Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

The Old Swimming Hole: Bay Head, NJ

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On my way down to the Maritime Heritage Conference in Baltimore this week, I stopped by my old Atlantic haunts in Bay Head, NJ.  My parents bought a house across the street from the beach there around 1980, & that short stretch of beach, with the pilings you see in the picture, were my home waters through high school, college, grad school, & beyond, until they sold the house about five years ago to move to FL.

It’s probably over-sentimental to think I was swimming with ghosts, but there’s a lot of personal history ground into that sand. Plus September is the best swimming month on the Atlantic seaboard.

On Wed morning, little jelly fragments were thick in the water — not stingers, but marble-sized chunks of jellyfish-body, scattered in the water and swirling about.  A couple of moon jellies, too, but mostly just bits.  You can swim through them pretty easily, pushing your way through the cloud with an extra tactile sense of the ocean as a home for living, strange, inhuman bodies.

Jellyfish are the ocean’s future, scientists tell us.  They are the species that will do best in the ocean that’s coming: oxygen-deprived, warm, depleted of fish.  It’s a gruesome thought, a violation of our long shared history of ocean aesthetics.  But swimming through the jelly-cloud early Wed morning, with a solitary older fisherman just up the beach on a cloudless day, it seemed as if swimmers & jellies could manage.  The feel of them between my fingers was foreign, slimy, a little disturbing — but also something I could get used to.

The Storm

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About four years ago, when I was in the rare books library at Mystic Seaport making some notes that eventually turned into At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, I wanted to write the entire book on The Tempest.  And, really, to be even more extreme, I wanted to write the whole thing about the first scene.

I’ve never seen the storm scene done well on stage (it was the low point of the great Bridge Project Tempest last year at BAM, and also of the engaging RSC production with Patrick Stewart I saw in London a few years ago).  As I read it, the scene exposes the chaos and disruption at the play’s core.  “We split,” say the wet mariners, and at this moment — before the magus & his emotive daughter & the air spirit & etc arrive to explain & clarify & order everything — disorder rules the stage.  In production that have Prospero on the stage in 1.1 — as he was in the Sam Mendes/Bridge version, as in many others — it short-circuits the scene.  We shouldn’t have anyone visible to trust.

So many choices — I wrote about the Boatswain’s technical maritime language (“yar!”) in Shakespeare’s Ocean, and I’ve read good explanations of the scene’s anti-monarchism (“What cares these roarers for the name of king?”).  Alonso’s plea for theatrical authority (“Where’s the master?”), Antonio’s rough individualism (“Hang, cur, hang”), and Gonzalo’s weepy plea for “long heath, brown furze”  all amount to different efforts to wring chaos into order.

But there’s a brief moment here, before Miranda & Prospero come on stage, when it’s not clear that any order is forthcoming.  That’s the wrack really does wreck everything.  That that play really investigates the meaning of being “lost at sea” (to borrow a phrase).  That’s what I don’t think anyone has managed to capture on stage.

I wonder what it would be like to try to stage it underwater.

The Old Swimming Hole: Short Beach

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A nice half-hour today in what Mary Oliver calls the “dreamhouse / Of salt and exercise.”  The weekend of high winds has churned up the sand in the water, so that swimming is like running through a sandstorm out of Prince of Persia.  About 2′ swells today, once I got past the protected part of the beach.  Post-Labor Day open water swims are precious.

Night Swims

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Saturday 4 Sept 2010 was a big end-of-summer day on the local blue humanities front.  Turnings of the tide…

My son Ian & I swam in the Short Beach Days swimming races; Ian placed fourth as a nine year old in the 9-10 age range, & I placed third in the old guys 40+ category.  We both need to work on our starts.

Both kids, plus some neighbors, entered the Sand Sculpture contest in the “unassisted” division, which meant that I could not help sculpt & instead got a great mid-day swim out to Half-Tide rock in the middle of the bay.  Back in time to see them awarded “Most Original” for sculpting the “Short Beach Alien Invasion.”  Nice use of seaweed & other plant materials…

As part of the haul from the kids’ “Juice Stand” in the afternoon, Olivia received a US quarter stamped with “Northern Mariana Islands” — one of the most coveted in our collection.

We’ve found three now from the non-state territories: Grandpa Bill received Guam in change from a DC taxi-cab, Ryan the babysitter got Samoa for Ian in a Branford Dunkin Donuts, & now Olivia’s Marianas from the Short Beach juice drinkers.  Changes how you look at change.

Just after the 8:19 pm high tide, Olivia & I took a night swim — the moon hadn’t risen yet, a few bright stars behind fleecy clouds, warm water, and cold air.  The beach is lit by street lights, and they dim fast as you swim out. Swimming is always about putting your body in a place that it can’t fully understand, where you move slowly & can’t see well.  At night, in warm water, in the dark, swimming doubles itself — opaque and invisible and all around you. I love a night swim.

Also, “Lost at Sea” struck its sails in DC at 5:00 pm.  Into the dark night…

a fragment from W. S. Merwin

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They began to go

To pieces at once under the waves’ hammer.

Sick at heart since that first stroke, they moved

Nevertheless as they had learned always to move

When it should come, not weighing hope against

The weight of the water, yet knowing that no breath

Would escape to betray what they underwent then.

Dazed, incredulous, that it had come,

That they could recognize it….

…And to some it seemed that the waves

Grew gentle, spared them, while they died of that knowledge.

“The Shipwreck” (Green with Beasts, 1956)

The Tempest and the Postmodern Novel

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The new semester’s here, so it’s time to put away the summer reading & turn to class prep.  In the past few months I’ve been reading postmodern (mostly 21c) novels that in various ways respond to The Tempest, & I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997): The utopian fantasia becomes a “Visto through the Wilderness,” as Englightenment rationality does for Pynchon what humanism did for Shakespeare, though Pynchon is more overtly skeptical.  But I wonder if the deep ambivalence that’s M&D wears on its sleeve isn’t the underlying anxiety that clouds Shakespeare’s play: the sense that, at the end, Prospero’s brave new world isn’t as “brave” (in the early modern sense of decked out, dressed up) so much as it is costly, both morally and economically.

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (1992): The two cousins both want to be the princely heir, and the great thing about this book is that the multiracial utopian section, in which the proto-Darwinist doctor enters into a matriarchal mixed marriage with a former slave, isn’t cloying or overdone.  Instead it’s a version of that old feminist plea about Caliban and Miranda forming an alliance, even if it doesn’t end up working out any better than it might in the play.

Marina Warner, Indigo (1992): What does Miranda want?  She, too, gets her Caliban (in the 20c frame tale), and Warner’s novel presents the various Prospero-ish men as the fuller opacity than the fertile Caribbean.   Great stuff about sports & sporting culture — perhaps an oblique way of thinking again about the theater, another profession that runs on sanguy or physical charisma?

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004): In the end more Melvillean than Shakeseparean (if that’s a distinction with a difference), Mitchell’s high-wire act of stylistic change mirrors, on the level of the phrase, the experience of radical cultural change that the novel describes (and that we’re all experiencing).  Perhaps a bit sentimental on the last page?  How can you reconcile the novel’s deep fear of corporate power structures with a humane plea for abolition?  Need to re-read Benito Cereno..

The Old Swimming Hole: Tahoe

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View from the Beach south of Cave Rock (NV)

Spent last week swimming on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, about 1/3 mile south of Cave Rock & 4 miles north of State Line & its casinos.  It’s a pretty extreme place: dry & windy, with thin air (6100′) & cold clear water (60 degrees, more or less).  We got good weather for late summer —  80 by mid-afternoon, down to 50 or below in the evenings & early morning.  The old family tradition of swimming before breakfast got bent a little, by pushing breakfast to 10 am so that the sun reached the beach before our plunge.

It’s one of the world’s great swimming holes: Caribbean-blue clear water, and when you’re under in that cold blue everything falls away.  Swimming’s a bit like outer space under any circumstances, but Lake Tahoe feels more moonlike than the moon: the windy chop at the surface vanishes & all of a sudden it’s just you and the still bottom, with huge granite boulders scattered haphazardly like giants’ marbles.

It was wetsuit water, mostly, except a few times in the afternoons when it was too much bother to suit up again.

Rock hopping was the way to go, mostly, moving from one barely submerged boulder to another just poking up its froth-bearded head.  A tricky place for nonwet navigators: we brought a little El Toro, which made a few abrupt stops when the centerboard found a rock before we did.