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Fishing: A Reflection On Autopoiesis ("self-creation")

The fishing trip should always start before dawn. Anxious not to have overslept I have rolled out of that cocoon of unconsciousness and dressed without light. Easiest of course, to wait for morning with the others, those weekend sports, overbreakfasted and slipping back already into the sleep of day that the world provides, but just as nonproductive.

No, questions of fishing are best decided in the earliest light, or earlier, so that the plans merely give shape to the commitment and a place for habits to be acted out. Darkness muffles the need to speak even to a companion and you can, surrendering (or succumbing, really, for what volition is there here?) to habit and agreement, gather equipment and leave without more than a murmured acknowledgement.

This is not the unconsciousness of the somnambulist, but rather the easy moving through patterns of long standing where intention lets attention wander. The fish will be doing the same in their own rhythm, as will the mayfly nymphs, each attuned un-selfconsciously to the water environment that determines the feeding times.

The travelling too has a message. Whether you walk from a cabin to the edge of a lake or drive fifty miles, there is always the gathering impatience to put things to the test, to focus all the hearsay about insect hatches, the newly-tied flies, the cumulative ability of all the past excursions and practice casts, into this water, this time.

Objects arise from the general darkness into silhouettes and then to real trees and barns and telephone poles. Sunrise happens and adds its insistence to the haste. But wait; the fish will still be there, and there can be no hurrying the debate. It is the error of assuming a finality to the experience that prompts this urgency, this soft compulsion. When I catch this fish this time, then I'll be satisfied, and then I'll relax. We tell the addict's lies so transparently, there is no need for rebuttal. The trip unfolds in an elastic time stretched always too thin for common chatter and we arrive awake to our own eagerness. 

When there are no more preparations, there is, and I have seen it - done it - so many times, a moment of hesitation. This spot? As good as any other. Did we bring everything? The net? Test the knot with a steady pull. Examine the fly. Drop it onto the water. Move it a bit. Is it good enough to pass for real? And the surface of the lake? Often, a ceiling of mist will hold above the water. Dip your head and the sky is covered; sit upright and the surface is lost to sight. It floats, a misplaced cloud over the clear pond anchored on a far shore by reed beds. 

Enough. Breathe and flex the arm. Strip line on the pull back, hold for the softest moment as it lofts back out of sight, wait for the moment, (a time not a sensation even) and push forward pulling more line from the reel. And again. And on the third push, unhinge the wrist forward and let the fly touch down. 

The retrieval is the other half, and whether it lasts minutes or seconds it must be attended to with the same care as the casting out. Without this there is no meaning in the cast; better to drop a baited hook over the side, or shoot 3000 feet of monofilament mesh from the stern of a factory ship. This is the imitation of randomness of newly hatched insect, or the erratic struggle of the exhausted, eggs-now-dropped adult dying -- why so soon dying? -- at the interface of its worlds.

Twitch and pause. Pull slowly and then relax. And for what result? Oh, the fish, yes, but what in its purest form is there in the strike? Within certain prescribed limits of movement, the piece of feathers, wool and metal will set off a response in a fish. Observedly, there is no musing; only bite or not bite. In my stories there will be a granting of intelligence no biologist would credit, and interpretations for every tug and nearby swirl, but the test is in the line that connects us. Is there a fish there or not? The rest is boasting or excuse. I leave off willing the fish to bite and concentrate on retrieving the fly.

Stay with this for a moment,-- the instant between mere fluff on the surface of a lake and the rush to devour whole. I built the lure and chose the spot and cast the line, and have done those things so many times that what once were questions of other more experienced fishermen are now my story of the way it is. Each success confirms the truth of one part of my narrative; each failure confirms another, not antagonistic to but supportive of that other. The whole story is mine and it plays out always in accordance with my knowing.

Even what I don't know is accommodated under the label of "that which I don't know the reason for, but there is a reason." And so, what will happen next is seen as perfectly in accordance with some already-seen, already-listening for, already-known scheme which I have created, and because it just is, my knowing is not apparent to me. Everything accords.

Is there not some way to supercede my observation (description)? There is definitely a relationship between the hook and the fish, more explicit, happily, if the fish becomes hooked, but the elements of that relationship are not discernible in my system or in systems available to me, for I construct such systems from my observations or my ways of knowing. Fish and fishing are only one aspect of this phenomenon. I could as well examine the ways I have of knowing about time and the fallacies that arise from that way of knowing, or indeed, any of the elements of my life which I first objectify and then explain. 

The sudden jerk on the line brings me out of such reflections. For whatever reasons, the fish has taken the fly and the next scene has many possible ways to be played out. I need not muse, (if I ever could) on fishy preferences, (if they ever had any); now there is only action. Indeed, the act may be that which supercedes observation, for it calls me forth into my world of phenomena where I am often other than that which I have supposed I would be, acting in ways I did not think I would.

This is not the cosmic battlefield of the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna heard his lord commanding him to forsake thinking for action, but the advice is no less apt. I cannot think the fish into the net for he moves faster than my attending to my thoughts, and only instinct and the overiding dictum to keep tension in the line that joins us will prevail.

Why is there not complete satisfaction with the fish netted rather than the renewed anticipation of the next strike? The question of my skill has been answered, and often I release the fish, so what else is there posed by my paying out the line and laying out the fly again? The action itself is a question of course, and, repeated, it becomes the environment in which I live. Better to stand in the question as I do here by this water than be driven to have answers. 

Listen, there is a copy of a painting which may still hang in a church in Santiago, Chile, and it shows a conception of the temptations of Christ. There are the people representing power and wealth, of course, but, standing by the side of Jesus there is a figure gripping his arm pointing to a space in the foreground out of the picture on which his eyes are clearly focused.

That figure is Certainty, the knowing beyond all doubt. In that gaze there is no question and no possibility for other than what is observed. In thrall to such a temptation there would be no inquiry. Something insists (so quickly I never notice how firmly in its grip I am) that there would be no real satisfaction either, no humanity, but that is not knowable from either introspection or history. As it is, I question and confront questions, and am always an already-decided response that closes the discussion, or I am for a moment, an opening.

Plato admonished that we would be "better and braver to face the world not knowing" than with a mind already made up, and this for me is the lesson inherent in every cast of the fly line, with whatever lure, into any pond.

References: I am indebted to Humberto Maturana for the description of the painting of the temptations of Christ. He gave the anecdote at the start of a two-day lecture on Language & Being in Vancouver in 1983. I have also benefitted from reading of his work in the text Understanding Computers and Cognition (Fernando Flores & Terry Winograd; Ablex Press; Norwood, N.J,; 1986) He has also given a description of his theory of autopoesis in a text co-authored with Francisco J. Varela; Autopoiesis and Cognition; Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, v. 42; D. Reidel Publishing; Boston; 1980.