Groping for trouts in a peculiar river

Throughout human history, fishing metaphors abound. The title line appears in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a sometimes challenging play that speaks much to the difficulty of defining or regulating human desire. The exchange between the local Madame, Mistress Overdone, and her tapster, Pompey, establishes for the audience why Claudio is being taken to prison:

POMPEY: Yonder man is carried to prison.
OVERDONE: Well, what has he done?
POMPEY: A woman.
OVERDONE: But what’s his offense?
POMPEY: Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.
OVERDONE: What? Is there a maid with child by him?
POMPEY: No, but there’s a woman with maid by him.

Measure for Measure 1.2.83-9

As the next part of the play makes clear, Claudio has fallen victim to a change of political regime. Although he has gotten Juliet with child ‘out of wedlock’, the judgment that defines his adultery as a criminal offense stands on a technicality. As Claudio tells Lucio:

CLAUDIO: 
Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta’s bed.
You know the lady. She is fast my wife,
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order. This we came not to
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
Till time had made them for us. But it chances
The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
With character too gross is writ on Juliet.

1.2.142-52

Claudio is further frustrated by the fact that the old statutes against adultery had long remained unenforced, but the newly deputised Angelo (who has been temporarily granted sovereign authority by the absent Duke) has chosen to enforce the ancient laws and make an example of Claudio who has had the bad luck to impregnate his fiancée.

CLAUDIO: –but this new governor
Awakes me all the enrollèd penalties
Which have, like unscoured armor, hung by th’ wall
So long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round,
And none of them been worn; and for a name
Now puts the drowsy and neglected act
Freshly on me. ’Tis surely for a name.

1.2.163-9

Pompey’s description of Claudio’s adultery captures the unusual nature of the ‘peculiar’ instance while the historical familiarity of the fishing metaphor also comments obliquely on the commonality of the act of adultery itself. In fact, the play calls the very idea of human judgment of others into question, and it leaves the question hanging in a number of ways that have established Measure‘s reputation as a ‘problem play’–which it is. It can be troublesome to produce and stage, and much of the play’s language remains complex enough to baffle the ear of many modern audience members. The jokes, many about sex or venereal disease, seem archaic, and even the ‘good’ characters seem to display a cold aloofness, an inaccessibly quality, that renders them less than fully sympathetic.

In such instances, however, fishing metaphors offer abundant illustrative complexities in their own right, and this is in no small part because the task or art of angling itself can be both simple and simultaneously complex and multilayered. Fishing, as a practice, has long been evocative of mysticism. In this verse, by Ouyang Xiu (歐陽脩 1007-1072, also known as the Old Drunkard), the act of fishing lends a sense of immediacy and truth which in turn obscures the surrounding world:

The Angler  

Wind pulls at the silk line  
curling gracefully from the rod.  
In straw hat and grass cape, the angler  
invisible in thin reeds.  
And in the fine spring rain it is impossible  
to see very far.  
Mist rising from the water  
has hidden the hills.*

Or, as Yeats describes it, fishing may be a metaphor for love, or how love arises and vanishes, quickly and mysteriously, along life’s way:

The Song Of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went t blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled n the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the drunken and licentious Sir Toby views the unpleasant and puritanical Malvolio as a “trout that must be caught with tickling”, referring to the trap that he, Maria, Andrew, and Fabian have laid for the steward–planting a false letter to make the egotistical Malvolio believe that his mistress is in love with him.**

Yet, although catching fish can be a reference to a confidence game, there are other times when the metaphor refers to something else entirely. Fishing, often a solitary or meditative practice which takes place in the wilderness, may suggest mysticism, the human kinship with the entire universe. In Mary Oliver’s verses, catching a fish becomes a metaphor for human existence, and a luminous communion with something divine, something larger than any single self:

THE FISH   

The first fish 
I ever caught 
would not lie down 
quiet in the pail 
but flailed and sucked 
at the burning 
amazement of the air 
and died 
in the slow pouring off 
of rainbows. 
Later I opened his body and separated 
the flesh from the bones 
and ate him. Now the sea 
is in me: I am the fish, the fish 
glitters in me; we are 
risen, tangled together, certain to fall 
back to the sea. Out of pain, 
and pain, and more pain 
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished 
by the mystery.

As, Dogen, the great Zen thinker and teacher used to put it, the moon in a dewdrop really is a thing. (Okay. I’m paraphrasing a little bit.)

So where does that leave us? We live in a world where leaders murder their citizens by politicizing masks during a global pandemic, in a world where the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries seems to recede in importance next to the altars of attainment and advancement. Where the importance of human life is routinely sacrificed at the altar of economic advancement. Where in spite of massively racist societies and the authorities and thugs who persist in operating according to their criminal precepts, ideas of human expansion, self examination, and spiritual and moral advancement are routinely thrown upon the every burning pyres of corporate and military/industrial enslavement. What should anyone do?

Of course, why should anyone listen to any scholar of early modern literature? A humanities scholar? Someone who wasted years in a field that is being cut from so many universities because it has been perceived as largely pointless, and appears to be a terrible life choice, at least in terms of making money. Why should one heed the words of unemployed theatre practitioners? Actors? Directors? Writers? If they were so smart, these people, why didn’t they choose to study subjects that would offer them lucrative returns? Why should one listen to the yammerings of mere bloggers? Why should anyone care?

The answer is because the thinkers and the artists still tend to know, and that knowing seems to be in inverse proportion to how much or often such voices are dismissed as frivolous. We continue to argue for the expansion of possibility, the growth of our understanding of what human is, of what human life may mean, of what human experience is comprised, and of our options for a better a world beyond pandemic lockdowns and fascist politicians. That new world must be based on careful thought and understanding, on evaluation and critical thinking about human experience instead of something based on obsolete paradigms of material economics, We must see possibility beyond our society’s illusory emphases on human differences which have shamefully continued to impede those with ‘different’ skin tones, features, or cultures. We must look beyond structures that make money into a god, replacing those with methods of care for our fellow people and their well being.

Now, still faced with a global pandemic, we pause at this threshold of our very humanity, of our world. We must choose wisely now for the sake of all our children–all the children of our human community, for our neighbour’s children, and our neighbouring countries’ children are all our children too. We all fish from the same stream. We are confronted with the same fields, the same water, the same weather. I urge every reader to choose any metaphor you wish, as long as you don’t ignore the call. The hour is late indeed, and we must step forward as one humanity, all of us, before we lose the whole of our existence to a colder wind than we have ever known.

*trans. Henry Hughes

**Tickling trout is an old method of catching fish bare handed. A talented angler, lying on the banks of a stream, immerses his or her hand into the water and slowly approaches the fish with a gentle stroking motion. This gradually lulls the fish into becoming accustomed to the fisherman’s touch, or ‘tickling’, after which the angler may seize the fish and throw it onto the bank where it may be retrieved and taken home for dinner. Although such a practice may sound cruel to modern ears, history has it that it has been a way of feeding poor families since antiquity, especially those who had no easy access to angling equipment on short notice. In an account by the noted speech pathologist, Charles Van Riper (in the Northwoods Reader books that he wrote under the pen name of Cully Gage), an elderly poacher taught a young Charles how to tickle trout, stopping the young man after his second fish with the admonition, “How many fish do you need?”