Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

A Man from Clam Island

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Alinor told me about a 67-year old man who was found dead yesterday  in Long Island Sound about a mile along the shoreline from where we swim.  He lived on Clam Island, one of the low, bare bits of rock on which people have been perching houses since the late 19c.

He was fully dressed, so it doesn’t seem to have been a case of swimming gone wrong, though it’s not clear how or why he got into the water.   What is clear is that however he got in — falling, tripping, a stroke — he wasn’t able to support himself in what Conrad calls “the destructive element.”

I went on my afternoon swim anyway — it won’t be gorgeous September swimming weather much longer — but not as far as I usually go.  The wind blew hard out of the southwest, and the waves were choppy.

Shakespeare and Slavery

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A few sources for Danielle’s project on the Atlantic slave trade in the early modern period, which may be of interest to the rest of you.

Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999)

Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (any number of editions of the well-known & influential abolitionist autobiography)

Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African (Penguin, 2005) (a controversial & well-regarded biography that provides evidence that Equiano may have been born in North Carolina)

Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader (2004) a good popular bio of John Hawkins

I’ll also see if I can find a copy of vol 10 of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, which has Hawkins’s most substantial voyage to Africa in it.  If I can’t find it, the NY Public Library is your best best.

I’ll also bring in an interesting short article in the journal Sea History that discusses the American anti-slavery squadron in the early 19c, & their use of African small boat handlers to negotiate the dangerous surf along the West African coast.  Interactions between Europeans & Africans were quite complex during the slave trade, with lots of individuals and groups on both sides of the various transactions.

Oceanic Nature and Literary Studies

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Just a couple of broad points for us to think about on Tues when we discuss “blue humanities” or the “new thalassology” or whatever we’d like to call it.

1. Natural Disorder and Literary Form: In both the oceanic and non-oceanic elements of my work on nature, I’m interested in contrasting the disorder of the natural world (and the environment-human culture relationship) with the kind of order — provisional, of course — that literary form provides.

Prospero’s “revels now are ended” speech might be relevant here.

2. Historicism and Anachronism: In early modern studies (and, I believe, other areas of literary studies as well), much research in recent decades has been historicist in a comprehensive and horizontal sense: scholars immerse themselves in the culture & habits of thought of one particular age.  Part of what At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and the Shakespeare Now! series of which it’s part tries to do is open up this closed historicist circle & ask Shakespeare to speak directly to 21c questions and concerns.  There are lots of risks involved in this sort of thing; sometimes it doesn’t work; and I think that a deep historicism is part of this project.  But I also want to talk on Tues night about the blindfolds that history puts on us.

The passage in The Tempest that might be relevant here is Miranda’s recollection of her mother, in the “dark backward and abysm of time” in 1.2.

A Different Salty Allegory: The Mariner’s Mirror

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Last week we talked about the chaotic opening scene of The Tempest as a representation of the educational process.  I’ll suggest a different, and perhaps more palatable, image this week.  The Mariner’s Mirror was a Dutch atlas translated into English in the late Elizabethan period, in order to advance English navigation and cartography.  The Folger copy was hand-colored at some later date —

For some more information on the Mirror, you can look at the entry in the Lost at Sea website

Mariner’s Mirror Website

and also listen to my 90-second description of it on the Audio tour

Mariner’s Mirror

Conrad on Swimming

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Listening to Lord Jim on audio CD on my way home from Baltimore last night, I noticed a passage about swimming that’s worth making a note of for the thalassologically inclined.  The speaker is Marlow’s friend Stein, a German butterfly-collector & Indonesian traveler whose past includes marriage into a family of local nobility on Celebes (Sulawesi), the deaths of his best friend, wife, and daughter, and then a second life as an wandering ent0mologist.   It’s Stein who places Jim in Patusan.

The excerpt comes from the end of  Chapter 20.

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns — nicht wah? …No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.  So if you ask me — how to be?

Again, a little bit later

And yet it is true — it is true.  In the destructive element immerse.

The chapter ends with a turn away from this (German, idealist, philosophical) fantasy

Sleep well.  And to-morrow we must do something practical — practical…

Stein, however, doesn’t head toward bed at this point, but instead returns “back to his butterflies,” his own obsession.

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.