An Epistolary Essay in Defense of Sorrow

         
Dear Professor of Chemistry and Distinguished Physician,
    Dear Claude and John, I feel I must babble some sort of response to your recent concern for me, your devoted old friend who poses as a critic of whatever crosses his mind. We must be off on a stroll, three old “doctors,” hand in hand, talking of many things. Which of you is the Walrus and which the Carpenter I must leave you to decide, but I am stuck in the formula as the simple old oyster: ready to comment on your shoes and ships and sealing wax…  nothing on your cabbages and only a touch or two on a king.
     Is it possible to write to you as in a letter like this and make it do double-duty as a column to blog on The Bouldercreek Angler? We shall see.

IN MEMORIUM

 Upon the Sudden Death in the Night

 on a Road near Saratoga, Wyoming
on September 3, 2010

 of

 Adrian Bantjes

Distinguished

   Professor of History

   And Historian of Angling

at

 The University of Wyoming

He who learns must suffer.

And even in our sleep,

pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

and in our despair, against our will,

comes wisdom to us

by the awful grace of god.

Aeschylus

Agamemnon  l.179ff

Edith Hamilton, translator

He was my friend and colleague

A Critique of American Fly Fishing in Two Parts

      

                                PART I

                                    IN THE BEGINNING           

    In the beginning, in colonial America, in that agrarian, rural community, where fauna were still in balance with flora and both reconciled to the vagaries of local geologies and climates, there had to have been an idyllic landscape that offered those early Americans a marvelous promise of fish and game-- of both sport and provender.

    The good and beautiful earth lay at almost every doorstep, easier for those early folks to enter upon than for us today to drive down town.

     And that is what has become of us. We are all down town in the center of things most all the time and doing quite nicely, thank you.

    But, back then, in that once upon a time, fishing was close to home, by foot or by horseback, and intimately connected to the household economy. And it was free.

    A new politics and a new economy in a new land appeared to promise that freedom of access and supply of nature’s bounty in perpetuity. There was no need to hurry and so the technology of the field sports developed but slowly. A solid wood fishing rod with a fixed horsehair line was more than adequate; and two open barrels, side by side with hammer locks, did nicely on bird or beast.

     Once upon a time, in order to enjoy, have success, and advance in the sport, fishermen went fishing close to home, usually for a few hours only. They went casually, and at little expense. A journey to a remote camp in  the  woods was a considerable undertaking and rare.

     Today, our angler regularly finds himself in the air or for days on the road, on the way to distant, often exotic territories to find the same satisfactions, and accomplishment he used to get at home-- now with a new sense of urgency if not anxiety.

     Urbanization is the great villain and moving force fueling this shift. The city has drawn our anglers into its service and some might say “bondage”. It has forced  “nature” and its pleasures farther and farther a-field and kept us in our offices. Kept us starved for fishing.

    So, what have we done? In our hours off, we have joined clubs, certainly Trout Unlimited. We have read the magazines and doted on the videos, in those hours stolen from the urban machine. A bit of “virtual” angling must often suffice.

    Then comes what once was called  “vacation”, today more flexible, less formal than the locked-in conventional two weeks of Julys-past when there were no cell phones or texting, to keep the job vibrating or ringing in our pockets. In any case, there still is time to get away and fish. Half an hour on the computer sets us up with destination and transportation. And off we go to a week in Alaska, or, as I do in my dreams, off to The Rio Grande in Patagonia. We pretty much bet our fishing season on those few days away.

   Where in the past, fishing was more relaxed and easy- going, now it is marked  by a sense of urgency. Angling success becomes urgently necessary in a new, less forgiving, way.

    The dark side of all this is to increase the expense of it. The fishing is no longer free: it costs. Sometimes a lot.  The water is likely to be private and  privileged as once it was for an aristocratically wealthy few. The rest of us have always had to depend on  free and public waters. We have been the undecorated anglers who en masse have paid the bill and kept the sport alive.

   This  en masse, we, the  anglers of the working day, since the burst in popularity of fly fishing in the mid 1980s, have enjoyed more disposable income for recreation and developed keen interest in issues of the environment. And today we are wetting our waders in the finest rivers and lakes in the world, right  along with our aristocratically wealthy betters of  the older tradition.

    And so our fishing has been transformed in our time. It has been driven by an historic irony that what we have always loved, we could readily get at home, we now chase quite cheerfully half way round the world to find it.

    Nor do we do it alone. The adventure to new and uncharted fishing, with the least possible chance of failure, requires help. And so here comes a key factor in the revolution that has overtaken our angling:  The Guide.

                                             PART II

                AND THEN THERE WAS THE GUIDE

    The meteoric rise of the Guide finds us caught in another vexing irony: that now it requires two people to catch any  given trout-- where once we did  it alone, by ourselves, and solitary. Now we do it in the company of an assistant, an instructor, a protector, caterer, and a boss.

     The angler who at one time we looked upon as a self-sufficient, internal sort of person, we now find transformed into a pupil, dependent upon a guide for instruction, landing his fish, selecting his flies, providing safety, lunch, and the conventional conversation of  the facilitator, of one who is paid to be always encouraging. His conversation becomes a lingua franca-- or guide-talk.

    Guides are an interesting lot. They are more often than not, superior young men and women, smart and capable of deep feeling, even delicacy of feeling.  But, their conversation in the service of their profession, made of current slang, and excessive effusion, grows automatic and repetitive,They feel they must keep the client’s spirits buoyed up at all costs. It’s guide-talk talking.

   Guides are often young men and women who have chucked the values of the middle class, what they call the “rat race”, and are content to live quite simply, on not much of a yearly income-- just as long as they can be allowed to fish! Fish a lot.

   They may have had a bit of college, but not enough to spoil their innocense. Instead they tie the finest flies the world has ever seen, cast the farthest, and achieve supremacy in every one of the delicacies that attend on angling skill and gear.

    They live the life that the rest of us dare not. But they depend upon us for alms. Their culture-hero is that unhappy man Thoreau in his shack by Walden Pond.  Their ideology is an uncritical devotion to Catch and Release. All of them were born under the star of Trout Unlimited. They tend to agree with each other on most every issue and so tend to sound alike, think alike, and dress alike-- always on the youthful side of maturity.

     As an occupational class, they tend to identify first with the owners of the water, then the fly shops, and lastly with the fish. The fee-paying client becomes their necessary suppliant.

    Out on the water, the guide becomes the one who “knows” and therefore is the one who “decides”-- and later, back in camp,  it is the guide who most vividly  establishes the  narrative of the day and reports on it. His narrative will often be exploited as an advertisement for his  boss, the owner.

    The guide’s reports are devoured by angling media  and become an extension of it. This becomes the stuff on which the virtual angler feeds.  He becomes a consumer of a product as commercial as any other. The client is voracious, always wanting more of the same and always something  new. He pays and so must be fed.

    Sport has indeed become an industry, business.

   In the end, it is the language of angling that suffers. The distinguished literature of angling takes a drubbing as it becomes amorphous, repetitive, and commercial.

    What is lacking is big personality and a clear voice. Before this contemporary rise in the popularity of angling and all the attendant writing about it, it was not difficult to tell the difference between the writing of giants like Ted Trueblood and Ray Bergman. Both wrote about the same subject, but with a nuanced tracing of personality, imagination, and sensibility that is the hallmark that separates literature from mere word-grubbing. I believe it fair to conclude that the guides as a professional class have absconded with the literature of angling and have made it their own. Our language has been made to pay.

                                                  ~~~

    At a book signing, once, I heard John Gierach say that for him it was the writing that came first and was most important. Then came the fish and the fishing.  Such is the primal way: first an irresistible need and craving to speak and only then to cast about for a congenial subject matter-- like angling.  Were I not writing this essay about fishing, I would surely he haranguing you about something else.

   

A Test Blog with a Piscatorial Musing

    If you are a subscriber to my blog, I wonder if you received an email alerting you to this trial posting…. In other words, is the system working for you?

     In order that this posting not be altogether without substance, let me report that recently I over-heard Piscator saying to Venator:

   “Contemporary fly tying is ingenious to a fault and superbly skilled: in these respects it has never been equaled. But the new generation of flies,” he said, “are rarely beautiful-- in the old, aesthetic and traditional way of flies.” He went on to say that there can be no doubt but that the new flies are more effective in the water than the older, now antique dressings. But, he sees the new flies as a drab and faintly melancholy spectacle with even duller names. Few if any would he want to rush home to duplicate. He would have to look long and hard to find that rare one, which might be for him like the poet Yeats’s yellow-haired girl whom only God could love for herself alone and not her yellow hair.

Male and Female Created He Them

                     

                    Hamlet and Lisbeth

                                        Caveat

    Whether or not you have read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you know the character, the man. Hamlet lives in our blood stream. We have all, in one way or another had to cope with his disruptions of our lives. We can’t avoid him; he’s everywhere. He has been elemental on the Periodic Table of our thought since Shakespeare discovered him. Now we have discovered his shadow, Lisbeth.

    You may or may not have read the sensational three Swedish novels about crime and attendant horrors by the late Stieg Larsson and so may want to dodge this diatribe in which I propose to compare and contrast Hamlet with Larsson’s main character, Lisbeth Salander. To know one is, I think, to know the other.

   Like Hamlet, Lisbeth, is also out there among us. Be warned.

                              ~

   As in electricity, there is no value assessment attributed to  the factors, positive and negative, there should be no such values attributed to my suggestion that Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is the post-modern negative of the early-modern positive Hamlet.  They are opposite sides of the same narrative coin.  Hamlet came first on the waves of a new era:  Lisbeth at the end of one, of what many feel are dark, angry days on the verge of socio-cultural recession. Both these powerful characters are structural markings of our literature and subject of our endless, if lurid, fascination-- and dreaming.

   I should like to suggest a fist-full of comparative qualities that these two important figures of our imagination define. I wish to offer some bit of support for my free-swinging assertion.

                               ~

 ~Hamlet and Lisbeth are preeminently models of the  alienation of young people. One a prince, the other a nobody-- and both Nordic.

 ~Each is a kind of dream-life for the reader-- the same set of dreams over and over again.

 ~The dream of Hamlet is the old dream of the perfection of brilliant, clear youth and all its entitlements.

 ~The dream of Lisbeth Salander is also the old dream, the panic-dream of the dark, dangerous female side of things, the diamond-carbon brilliance of her funereal persona in a minimalist body-- and our frightened male’s attraction to it.

 ~ Both of these “moderns” are badly injured in their life-experience.

 ~ Both emerge from dangerous, unwholesome family circumstances.

  ~Each dreams of  a father, a  father who is playing havoc in their lives.

  ~Hamlet dreams of a great father who appears to demand his self-destruction.

   ~Salander dreams of a monster-father on the prowl to kill her.

   ~Both want to love and be loved, but they cannot trust in it.

   ~And so both become “ironists”. They see the world as a ghastly system of ironies.

   ~They are expert in their particular “modern” technologies: Hamlet in his revolutionary university ideas, Salander as a past-master of the computer and all its extra-legal resources.

   ~ Hamlet has “connections” outside Denmark at the university at Wittenberg; Lisbeth belongs to an international underground of powerful underworld  hackers.

    ~Both are intellectuals on the razor’s edge of their times.

    ~Whatever else they are, both are brilliant.

    ~Both have a “global” consciousness and are at home nowhere.  They are sojourners in the poisonous environments that they once called home.

    ~They know every thing that’s to be known. They know our secrets.

   ~ Each lives in emotional turmoil.

    ~Unimaginably terrible things dog their every step.

    ~Both are cruel and ready for any violence.

    ~Sexual violence is one of them.

    ~They are killers.

    ~They hate categorically, each in his/her own new way.

    ~They are solaced by their crimes.

   ~ By definition, they are vengeful. They prowl about looking for revenge.

    ~They feel that they are at the center of things and appointed “to set it right” with their rough justice.

  ~ The madness attributed to them becomes a real possibility. Madness as strategy, or therapy.

     

                                        ~

     In the end, both Hamlet and Lisbeth Salander work a sort of salvation, a transformation of the horror  of their circumstances.  Hamlet will be “saved” and given new life by his  narrative, the  “story of Hamlet” that  Horatio will  live to tell to the ages.  Salander will live on in her money, on her stiletto heels and under a blonde wig-- in the millions upon millions of kronor she has stolen from an exposed criminal corporate giant she has destroyed, now a suicide.  It is a two-headed coin. Either way we win, with a good story or with the cash.

    But night or day, big or little, they are much the same character. Too dangerous to mess  with. How interesting it is that we are so drawn to them both and yet would find living with either of them unbearable.

                                                                           

A Wagnerism of Recent Note

A report on the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s

Das Rheingold, simulcast in high definition to the Cinemark Theatre 

at  Boulder,Colorado on 10/10/10-- 
by Gordon M. Wickstrom who…

   who has lived his life under the spell of this music and this drama, who has collected this stuff throughout the history of his imagination, and has lived to see this day.

   I was more than moved by what I experienced. I was shaken. I am not one to encourage crying: I leave that to television’s evening news. But this production came as close as I want to come to tears-- of joy.

   That great ending, when the gods cross over into Valhalla over the rainbow bridge, the staging of which failed to work on opening night last month (9/27), worked flawlessly yesterday afternoon. I think I have never witnessed a finer effect on any stage anywhere. One could only gasp at the daring and the magic of it. My wife grabbed at me.

    The dangerous mechanics of that wondrous setting: it was not an environment in the ordinary sense of stage scenery, but a machine for acting. It was a machine for our time.

    And there was James Levine getting that great and glorious sound out of that great orchestra, and he grown so frail and physically diminished by his recent surgeries! And those singers, busting a gut, for us, risking everything on that next note, that next phrase, coming at us straight on! One might call the afternoon a perfect riot of superb bass and base-baritone singing, all those accomplished men pouring it out. I have heard many of the great German Alberichs and have admired them immensely. But this American guy, Eric Owens, was phenomenally effective and persuasive.

   I put that word “guy” in italics because that’s what these people were, all regular “guys” for the working day, on a big job of work. Singing Wagner with what feels to me an American clarity and directness. It made me flush with pride. No “Bayreuth barking” here.

   And as if this were not enough, we have a new Wotan on our hands, to rival the international master of the role, James Morris, who must all too soon pass it on to the likes of this young Welshman, Bryn Terfel.

   It has always seemed to me that, after the brilliant orchestral introduction to the opera, the action opens only to drag on too long with the Rheinmaidens (or “dotters”) teasing poor Alberich about what must be his erection, hidden in that costume, and then about the gold itself. But not yesterday, not with these three Rheinmaidens, who were captivating, clever, intelligent and, again, with what I want to call that American clarity, vitality, and precision of voice-- and high  spirits.

   In fact, I want to say that there was a peculiar high spiritedness throughout the production, a certain “lift” and lightness of heart amid the most dire of existential circumstances. Call it “tragic joy”.

   I will never admit and always deny it, but I suspect that it is the very technology of this satellite performance that must contribute hugely to this extraordinary accomplishment.

   This mode of performance, electronic as it may be, manifests a new kind of audience, one readier for the intimacies of acting and singing, an audience who is let in on the  secrets of  production,

   I have always argued for the traditional decorums of performance. I have resisted the contemporary urge to demystify art. I have wanted to preserve, especially in the opera, its glamour, its ceremony, its privileges, and secrets. But I give up. I realize now that I have lived to experience the secularization, the improvisation, the democratization of the opera. I am now all too glad to be let in on the secrets, to see back stage, and to see what I knew all along, that it was not a mystery after all, but hard, hard work accomplished with an efficiency and dedication that is breath-taking.

   I understand now what made the traditional ceremony of opera possible. It was hard-working men and women, all the technical staff and support people, all the singers, even those acrobats who doubled the singers in Rheingold. 

   If the Met radio broadcasts, beginning in 1940, were the start of this secularization, it must be these HD transmissions to movie theatres everywhere that are accomplishing this cultural transformation. (There are those who feel that these transmissions take a toll on the production’s effectiveness in the theatre. One major reviewer suggests that the production was cast with lighter, inadequate voices in order to record them “easier”. )

    In any case, I am awed with admiration for those hundreds of men and women who worked at such a high level of accomplishment, all of it entirely “hand made”, depending on those theatre workers doing their jobs faithfully and precisely. I get so proud of it that I want to burst. I feel personally involved with them and what they are doing-- and don’t forget: it’s IN REAL TIME,  at the instant that I’m watching them.  Just think! And then wipe the dazzle from your eyes.

   This Rheingold reminds us of the meaning of work, of making something by hand, and for the first time, and knowing that it will have a continuing life in a community as a proclamation of its profoundest values.

    At the curtain-call, as those singers came forward to take their bows, there was gaiety on that stage, a sign of the oneness of performer and audience, of their having been somewhere together that afternoon, where their shared humanity reached its fullness-- in spite of everything. These best of workers for the working day had achieved something greater than any one of them, something in the total service of music and theatre that ennobles us all. Then, after their bows and getting out of costume, they could go out for a good dinner.

    Before this, back in the 80s, I had a seat in the house in New York for the complete Ring Cycle, the Otto Schenk ravishing “naturalistic” cycle. Levine was there, back then, working the pit, making music, and making me hold my breath with that exaltation peculiar to Wagnerites. Sometimes we are chided for our enthusiasm. But, look what we got yesterday: we got this stunning electronic transmission of Das Rheingold to our own local movie palace, live! It was not the old and dear ceremony of opera, but something else, not a substitute for the “real thing”, but a new thing in art and life. I, for one, welcome it.

ADDENDUM

    This production was haunted. A spook out of the Met’s Golden Age haunted the stage as Froh, and calling himself  Adam Diegel . But  we know better: this guy  is actually the re-incarnation of  the youthful Lauritz Melchior, whom, I bet, we will  one  day soon hear as Siegfried himself,  when he will  remove  the breast-plate of  the sleeping Brunhilde and  sing  out in  consternation, maybe  the funniest  line in all opera, “Das ist kein Mench!”

Walking North with Walton

    Driving the Peloponnese in Greece some years ago, through the countryside of Arcadia-- where myth and tradition locate the Golden Age of pastoral perfection-- I looked everywhere for an Arkadian landscape where shepherds and shepherdesses might tend their flocks under endlessly blue skies, in endless leisure, along crystal brooks, singing their songs of love and peace, with strife and greed unknown, and every need effortlessly satisfied. But I could not find it.

   More recently, turning back to Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, I thought again of his miles-long walk north out of London to Tottenham and on toward Ware along his beloved River Lea to fish the lovely spotted brown trout and possibly share the day with an agreeable companion. When I think how that great old royalist man of letters and affairs urges me, his reader, to take up my bed and walk out to a country-side of lovely little rivers, gentle fields, intimate village inns, and charming country folk, removed from every anxiety, greed, and resentment; when I understand that he offers me that perfection of the rural life in contrast to the system he so vehemently opposes: the monstrosity of London's mercantilism-- to which he was himself a hardware merchant in Fleet Street-- I just cannot do it. 

   In our terrible times, invited as we are to every tea party, we can’t but see the world through a different system of lenses from those of the pastoral. We think we see more clearly, if bitterly, and are disabused of Arcadian and  Waltonian idealisms.

    Thing  is, I suspect that the poets of Arcadian perfection from Virgil to Walton himself knew well enough that the pastoral ideal of Greek myth and of rural Old England were just that: ideals only. But, then, an ideal is never only an ideal.

   Ideals have life and energy of their own. They can live powerfully inside us. They can cause us to try to live in certain ways.

   If Izaak Walton's ideal or idea of pastoral angling on the Lea or on the Dove in Derbyshire never quite existed, it surely lived inside his head and heart as it can do in ours -- if we can get it there.

   How do we get it? I've not seen it for sale in any fly shop. We may, however, be able to catch it, like a virus, from another angler who has it, as that fellow Venator caught it from Walton himself in the Compleat Angler. Or maybe it will rub off from its archetypal memory in art of all kinds. Maybe we are smart enough to invent it for ourselves out of the combination of deep memory and experience. Perhaps we can dream it.

   This idea, once locked in, completes us as angler-- the compleat angler whom Walton called “contemplative.” After we have acquired every item of tackle, every angling skill imaginable, this idea, this ideal, calls us to try to live without greed and avarice, or morbid striving-- a life in harmony with the ideal landscape of the stream itself. A place to be quiet and grateful-- and as Walton added, to “go a-angling,” and "study to be quiet."

   If this ideal were just that, only an ideal, a literary construct from the imaginatively engaged Walton, if it never did and never will precisely exist, if there are no landscapes of that perfection, if it was all a matter of Walton's all-creating artistic and social dreaming, it was for him, nevertheless, an instrument of his moral and psychological salvation. How terribly urgent, then, it must it be for us now, in our awful predicament, to imagine that ideal as powerfully as we can, and act it out. We need rescue of some sort.