank or a fin—
[iv] an imitation of life. Once the line is landed in the water: “Follow it round reluctantly with the rod tip. Don’t lead it, or you will momentarily ease the tension of the current and lose touch with your flies. As it swings round, gently raise and lower your rod tip, about a foot of movement each way, up and down. This will help to give your flies a darting, fluttering motion in the water. Never forget that they are supposed to simulate tiny fish, struggling in the current” (Wiggin, Fly Fishing, 71).
“You are trying to convince a fish that here at the end of your line is a tiny, succulent morsel of fish-life—in trouble. A bit of a slip of a fry, struggling to maintain itself against the current. Easy meat, in fact, for a predator.” Ibid., 63.
I wish the fly could leave a trace of its movement on the surface of the water as it moved, and afterwards I could look at it. Not the ripples and concentric rings it naturally leaves in its wake, but the line of its movement, as though it were a stylus and the water were paper. What lively scribbles they would be. I try to imagine the line, but the water moves too much. It is impossible to conjure in my mind the geometry of such a line as the water’s surface bounces and dips and ushers the fly downstream even as my wrist raises and lowers the rod to animate it against the current.
I remember the way Nicolete Grey described calligraphic lettering. “The results are the most elaborate drawn letters known, superb creations, great swirling lines moving out of some dark centre in a cloud of gossamer curls; they are like some whirlpool, or a Leonardo drawing of water.” She offered as an example C. F. Brechtel’s letter V. Lettering as Drawing: The Moving Line, 61.
I don’t see the fluidity Grey describes. The composition of the letter is amply balanced; the hand is so certain and sure; the thickest lines will have been outlined first, then filled in with ink. The lines might be drawings of flourishes, but they are not the flourishes themselves. Did Brechtel know exactly how his letter V would look when he began to cast his line onto the page? If so, is his really a line cast, or a line laid out?
I would like to see his preparatory sketches.
Then again, I would like to watch an angler practise casting repeatedly onto a scrap of paper laid on the grass, learning not to startle a catch. I have read that you can do this.
“It is purely and simply a matter of practice. You won’t be able to do it without a lot of practice. Put a saucer on the lawn and cast at it—or, I should say, over it—for hours on end.” (Wiggin, Fly Fishing, 96-7)
It was a saucer after all. I misremembered it as a scrap of paper.
[v] predator. Calling the fish the predator is an uncomfortable reversal; so is giving life to the fly to take the life of the fish.
[vi] the fly imitates the diet of the fish being courted. To identify the fish’s diet you can gut it on the bank as soon as it is caught and killed, and examine the contents of its stomach. The least digested of the food, which was most recently eaten, is the food you imitate.
Autopsy, from Ancient Greek autopsíā: seeing with one’s own eyes.
Imagine Tender Buttons, the book of unfamiliar descriptions by Gertrude Stein, is really an array of autopsies. “ROASTBEEF. Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapour and slender butter, all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkning drunk, all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness, all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry.” Imagine these lines are the stomach contents of roast beef as Gertrude Stein examined them. Or imagine that, having turned out the contents of the stomach and studied them, these lines are the play of a fly she constructed especially, to lure and capture and gut the meat again and again.
Imagine that whenever you write, the movement of your pen is the movement of the fly, trying to coax up onto the surface of the page a thing you know so intimately the contents of its stomach are still wet your fingers.
[vii] take the bait some way into its body. The fish is persuaded to swallow the fly because it seems to be something of its own world: alive, soft, meaty, familiar. When it accepts into its body a real morsel of living food nothing much happens: flesh digests flesh and absorbs it into itself, their substances coming together in a kind of caress, even if it is partly fatal. (Levinas: the caress does not know what it seeks.) The artificial fly promises such a caress, but the hook it conceals never takes its eye off the fish, and it waits until it is swallowed (hook line and sinker) before its glare pierces the soft palette of the mouth.
[viii] the hook is driven home, home usually being the soft palette of the fish’s mouth or, if the fly is already swallowed, the lining of the stomach.
[ix] the play. “This steering involves not only sensitivity but also a kind of strong tact in knowing when to give line and when to redeem it” (McCully, Fly-Fishing, 164) and “the combined certainty and delicacy of correspondence between wrist and eye”. Skues, The Way of a Trout, 192.
I remember the way Emma Cocker describes the movement of her pencil when she draws in a restless way. A kind of tact comes into it. Her restless drawings have no object to describe apart from the drawing process itself; a process being discovered in the process of describing it. When you look at her drawings you see lines wandering across the surface.
She writes that she steers the pencil like a helmsman steers a vessel, making decisions moment by moment in response “to situations which are contingent, shifting or unpredictable” (The Restless Line, Drawing, xvii). The currents agitate the surface of the water in unpredictable ways, and to keep the ship steady every agitation needs, at that very moment, its opposite measure from the helmsman.
If the helmsman were quick and powerful enough, as quick and as powerful as the sea, then his measures would match the agitation of the waves exactly and the boat would stay precisely still, not moving or rocking at all. A dot.
Then again if the helmsman did absolutely nothing the ship would move in precise synchrony with the waves; each sail, all the weight of the mast, every splinter of decking, the mass of every living thing on board contributing their proper dynamic force to the ship’s most natural conclusion on the sea bed.
[x] You tire it out. When a fish is all played out its movements will slow and it will turn onto its flank to float at the surface of the water, alive but almost tamed into the condition of a lifeless thing. In this state it is easy to net the fish or even collect it in the hand, bringing it from the water onto the bank with little resistance.
[xi] gradually making it yours. “the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?” Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 5.
I think of Orpheus, cautious, walking back towards the light, listening for the footsteps behind him: and he can hear nothing.
[xii] until it no longer belongs to the water. At the end is the death of the fish. The death of the fish, then, is the price we pay for the catch. I remember Peter Schwenger wrote in his article Words and the Murder of the Thing: “The death of the thing, then, is the price we pay for the word.” (100)
Anglers often carry a weighted baton for cleanly killing the fish on the bankside as soon as it is caught (the baton is called a priest, for administering last rites). But inserting a long spike through the eyeball and into the hindbrain causes a swifter death. Because the fish suffers more briefly its muscles endure less thrashing, and this reduces the flow of sour lactic acid through the body improving the taste of the meat. Angus et al., Improving the Quality of Farmed Salmon by Ike Jime Harvesting.
When does flesh become meat?
A flowering stem does not die the moment it is cut, although the cut is swiftly sealed to prevent the ingression of bacteria. This inhibits transpiration, the process by which menisci in the plant’s cell walls regulate the pull of water from the soil or water vapor from the air. The cutting dies when its reserves of mineral nutrients from the soil are so depleted that transpiration slows and stops.
I remember Franz Kafka grew preoccupied with the vases of cut flowers around his hospital bed where he spent his final days and nights. Like them he was unable to swallow fluid. “Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos,” read one of the fragmented sentences he wrote during this time. Kafka, Briefe, 491?
At the end is the death of the thing. When a thing is given a name it is changed, brought out into the open, and is no longer what it was in the dark. It becomes an object: the object of the subject that named it. This is the setting for Peter Schwenger’s article, which constructs an argument upon the thought of Hegel, Heidegger, Blanchot and the recurrent biblical and literary metaphors that see language annihilating, nullifying or murdering the thing it names. But when the thing is named, he points out, it is not altogether lost, because our knowledge of it is always shadowed by “something more, namely, that there is an unknowable otherness to the thing” (Words and the Murder of the Thing, 101). Lurking in the dark is an “ineluctable presence—the thingness of the thing—that we can never grasp” and “of this we must think in exactly the measure that we are unable to think it”. Ibid., 102, 101.
What glutinous contortions, I wonder, must be made by the ineluctable thing that lurks underwater as its flank is brushed by the line, and the line coaxes it into the inkling of an idea that might conglomerate there? And what contortions could you possibly make with your line, your words, your cautious wrist, to haul it to the surface in tact?
“Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked […]. But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas”. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 5-6.
When she puts the thought back into her mind, is it really the same thought, or is it changed?
Even if the hook is clipped free or curved back through the hole it made, the hole is still there. If the fish is released it swims away punctured, with a little hole, a punctum, pierced into its flesh. The hole will seal into a little scarred nib of flesh denser and tougher than before. It becomes a fish that has been played, that has laid on its flank exhausted at the surface of the water, tamed towards death, brought up into the light and measured for length and weight. Once caught and returned to the river a wild trout “is no longer wild”. Leventon, Trout and Salmon, 2.
Neb. “The extreme forward part of the fish’s mouth (the ‘nose’) from OE nebb, cf. e.g. the nib of a pen. In angling literature, the surface of, for example, a placidly-flowing chalk stream is often broken by ‘the large neb of a rising trout’”. McCully, Fly-Fishing, 138.
Neb. “1: The beak or bill of a bird, also a person’s mouth. 2: The nose; the snout of an animal. 3: The face. 4a: A projecting part or point; a tip, a spout etc.; the extremity of something ending in a point or narrowed part. 4b: The point or nib of a pen.” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
[xiii] but to you. Perhaps Woolf’s young writer dipped her head into the water, so that when she laid out her thought on the metaphorical grass, then the grass—and everything else—was submerged as well. In this way perhaps she could have put the thought back into her mind unchanged. But how long, and how well, can one stay underwater?
Sometimes, wearing a scarf on cold days, it occurs to the blind theologian that he could equally go about with his whole head covered, not just the lower part of his face. Hull, Touching the Rock, 53.
“To a fish, the act of rising to a fly is something like a dive would be to us: quite a business, extracting energy and involving a brief contact with a deadly element in which it could not survive.” Wiggin, Fly Fishing, 56.
Imagine there are no words underwater, and words are the air that kills the thing. Imagine thoughts, like things undiscovered and undisturbed deep in an ancient peat bog, which maintain some kind of compositional integrity, chemical or biological, as long as they are undisturbed. Then brightly from above a boot stamps the hilt of a spade, cuts through a darkened skull, bends the bones and breaks the hair and lets oxygen in.
You can kill a thing by giving it a name. Then what you have named is no longer what it was in the dark; it becomes an object in relation to you: the subject with your piercing eyes.
You can imagine Tender Buttons in another way, as an attempt to give names to things themselves, and not the objects they become by being named. An exercise in overcoming death, or otherwise diving into it, submerged and never surfacing for air. Then we, the readers, are the ones who have to hold our breath and dive under with the effort it takes the fish to rise. Far from opening the stomach to capture the thing, fingers wet and oily with death, you can imagine Stein underwater, her words fleshy and darting in the dark, now and again brushing against the flank or crinkling fin of some unseen companion, and trying to put off forever the moment of coming up for breath, the moment her caress rises into bright light and language again. You can read in her words the attempt to not just to hide the hook and eye the words conceal but, as much as possible, dissolve them altogether, so that when her artificial fly persuades the fish that it too is flesh and life, it is almost true.
But it is not true. “I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible.” (Stein, A Transatlantic Interview, 18.) There must be many fatalities in Tender Buttons, many little puncta, where the words scratch and pierce the thing.