We see the world most often through a thin gaseous medium, and although air bends the color spectrum, it’s when light passes through water that we see the most spectacular affects.  Rainbows, partial-reflections, magnification, prism-bending: the things water does to light comprise a catalog of aesthetic shifts.  A poetics of the sea begins here, where lights bends and colors separate.

The point isn’t only to connect underwater vision with high modernist experimentation, though I’m very much looking forward to Margaret Cohen’s ongoing project connecting these two things.  It’s also, in historical periods that precede underwater photography, a way of coming to grips with a medium that occludes, distorts, radically shifts our terrestrial experience.  The ocean is the surface of the world, and the biosphere, to a rough degree of approximation — but for land creatures like humans, returning to an aqueous medium entails making everything visual unclear.  It’s a sea-change, but not always a pleasing one: the pearls that were his eyes are hard to see underwater.

Maybe that’s what captures the Homeric imagination about “wine-dark”: the epithet glimpses the sea at its least see-through, when light fades and the waters shift from translucent to light-stealing, as if a door into Mediterranean bottomlessness has suddenly shut.  It’s the shift from visible to opaque, from open to shut, that the poet captures.  Or tries to capture —

The sea is a forgetting,

a song, a lip;

the sea is a lover,

a faithful response to desire…

On dark shoulders

the waves are enjoying themselves.

Luis Cernuda (trans from Spanish by Brian Cole)

Odysseus the master-mariner was also a canny negotiator, clever talker, unscrupulous tactician, and hand-crafter of the Great Bed of marriage.  His heroism captures a deeply hand-ed, not to say handy, way of working with things in the world, an embodied and physical knowing-how as opposed to knowing-what.  The master of “cunning intelligence” and maritime know-how combines mental & physical practices, like  John Davis, inventor of the Davis staff, navigator, and mathematician.

The Greek word for Odysseus’s kind of knowledge is metis, and one translation of this term in English maritime literature is “craft.”  That’s Conrad’s favorite word for seamanship, as Margaret Cohen has explored nicely in her recent book.

Maritime literary studies can build on the basic homology between craft in the maritime context, a combination of knowledge, skill, performance, and social acumen, and craft in the context of poetic making and shaping.  Recent studies of embodied cognition have been pushing back against  hyper-intellectual and abstract culture of postmodern thought.  Connecting “the way of a ship” — the complex mixing of social, physical, intellectual, cultural, natural forces into a constantly-errant voyaging body — to the way(s) of a poem seems a worthwhile task.

I’m working on a version of this overlap in two chapters of the Shipwreck book on professional mariners and amateur poets Jeremy Roch and Edward Barlow.  It’ll also inform the lyric poetry chapter that begins with Donne’s “The Calm” and “The Storm.”  The Bookfish itself is a physical and poetic object.

In Shakespeare’s Ocean I said I wanted a poetics of the sea, and I still want it.  This will be one way to get there.  First a poetics of craft, then a poetics of swimming, then…

I’ve been through this one before.  Blue ecocrit positions itself against green visions of pastoral stasis.  Instead it writes a surging, unstable, chaotic version of nature, a way of being in the world that isn’t quite sure it can really manage to be in this salty world.  Or, in the 5-point play with which I concluded At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean —

This World in Not Our Home.

Ecology Won’t Keep Us Dry

The Ocean Rules the Weather.

Our Only Inexhaustable Resource in Langauge.

Shakespeare Isn’t Dead.  He Isn’t Even Past.

The turn in the last two of those points toward a literary recovery, or an understanding through Shakespeare, flow from my sense, or my hope, that literary culture’s ability to make sense of radical change, to make us love change, crave it, and sometimes even survive it, makes a literary blue ecology possible.

I’m reading a book on water policy right now, The Big Thirst, that might have some things to add to this as well.  The earth’s water, itself unliving but essential for all life, represents a closed system; every drop of water on earth has been here for millions of years.  That’s true of organic matter too, of course, but unlike carbon compounds, water just doesn’t change that much: fresh to salt, ice to mist, dirty to clean it’s almost always available, or almost available, to us.  More to come on this…

I’ve been mulling recently about wet globalism, as I get ready to draft an intro for an essay collection drawing on the Hungry Ocean conference.  I’m hoping to use an oceanic focus to get our increasingly central ideas about global culture wetter, to bring them down into the watery element, splash them around, and see what happens to some of our grand illusions.

Partly here I’m thinking about Ursula Heise’s shrewd observation that in the works of theorists like Appadurai, Beck, Giddens, et al, globalism has become the term of choice, to some extent replacing postmodernism while also doing some of the same work as that more theoretical / philosophical term.  That’s a useful move, and it could liberate some aspects of postmodern thinking from its “end of history” habits.  But I can’t help thinking that 20/21c visions of the global fly in airplanes, when they should, even today, be ploughing the waves.

To shift from an airy or plane’s-eye vision to a wetter, bluer globalism would require a sharper focus on the difficulties and disorientations of the sea, an element, after all, in which we’d each drown if left too long.  It’s a hard place for humans to be, even today.  I was thinking again about the sea’s inhumanity as I went for my afternoon swim and had to fight just about a foot of gentle, rolling, implacable swell, there to greet me and threaten me every time I turned my head to breathe.

What might a wet globalism do?  Put a focus back on seamanship, on errancy, disorientation, shipwreck as the price of culture?  Re-figure humanity in the world in less pastoral and more dire terms? Emphasize that Heise’s “deterritorialization” has already been the condition of the tiny maritime slice of humans?  Ask us to re-read Moby-Dick in the global terms that Wai-Chi Dimock has already asked for (and that I’ve not yet read)?

As usual, Glissant is already there, using slightly different words —

For centuries ‘generalization,’ as operated by the West, brought different community tempos into an equivalency in which it attempted to give a hierarchical order to the times they flowered.  Now that the panorama has been determined and equidistances described, is it not, perhaps, time to return to a no less necessary ‘degeneralization”? Not to a replenished outrageous excess of specificities but to a total (dreamed-of) freedom of the connections among them, cleared out of the very chaos of their confrontations. (Poetics of Relation, 62)

This chaos and connection, a return to degeneralized freedom from generalization, is what Glissant calls Relation.  I’d like wet globalism to work something like this, plus a turn toward the historically specific and physically connecting.  Swimming in the blue ocean models this impossibility —

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

(Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”)