Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Big Tree Down

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Some approximate numbers: about 40 feet tall, 60″ around at chest-height, 20″ in diameter. According to the growth multiplier for white pine, that means roughly 100 years old. Which takes us back to 1912, before my parents were born and before our house was built. I imagine the tree was planted to mark the northeastern corner of the rock wall that now borders our property. When it was built it marked the edge of the estate that then filled up almost all of our neighborhood, before smaller properties were carved out of it after WWII.

This tree’s life was not quite on a nonhuman time scale, but it’s been through a lot of storms, including some bigger than Sandy: Gloria in 1985 and the great storm of 1938, among others. 

I’d been worried about storm surge, which turned out to be a bit less than Irene, though it still produced major flooding just a bit downhill from us. We’re all fine, but it’s odd that our damage came from being high, not low. This tree was probably one of the highest points in our little neighborhood, which exposed it to the full force of the east wind. We’re very lucky it didn’t fall on the house, though a little playhouse we put in for the kids years ago is underneath it. Still standing, as far as I can tell.

The tree came down around 7 pm, two hours after the power cut out. I was sitting on that side of the house with the kids telling stories when we heard a muffled thump and then a sharp bang. We jumped up away from the window, but the bang turned out to be just the power cable getting ripped off the wall. It was dark and hard to see, but as we peered through the glare of our flashlights, we eventually could make out the dark outline of a huge shape, lying sideways along the yard. We figured out what it was by looking at the hole in the skyline, visible by the full moon, on the corner of the property where the tree had been.

A few hours earlier, in the last of the power, I’d watched the Fangorn scenes from The Two Towers with the kids. Eald enta geworc, goes the Anglo-Saxon verse line from which Tolkien invented his tree-herders. The old work of giants.

We’ll miss that tree. 

Globalization and Ideas of Mexico in “Merchant of Venice”

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I’ll share the opening and closing paragraph out of my talk at EMU last week, which is the early stirrings of a project on Shakespeare and the Pacific that’s rumbling beneath the other things I’m working on now. After claiming that this play has Shakespeare’s “perhaps unique” reference to the Pacific via Mexico, I remembered Rosalind’s invocation of the “South Sea of discovery” in AYLI 3.2 — but that’s as a place infinitely far away and unreachable. Which may be part of what the Pacific means to the Elizabethans.

In any case, here’s the opening of the talk —

I’ll start by noting that The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s only play to mention “Mexico,” a word that came into English in the mid-sixteenth century via Spanish, probably from a Native American language (Nahuatl, OED). The play twice explains that Antonio has ships bound for this New World territory. The first time, Shylock includes Mexico among several destinations, including Tripoli, the Indies, and England. Later Bassanio elaborates an even wider network, repeating Shylock’s three and adding Lisbon, Barbary, and India. Spanish Mexico, with its gold mines and brutal history of conquest, spans the early modern Atlantic and Pacific worlds, so these references comprise not only one of Shakespeare’s rare mentions of the Americas but also perhaps his unique gesture to the Pacific.[i] Using worlds and oceans conjured by Mexico, I want to re-examine economic readings of this play. Merchant has long been the favorite play of economic critics, New and old, Marxist or not.[ii] I suggest that among the many binaries that distinguish the play – usurer and merchant, Christian and Jew, male and female, gift and market economies in Karen Newman’s essay – we should add the contrast between two different models of maritime trade. The first system, associated with Shylock’s Rialto, the economic history of Venice, and Mediterranean sea-lanes, establishes a local network of connectivity and inter-dependence. The second system, associated with Antonio’s dispersed fleet, Mexico, and the European encounter with the Americas and Asia, creates a deterratorialized, planet-sized oceanic world of immense potential wealth but little certainty. The play’s critique of economic exchange needs to consider the differences, as well as connections, between these two versions of maritime expansion.


[i] The only use of the term “America” comes metaphorically in Errors (3.2). “Indies,” a term that could indicate both East and West, appears in Merchant, Errors, Henry 8, Merry Wives, and Twelfth Night. “Bermuda,” an ambiguously American island, famously appears in The Tempest only. Other New World names such as Virginia and Peru do not appear at all.

[ii] For a collection that surveys the field, see Linda Woodbridge, ed., Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (London: Palgrave, 2003).

And here’s the truncated but eventually will become rousing conclusion, via Charles Olson —

I’ll conclude my talk with a very brief suggestion about what a “Pacific Shakespeare” might look like, taking Merchant’s gestures toward Mexico as points of departure. In asking for a reading of Shakespeare that embraces our planet’s largest ocean, by far the biggest single thing on our watery globe, I’ll employ the poet Charles Olson’s visionary reading of “Pacific Man.” This figure represents “the NEW HISTORY,” a radical expansion of space, reconfiguration of the past, and “confirmation” of a new future.[i] Olson celebrates Magellan’s discovery of the Pacific as exceeding Columbus’s of America, because in that new ocean “3000 years went overboard” (116). Against ancient worlds that were “locked tight in River Ocean which encircled it” – here Olson draws on classical geography – the Pacific represents the last opening, “the end of the Unknown” (119). This expansive vision inverts the anxiety and disorientation that both Shylock and Bassanio figure through Mexico. The global expanse that Shakespeare invokes only obliquely becomes, for Olson, an ecstatically globalized trajectory. Antonio’s ships, after sailing Pacific waters, come to road mysteriously, bringing nothing we hear of to Belmont. But the play also gestures toward a Pacific future, a world joining Mexico to Venice to England, and all of these waters to the English merchant ships that float, then and today, on all the world’s oceans. The imaginative presence of these alien waters suggests that hidden paradises cannot remain forever in isolation. I wonder what the merchant’s ships brought back from Mexico.


[i] Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (San Francisco: City Lights, 1947) 116.

Swimmer Poetics

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Here’s the opening couple paragraphs of my ecology piece for O-Zone, which thinks eco-literary thoughts while narrating the Great Chesapeake Bay race last June.

Into the warm salt water splashed the six hundred. Not all of us knew we were diving into a theoretical paradigm.

 

We crowded up to the water’s edge like figures in a Robert Frost poem. Or whale-killing philosophers in Battery Park. We were swimmers, come to Chesapeake Bay in June 2012 to race four-point-four miles from western to eastern shore. Covering that distance in the water carves out a nice block of time, a discrete chronology to feel fluid dislocation on an intimate level. I wasn’t there to win. I wanted to think some things through.

 

My hope, then and now, is that swimming can model or inspire a dynamic ecological poetics for our age of crisis. The prolonged experience of immersion, its difficulties and pleasures, parallels how we must learn to live today. Being in the water forces the physical realities of this terraqueous globe onto your skin, adding urgency to the need to move beyond comforting green eco-visions.  The blue world ocean, as literary culture has long taught us, is unstable, dynamic, and inhospitable. But the gray-green silty waters of Chesapeake Bay proved survivable, even pleasurable. Dare I say philosophical?

Heroism, Marine Ecology, and Literary Culture

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Here’s a few bits from an essay that will introduce a section of the forthcoming volume, Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History.  The book originated in this great conference, about which I blogged here. I’m introducing a cluster of essays on Steinbeck, Hemingway, and American Maritime Revivalism.

What makes an ecological hero? Can heroic self-assertion ever be compatible with ecological interconnectedness? These three essays on maritime literature and historical ecology suggest ways to bring the special insights of literary culture to bear on these questions. In a broad sense, the problem of the hero is the problem of human-centered thinking. All human heroes, by virtue of being human, exacerbate the problem of anthropocentrism. To the extent that humans want to see examples of ecological heroism in people like us, we resist the full force of the ecological thought that de-centers the merely human.  But literature, to a degree, may be flexible enough to respond to this dilemma. Literary works both reflect and modify existing ideas about what human beings are and how we interact with large-scale natural systems. The massive surge of ecocritical readings of literature since the 1990s suggests that the human-nature relationship has become an essential topic of literary interest in the present. Literary culture may help unravel, or at least illuminate, the conflict between the cultural force of anthropocentric narratives and the counter-pressure of ecosystemic thinking.

The problem of the hero remains potent for all strains of ecological thinking, but perhaps especially so in the blue oceans of maritime ecocriticism. While the green world of traditional environmental studies has always had room for the humans who till the soil and tend pastures, the oceanic world is less hospitable and, in human terms at least, less sustainable. The ocean is not really a home for people. But despite or perhaps because of the difficulties of living in or near the great waters, the sea has always been one of the most fecund sites of literary invention. To explore blue voyages instead of green kingdoms requires imagining ways for humans to endure hostile, changeable ecologies. The heroes we need, as I have argued elsewhere, are swimmers and sailors, not warriors or conquerors. These oceanic heroes, who exert themselves in intimate and dangerous contact with the fluid element, may provide models for surviving the present era of ecological crisis and disruption. Humans crave both heroes and ecological order, and it may be that we cannot have both, at least not in either’s current form. This cluster of essays suggests new currents of maritime ecological thinking that can do justice to the mind-challenging world ocean and find ways for humans to thrive in contact with salt water.

As both scientists and literary scholars know, ecology represents a system of relations in which no single part takes precedence over the inter-relating whole. To embrace ecological thinking entails refusing singularity, attempting insofar as it is possible to think outside solitary human perspectives. Heroism works in the opposite way. The hero, the example of human greatness, invites attention and focus, so that the heroic body itself becomes a vessel for transcendent values. The history of art provides probably our clearest examples of how heroism becomes embodied. Michelangelo’s famous sixteenth-century sculpture of  David, poised nude just before his combat with Goliath, visually presents the singularity and physical force of human heroism. The hero, the shepherd boy about to slay the Philistine giant, stands out from the crowd. Rather than being defined by relations, the hero exceeds them. Imagining this figure as just a participant in an all-encompassing network seems difficult, and perhaps undesirable. The tension between the human desire for exemplary heroism and an opposed but also strong penchant for harmonious exchange marks the field of ecological literary criticism. Literary scholars have no easy answer for this dilemma – we want both sides of this coin also – but literary culture contains a host of figures who try, and at times do not entirely fail, to combine these value systems.

It is tempting to answer these questions with some names from recent ecological activism: Rachel Carson. Bill McKibbon. Aldo Leopold. Sylvia Earle. Al Gore.  These and others combine in different ways human heroism and ecological insight. But the search for heroic models, for exemplary humans, on a basic level works in tension with ecological ideas that de-center human primacy and advance inter-relation rather than solitary exemplarity. To be heroic, to stand out from and dominate a crowd, on some fundamental level is a non-ecological act. Heroism, the human desire for power and display, may be part of what got our watery planet into its current ecological mess. Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, in an ecological light, tells a story of human ambition in doomed conflict with the boundless sea. At the close of Melville’s novel, the waters close over Ahab and his whaleship and “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” A collective body drowns heroes. Only the philosophical Ishmael, who represents a different kind of heroism, poetic and speculative rather than epic and violent, survives to tell the tale. In Melville’s literary model, oceanic forces frustrate or reshape human ambitions. But in our age of climate change and ocean acidification, it no longer seems clear that the sea itself can remain what it has been.

Scenes from Portugal

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The view from our villa

I arrived in Lisbon airport around 4 pm on Saturday Aug 11, which gave me an afternoon and evening on my own before Alinor and the kids arrived the next morning. After checking into my airport hotel and making sure the rental car was all set for the next day, I took the slow local bus to the Praça Marquess Pombal near the center of town. I love seeing new cities by public transportation. The bus took me through the empty-feeling outskirts of Lisbon, filled with graffiti and young people walking slowly down broad avenues through the heat. I had the feeling I wasn’t in England any more.

Dinner in the Baixa.

At the statue of the Marquess Pombal, the Prime Minister who rebuilt the city after the 1755 earthquake, producing the first urban grid in the Western world, I switched to the fast new Metro and zipped down to the banks of the Tagus. After buying a pair of sunglasses at a kiosk for 5 Euros, I walked uphill through the steep maze of the Alfama, past the Sé (cathedral) to the Castello San Jorge. I didn’t pay for entrance, but I looked from the castle walls over the city toward the Ponte de 25 April, which looks just like the Golden Gate. First of many visions of northern California on this trip.

Dinner that night in the Baixa, where the long avenue are closed to cars and filled with small tables for the cafes. Sitting down to a glass of vinho verde and a  plate of fish-and-potato, I thought about how much fun it was to start by knowing nothing about Lisbon, just four hours earlier, and suddenly to have a sense of neighborhoods, public transit, the hills and wide river Tagus that dominates and orients the city. The last few days of the family trip we all stayed in Belem, about 6km west down the river, the port from which the great naus sailed to Africa, India, and Brazil, so we barely got back to the Baixa, and made only one trip to the Castello. Lisbon is a city to come back to.

The Roman bridge in Ponte de Lima

After getting Alinor and the kids on Sun morning, we drove our Renault Clio (“the muse of history”) north on the A1, one of Portugal’s great highways, built recently, presumably with EU credit. After almost three hours north to Porto we picked up the coast road that leads north into the Minho region, then turned east up the Lima River valley to the exit for Calheiros, just a few km short of Ponte de Lima and its Roman bridge. Then the fun began: the drive to our villa in upper Calheiros was maybe 5 km from the highway exit, but we drove up and around and up some more. The roads were all paved, but they kept getting smaller and the stone houses and walls closer together. We followed signs – including a great sign for the village of “Portal” with an arrow pointing both ways, the door being always open in Portugal – and drove through one-lane stretches that felt as if they were sunk into small culverts between the ancient stone walls that terraced the hillside for farming.

When we got to the villa we found a traffic jam. Our host Diana was there, the owner of the villa was there, and then we pulled up behind both of them in a narrow alley surrounded by stone houses. The housekeeper had locked gate of the carport, and no one had the key.  Portuguese was spoken, and the key was found.

The villa felt, and was, quite remote – the market to which we could walk was 1.5 km away, but along a paved road & besides it only featured old produce and Portuguese men drinking at all hours of the day or night. But the place itself was gorgeous. A small pool, a bit of flat lawn, an engineering feat on the steep hillside, a large deck, and a view across the Lima valley. The car port had table grapes growing in fat clusters, which we ate. The inside was Euro-new, complete with an electric stovetop that took us days to master, but the building also incorporated much older stonework in its construction.

Festival day in Viana de Castello

3. The first few days were quiet as the kids and Alinor processed jet lag. We drove into Ponte de Lima for the big biweekly market on Monday, but it was huge and crowded and we didn’t stay. I found a supermarket & brought in enough food so that we didn’t have to eat all our meals down the hill. Slowly I mastered the mountain driving, and gradually figured out the lay of the land in and around Ponte de Lima. The story goes that Decimus Brutus’s legions at first refused to cross the river, thinking it was the Lethe & if they crossed they would forget their families and homes. So the commander crossed first and called his own name back to the men, after which they followed him north.

Monday night we met Sonja, a Portuguese women who drove up from Viana de Castello on the coast to cook arroz mariscos for us – a somewhat wetter version of paella with lots of mussels, calamari, pieces of fish, octopus, and huge prawns. We communicated with her mostly in French, which many people spoke more easily than English — it seems that during the depressed 70s a lot of residents of the Minho emigrated to France, and there are lots of connections that remain. We saw lots of EU cars with the letter “F” on the license plate, more than any other foreign country. That meal started a trend in Portuguese food: the seafood was great. We also liked the national pastry, pastel de nata, which are little custard tarts. The best ones are made in a mid-19c bakery in Belem right next to the hotel we stayed a when we were in Lisbon.

Tuesday it poured rain all day and we stayed in the villa, but Wednesday we drove over the mountains to Valença on the Spanish border to see the great fortress. Traffic was bad and the “shopping fortress” was filled with Spanish tourists snapping up Portuguese linens.

Luis and Alinor after our hike in the Sierra de Peneda

4. Thursday was the turning point of the trip: we drove up to Arcos de Valdevez to ride horses at Carlos Orlando’s Quinto do Fijo, which the villa’s office had suggested. Olivia got nervous about riding English saddles up steep mountain trails, but Alinor & Ian rode through the steep alleys and dirt paths, getting a local’s eye view of the network of roads and byways of the hills above Arcos. Olivia & I swam at the river beach on the Vez in town.

But the best of all was being put in touch with Carolos’s friend Luis Barros, who runs AktivaNatura, a kayaking/hiking/biking/etc outfit based in Ponte de Barca who became our guide for two of our remaining four days in the Minho. On Friday we met him near his office in Ponte de Barca & he drove us in his van into the Sierra Peneda, the northern valley of Portugal’s largest National Park. It’s a huge, high, stone-rimmed valley, almost entirely cut off on both sides until the Portuguese government put in a paved road in the 1970s. The driving is slow and sometimes frightening, with sheer drops, endless views, and free-ranging longhorn cattle and wild horses. We were only supposed to hike until around 7pm, according to the plans we’d made via Facebook with Luis, but he ended up giving us the full tour: a trip to the park entrance and its visitor center, to see the espagerras or stone granaries in Soajo, to a fantastic “fresh” (ie, cold) swimming hole just a bit past Soajo, and finally, after hours of driving & Olivia getting a bit carsick, as good a bit of hiking as I’ve ever done, over granite pathways and glacier-carved valleys, past  live oaks and wild horses down to the town of Peneda, with its three-star hotel, famous church, and pilgrimage site. We made it to the hotel restaurant just before the kitchen closed at 9:30 pm. There we had local wine – vinho verde, but the red variety this time, which tasted a bit underaged, which is to say, like grape juice – veal steaks, and the only good chocolate mouse we found in Portugal.

Luis himself was as friendly and interested as you could wish. He runs Aktiva in part b/c of an ecological commitment to nature, as near as I can tell, partly inspired (I think) by his eco-themed reading of science fiction as a boy. We had a great conversation about E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series after the sun went down and he was driving us back to Ponte de Barca through dark mountain roads. We made plans to go kayaking with him on Sunday. It was a festival night in Ponte de Barca when we go there, so all the cafes were still full at 12:30 am, but Olivia had been sleeping in the car for hours. A long day for her.

The Hotel de Peneda, last stop on our hike.

Saturday Luis had a big group of kayakers & we went to Braga, the largest city in the Minho and a religious center. Alinor & Olivia went to see an 18c Baroque palace, and Ian and I went to the amazing 16c Sé and the Roman baths. It was a fantastic cathedral, fill of many different styles of art and decoration. Ian lit a candle for Grandpa Charlie & talked eloquently about that strange feeling you get inside sacred places even if you’re not all that religious. Olivia bought cute sandals on the pedestrian avenues, where the two groups at lunch at separate cafes within a few hundred meters of each other. The salada de polvo (octopus) was the best thing any of us ate in Braga.

Sunday Olivia was feeling tired plus didn’t really want to kayak, so Ian & I went with Luis for 6 km of white water on the Vez. We met him in the Aquario, a café overlooking the river beach where Olivia & I had swam on Th. Luis pulled up in his trailer, we dropped his mini-motorbike – only 60 kilos! – so that he could drive back to get the boat trailer after we finished, he outfitted us both in lightweight shorty wetsuits, and away we went. The Vez was low, but not so low we couldn’t get through the 6 sets of rapids. Ian did great; he floated a little higher in the water than I did, so he could bounce off the rocks more easily. Luis also let him work things out for himself if he got a little bit stuck. It was great to see him figure out how to get his kayak pointed the right way in the white water.

I didn’t float quite as high as Ian – too  many pasteles de nata? – and got dumped a couple of times. But the river was good for swimming too, and we all stopped at a rope swim on a calm section. Plus Luis gave us careful instruction in the right way to use a kayak paddle for maximum splashing.

We invited Luis to come back to our villa for dinner that night, and bought the best local vinho verde on his suggestions – Quito Mendalhes, I think was the name? We served a simple meal of pasta and tomato sauce, partly b/c we had not been shopping that day & also b/c that’s what Olivia liked eating. She was not as ready as I was for grilled sardines or fried baby mackerel, which really are the things to eat in Portugal.

Monday was meant to be our last full day in the villa, and we had a lovely slow morning around the pool. Alinor & I took a long walk up the road for about 45 minutes, but could not quite get to the rocky peaks above the village. After lunch, we were feeling restless, so we decided to go to Lisbon a day early. Fortunately our great hotel – Jeronimos 8 in Belem – could take us a day early, so off we went. Highway driving was easy, and though we arrived in Lisbon after dark, we navigated by the monastery and found our hotel without too much trouble. Not many people seem to live in Belem, though it’s flooded with tourists during the day, so street parking was easy.

Lisbon is a very different sort of place: full of people where the Minho was empty, crowded, with better food and more chaos. The next morning we snaked our way through the single-file turret up the Torre de Belem, saw the late 20c fascist monument to the Portuguese descobradores, and walked through the monastery, built with the wealth generated by the careirra de India. The highlight for me was the great maritime museum, one of the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s hard to believe the trip is over! I may have more to say about Pessoa and other matters. Plus for the dedicated who’ve read this far, here’s a link to our almost 400 photos.

 

Twelve Things I Learned at NCS in Portland

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1. Listening to poetry in Middle English is pure pleasure, though I’m a bit shy about performing it in public myself. Enjoying the slightly-different syllables as they wash over you is a particular joy of the culture of medieval studies.

2. The state of eco-play in medieval criticism is vibrant, and its green owes much to the forest otherworld of romance and also of pre-Christian mythologies. Not nearly as much pastoral as on my home turf. That’s a nice reminder for me.

3. The innovation of threaded panels snaking through the conference — the two I followed most were “Oceans” and “Ecology,” but there were several others including “Neighbors” of which I wished I could have heard more — created a wonderfully connected but variable labyrinth through the days’ events. A very well-executed idea that at some point I’ll want to steal.

4. Inspired perhaps by Portland’s shockingly good micro-brews, the circum-conference festivities felt like we were Olympic swimmers plunging in for a sprint. Exhausting but exhilarating, though I confess I wasn’t really ready for the karaoke. The night before my panel I had to duck out of the bar before the apotheosis of Eileen Joy, but I have no doubt it went off as planned. Or maybe better than that.

5. Someone I don’t know at one of Thursday’s (?) panels said that the essential virtue of The Canterbury Tales was “fellowship” — or maybe I’ve garbled that slightly, but in any case I was amazed by the good fellowship on display everywhere, and the willingness to welcome an interloping early modernists into both the intellectual and festive parts of the week. As Jeffrey Cohen noted in his post-conference blog, the mood was “future-oriented, not nostalgic,” and strikingly optimistic, which I like.

6. Too many great papers to name, but I was fascinated by Anne Harris’s talk on the making of stained glass in Allan Mitchell’s “Animate Objects and Ecologies” panel and also by George Edmondson on King Horn as sea-creature in Jeffrey Cohen and Patricia Ingham’s “Oceans/Neighbors” session. Anne also wrote a lovely meditation on the conference on her Medieval meets world blog.

7. It was a pleasure to meet Geoffrey Chaucer himself, and to locate his blog, which featured in the plenary talk.

8. I had wondered what sorts of fluid bodies medieval oceans might be, and whether the relatively local, Med and Channel and North Sea confines of English voyaging would change the way literary scholars read the sea. I’m not sure; my own talk was about maritime orientation across the medieval / early modern divide, via astrolabes, lead lines, ports, and poetry. I heard some great stuff on the multilingual English Channel from Jonathan Hsy, literal and spiritual turbulance by James Smith, and the “Man of Law’s Tale” by Ingrid Nelson. Bodies of salt water always exert disorienting pressure, whether of literally global size or not. Plus it’s all the same water, anyway, slowly circulating.

9. Portland is a great place for a conference: great beer, good food, plus  poetry readings at Mother Foucault’s and of course Powell’s. I especially loved the food trucks at which we ate lunch everyday, banh mi to pad thai to assorted mexican and other places. Any time NYC wants to license food trucks, I’m ready.

10. Hearing a bunch of conference delegates read their own original poetry was a real treat. Organized by Chris Piuma, who read an elaborate connecting poem about bananas, the reading brought together a few local poets — Chris used to live in Portland and knows the local scene — with intense and heartfelt poems by Eileen Joy, Dan Reiman, and a medievalist from SUNY Buffalo named David whose last name I don’t remember but who read great walking-around poems from his days in San Francisco. Sometimes academic conferences can play too close to the vest, but original poetry has a way of bringing the real stuff out.

11. Some great swimming in Oregon, too: I only got one early-morning workout at a nice local community pool (I blame it on the beer, or perhaps the good fellowship), but an icy dip in Crater Lake on the way north plus two swims in the cold Pacific, one without and one with a wetsuit, were as cleansing as could be.

12. Some might think that the highlight of my conference was throwing Jeffrey Cohen into the Pacific on Friday afternoon at Cannon Beach. It was memorable — plus, since I joined forces to corral Jeffrey with fellow early modernist Lowell Duckert, this event brought to a head the running Shakespeare-v-Chaucer gags that punctuated the week. (Btw: we made sure Jeffrey put his iPhone down before immersion. Really it was all very civilized, if wet.)

I loved the whole post-NCS coastal excursion with Jeffrey, Lowell, Dan, and Marcus: nothing like making one’s academic subject personal. The Pacific is cold in Oregon — for body-surfing the next day I used a wetsuit. But Friday night with the post-NCS crowd it was perfect: cold, frothy, clear, like a perfectly lucid thought that’s too sharp to be forced into words. I’m sure Jeffrey realizes now that it was worth going in.

Will I return to this biannual Chaucerpalooza? I hope so, time and travel budgets willing. But if  salt-water immersion is a necessary capstone, perhaps I should give Iceland 2014 a pass? Or is that a perfect opportunity for a maritime Beowulf panel?

To Portland, with “The Seafarer”

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Here’s a few lines that I retranslated from the great Old English elegy, “The Seafarer.” They are part of my paper for a conference I’ve not been to before, the New Chaucer Society, in Portland next week. Yes, I do also talk about Chaucer…

And now my heart turns

Out of my spirit-locker,

My mind goes

Out onto the sea-flood.

Over the whale’s road

It flies widely

Across the surfaces of the globe.

Then it returns to me

Ravenous and greedy (58-62a).

I also used this poem for the first line of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean.

World without Reefs?

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I’ve been thinking and chatting on Facebook with Jeffrey Cohen and others about this editorial in yesterday’s Times about the collapse of coral reefs. The key point, by Roger Bradbury from  ANU in Canberra, is that the catastrophe is today, not tomorrow:

IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.

It’s very sad to sea such beauty breaking, but the author is right that denial is no good response. There’s lots of fear and anxiety surrounding the new ocean that’s being built with plastics and jellyfish. But it’s important to remember that things are never what they used to be. The coral-filled wonders of Jacques Cousteau films are gone or going, but so are schools of North Atlantic cod and the incredibly dense oyster ecosystem that used to fill New York harbor. Oceans don’t stay the same, any more than anything or anyplace else. We need to stop expecting stasis out of natural systems.

We can still love an ocean full of “remnants” of coral wonders and a “algal-dominated hard ocean bottom.” A rapprochement with jelly is, I believe, already in progress. We don’t yet love jellyfish the way we love Nemo-fish or dolphins, but we’ve seen gorgeous jellyfish displays in aquariums from Monterray to Mystic, plus jellyfish sushi is making inroads, and not just in Japan. An ocean with a jelly-face is not what we’re used to, but it’s surely part of our future. I remember swimming through a cloud of non-stinging jellies the last time I swam in the Jersey shore where I grew up. I ended up thinking it wasn’t so horrible —

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 title of the Times editorial, I think, is too stark. Surely we know enough about ecology to know that things never go away. Our present and future appears less a world w/o reefs than a world with remnants.

I have some hope for fishing-free zones, which seem to be restoring reef habitat faster than predicted, though doubtless the restoration is less than full, and it is challenging to expand such oceanic preserves. But I don’t think our only response to oceanic change should be nostalgia.

For some more comments and commentary, including (at the bottom of the post), a great response by Carl Safina, author of Song for a Blue Ocean , here’s a link to the NYT blog follow-up, Reefs in the Anthropocene. Safina closes with a carefully measured point:

 The science is clear that reefs are in many places degraded and in serious trouble. But no science has, or likely can, determine that reefs and all their associated non-coral creatures are unequivocally, equally and everywhere, completely doomed to total non-existence. In fact, much science suggests they will persist in some lesser form. Bleak prospects have been part of many dramatic turnarounds, and, who knows, life may, as usual—with our best efforts—find a way.

Alongside which I’ll close with one of the most non-maritime poets I can think of, Robert Frost, in “The Oven Bird” —

The question he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.