Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Creating Nature: Draft program and title

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“Boring the Moon.” Photograph by Rosamund Purcell

The full draft program for Creating Nature: Premodern Climate and the Environmental Humanities, is now online at Folgerpedia.

I’m excited to be co-organizing this event with Owen Williams of the Folger Institute. We’re asking how the premodern environmental humanities can speak to the eco-disorders of our past and present. The event will also work to expanding our cross-disciplinary capacities: the plenary will be co-delivered by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a medieval literature scholar who’s recently crossed over to the Dean side, and Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator for NASA’s planned mission to the asteroid Psyche. These two, who recently co-wrote the Object Lessons book Earth, will speak to a group that includes not only scholars working actively in early modern and medieval eco-studies but also practitioners of paleoclimatology, legal studies, philosophy, and anthropology.

Here’s the description of the event from the Folger site:

In the premodern past, weather was never just weather. Storms expressed the rage of gods, drought punished human sinfulness, and fires provided revelations straight from divine mouths. To suffer in hostile environments meant encountering more-than-human forces with merely human flesh. The inhuman power Shakespeare calls “great creating Nature” touches and sustains human bodies, but opaquely, and sometimes painfully. Nature is creator and created, force and object, destroyer and home.

This conference will bring together premodern environmental humanities scholars to explore the long and varied history of how humans have conceptualized their environment. Its invited speakers will explore historical and cultural forms in which humans have come to terms with their love for, dependence on, and need to manipulate the nonhuman world.

The distinguished speakers will cluster their conversations around four environmental keywords: “storms,” “sustenance,” “shelter,” and “spirits and science.” Together with the conference-goers welcomed into conversation, “Creating Nature” will provide insights into premodern ideas about human entanglement with the nature they knew themselves to be creating and the nature that created them.

Over the six months remaining before we convene in Washington in May, I’ll intermittently blog about the conference. I’ll also link to related subjects, including the amazing eco-talk by Bruno Latour I saw in mid-town just before Halloween. Eventually I’ll gather the posts together on a Creating Nature webpage.

My opening post investigates the conference title.

It’s at the Folger and I’m co-organizing it, so it’ll surprise few people that the title comes from Shakespeare. But after however many years as card-carrying Shakespearean, I still find the phrase “great creating nature” hard to parse. I’ve been wrestling with the lines and the dynamic idea of Nature they imagine since grad-school in the ’90s. Back in 2015 I was fortunate to explore the exchange with the help of brilliant actors and directors at Loyola University of Chicago’s McElroy Shakespeare Celebration. After that talk-and-performance, I remember feeling “unsettled” about the “creating nature” exchange. I wanted to dig more into it — and I’m eager to do so with another amazing group of collaborators in DC this coming May.

In the sheep-sheering festival scene in The Winter’s Tale (4.4), King Polixenes debates Art and Nature with not-really-shepherdess Perdita. The King wonders why the foundling we know to be a princess refuses to plant streaked carnations, a popular hybrid species, in her garden. Perdita rejects them because

There is an art which in their piedness shares

With great creating Nature (4.4.87-88)

In an argument that has engaged and baffled literary critics for centuries, Polixenes counters Perdita’s anti-hybrid position with the claim that “the art itself is Nature” (4.4.97). Perdita’s desire to prohibit “Nature’s bastards” (4.4.83) from her garden seems an error of exclusion, and perhaps also an aesthetic narrowing. She craves simplicity while Polixenes champions complexity. Both believe they speak for natural truth, even though both arrive on the scene with their identities hidden. But neither regal authority nor youthful promise accurately maps the sinuous path creation takes in the redemptive second half of this play. At the heart of the exchange lies the unfathomable creative pressures of nonhuman Nature, the powers that make flowers and words, gardens and kingdoms. What happens when we can’t separate creators from created?

Our conference takes Shakespeare’s “creating nature” to limn the core paradox of environmentalism: that the ecosphere in which we live creates us while we re-create it. The shock of anthropogenic climate change in the present sometimes obscures the long cultural and physical histories in which humans have imagined, not always mistakenly, that climate responds to human actions, sinful or hubristic or fortunate. The ecological devastation of tropical island paradises from the Canaries to Easter Island provides a historical view onto today’s global environmental crisis. Weather emerges on the borders of understanding and experience. Systemic visions of climate from Aristotle to the Weather Channel posit structural forces that govern daily fluctuations. These changes carve themselves into human experience through the rawness of exposed skin in a storm, or the softness of a spring breeze.

We hope you’ll join us to explore how “Creating Nature” can help us understand the changes we are witnessing in our creating and created environments.

More soon!

 

Bruno Latour “Inside” (plus French Natures!)

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In the final phrase of his dazzling “anti-TED talk” “Inside,” which I saw at the Linney Courtyard Theater on West 42nd St Friday night, Bruno Latour named his vision for the future as something that might “merit the term Renaissance.” I was surprised enough that I had to ask the person next to me, an eco-modernist from City College, if I’d heard the R-word correctly. Has the man who denied modernity gone over to the side of Rebirth?

An image from Inside

After joining everyone on my twitterfeed in reading an engaging profile of Latour in this week’s Times, I was excited for the “lecture-performance.” Latour’s part of the show was mostly lecture, but in front of him on the stage electronic images and graphics designed by Frédérique Ait-Touati  superimposed themselves. The pictures started with a vision of the polar ice caps, which Latour said spoke to him on a flight from France to Calgary, and ended with a four-way image of the polarities of modern politics. One axis angled from the local to the global; its partner crossed between an empty circle that Latour associated with the current US President, matched against his hopes for what he calls “terrestrialism,” a way of living that engages with our shared planetary system in its era of stress. At its odd angle, terrestrialism represents Latour’s off-kilter optimism, his belief that ways of imagining our world — what he called “representations” throughout the lecture — can change political reality. Like his earlier notion of a “Parliament of Things,” his utopian future hinges on a radical expansion of representative democracy.

Much of “Inside” critiques traditional ways of thinking that Latour wants us to move beyond. Whatever his reservations about critique as a methodology, he ran through a litany of ideas he believes have distorted Western thinking. Here’s a partial list of Things Latour Doesn’t Like:

  • Plato’s Cave, which insists that true reality lies Outside, rather than before our eyes on the surface of the planet where humans and “everything we have ever cared about” live.
  • The desire to escape, which he suggests comes from, among other things, Plato’s cave. His hope throughout the lecture was to re-value being “inside,” rather than wanting to escape to an idealized or imaginary “outside.”
  • The sublime as a way to relating to nonhuman nature, which he associates with imperialism and global conquest. He’s not wrong about intellectual history, but his comments on the sublime made me think that an important project for the environmental humanities might be to conceive a non-imperial, non-racist, non-sexist sublime. That project means recognizing and refusing the imperial dreams of mountain peaks and storms at sea, but maybe also salvaging something of the sublime’s open-ness to nonhuman experience. My money is on swimming, not rock climbing.

    Stratigraphy

  • The blue marble image of the planet seen from orbit, which Latour associates both with NASA’s drive to escape our terrestrial “inside” and with the global view, which he, in a moment of uncomfortable agreement with nefarious forces in our current politics, wishes to reject. He reads the globe the way Peter Sloterdijk does, as Western culture’s dominant image of totality, abstraction, and global conquest. He seeks a different model to understand our planetary home.
  • Stratigraphy, which in a moment that surprised me he read as a problem, a lure into inhuman “deep time” which distracts and disorients human attention away from the terrestrial engagement at hand.

These elements all share a fundamental disorientation that historicist thinkers from Petrarch to Burckhardt to Foucault have associated with the sense of being “modern” that Latour has famously claimed we “have never been.” Disorientation, as I understood his lecture, emerges from the desire to escape from “inside” into a vastness and perspective from which we can see either the globe as a marble or human history as one more layer in the rock. He asked for a different response to disorientation, a burrowing into rather than escaping from the bounded experience of living on our planet. Trying out the thought experiment, I thought — as I often do — of a line from one of my favorite novels: “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –”

A diagram of the local and the global

There are some things that can help. In its second half, “Inside” turned toward politics and also toward hope. Latour asked us to re-imagine being “inside” as a place of connection. The physical space he asked us to imagine was neither the globe as blue marble when viewed from orbit nor the deep layers of rock leading down toward the planetary core. Instead, he asked that we focus on what scientists call the “critical zone,” the narrow splash of “biofilm” that spreads across the earth’s surface and extends just “a few kilometers” above and below. Only on this thin, permeable layer, Latour reminded us, does life exist. It’s the space where living and nonliving things and systems interact. It’s where our bodies are, and where our attention should be.

He mentioned the word “Anthropocene” only one or two times in the lecture– he’s previously suggested that he doesn’t like the term — but when he talked about the Critical Zone I could not help thinking that he was asking Old Man Anthropos to look around his aging and broken body and remember that he’s only been in one place all this time. In a cave, on a thin membrane, inside the atmosphere, standing on rock, with wet toes on the edge of the sea —  these are all the same place, from a certain point of view. Have we always and only been Inside?

By chance — we were two among 4+ million riders the subway last Friday — I bumped into my sister in the West 4th St station when I was moving between NYU and Latour’s lecture. She lives in Florida and I live in Connecticut. Coincidences happen!

I wondered if it matters, from the point of view of Inside-theory, that roughly 70% of the Critical Zone is covered by salt water.

I also wondered if Latour’s vision of science as a technique for re-enchantment, for revealing the nearly infinite richness of the limited and in a cosmic sense tiny world Inside, might prove useful in re-structuring an eco-sublime for our broken world. He spent some time, when talking about the science of measuring the Critical Zone, engaging with Thoreau’s Walden. (He also got some comedy out of pronouncing the American writer’s name in several different ways in his French accent.) I wondered not only about the canonical pond in Massachusetts, but also about Thoreau’s wilder and less settled spaces, from the shipwreck beaches of Cape Cod to his failed attempt to scale Mount Katahdin in Maine. The mountain that repulsed him generated some ecstatic language:

Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

The mountain-top sublime bears many too-familiar Romantic and imperialist flaws, including a worship of masculine power and solidity, a rejection of social and feminine spaces down below, and the belief in a super-reality — “Matter” — that exists only in solitary splendor at the uttermost edge of things. But I wonder, too, if the matter-of-fact-ness of Thoreau’s matter, its “rocks, trees, wind” and “solid earth,” might lend itself to reconceptualization via Latour’s networks and actants and desire to find all the imaginable riches Inside. Is there a salvageable sublime still to be found? Might that project be what Latour enigmatically called a “Renaissance”?

Bruno Latour

It was a stunning lecture, and a pleasure to attend with many of the amazing people from the French Natures  “conference-festival” (shouldn’t all conferences also be festivals? an excellent idea!) that I caught a bit of at NYU earlier on Friday. Thanks to Phillip Usher, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and the other organizers, and also to Hannah Freed-Thali for a lively blue humanities-flavored talk about the modernist beach in French literary culture.

I’m looking forward to the English translation of Latour’s new book, Down to Earth, which should expand on many of these ideas!

Imagining the Coast in Mystic and Enders Island

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Day 1 at the Greenmanville Church

I’m back home after a glorious two days at the Imagining the Coast symposium organized by Nels Pearson and the Fairfield Humanities Institute. I come away buzzing with ideas about coastal retreat and the need to face our shared history of human and environmental injustice. Turning it over, I’m mulling two semi-inverted questions about coastal ecologies and societies:

  1. How will it be possible for us to retreat from the over-development that puts coastal areas at risk while still facing and learning from the sea ?
  2. Can we face our shared history of prejudice and injustice while also remaking the cultural and physical systems we have inherited?

In other words — can we learn from our engagement with our coasts and oceans? Can we transform ourselves into that combination of unlike things Melville calls “terraqueous”? How might we swim in these coastal waters?

The Vinland Map (a forgery)

At the end of the event some eloquent answers came from Barbara Hurd, who at sunset on Saturday afternoon on Enders Island, as we watched a three-masted sloop disappear behind the silhouette of Fisher’s Island, read  from her dazzling memoir Walking the Wrack Line while also getting to the heart of the matter.

“We live in more than one world at a time,” she insisted. We need the project of attention — which is the project of art — to help us to “glide easily between the scales.”

In listening to her in golden afternoon light pronounce the dual imperatives to embrace all the scales (physical, temporal, human) and to cultivate attention as the engine that drives language and narrative, I found myself more hopeful than I often am at environmental events. More hopeful, also, than I allowed myself to be after my own talk on Atlantic hurricanes past and present.

So many riches in this dense and friend-filled weekend! I’ll skate through some highlights, with apologies in advance for mis-statements and omissions —

Nicholas Bell of Mystic Seaport opened the weekend by leading us through Mystic’s current exhibition on the Vinland Map, a forgery that Yale University was attacked for exhibiting as truth in 1965, though one of the ironies of the story is that while the map has been conclusively exposed as a fake, the underlying claim that Viking traveled to the Americas around 1000 CE — the fact that outraged Italian-Americans just before Columbus Day in 1965 when Yale unveiled the map — seems unquestionably true. There’s a lesson in the Vinland Map story about secrecy and the hubris of elite institutions, and also one about why certain kinds of evidence — maps you can photograph — count for more than, say, Viking artifacts found in archeological digs.

Working aloft on the Joseph Conrad

The first panel that afternoon include information about the fantastic Blue Heritage Corridor Project, a work-in-progress presented by Nat Trumbell, Syma Ebbin, and the Maritime Studies faculty at UConn Avery Point, and a presentation by John Buell about the Sound School in New Haven, where my kids used to go to summer camp. It turns out, not surprisingly I suppose, that I share some common ground (and water) with the folks from the Sound School.

Next I shared a plenary stage with my long-ago teacher Glenn Gordinier of Mystic seaport. I talked about American hurricanes and the violent weather of the Western Hemisphere, and I used the disorienting experiences of early modern Europeans encountering this weather system for the first time as a way to imagine our own era of increasingly unfamiliar storms. Glenn talked about the long history of Connecticut and the sea, starting with the last Ice Age.

After a festive dinner including oysters and local craft beer, the next morning started early with a panel on Long Island Sound featuring talks by Jason Mancini of Connecticut Humanities on Native American mariners, Glenn Gordinier (again!) on Yankee whalers, and Andrew Kahrl of UVA with a close-to-home discussion of coastal development in Shoreline CT towns after hurricanes Sandy and Irene.

(One personal undersong of this short trip was me getting lost driving around Mystic with a car full of visiting scholars from Ireland, England, and Spain. I spent six weeks in Mystic as an NEH fellow in 2006, came back regularly over the next couple years to work on the demo squad, guest-taught for the Williams-Mystic program, and brought my then-young kids to the Seaport and Aquarium — so I think of myself as someone who knows my way around the area. But I’ve not been back much in the past half-dozen years, and to be honest I was sometimes distracted by coastal academic chatter. So my car took some roundabout routes. But the good news was that we discovered the new home of my long-ago favorite breakfast spot, Kitchen Little, which is now out by the harbor on Mason’s Island. The Portuguese Fisherman scramble with chorizo, just as I remember it from 2006, tempted me into sliding off the vegetarian wagon just for one meal.)

During a very busy Saturday I heard some concurrent panels featuring Kurt Schlichting of Fairfield U on the Manhattan Waterfront; Richard Greenwald, also from Fairfield, on the containerization revolution and the New York’s longshoreman’s union’s connections to the shift of the port to Newark, NJ; Mary Murphy of Fairfield on Newport; Shawn Driscoll of Becker College on Nantucket separatism during the War of 1812; Ken Reeds from Salem State U on Kipling’s poetics of (American) empire); and Elizabeth Rose from the Fairfield Museum on their great exhibition on Rising Tides on the CT coast.

The Featured Panel in the afternoon brought together three stunning papers about Atlantic connections. Hester Blum of Penn State, a leader in oceanic literary studies, presented her research on Inuits who were buried in Groton, CT, in the 19c in a way that demonstrated both the powerful local New England connections of some well-traveled Inuits and also their continued longing for the land of ice. Nicholas Allen, who runs the Wilson Center for the Humanities at the U of Georgia, spoke compellingly about an Irish revolutionary whose portraits of his home superimposed themselves onto American landscapes from Taos to Stonington, CT. John Brannigan, who’s recently been directing an interdisciplinary Coastal project at University College Dublin, juxtaposed nuclear power plants in Connecticut  and Cambria and showed how these environments reflect and are reflected in site-specific poetry. All three papers wrestled with how oceanic connections allows us to think plurality and human individuality at the same time. All coasts are particular and the tidal circulation of winds and currents makes coastal experiences at least partly mobile and shared.

Our final shared event Saturday was Barbara Hurd’s keynote about scales of time and poetic attention, wrack lines and artistic visions. After so many dense academic papers, it was a pleasure to hear from a writer whose directness squarely faced the challenge of loving and attending to our beautiful broken world as it breaks and dazzles us and our communities.

I’ll be thinking about what I learned this weekend at Mystic and Enders Island for a long time. I’ll also be thinking about what Barbara Hurd said to me when I thanked her for her words, and for bringing together the challenge of thinking across many scales with the imperative to focus our attention.”I think swimming has something to do with it,” she said.

I said that I think so, too.

View from Enders Island

Thanks to the Fairfield University Humanities Institute, Mystic Seaport and Enders Island, CT Humanities, the SeaGrant Program, and all the interlocutors of the weekend! I look forward to seeing these thoughts and words continue their circulations.

Another view from Enders

An Eco-Trio: Posthuman Glossary, Brave New Worlds, Victorian Ecotime

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Victorian Ecotime: the cake! (Photo by Nathan Hensley)

May is a transitional month where I live in southern New England. After a long wait, tulips, cherry blossoms, and hay fever all erupt. Academic semesters wind into exams. The air can be hot, but the water in Long Island Sound is still too cold for me to swim. (54.5 degrees at the New Haven buoy this morning: not yet, but soon!)

I’m submerged in sabbatical time-warp this spring, listening to my colleagues announce their final classes of the semester on FB and wondering if that means my research leave is over. So soon hath time, &c.

But this first week of May has also given me an intense eco-trio of events  that have me excited about the brilliance and imagination in the environmental humanities today. A good time to be catching the tide in flood!

(from Posthuman Glossary video)

First up on Wed May 2 was the book launch of The Posthuman Glossary, co-edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (Bloomsbury). The event was hosted by Deakon U. in Melbourne, Australia, which meant I couldn’t even Skype in effectively b/c of the time change: 2:30 am local time is no good for this old body, even if I could have avoided waking kids and dogs.

Tulips of May

So I ended up learning a new trick by contributing a 4-minute video, in which I talk over a series of pictures taken from the little splash of the World Ocean to which I walk my dogs each morning. As my daughter told me with classic teenage eyeroll, iMovie is easy to use– and fun!

Here it is, uploaded to YouTube.

I hope at some point to hear the rest of the presentations!

Next up on Th May 3 was the first of two at the CUNY Grad Center: Brave New Worlds: Dwelling in a Changing Climate. Just the sort of multi-disciplinary thing that I like, this event featured a brilliantly arranged triplet of talks. Setha Low, anthropologist (and swimmer!) from the CUNY Grad Center, talked about her work in the Rockaways and Puerto Rico, with particular attention to how social justice should remain at the forefront of thinking about climate change. Bethany Wiggin, founder of the amazing Environmental Humanities program at Penn, spoke about the swampy history of Philadelphia in terms of oil, the “1610 Anthropocene,” and colonial expansion into the New World. Dylan Gauthier, a “boat builder artist” who teaches at the New School and Parsons School of Art and Design described a series of projects he’s been involved in over the years, including his work at Penn in the “Ecotopian Toolkit” project and (to my great delight) his longstanding interest in the glories of Newtown Creek. I’ve known Bethany for a few years, and it was great to get caught up a bit on the amazing things she and her Penn colleagues have going on. I’ve been a fan of Dylan Gauthier’s for a while also — I meant to ask how influenced by Hugo Grotius his Mare Liberum project is — and it was a treat to meet him finally. Plus Setha turns out to be another academic who does much of her concentrated thinking while swimming — so great to meet a kindred waterspirit!

Double Eco- at CUNY Grad Center!

Friday the 4th was the  most intense of the three. Victorian Ecotime, a full day conference, juxtaposed seven substantial presentations of new eco-scholarship in Victorian literature and culture, followed by brief dessert-slices by four representatives of other areas of eco-study, including me speaking on behalf of the premodern.

It was quite amazing to be in a room all day listening to talks by academics who I don’t know discuss works I mostly haven’t read, or, if the works were canonical — Alice in Wonderland, “Dover Beach,” Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars” — they were mostly things I haven’t thought about in eco-terms. (To me, I may as well admit, “Dover Beach” appears first and foremost as a slightly sentimental gloss on King Lear’s Dover cliff scene, 4.6. Am I missing something?)

As a couple of us on the closing round-table noted, the eco-theoretical touchstones invoked over the course of the day were familiar to us non-Victorianists: Haraway, Latour, Bennett, Ghosh, Morton, Heise, Scranton, etc. The terms of analysis were both familiar and tantalizingly askew: I’ve never heard so many great papers on genre without any mention of the inescapable (in my world) terms tragedy and epic. It was tremendously liberating to think about genre untethered to Aristotle and his interpretive tradition, though I also wondered if readings of Tennyson and George Eliot especially might have interesting things to say in dialogue with early modern generic ideas such as imitatio and contaminatio, not to mention Polonius’s “comical-historical-pastoral” hodge-podge. It’s not possible to keep all the balls in the air all the time, and it was a pleasure to watch people playing a slightly different game, with some of the same tokens I use on my home field.

In an effort to fix the super-abundance of the day’s talks in my memory, I’ll trace them quickly here before I lose them — with apologies for anything I’ve garbled or mistranslated out of the 19c idiom!

Outside the Grad Center on Th night

The opening session,”Inveting Ecostories,” paired Dennis Denisoff (Tulsa) presenting a dizzying array of eco-pagan narratives with Siobhan Carroll (Delaware) unpacking the peat archives and coal plots shared obliquely by Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. I came away from that session thinking about heroism, and how the epic desire to stand alone and apart, to distinguish oneself — a problematic and sometimes destructive imperative in late capitalism and neoliberal academic culture also! — may not be compatible with the shared and systematic virtues that underwrite much ecological thinking. Can we have an eco-epic, an eco-hero, an eco-warrior? Do we want such a figure?

Next up, “Imagining Ecofutures” brought together Mark Frost (Portsmouth) on Victorian eco-apocalypse narratives about the destruction of London with a powerfull micro-analysis by Deanna Kreisal (UBC) of “Dover Beach” and “Binsey Poplars” in relation to what she calls the “eco melancholiacs,” in whose number she puts Morton, Scranton, Heise, and perhaps also Haraway. There was a lot of Freud throughout the day, and I wondered about the figure of the melancholiac as a response to eco-catastrophe: not a hero but something like a sensitive, attuned in mood (and perhaps bodily humors, in an older model of melancholy) to changes in the planetary climate.

After lunch we returned to “Mapping ecoforms” with a lively and sometimes musical presentation by Devin Griffiths (USC) on “just in time formalism” in a Darwinian sense, paired with with Nathan Hensley (Georgetown), who presented readings of Alice and Tennyson’s “Maud” in terms of the “boundary event” that ruptures categories: might these genre-breaking/reforming literary works provide an echo or ways to think about the boundary-erasure that is the Anthropocene/end Holocene event? I thought both about Derrida’s “law of genre,” in which nothing ever really belongs to itself (I think Nathan mentioned this?) and also, as I tend to do, about 16c Italian genre theorists who articulated what I basically think of as a sophisticated humanist theory of mash-up culture.

The keynote talk by Barbara Leicke (Carlton) dove deeply into two Eliot novels, Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, that I’m ashamed to admit I do not know very well: maybe I read Bede in high school, or maybe not, and sadly Deronda still sits unread on the virtual self. But I loved her talk’s framing of the “too late” refrain in climate change rhetoric, and also the idea that a novel’s complex narration can isolate and engage the multi-faceted temporality that the Anthropocene demands. “Too late” for what? What might it mean to over-live an over-heated planet? Does the Anthropocene make zombies? Has it already?

I’m not sure who it was in the audience who asked the Bob Dylan comparative question, with reference to the great late-period song, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there” (Time Out of Mind, 1997) — but I appreciated it! (Pedantic & obscure note: in Toneelgroep’s incandescent production of Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies, which I saw in Brooklyn in 2012, this song heart-breakingly choreographs Antony & Cleopatra’s last dance the night before the world ends at Actium. A sound track for the pre-catastrophize?)

The non-Victorian round-table opened at the close with brilliant post-colonial insights by Sonya Postmentier (NYU) and Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia), a rousing call to arms by Ashley Dawson (Grad Center and CSI), and was rounded out by my own plea, on behalf of the long premodern period from Lascaux to Hamlet, to, as the hashtag sez, #pluralizetheanthropocene!

Such a pleasure to spend three days in May eco-ing with such imaginative and generous colleagues!

 

Savage Lecture in Mississippi

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I’m just back from a lovely short trip to Oxford, MS, where I was pleased to deliver the 46th Annual James Edwin Savage Lecture in the Renaissance. My talk, “Nature Loves to Err: Catastrophe and Ecology in The Winter’s Tale” is part of the larger #pluralizetheAnthropocene project that will wind its way into book-shape over the next few months.

The trip started with an excursion, navigated by early medievalist Lindy Brady of the English department, to the swirling brown waters of Sardis Lake, a large reservoir carved out of the Little Tallahatchie River. The flood ran high after heavy spring rains, and the beach near the boat launch was completely underwater. Undeterred, we re-directed to a shallow mud-flat where I was able to swim out to a clump of willow trees that I’m told will be high and dry when the floods recede in summer. The water was chilly and silty, though not too cold for a brisk fifteen minute swim. I always love getting to know a new place by way of its open water!

After a dip in Sardis Lake

The University of Mississippi, which brands itself “Ole Miss,” though I came to learn during my visit that the phrase designates a plantation’s mistress as well as the state university, is quite a lovely and hospitable place. On Wed morning before my talk I got up early to swim around 3,000 yards with the Master’s Group at the gorgeous Turner Center on campus. Thanks especially to the coach, Walker Burrow, for pushing me on the sprint sets — which got me ready for a long day before my 6:30 pm talk. My tour of Mississippi included lots of excellent food, a trip to William Faulker’s home Rowan Oak, a ride out to see my host Karen Raber’s home in the nearby country, and several walking trips around campus to the Grove and other landmarks, some of which figure on College Football’s Gameday.

I also saw two identical versions of a controversial statue to the Confederate dead in the Civil War. The one on campus, placed prominently at the center of the old circle, was fronted by a carefully-written plaque detailing the history of the monument, its role during the Civil Rights era, and its controversial meanings now. It seemed fairly well-done, though I still wonder about keeping a monument to Jim Crow in such a place of honor.

“Contextualization”

The statue in the town square, however, had no contextualizing plaque. Its inscription, presumably done in 1907 when the statue was made, described the cause for which Confederate soldiers died as “holy and just.”

Clearly some cultural and historical work remains to be done in Oxford, among other places in the US.

Just before the talk we had an amusing overlap with a Korean student association event, which had apparently been given the room where I was to lecture for an overlapping time window. They graciously moved the kim chi pancakes part of their event into the hall, though I suspect enthusiastic pancake eating may have competed with my opening minutes on Heraclitus’s “Nature loves to hide.” Does Nature also love to eat pancakes? I suspect so.

We wrapped up the evening with a great dinner with assorted members of the English and History departments. I came away thinking about how humanities departments can be cultural forces in different parts of the country — while also recognizing that not all parts of our nation are eager to to defer to pointy-headed academics. Talking in particular with department chair Ivo

Southern flora

Kamps, who it turns out was a grad student when I was an undergrad at Princeton, and who has been at the University of Mississippi for several decades, I was impressed with the way he imagined the English department as being able to serve both community and University, as well as the way that he argued, sometimes successfully, for the department to receive more resources.

A great visit to the Southland in spring! And now I’m back in cold, drizzly New England —

Eli in the hallway of my hotel

Thanks to the English department and University of Mississippi for hosting me!

A good list to be a part of

Touching the Past (Again) and Letting Go of MEMSI

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Photo by Jesus Velasco

In the narrow hallway of the Hotel Lombardy, heading to the Venetian Room for the last of a decade’s epic of Old Fashioneds after MEMSI events, a brilliant scholar of medieval French accused me of being an old fashioned humanist. At first I thought she was joking, since I punched my posthuman card years ago, but I had, it took me a few minutes to realize, given a pretty humanist talk earlier that day. So I tried to explain myself. My current premodern Anthropocene project, as I tried to communicate in one of the super-intense intellectual exchanges of this past glorious weekend in DC, wants to salvage ethical traces of the human amid the swirl and pressure of more-than-human environs. I’m not sure how persuasive I was, then on the low couches of the Venetian room or earlier in my presentation. I’m seeking out a hybrid stew of human longing and posthuman wonder, an openness to change and disruption that also labors to build refuges and radical hospitality. But do I have the language for it?

On the 7 am train back to New Haven this morning I’m thinking that the not-only-human humanism that I rhapsodized owes quite a lot to MEMSI itself, and to the spark of communities that assemble, blaze, and disperse. A decade is a long time for a Humanities Institute, in some ways of thinking about time, though barely a blink in others. How many things would not have been possible but for this!

Ark & names.
Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

Among the great innovations that Jeffrey Cohen & his merry band have supported through MEMSI has been a re-imagining and making-experimental of the robust ancient genre of the academic lecture. He saved a special treat for last this weekend. We spent most of two days sitting down to a hearty dozen talks on topics from San Francisco drag theater in the 1970s to twelfth-century Spanish legal structures to early modern bees and the market-fantasies used to sell expensive reproductions of medieval illuminated manuscripts, among many other things. Then we followed all those presentations with an impromptu set of unscripted closing “Letting Go” comments, with each of the speakers, chairs, and some brave volunteers walking up to the front of the room to extemporize on what had preceded, and what might yet follow.

Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

I loved all the talks, but these unrehearsed fragments were the best part of the weekend. I didn’t take notes, alas, and I’m pretty sure that what I’m remembering now, not much more than twelve hours and much wine and Indian food later, mashes up the more formal presentations with the closing snippets. But I’m going to try to reinhabit the moments, or maybe just bits of them.

Carolyn Dinshaw spoke at the start and end of the weekend about play, performance, and the desire of so many deeply textual and contextual literary critics to move beyond language into structures of feeling and physicality.

Julian Yates turned away from his bees and at the end off-the-cuffed with typical brilliance, reminding us that fetish-love for things past might not be so bad. He didn’t revisit it, but as he was speaking I thought of his brilliant fauxtemology for MEMSI itself, a name built out of equal helpings of mnemosyne the goddess of memory plus whimsey. Exactly right.

Joe Moshenka opened up the physicality of toys and playing, building on Carolyn’s opening move to think about what gets made into toys, who plays, what sorts of performances become public.

Gift giving.
Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

Anthony Bale, whose stunning talk the afternoon before about following Marjory Kempe into modern Palestine upped the stakes of how I think about embodied scholarship, pushed us at the end of the second day toward thinking about the public stakes of touching many pasts.

Ellen MacKay extended her brilliant engagement with the public restaging of history by reminding us of the need we academics have to speak to beyond the confines of narrow rooms.

Dorothy Kim, whose whirlwind weekend also included a plenary talk about the Medieval Academy in Atlanta, uncovered the visible politics of race from Middle English narratives of St Margaret to 21c century popular and academic cultures.

At the end of the second day, I offered the mixed temporal imperatives of play (present), recover (past), and imagine (future), and I tried to wrap them in an inhuman and oceanic package called “circulation.”

Peggy McCracken developed a wonderfully material and aesthetic reading of Pygmalion’s “ivory” statue and the assimilation of whiteness and warmth to ideas of beauty and femininity.

Stephanie Trigg returned to play and touch, our weekend’s keywords and master-metaphors, and her delicate analysis of the rhetoric of high-priced facsimile reproductions of medieval manuscripts showed us how similar and dissimilar these fascinations are to scholarly inquiry. The paradox of “entirely similar,” which phrase she drew from a marketing website, resonated with our own professional desire to touch a past that we can’t fully encounter.

Jesus Velasco, who I hadn’t met before this weekend except on Facebook, performed a glorious excavation of 13c Spanish legal structures to help us think about fantasies of “convivencia” and legal personhood in medieval and modern contexts.

Cord Whitaker, relishing his role as closing speaker (twice!), enjoined us to celebrate MEMSI’s flourishing and our shared dedication to the promises that can be unearthed from shared and hidden pasts.

The home team of GWU session chairs and MEMSI supporters, Holly Dugan, Jonathan Hsy, and Alexa Alice Joubin plus ex-GWUer Lowell Duckert, voiced the underlying mixture of sadness and celebration that subtended this MEMSI-closing event.

Endings don’t always close exactly when we think they will, and Cord’s second finishing chorus of “another chance to pronounce MEMSI’s final syllables” proved just one more prologue to Lowell’s heartfelt thanks to Jeffrey as we presented the wizard of refuge and experiment with two symbolic gifts: a handmade wooden ark signed by the participants of the weekend’s event, and a walking stick for future adventures, inscribed with words of wisdom in two languages —

A home, a limit, and a recurring challenge.

Ad astra per elephantos! 

Jeffrey Letting Go.
Photo by Alexa Alice Joubin

Passing now through 30th Street Station, I’m tallying up how much I owe to MEMSI for its inspiration, hospitality, and relentless imagination. I counted five events since the sparkling TemFest of December 2010, but Jeffrey’s better accounting punched me up to seven, I think because MEMSI helped bring me to DC to speak to his Folger seminar in 2015 and a few years earlier to serve as Lowell’s external examiner for his dissertation defense. So many long rides on the Northeast Regional!

I don’t want to get too sentimental, since the best parts of MEMSI’s vision and drive remain in circulation through and beyond our academic culture. Its end punctuates one inflection of premodern studies, but, as Dan Remein cogently remarked yesterday, MEMSI has already moved through many phases and changes. Surely the response most in-keeping with the spirit of the beast will be to kindle more experimental fires and keep changing. Arks of history bend through MEMSI, with whimsy, toward community.

Thanks to everyone, in and beyond DC this weekend!

Plural Anthropocenes in Lausanne

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During the workshop, with Vanessa Daws’s watercolor

I’m just back from a thrilling and exhausting trip to Lausanne, where I was a guest of CUSO, the affiliated group of Western (Francophone) Swiss universities. On Saturday, for a group of post-docs, faculty, and graduate students gathered together from various universities and departments, I ran a morning workshop, heard two great early afternoon talks by Swiss doctoral students, and gave a lecture, “Eco-Poetics in the Anthropocene.” Last night, sitting in the belly of the big Air France bird, I tried to put some of it back into words.

  1. Pluralizing the Anthropocene means churning the idea out into the world. We started yesterday talking about the geological sciences, but pretty soon we moved into the visual arts, poetry, and eventually my beloved toxic byways near Newtown Creek.
  2.  Bruno Latour says the Anthropocene provides an alternative to modernity, which seems like something that we very much need.
  3. The last question after my talk observed that we’d spoken about many different pasts and presents over the long day, but “What do you have to say about the future?”
  4. I answered with my favorite old Polonius song about generic mixing and variety. I said that I hope the literary humanities can half create and perceive hybrid narratives that play across tragedy and utopia without hewing too exclusively to either extreme.
  5. I also got a pointed follow-up while I was packing up my things: “So, do you think the Anthropocene is a romance?”

    My hotel

  6. I don’t really think so, whatever my allegiance to the flexible and capacious ur-genre of tragicomic romance. But I am looking, as I said, for a not-only tragic futurity — and then, all of a sudden, the pointed question turned into discussion of Primo Levi’s retelling of Ulysses’s drowning in Dante, the tragic vision with which I opened Shipwreck Modernity. Down into the whirlpool sinks the hero, finding fragments of solace, perhaps, in the act of re-narration.

Watercolor by Vanessa Daws. 2018

The morning workshop reached its greatest focus and intensity when we talked about the amazing #pluralizetheanthropocene image that the artist Vanessa Daws made for the event. I had asked her to make an icon for us, and I gave a few suggestions, including the photograph of a ship overfull of refugees crossing the Med that I included in my pre-event post. Like all the participants in the workshop, I was blown away by what she created for us.

She choose to paint a watercolor, a circular image featuring a crowded ship, a stormy sea, and the tail of a vast monster, whose curves she modeled on a creature she found in an illustration from a paperback copy of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. (I’ve not yet tracked down the source, but I will.)

Near the Cathedral

We talked about the glorious colors: the yellow water-fire of the trash-filled sea spilling out the inhospitality of the Anthropocene. We speculated about the “ship of fools” perched on the trash-wave’s crest, teeming with faceless bodies. We wondered about those faces, about what was behind them. Old Man Anthropos may not have been there himself, unless that’s him in the crow’s nest with the spyglass. The vessel holds preterite ones, those who have been passed over, and who soon may plunge into iridescent waters.

How, I asked our group, does this fragile ship, sinuous tail, and crowded sea blaze forth our Anthropocene condition?

The particular joy of turning all the eyes in the room onto a (projected image of a) painting is that, after we’d spent the first hour-plus introducing ourselves and speculating about Anthropocene and other ideas, we were now aligned into community, everyone looking the same way. I’m not an art historian, but I love the focalizing pressure of a painting’s crafted surface. Its meanings can only emerge in time, but all that the image is and means shows itself simultaneously. Surface plenitude signifies all at once, through a unity into which our historical, cultural, and scientific ideas about environmental change can’t quite coalesce.

I had a line in the lecture I’d give a few hours later about the environmental humanities fostering techniques of attention, and I was thinking about that as all of us looked together at the painting and tried to make sense of it. I’d just received the image by email the day before, so it was new to everyone in the room.

Vanessa Daws, like me, is an open-water swimmer. We first met, at least in the world beyond Facebook, in the surf in Santa Barbara. When I look at her painting, I think about how angry the sea appears. As toxic, perhaps, as the waters of Newtown Creek.

The hinge of the day rotated around a pair of great presentations by CUSO grad students.

Rachel Nisbit, who had just submitted her dissertation the week before, presented a suggestive summary of the project, “Murmuring to Muttering: Anthropocene River Narratives (1789-2009).” She started with Wordsworth’s Prelude, turned her fluvial path toward George Eliot and then to Joyce’s Wake before concluding with Alice Oswald’s river-poem Dart, set in Devonshire. She also talked about her earlier geological field work, and shared some wonderful images from a dig in Germany. It made me think of Jeffrey Cohen’s idea of the Mississippi as an “earth artist,” shaping premodern and modern North America.

Lausanne Ouchy

The second paper was by Viola Marchi, who I think works mostly in science fiction, but for this occasion reimagined Sophocles’s famous tragedy as the story of Anthropos Rex, self-destroying figure for desire and painful knowledge. She spoke wonderfully about the Anthropocene’s challenge to theory and engagingly discussed the literary meanings of catastrophe and the sublime. She would later in the q&a after my talk offer a wonderfully enthusiastic question about disorientation and environmental experience. Wanting to connect to her late 20/21c materials, I nudged her toward Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, a disorienting novel about disorientation that highlights the violence that accompanies orienting technologies as they carve Lines onto nonhuman landscapes.

My lecture proffered four eco-keywords: catastrophe, time, human, and toxicity. I was happy with how they resonated with what we’d already been discussing.

Mont Blanc (center)

During the whole event, though, I heard an echoing nonhuman voice that I couldn’t quite work into the conversation —

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe —

I’d been up high to see the vistas the day before, so even as Viola talked about the Romantic sublime I was already there.

For much of the past decade or so, I’ve been consciously writing and thinking against a certain sublime of which Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” provides a defining lyric exemplar. That sublime imagines the human engagement with Nature in terms that are heroic, instrumental, macho, greedy to take in all the mountain’s sparkling glory.

So during my jet-lag processing Friday, I rented a car, drove about an hour into the Alps, and then rode multiple gondolas, trams, and ski lifts up to the 33oom top of Mont Fort, to spy out my own view to Mont Blanc. I stood there a minute in the cold wind and stared at the blaze of sun on snow.

Downhill skiing, which I’ve loved since I was six years old but haven’t done much for the past few seasons, is on a physical level an Anthropocene horror show, in which petro-industry funnels human bodies into glacial vastness. My love for it feels pretty guilty, these days.

But there I was, looking at the peaks, cold and a bit tired, murmuring Shelley’s opening lines to myself:

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind…

How everlasting are the things of this Anthropocene? How much can flow into each solitary mind? How can we love this fragile and partially inaccessible world, its flashes of light and its slow dripping melt?

That’s what I was thinking about on Air France westbound into JFK last night.

Thanks to my amazing hosts at CUSO, especially fondue companions and organizers Maria Shmygol, Kirsten Stirling, and Zoe Imfeld. Deep gratitude to Vanessa Daws for the art, and to Mont Blanc for showing itself through the haze.