December
1994
The Satya Interview:
Memoirs of a Fly-Fishing Man
An Interview with James Carse
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James Carse is director of religious
studies and professor of the history and literature of religion at New
York University, where among other subjects he has taught classes on
Environmental Ethics, Mysticism, and World Mythology. His most recent
book, Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience
(HarperSanFrancisco, $21.00), includes a number of stories from his
childhood and youth in Michigan and reflections on the natural world
and animals around his house in Rowe, Massachusetts. He has been a vegetarian
for over twenty years.
Q: The final story in your book is an extended meditation
on the catching of a large trout in a pond near your house in Rowe.
You
talk about how you were unable to kill and clean the fish, and suggest
that your children, who didn’t want the fish killed, had a deeper
connection to the animal which you had forgotten; and that in order
to become a man — and clean the trout — you had to set
aside that connection. Could you explain what you meant by that?
A: When I grew up in the Mid-West, the ritual every
kid went through was the deer-hunt. The ritual had many components.
First, you had to learn how to fire a deer rifle. It was a substantial
gun which hurt, because it kicked back into your shoulder when you fired
it. You had to be a real man to fire that gun. Secondly, you were drawn
into a band of hunters. Now you were big enough to be one of them, you
had to learn certain rules, I think appropriately. You had to know how
not to be a danger with your gun and how not to shoot the wrong target.
But I think you also had to learn how to be one of the hunters and have
the right kind of mood and attitude. That meant drinking, smoking, and
swearing.
More importantly, however, there was the killing of the animal. One
of the big ideas I grew up with — something that a lot of
my students and friends from the East have never heard of — is
“buck-fever.” This refers to the fear of putting the first
deer in your gunsights and not being able to pull the trigger. You
freeze
when you see a deer. So the real test of your manhood was whether you
could overcome buck-fever.
Buck-fever had a meaning that extended far beyond hunting. We used
the term all the time to refer to someone who was unable to make a
decisive
male action. You got buck-fever before going into a fight, or a match,
or a game, or even an examination. It became a major feature of my
life.
Now, it’s true, I didn’t come from a shooting family — my
father would not have shot an animal, he had principles about that.
But I went through something similar I think in fishing.
There’s a lot of killing that goes on in fishing. You kill the
bait in a fairly ghastly way — by running the worm on a hook,
or spearing mayflies and larva and minnows that you learnt to attach
to your hook without killing them. The final part, of course, is killing
the fish and gutting it. Cleaning the fish is part of the male nature
of the exercise; you didn’t take the fish home and let your mother
or wife clean them.
I was stunned when I first saw the insides of a fish. I looked at it,
and thought: “My God, this is life.” And it bothered me
every time I killed one. Although I killed hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of fish in my childhood, I hated it every time.
Q: What was the part of you that hated the killing?
A: It was the part that thought the fish was beautiful.
I often think about this. Where we lived there were these really beautiful
trout streams, deep and dark. The water was dark because it was stained
by tamarack trees, a kind of scrubby pine tree that was all over Michigan.
These dark pools would be full of surprises and possibilities, filled
with great fish that would likely ignore your hook.
The complete aspect of fly-fishing, I felt, had a lot of beauty involved
in it. I made and tied flies for years; and my dad’s closest
friend owned a small company that made simple fishing rods, lures,
flies and
so on. I loved going and watching them make all that stuff. Fly-fishing
is still a very beautiful idea to me: to be out at dawn or dusk; the
water, the setting, the environment, the equipment; all the skill required
to land a fish.
Perhaps more than beauty, it was the mystery of it that attracted me.
You simply didn’t know there were fish until they hit your line.
Q: Was it the sense of the hunt, the prize as well?
A: It was more than just the prize. There was something
beyond, something strange and alien which you didn’t know and
didn’t understand. All you could do is get to the surface of it,
and you could only get more knowledge through your skill, and wile,
and the deception of these creatures — presenting yourself
as someone you were not.
Q: Was the experience unique every time, or was it in the repetition
that the beauty and mystery lay?
A: It was unique each time. I can still remember certain
fish I caught at certain times and places. We used to fish through
the
ice. We had a house near the lake, which meant that during the winter
the light came through the ice and not through the windows. That meant
you could not only see into the water, but that you couldn’t even
see the surface of the water when you were sitting in the house. We
opened a hole about eighteen inches square in the ice and sat there
around it. With no light to reflect off the surface of the water, you
had the sense you were in the same element as the fish. And gorgeous
colors came up through the water, water so clear and lit you could see
fish sometimes fifty or sixty feet down. You really felt you were in
on a very different realm — a world that was impenetrable
to your imagination or your experience. So, that part was the part
of
me that loved mystery and beauty and hated the killing.
Q: And the other part? What was the part that allowed you to do the
killing?
A: It was the competitive part, the one that was all
boy. It was very much bound up with my father. I was thrilled by my
father’s violence — it was terrifying but it was also thrilling.
He was a professional boxer, very athletic, physical, aggressive, engaging,
loud and amusing and irresistible in many ways. I was drawn into the
maleness of him, the exuberance and joy of it. We laughed and punched
each other. Particularly in winter, when it was often below zero, there
were many ways of proving your manhood. For instance, we would go fishing
in the rivers in late winter, before the big thaw, and eat the suckers,
which you could eat in the very cold waters.
Ironically, it was our very favorite river for fishing that my father
years later chose to throw himself into to commit suicide. He failed,
but then succeeded a few months later by hanging himself. That was the
pay-off the violence had for him. He was at that time a desperately
depressed man.
Nevertheless, I thought of this side — the killing side —
as the positive side. It was the side I consciously tried to promote.
I didn’t want buck-fever. I wanted to be like my Dad — to
scoop, like him, the ice out of the hole with my bare hands, to break
the neck of fish just like that, to throw them out on the ice and let
them freeze to death without a thought. But every time I did it, there
was a reaction. I kept trying to overcome that aspect of myself; it
was the part I tried to reject and refuse.
Finally, I realized one day I didn’t have to do that. I could
live the other way.
Q: Is that, in some ways, how you became a man?
A: Yes. Paradoxically, I became a man by finally being
able to give up being a boy proving himself, which I thought my father
was doing. Now, looking back on it, due to the peculiar and sad features
of his own childhood, he spent his life proving that he was not a loser.
But once you’re on that track you never have enough proof, you
never quite give that up; never quite grow up. Even when I was a kid,
I thought I was more grown up than he was, and felt often like his parent.
I could see the contradictory nature of the competitive way of proving
your own manhood to yourself. So I allowed that other self — the
side that was fascinated by mystery — to surface and be
dominant.
Q: Did this happen automatically?
A: No, it wasn’t automatic. It took years; years
of struggle. It was nothing like a conversion. However, the day I stopped
eating meat was sort of a conversion. I suddenly realized: “Wait
a minute, I hate this shit; why am I eating it? I don’t need
any more justification for it.”
Q: I’m interested in where this killing part comes from.
Do you think it is envy of the beauty of the natural world?
A: Beauty is always threatening because the only thing
you can do with beauty is leave it alone and let it be. Once you make
use of it, it’s no longer beautiful. The more you’re surrounded
by beauty, the more out of control you are of it. Kant is right about
this: we see something as beautiful only when we see the uselessness
of it. As soon as you see something and say, “Oh, this would look
great on my wall,” it becomes decoration and no longer beauty.
If your attitude towards the world is one of exploitation, domination,
manipulation, or competition, beauty becomes a natural enemy.
Q: There is a story you tell in the book about a mouse in your cottage
who becomes a brief, although constant and fearless, companion. You
find the mouse staring directly into your eyes. What did you see?
A: The mouse’s existence clearly doesn’t
have the level of consciousness of a human’s; but the questions
remain as to what level the consciousness is and how we make sense of
it. I think that the only way we can make sense of it is to say that
the mouse is living in a dream; but a dream from which it never awakes.
We too live in a dream, except at a higher level of a dream, and the
question relevant for us is when we will awake from our own dream. Further
to that is the question whether, when we do awake, we will wake up or,
as it were, “wake down”? In Breakfast at the Victory I argue
that we “wake down,” and that the wisdom we gain is not
a move away from the animals but towards them.
This is why the silence of the Buddha is powerful. It is not because
it’s human silence, but because it approaches that of animals
— a silence that doesn’t need to speak.
Q: What was the difference between the eyes of the mouse, and
the eyes of your cat Charlie?
A: The mouse’s gaze was more stark. Charlie made
me wonder, because there was something slightly recognizable in his
eyes. I thought it was possible I could even imagine what Charlie was
thinking; I couldn’t imagine what the mouse was thinking. It was
too distant, more alien, more like a fish than a cat. The mouse had
no expression on its face; its eyes were two dots. It had all the elements
of a face, but it wasn’t a face; and yet it was looking right
into my eyes.
Q: What do you extrapolate is our responsibility towards animals
based on that knowledge?
A: Our responsibility is to take our own awareness
of our incomprehension seriously. The fact that I don’t know what’s
going on with the mouse prevents or protects me from the arrogance I
would normally experience or express in dealing with animals. The fact
that I don’t know doesn’t tell me I can do whatever I want
with animals, it tells me I can’t do whatever I want.
Q: So, theoretically, if you could find out what a mouse was
thinking by cutting open his or her head, you feel the knowledge you
would gain from that is not the knowledge that you get from just looking
at the mouse?
A: The knowledge is deeper than the knowledge you
can know. Because the knowledge that the mouse has is inaccessible
to me
I will never know, and nor will anyone else. It is unavailable, and
what is more awesome to me is that my knowledge is not available to
the mice. Nor is it to the ants, centipedes, millipedes, snakes, flies,
mosquitoes, gnats, birds, and all the other animals that live around
my house. Each of them has a knowledge that’s forever asleep
to the knowledge of all the others.
Q: And is it this that makes them creatures of God?
A: Yes. The fact that you’re surrounded by them
makes existence splendid, but mysterious. That’s why the mystics,
particularly the Sufis, had so much to say about ants. Because ants
were the smallest visible creatures they knew, they nevertheless had
a knowledge of God so brilliant that, as the Sufis say, “the
monotheists of the whole world would be put to shame.”
Q: What would you say to the accusation that giving animals
this knowledge is merely being anthropomorphic?
A: It’s not being anthropomorphic. The knowledge
is simply unavailable to us. We are all limited knowers; but it is
taking
those limits seriously that is the essence of mysticism. This is why
mysticism is compatible with radical environmentalism and vegetarianism;
it preserves a respect for the mystery of other beings. That recognition
does not rest with just protecting other beings; but also creates a
deeper sense of our own mysteriousness to ourselves.
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