Connected Communities

Communicating Wisdom
An Arts and Humanities-based Study of Fishing in Youth
Work

Johan Siebers, Kate Pahl, Richard SteadmanJones, Steve Pool, Marcus Hurcome, Andrew
McMillan, Hugh Escott

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Communicating Wisdom
Johan Siebers, Kate Pahl, Richard SteadmanJones, Steve Pool, Andrew McMillan, Hugh Escott,
Marcus Hurcombe
Executive Summary
This multi-disciplinary, participatory research project was carried out by Kate Pahl,
Richard Steadman-Jones, Steve Pool, Hugh Escott, Andrew McMillan and Johan Siebers,
in cooperation with Marcus Hurcombe (Rotherham Youth Service), the Phoenix and
Parkgate Junior Angling Club and its anglers. The beneficial effects of angling have been
known for a long time. Recently, specifically the beneficial effects of angling in the
context of youth work have received attention from researchers (Brown, Johari, Stolk
2012). But up until now research has focused on skills and relationships rather than on
contemplation, which however is a prominent aspect of angling as a practice and has
been part of the place fishing occupies in the British cultural imagination since Izaak
Waltons The Compleat Angler, or: The Contemplative Mans Recreation (1653). In this
project we have investigated fishing as a practice of mindfulness, exploring with
participants the experiences of angling, the cultural history of it and the links between
fishing and meditative practice. In this way a set of insights, expressions and
articulations have emerged that, together, constitute a language with which to address
the dimension of cultivation of the self which has proven to be such a central feature
in the way participants experienced their fishing sessions. Youth work has been
connected to issues of self-awareness and wisdom and cross-generational
communication; furthermore a current practice has been placed within the context of its
long history in British culture. Ways of knowing and ways of working have emerged that
can be applied to other community activities and that help communities to articulate
meaning and awareness. Outcomes were captured in a blog, poetry and poetry analysis,
a co-produced video, ethnographic writing, texts on the cultural history of fishing and
the translation and commentary of a text on wisdom. The repository of the project can
be accessed via http://spsheff.wix.com/fishingaswisdom.

Researchers and Project Partners

Kate Pahl, Richard Steadman-Jones, Steve Pool, Andrew McMillan, Hugh Escott, Johan
Siebers, Marcus Hurcombe, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Youth Service, Phoenix
and Parkgate Junior Angling Club

Key words
Wisdom, Contemplation, Fishing, Cultural History, Subjective Agency, Youth Work.

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Fishing as Wisdom, Wisdom as Fishing

I have laid aside business, and gone afishing (Izaak Walton). This research project
sought to investigate a special space, the space of contemplation. This space closes itself
off for investigative methods that seek to objectify it, measure it, turn it into fact rather
than develop a sensitivity to the states of consciousness that emerge in this space,
states of reverie, of becoming aware of self and of existence, and of slowly working out
who we are and what the meaning of what is going on in our lives is. The space of
contemplation can be known only, as the medieval philosophers would have said, by
connaturality: by becoming like it and speaking from that position.
The humanities and the arts are particularly well suited for this purpose. They are both
oriented towards interpretation and the creation of meaning. The project drew on
philosophy, cultural history, literature, writing of poetry and (auto)ethnography as
reservoirs of insights and approaches on which to draw. It also made use of arts practice
(video) in engaging the participants in the fishing practice which we investigated directly
in the research.
How does the space of contemplation work when it takes the form of a skilled practice,
here that of fishing? We worked with a group of young people who, over a number of
fishing sessions organised by the
youth service in Rotherham,
learned the art of angling from a
group of experienced anglers. In
the fishing sessions a particular
form
of
intergenerational
communication takes place, with
elements
of
instruction,
of
dialogue, and also of a simple copresence, without words, that is
so familiar from the world of
angling. The youth service had observed already that the effects of angling go beyond
the positive aspects of learning a skill and being in nature. To a certain extent, these
sessions gave young people the opportunity to achieve a mindfulness that translates to
other aspects of their lives. But this mindfulness was not achieved in isolation by solitary
contemplation; it was achieved within the context of a communal activity and by relating
to others, across generational boundaries something that, with the particular group of
people we worked with, was hard to achieve in other context such as parenting or
education. We conclude that the space of fishing is a space in which the wisdom of
communication is also the communication of wisdom. The communication of wisdom is a
learning of wisdom. This is one of the central experiences this project investigated: the
co-dependency of action and contemplation, of applying yourself to a structured
procedure consistently as a basis of become more aware of subjective consciousness.
Izaak Walton also noticed this mingling of modes and the need to learn: As no man is
born an artist, so no man is born an angler. And Richard Steadman-Jones made a
similar observation in his project blog, for which he wrote one entry, every day for a

COMMUNICATING WISDOM GRANT AH/K006479/1

hundred days, on the cultural history of contemplation and fishing: contemplation is

pictured not as some extraordinary or special experience but as a regular form of
exercise or work, to engage in which is to cultivate the self in a quiet and systematic way
- to engage in a process of alchemical experimentation that is hidden away in a
workshop inside the head.
In a number of ways we sought to gain a deeper understanding of what went on in these
sessions. The outcomes of the project hopefully communicate some of these encounters
with contemplation and point to other ways in which they might be shaped and mediated,
beyond the context of the project itself. What motivated us was the aim of articulating a
dimension of agency and experience that is vital to well-being but that gets lost in an
objectifying and instrumental mode of knowing. As such the project provides an
additional, alternative model for participatory and engaged research, one of conversation
and exploration.
I decided to sit on the bank and watch Dylan. He sat very still. He
dropped his line very low in the water. He watched and did not do
anything else speak or chat or move. Every so often he would catch a
fish and he would bring it in, carefully inspect it, take the hook and
throw it back. Once or twice he needed the landing net. When he caught
a fish he drew it in quietly and gently. He did not boast or show other
people. It was a part of the process. Nothing more. (Fieldnotes,
Rotherham)

The scene of the angler is symbolically rich in meaning. There is the waiting, but also the
striking at the right moment; the meeting of media (land, air and water) and the relation
to an unknown (what is below the surface, when will a fish bite?). There is the relation to
ones own unconscious feelings, which, like the water, dwell in a subsurface space, a
space of imagination and dreaming. But there is also the skill in handling the
instruments and the sense of achievement when a fish has been caught. Then there is
the handling of other life, the encounter with an alien sphere and the confrontation with
the dilemmas of being implied in the natural process of hunting, of life and death.
The speaker, a fish, addresses the human thus: O breather of
unbreathable, sword-sharp air. The fish and the human cannot exist for
long in the same realm. If they are to meet, then one of them must risk
death. (On Leigh Hunts poem, The Fish, The Man, and the Spirit)
The angler waits, is at the mercy of nature, but then, suddenly, she holds life in her
hands as she frees the fish and puts it back into the water. What will the fish make of it
all? We were interested in the ways in which awareness is called to pay attention to the
full dimensionality of existence in this practice. In our research and reflections and in the
work done with the participants all these aspects surfaced and added to the emerging
overall picture of the symbolic space that the participants were inhabiting. The angling
space became for participants, in different ways, a space of mindfulness which could be
applied to other spheres of life, taking some of the awareness, behaviours and attitudes
in this ancient, deep-rooted activity with them into their daily lives.

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Terry told us that fishing wasnt simply something that got him away
from it all, as he is always thinking and is very busy when he fishes.
Perhaps it is because he is trying to think like a fish, I said. He told us a
story about how he was threatened by two youths with Stanley knives
when he was a youth worker. He made the mistake of letting them get
between him and the door. He dealt with the situation by threatening to
jump out of the second storey window. He said that he shook for an
hour and that, to deal with these things, he would listen to punk music
and shout really loudly. (Fieldnotes, Rotherham)
Participants discovered contemplation in the activity of preparing tackle, learning how to
handle the fishing rod, assessing the natural environment, waiting, listening, staying
watchful and communicating with others, some more experienced and some less. But we
also engaged with the history of the link between fishing and contemplation, especially in
the work of Izaak Walton, whose pastoral idyll of the British countryside is both a
handbook for anglers and a spiritual guide to a form of almost secular, natural reverence
and observance that, while using a language suffused with Christian notions and terms,
aims at an almost pantheistic and philosophical awareness of nature, by which the soul
learns to strengthen itself one that fits well with contemporary, often secular, notions
of contemplation and spirituality. Walton also emphasis the communicative aspect of this
spirituality. The Compleat Angler is a conversation among friends; in the last chapter we
read:
for, indeed, your company and discourse have been so useful and
pleasant, that, I may truly say, I have only lived since I enjoyed them
and turned angler, and not before. I will not forget the doctrine which
you told me Socrates taught his scholars, that they should not think to
be honoured so much for being philosophers, as to honour philosophy by
their virtuous lives. You advised me to the like concerning Angling, and I
will endeavour to do so and be quiet; and go a Angling. Study to be
quiet."
Quietude here refers to the quietist tradition, but we have taken learning to be quiet not
so much as recommendation to keep your mouth shut, but rather as a studying, a
training, in the awareness of quietude that lies at the basis of having a voice. For
existential quietude allows meaning to emerge, after which it can be articulated. In
Waltons short paragraph we see several of the main topoi of our charting of the practice
of angling: quietude, discourse, company, pleasure, the connection between philosophy
and angling, the good life: all aspects of the idea of wisdom.
What I found, with the pond, when I was watching it I was really
calm just watching the water. When it were, like, spitting a little bit it
looked amazing on the water because it was so peaceful. You could see
the little rings just spreading out. (Young angler, Rotherham)
Wisdom provided the backdrop of the projects activities. We distinguished wisdom from
skill, instrumental knowledge or know how, cleverness, factual knowledge, analytical
ability but rather looked at wisdom as the ability to distinguish what is important from

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what is not important and to bring ones life, actions and thoughts in accordance with it.
We recognised from the start that wisdom, certainly today, is a difficult concept and not
one that can simply be taken from historical traditions of thought that often arose in
static and hierarchical societies. But at the same time we emphasised that in
contemporary life there is still very much a place for wisdom. One of the projects aims
therefore was to reconceptualise wisdom. We did this by a close study, translation and
commentary of Ernst Blochs text Der Begriff Weisheit (The Concept of Wisdom, 1953),
to which a workshop was devoted. In this text Bloch sets out to develop a concept of
wisdom suitable for modern societies and a modern, even atheist, spiritual awareness.
He identifies the following aspects: Becoming peaceful; maturity; active care for the
common good; imperturbability; Tao or Simplicity; Beyond; Humor.
Where tranquillity and harmony happen, a maternal category is in
charge. Without it the Stoic idea of wisdom, as all the more that of Lao
Tzu, whose Tao fully incorporates the eponymous ancient Chinese
mother-god, has no background.
While this background may be
signified in a completely mythological manner, even up to the
Enlightenment notion of mother nature, it nevertheless contains a
rejection of everything that has not come into reason, simplicity and
order. (Ernst Bloch, The Concept of Wisdom)

A son asks his father what the inside of a

fish is like and the dad looks for an answer to
placate him:
Its red and pink
and cool
As a tomb
In the morning
But the child, clearly precocious, points out
that we can only see this when the fish is
dead. (On Brian Turners poem, Fish)
My epiphany is that the insight we are searching for
is wrapped up in the stories we tell and that the
meaning which we are making is not about reducing
these stories to fieldnotes or films or seminars but in
collectively finding a way to layer and fold the stories
which tell a slanted truth about the world. (Email
quoted in fieldnotes, Rotherham)
The experiences, insights, reflections, conversations, observations and skills that formed
the layers and folds of the stories the participants created during the project were
collected on the project website and in a hypertext, The Incompleat Angler an
interactive complex set of pathways through the material that was produced. The
incompleteness and undefined multiplicity of approaches to and paths through the work

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reflects the embodied, connatural way of knowing that the project engaged with, it
reflects the personal dimension of contemplation, in which each seeks her or his own
path, and it reflects, in contrast to Waltons country idyll, a concept of wisdom for an
unfinished world.
Izaak Walton knew the Socratic view of wisdom and he knew that humour is a part of
wisdom. He says he is too wise to count himself among the wise. But he is a lover of
wisdom and a life-long learner.What does it mean for us to be lovers of wisdom? Is it at
all a possibility or something we desire? What do we expect from such a love affair?
Which desires and hopes are at work below the surface, in the constellation of patience,
courage, alertness, skill and technique, hunter and hunted, land, air and water of the
fishing party? What may surface there? How do we experience fishing as learning? How
do we learn from each other without instructing each other? That is the path of wisdom:
unlearning.

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References and external links

Bloch, E., Der Begriff Weisheit, in: Philosophische Aufstze zur Objektiven Phantasie,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1969, pp. 377-412.
Brown, A., Johari., N, Stolk, P. Fishing for Answers. The Final on the Social and
Community Benefits of Angling Project. Substance 2012.
Pool, S. Fishing as Wisdom, 2014. http://spsheff.wix.com/fishingaswisdom

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