The fisher king, the keeper of the holy grail, lives and suffers with a wound that will not heal, compelled to search or hope for relief. In some sense don’t we all live like this. Anfortas, very occasionally spelled Anphortas as I have chosen and also Amfortas as by Wagner in Parsifal, is a character that seemed to me resonant and immediately meaningful. There are a number of versions of this story, most notably as told by Chrétien de Troyes and also Wolfram von Eschenbach.
Fishing is one way Anphortas finds relief. Fishing is a searching thing. There really is something about fishing. When I was a boy, I used to go fishing, when I was 7 or 8 I walked of to a mill pond a long way off with a net and a jar, whilst I was trying to catch sticklebacks, someone behind me said “he’s going to catch a shark”, it was my father and brothers who had come to find me. The Grimm brothers story stays with me, “Oh fish of the sea, come listen to me, for Alice my wife, the plague of my life, hath sent me to beg a boon of thee”. In my teens I used to go off with friends to fish the rivers. I recall releasing a fish I had caught, perhaps not expertly removing the hook, and watched it swim of upside down and thought to myself, this is not a good thing, I won’t do this any more. But still it is there with me. In my dreams, I often dream of rivers and ponds with great fish swimming just beneath the surface. These are powerful and positive dreams that I relish, it’s like the answer to things is hidden in these waters.
I have this continuing vision of dank and sullen waters, surrounded by corroding woodlands, this is the place of Anphortas. And what of being wounded. Is there anyone who isn’t wounded? From that first moment, brought into this world, crying and screaming. Is there anyone who isn’t wounded? The ‘Anphortas wound’ is usually described as being to the thigh, and in a somewhat Freudian take on that, this is sometimes taken to really imply a wound to the groin. Perhaps coincidental but at the time of beginning to release my music, I was recovering from a heart operation, one of my wounds was in my groin and had become infected and became slow to heal. It became even easier to identify with this benighted character.
Anphortas 