"Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self"
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Hughes makes fishing sound less like a pastime than a portal: not sport, not bragging rights, but a controlled descent into the nonverbal. The phrasing is doing double work. "Connection with the whole living world" invokes the poet’s lifelong fixation on animal life as something raw, pre-moral, and unedited by social performance. Fishing becomes a sanctioned way to enter that reality without pretending you can fully possess it. You touch the living system by waiting, watching, listening, participating in its rhythms, and yes, by taking from it.
Then he pivots inward. "Totally immersed" suggests the obvious physical setting, but it also names the psychological state: attention narrowed to water, line, weather, time. That narrowing is the trick. It "turns back into yourself", but not the polished self that talks in rooms and performs competence. "In a good way" is tellingly cautious, as if Hughes knows introspection can be narcissistic or corrosive; he’s pointing to a rarer kind, where solitude strips you down rather than inflates you.
Calling it "meditation" and "communion" smuggles in religious language without doctrine. Communion implies ritual, humility, and a relationship to something larger that doesn’t need to explain itself. The "ordinary self" is the social self; the deeper levels are instinct, memory, the animal attention Hughes chased across his work. In context, from a poet marked by public myth and private catastrophe, fishing reads as an ethic of silence: a practice where meaning isn’t argued into existence, it’s waited for.
Then he pivots inward. "Totally immersed" suggests the obvious physical setting, but it also names the psychological state: attention narrowed to water, line, weather, time. That narrowing is the trick. It "turns back into yourself", but not the polished self that talks in rooms and performs competence. "In a good way" is tellingly cautious, as if Hughes knows introspection can be narcissistic or corrosive; he’s pointing to a rarer kind, where solitude strips you down rather than inflates you.
Calling it "meditation" and "communion" smuggles in religious language without doctrine. Communion implies ritual, humility, and a relationship to something larger that doesn’t need to explain itself. The "ordinary self" is the social self; the deeper levels are instinct, memory, the animal attention Hughes chased across his work. In context, from a poet marked by public myth and private catastrophe, fishing reads as an ethic of silence: a practice where meaning isn’t argued into existence, it’s waited for.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meditation |
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