In Plato’s allegory of the cave, chained cave dwellers mistake the shadows of the cut-out shapes of objects moved in front of a large fire and cast on the wall in front of them as reality. Socrates tells this story to emphasize how far removed we are from the fundamental nature of things, how critically important it is to investigate what we think of as “real,” what we believe. And the cave dwellers don’t mistake the cut-outs—those false, two dimensional representations of reality; rather, they mistake the shadows of those false things for reality, and are thus doubly removed from the true world of forms, locked firmly within their shackles.
Trout would not be so foolish. But I can’t help but think of Plato when I think of them, lying in wait, looking out for something real and tasty to float by within their reach—a flash of color or the silhouette of what they assume is an insect triggering a rise. If what they take is your false offering, you know the deception has worked, that for a long enough instant the false thing was wholeheartedly accepted as real. And if the thing they took was a fly of your own making, the act is all the more complicated and fulfilling. Your audience have fully suspended their disbelief, accepting your copy as real.
As a fly tyer/artist, having your audience buy into the deception with such aplomb, something akin to how listeners of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” responded to that famous radio broadcast—fleeing New York City in droves, convinced the Martians were attacking—is about all you can hope for. But unlike applause or congratulations or accolades in print, (or terrified New Yorkers), the fly tyer/artist feels the reward of their artistic accomplishment viscerally, coming right through the cork handle of their fly rod.
At that moment of connection, when you feel the weight pulling back, the rod pulsing, the small thing you created transcends itself, finally becoming the work of art you were trying for all along. It is unfinished until the trout takes hold. And the artist then becomes audience, too, an essential part of the art-work itself, finally holding onto, fully connected to its mystery.
Fly fishing with flies of your own making speaks to the core of what artists, and in my case language artists, strive for. When I put pen to page or fingers to keyboard, I am immersing myself in a stream, casting out toward something unseen I hope to connect to, to bring to hand. I step unsteadily out of my normative life into the dense, fast-flowing rush of something that wants to topple me over, push my feet out from under me, carry me away. It is thrilling. Whenever I write a good line, one that has somehow found a way to “hook” the idea, the image, the emotion I’m after, I’m left with that same sensation I feel in trout streams when my fly becomes real to the trout. I sometimes even feel tears well up because I’m moved so deeply knowing that I’ve somehow managed to recast something inside of me through the craft of attaching words to each other—like so many feathers to a hook. I get this self-same sensation when reading a good poem or story, essay or novel, when viewing a powerful film. I often find myself choked up, lost in the wash of emotion a work of art has teased out of me—hooked, caught.
This happened recently when reading James Wright’s poem “A Blessing.” The poem lures us into its mysterious center with such simple, understated language, imagery, that quiet, urgent tone:
…Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
“Twilight bounds” —this simple personification somehow, magically, captures the emotion of seeing the horses at twilight, the horses the ones who should be “bounding softly forth”—but the twilight itself is such an essential part of their motion, of the whole experience he is working to capture, that it too “bounds.”
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
With these words I feel a powerful recognition of the emotion Wright imagines they feel, an echo of the emotion he is surely feeling too. With the poem he has found a way to express this all-but-overwhelming connection. And the specific tools he’s using here, like the raw materials of a fly—thread, feathers, fur—all work together to create something more, something “real” itself—the whole greater than the sum of its parts. I notice now, looking at this stanza of the poem as a construct of words, all those “Th” words—“they, they, their, that, they, they, they, there, theirs” with an extra “th” in “other” for good measure. They hold the emotion together somehow, evoke a kind of spell on us even as that lovely, perfect simile, “They bow shyly as wet swans” allows us to really see the horses, their muscles “rippling tensely.” Those repeating sounds and words, the imagery, the single simile…accumulate into two mysterious abstractions. “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.” The poem is about love, tenderness, and the loneliness of love surprises us (and the poet) but is somehow right. They only have each other, the tender grasses of their meadow to eat, fenced in “off the highway,” only the rare visitation of Wright and a friend stopping to visit them, their loneliness only ever known upon this visitation.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
The poem snowballs to its ending with a rush of imagery, metaphor, another striking simile, “delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist,” culminating into that final statement—the thing that is “realized,” the final, breathtaking metaphor. I’m especially struck with how the physical contact, that moment of tactile connection, feeling the horse’s soft ear as it nuzzles him, is what sparks the “sudden realization” at the end. The horses don’t munch tufts of grass, notice, but rather “tufts of spring,” ingesting the whole of this season even as Wright works to himself ingest the beauty, the complexity of this simple but powerful moment—the season such an integral part of it all. And what does he “suddenly realize” through all of this? Whatever it is, it is far too big for ordinary language; it requires the poetic, the metaphorical: “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom”—the line break on the word “break” somehow as essential as the image, the line of the poem itself literally breaking before the words “into blossom.” Wright has the poem culminate and end at its climax, at the moment when the whole of the experience has filled him with such power and mystery that he feels he will himself, like the flowers of spring in the spring season of the poem, “break into blossom.” If the horses can munch on spring, if twilight can bound, then he can “break into blossom.” And every time I read it, though I’ve read it hundreds of times and know what’s coming, I feel it too—a moment of blooming, of breaking into beauty itself, coming into contact with the tender moments of connection, the so powerfully positive things that life so often brings to us.
But it is all a kind of deception, too, a trick, remember—for all we really see are black and white markings on the two-dimensional page, just as all the trout sees are feathers and fur wrapped with fine thread around a small, steel hook. Somehow we believe in them so deeply, we step out of the darkness of the cave, reach out and take hold.
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Truly insightful. Pure pleasure to read, and I leave it, wiser. Thank you.