Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Water and Air

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I remember this time of year — that awkward pause between the last swims of fall and the closing-in of the season.  I don’t really want to go to the pool, b/c that would be admitting that’s where I’ll be all winter, but I can’t easily get into the water.  Olivia says she’s got a swim or two left in her this year, but the tide wasn’t right last weekend.

So I’m running instead, & left home this afternoon around 2 pm under bright sunshine.  Heard a slow rippling grumble as I passed the post office.  A sharp crack at Sweet Bears, our local coffee-shop-cum-ice-cream outfit.  The sun blazed off the sound to my right & I thought I’d get my short run in before any storm came.  The wind had been off the water when I’d left home.

The rain started as I was running down Double Beach Road toward the headquarters of CT Hospice (formerly the Double Beach Club & still a great place to swim — long story).  The wind now came from the northwest, inland.  It blew hard, making a cold, sharp staccato on my shoulders and back.

Hail mixed in as I turned into the Turtle Bay condo complex, & I started to think about the physical properties of water.  All three states surrounded me: liquid rain, solid ice, and water vapor.  Shakespeare talks about a “sea of air” somewhere, Timon I think.  No need to get in the Sound to get wet today.

By the time I got home I was soaked, and the sun was shining.  What was it Mark Twain said about the weather in CT?

Further sandy thoughts…

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Jeffrey Cohen takes time out from his pending trip to Catalonia to respond to my repsonse to his beach thoughts, and say some nice things about my book.

I especially like the two-prongedness of his emphasis on beaches as spurs to physical activity (though he does not mention swimming), and also  reminders of the relative weakness of the human bodies performing those activities —

If I say I find the sea calming in its agitation, that’s not because I sit at its edge with sun lotion and an alcoholic drink. For me the sea’s edge is for beachcombing, hiking, exploring. It’s a place of constant realization, of possible danger, of frequent reminders of death (empty shells, broken crabs, sea life suffocated in sand). The immensity of the sea reminds me of the small place of humans alongside its flow. Vastness gives perspective. That’s what I find calming: my own small agitations dissipate under those relentless waves, those sudden vistas and unexpected glimpses of life, all that noise so saturated with meaning it is chaos itself. Beautiful chaos, chaos as art.

I also like his thoughts on the “insinuating” quality of the ocean in shared human histories.

Calm, with agitation

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Today’s bloggy text  comes from that medievalist exemplar of academic blogging, Jeffrey Cohen (inthemedievalmiddle.com ).  He was posting while on family vacation in Bethany Beach last weekend —

And is there anything more beautiful than the noise of the water upon sand? I was reading Michel Serres’s short book Genesis just before I left, and I keep thinking about his obsession with the creative spur that marinal disorder yields. I believe it. There is nothing so calming as the ceaseless agitation of the sea.

It may seem churlish to pounce on such musings, & I certainly love a trip to the beach as much as anyone, but I’m struck by the closeness of “calming” to agitation and to Serres’s “creative spur.”  Do academics go to the beach to work, or to forget?  I sometimes joke that I’ve structured my whole  recent academic focus so that every time I go to the beach — and I live at the beach, albeit not a surf beach — it’s a work trip for me.  But is that b/c I try not to be too calm when I hear oceanic noises?

Three things seems possible.  Maybe all three at once.

First, our 21c experience of beachy calm is historically contingent, a function of our culture’s loss of the sea’s full terror and danger, partly b/c of the marginalization of sea travel & also, perhaps, because so many more of us are taught to swim reasonably well than was historically the case.  I certainly think the “meditation” that Ishmael claims 19c New Yorkers connect with the sea in Moby-Dick is a more fraught thing than today’s calm recreation.

Second, writerly types like to conceal disorderly thinking under a calm facade, so that the agitation of the surf covers up the ceaseless churn of (imagined?  inchoate? real?) intellectual productivity.  Perhaps this is a happy fiction?

Third, maybe  it’s our separation from the natural world, not any potential union with it, that “spurs” human creative work.  The distance between us & the sea motivates.

Is it a different love than we feel for tall mountains or wildflowers or Tintern Abbey?  I think it is.

A Question from the Woods

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  • I used this image in my talk at Farleigh Dickinson today to talk about the purportedly living forest of Birnam Wood in Macbeth and, by extension, the dream of a green pastoral ecology — a place of natural stability and sustainability that can serve as a kind of model for human practices.

I then went on to talk about a “blue” or oceanic ecology based on change & disorder, using this image

As I was talking about these two visions of nature in the play, I admitted that they are caricatures or cartoons, but I also got a great question, after the talk, from a grizzly old guy who, apparently, hadn’t wanted to raise his hand in the full Q&A.

“I live in the woods,” he said.  “It looks nothing like that picture.  The woods are messy, chaotic, with things falling & breaking & dying everywhere you look.  That picture isn’t a real woods.  It’s something somebody planted.”

Sounds right to me.  The green world, the green pastoral utopia that will heal all our ills, is a fantasy projection.

I suppose that implies that the blue world is too.

The Green and the Blue in Macbeth

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As a quasi-reply to my first batch of student papers, here’s an offering of my own, a few paragraphs out of an oceanic reading of Macbeth that I’ve just finished.  This version will be published in a Forum on “Shakespeare and Ecology” next year in *Shakespeare Studies*.  I’ll be giving a slightly different oral version atthe Annual Shakespeare Colloquium at Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, this Saturday at 1 pm.  Come by if you’re in the area!  It’s free & open to the public.

The ecological humanities have been drawn to Shakespeare in part because he’s the biggest fish in the Anglophone literary sea, but also because his long and living stage history provides tangible evidence of canonical texts engaging contemporary dilemmas.  The current surge of ecocritical Shakespeare, however, risks seeing only the happier side of nature, a beach where the weather is always good. Sustained attention to the Shakespeare’s “green” should not occlude his dramatization of a harsher “blue ecology” that locates itself not in cultured pastures or even marginal forests but in the deep sea.  Shakespeare’s literary works can’t get us all the way into this massive blue body – the most basic feature of the world ocean is that humans don’t live there – but they can serve as a fictive beach house, providing us with a beguiling window onto an inhuman space.  The view from Shakespeare’s beach house shows the void next to which we perch our fragile bodies.  It locates us right at the boundary which we can only temporarily cross.  Like other beach houses, it’s vulnerable to coastal storms, and probably built on sand.  It’s a place to which we return because of (not in spite of) the disorder in front of it.

Shakespeare’s dramatization of this inhuman, oceanic ecology appears in two intertwined tropes in Macbeth.  The play’s “green” ecology imagines Scotland as a troubled agricultural land, husbanded by King Duncan, violated by the Macbeths, and eventually renewed by Malcolm.  Against this now almost-traditional eco-reading, a “blue” ecological countercurrent exposes the play’s fascination with the inhospitable ocean.  References to the sea teem in this land-locked drama.  The bloody Captain analogizes battle to “shipwracking storms” (1.2.26); the Weird Sisters assail the merchant ship Tiger (1.3.7-26); and Macbeth himself rejects the “sure and firm-set earth” (2.1.57) for “multitudinous seas” (2.2.66).  Even Lady Macbeth’s fantasy that water can wash away murder represents a fervent plea that the liquid element might serve human purposes.  The play’s blue ecology combines the Weird Sisters’ inhuman perspective with the topos of the mind-stretching sea, which, as Auden observes, “misuses nothing because it values nothing.”  The green and blue in Macbeth represent different visions of how humans live in the natural world, with green sustainability first displaced by Macbeth’s oceanic ambitions and then finally re-asserting itself after the tyrant’s death.  For twenty-first century Shakespeareans living in an increasingly oceanic and disorderly world – the summer of this essay was the summer of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – supplementing green narratives with blue incursions feels urgent.

Columbus the Aquaman

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In Short Beach, Columbus Day is the semi-official end of the swimming season.  When it’s chilly but clear, like this weekend, it’s not all that easy to get in the water.  I ended up making the shift to wetsuits on Friday afternoon.

What did Columbus discover?  Certainly not America: he thought it was China, it had been visited many times before by Northern Europeans since the time of Erik the Red, and he had no interest in new places.  The thing he found that was new — or at least new-ish, for the part of Europe that had been formerly oriented toward the Mediterranean — was the deep sea.  “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” was what the Spanish called him.  He wasn’t really a land creature.

Today Olivia & I pulled on our 2mm Body Glove suits & walked past the fall colors to the beach.  A few teenagers were diving off the Yale boathouse docks & then shrieking as they rushed to get out.  The wet suits make it a little easier to get in, though it’s still a shock.  The real payoff is that as soon as that film of water gets warmed up, you feel ready to stay.

How many more swimming days are left in 2010?

Not enough.

October Twilight

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Got back from the rock-wall climbing birthday party after the second soccer game just as the sun was starting to go down.  A quick three-mile jog to warm up as the evening star poked her seductive head over Killam’s Point in the east.  The tide was just coming up to full, a wide, still pool of a flood.  In the last flashes of sunlight out on the Sound I could see white sails, round-bellied but still.

The water’s cooler now, & it takes me about 50 yards of fly and 50 free to get my body comfortable.  As soon as I stop my skin starts to tingle.  I turn to look back at the houses of Short Beach, every third one lit from inside.  No one else is visible on the bay.  Even the seaweed is silent, floating in stolid clumps.  I float on my back and watch the sky.

Timing is everything.

Robinson Crusoe

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I’ve been thinking over the past few days about Robinson Crusoe, Mariner.  We’ll be busy next week with the NY Public Library & Dr. Lubey’s work, but esp. since she’s one of our resident Defoe experts, we might want to expand this conversation.

Matt P., our roving seminar member who’s spent the last two weeks in China, has started his project by thinking about the similarities between Prospero’s exile and Crusoe’s: both Europeans on isolated islands who survive, enslave non-Europeans, and appear, perhaps in slightly different ways, to represent fantasies about the colonial experience.

There’s lots to chew on in that parallel, but I also thought I’d share some recent material on Defoe that I put together this summer at the Folger.  Here are links to a web site based on his comprehensive world history, the Atlas Maritimus of 1728, to a map of his maritime travels that was published in Part II of his story, and to two audio clips.  (The first is recorded by my brother-in-law, Maury Sterling, last seen in the cast of “The A-Team” this summer.)

Defoe’s Atlas Maritimus

Map of Robinson Crusoe’s Travels

Crusoe’s Shipwreck

Alexander Selkirk

Enjoy!

Surfing Short Beach

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Lat Thursday afternoon, Olivia poked her head into my office while I was hard at work writing an article on “Popular Fiction” for the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia.  “Daddy,” she said, “the waves are huge!  Will you take me swimming?”

The good thing about popular fiction is that it’s always there — that’s what popular means, after all — so it seemed like a pretty good idea.  It had been blowing hard for a day or so, with another day of high winds and rain to come.  The tide was high, and Short Beach was, for a change, a roaring shore.

Olivia suited up and put on a life jacket, & we even recruited Alinor to join us.  The water isn’t cold yet, but it was pretty rough: when the swell smacks into the sea-wall, it creates a standing wave that is (as high school physics tells us) twice as high as the first wave coming in.

The rare waves brought everybody out — our neighbor Joe Piscatelli the surfer was in the middle of the bay on his board, trying (with little success, alas) to ride the swell.  Dave & Gay Peterson, our most indefatigable swimmers, headed straight out along the sheltered western shore of the bay.  Plus a second surfer I didn’t know and a pair of Short Beach matrons were just getting in when we finally left.

Olivia likes to float in the surf & look out as each new wave floats her up and over.  We swam out pretty far, maybe 50 yards or so, so that we could float in the bigger waves.  We could feel the power of the destructive element, but it also buoyed us up.

Wetsuit weather!

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Olivia was the first in the family to make the leap to fall swimwear.  Any weekend with three salt-water swims — Fri, Sat, & Sun — is a good weekend.

Especially today, you can feel the change of seasons on your skin.