Barely made it to 20 degrees today, and wind out of the south drove ice in toward the beach. What’s happened to my summer swimming hole? The ducks don’t seem to mind it.
John Masefield, “Life”
What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells
Which work they know not why, which never halt;
Myself unwitting where their Master dwells.
I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin
A world which uses me as I use them.
Nor do I know which end or which begin,
Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.So like a marvel in a marvel set,
I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave
Or the great sun comes north; this myriad I
Tingle, not knowing how, yet wondering why.
First published in the Atlantic in 1916. (via andrew sullivan)
What comes after Nature?
Bruno Latour has a new article, or “manifesto,” out in NLH, which is something of a mash-up and extension of two of my favorites, We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature. It’s called “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto'” & for now at least NLH is letting the pdf go for free.
The liveliest bits include his twin rejection of modern “progress” and postmodern iconoclasm in favor of what he calls “compositionism” or the construction of new things through combinations: “We need to have a much more material, much more mundane, much more immanent, much more realistic, much more embodied definition of the material world if we wish to compose a common world” (484). Some of those terms seem familiar — material, immanent, embodied — but others less so — mundane, realistic, common.
Now that the (modern) age of Nature is over, sez Bruno, “it is time to compose” (487).
Update: Chased down one of Latour’s notes to find a lively op-ed by Erle Ellis, an ecologist at UMBC, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet.” Ellis insists that climate change has been going on, caused by humans for nearly 7000 years, & it’s time to get used to a “used planet.” Ready for a “postnatural environmentalism”? I think I am…
Coach Frank
Met the head Master’s Swimming coach at the YMCA this morning. Frank Keefe coached the US Olympic team in 84, Yale in the early 90s, and a variety of other places, including the Bermuda team at one point.
He told me to work on the flex in my ankles & knees while kicking (fins help here), and to reach farther out with my arms. Good to have a stroke coach after 20 years.
500 yds @ 8:16 today, roughly the same as my split time from the 1000 before I went off to LA.
More winter storms…
Histories of the Sea
I ran out of reading material last week when facing a 8+ hours on the plane — LHR->DAA, DAA->JFK — so I ended up looking through the used book display in front of the British Film Institute on the South Bank. Ended up with a couple of sci-fi oldies. Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island was a fun & fast read laying out the ancient boys & dolphins love story. Some improbably Cold War allegory about dolphins & orcas agreeing to live in separate parts of the oceans. But the fun part for me was the scientist’s dream of a “History of the Sea” that dolphins would have handed down over generations orally. An old story of a UFO was at the heart of it — sci fi in the 60s, after all — but also a glimpse of something we’re still working on, “historicizing the ocean,” some people call it. Important stuff.
The other plane read was Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the title of which (I hadn’t remembered) refers to 20,000 leagues around the globe, measuring distance, not depth.
Very odd to remember that this book appeared less than two decades after Moby-Dick, to which Verne alludes early on, though Verne’s colorless harpooneers Ned Land makes a pale Queequeg indeed. Verne, too, wants Nemo’s device to help his professor write “the true book of the sea” & he gestures hopefully toward the oceanographic work of “the learned Maury” as a model. Nemo’s world-ocean is a fantasy about human potential, in which “the sea supplies all my wants” and oceanic life creates visionary possibilities. “The earth,” says Nemo, “does not want new continents, but new men.”
The end of chapter 17, “Four thousand leagues under the Pacific,” contains a gorgeous description of an underwater shipwreck that the Nautilus finds —
The keel seemed to be in good order, and it had been wrecked at most some few hours. Three stumps of masts, broken off about two feet above the bridge, showed that the vessel had had to sacrifice its masts. But, lying on its side, it had filled, and it was heeling over to port. The skeleton of what it had once been, was a sad spectacle as it lay lost under the waves, but sadder still was the sight of the bridge, where some corpses, bound with ropes, were still lying. I counted five: — four men, one of whom was standing at the helm, and a woman standing at the poop, holding an infant in her arms. She was quite young. I could distinguish her features, which the water had not decomposed, by the brilliant light from the Nautilus. In one despairing effort, she had raised her infant above her head, poor little thing! whose arms encircled its mother’s neck. The attitude of the four sailors was frightful, distorted as they were by their convulsive movements, whilst making a last effort to free themselves from the cords that bound them to the vessel. The steersman along, calm, with a grave, clear face, his grey hair glued to his forehead, and his hand clutching the wheel of the helm, seemed even then to be guiding the three broken masts through the depths of the ocean.
Good 19c sentimentality.
First day on snow this year
The misnamed
Los Angeles is a good place to have MLA, and even though it was fairly cool and cloudy, I did sneak off to Venice for a few hours and a quick, cold dip in the misnamed Pacific on Sunday morning. What a strange name for the largest and most powerful fluid body on the planet. Though yesterday morning, as I ran south on the bike path & watched the surfers, I could see why the ocean can be calming. I took this picture from Venice pier , as I watched a surfer catch one of the slow curling waves that evenly shouldered in from a vast still sea.
After I was warm enough to make a ritual immersion — the wetsuited surfers didn’t even glance at me — I decamped to the Sidewalk Cafe, my favorite breakfast joint from my time living in Venice in 1991-2. I lived in a basement apartment on Westminster Ave, with old beat-up windows that let sand blow into my sink. I still remember coming up from underground after the MLK Day earthquake of 1994, when the whole neighborhood, from the New Zealand rugby players living in the closet across the hall to my skateboarding hippie landlady, ended up wandering down to the Sidewalk after the shaking stopped. There was no electricity, but the gas stoves worked, & pretty soon chorizo and eggs were flowing.
Here’s the view looking out from the Cafe —
Kerouac’s Pacific
A billion
years aint nothing —
…
These gentle tree pulp pages
which’ve nothing to do
with yr crash roar,
liar sea, ah,
were made for rock
tumble seabird digdown
footstep hollow weed
move bedarvaling
crash? Ah again?
Wine is salt here?
Tidal wave kitchen?
Engines of Russia
in yr soft talk —
from “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur” in Big Sur
Look familiar?
The Boxing Day Storm of 2010, courtesy of Nasa’s satellite …
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