 KISMET TOUCHAS — There really is nothing new under the sun — by Wolf Avni
THEY talk about a life-after-death as if it were a biggie. Bugger that — it takes everything I can muster just to stay on the trail of the life-after-birth. Every time, just as I begin to think that I might be getting a handle on it something happens to remind me that, for the most part, as much as we might aspire to be the Sweeper, we are, at the final cut, the swept, the sweepings, the scatterings of fates most fickle.
I am reminded of the parable of Jesus the Nazarene and his disciples (fishermen all), where He directs them to cast their nets to the side, and complying, they net so many fish that they nearly sink the boat. The metaphor is flagrant: even with their deepest aspirations met beyond their wildest imagining, they must still depend on divinity and on its direct intervention in their lives to prevent the entire circus and its flow of natural consequences from ending in fiasco and tragedy.
Hemingway, with his tale of the Old Man and the Sea, unpacks the same concept, only without the all-live-happily-ever-after spin.
In Hemingway’s version, the only shreds of salvation to be had are from participation in the experience itself. With the Bible’s story and Hemingways tale, the same idiom of the fish and the fisherman is used to make entirely different points, and it is not the only coincidence here.
Both Jesus and Hemingway died as violently and as uncomfortably as one might, both victims — one of a surfeit of faith, the other a paucity of it. Neither could escape their fate!
The mental image that this gives rise to is neatly foiled by one with an equally esoteric potency: the classic cartoon of Micky Mouse and Goofy (merely a difference in representation of the same old hominid alter-ego), wherein they go a-fishing, and no matter where they cast their lines, the fish are all a-jumping in the waters that they have but recently abandoned.
In the comic, they row out onto a lake of splashes, each spray marking the leap of a joyfully feeding fish. They anchor at the centre of the most frenzied action and each tosses a line out towards a juicy splash. The water goes dead around them, while elsewhere across the expanse of the lake fish continue to cavort. They up-anchor and pursue the action, yet no matter what their effort, wherever they come to rest the fish abandon the spot as soon as they arrive to toss their lines in. In the cartoon, just as in real life, they take it all very personally, and terribly seriously.
Not much salvation there either.
We get to see a lot of fishing and of fishermen, here at Giants Cup. They pass through in an unbroken stream as the years pool into decades. Perhaps that explains my interest in all these many metaphors, idioms, analogies and allegories that allude to angling. Their accumulated wisdom synthesises down to a single bright point in an endless void and it is simply this: there really is nothing new under the sun, or much beyond it.
Of the thousands of anglers passing through here, most do so in largely mechanical fashion. They come, they see, they leave ... and if they don’t catch a toilet full of fish, they find it hard to hide the disappointment in their eyes.
Read the full story in the February 2010 issue of FLYFISHING. |
|
