Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Tempest at the Queens Theater

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When I left the theater around 10 pm, the rain fell heavy and thick, splashing hard onto my bald head. I darted beneath trees but was pretty wet by the time I got to my car. I missed my exit for the Whitestone Bridge and had to navigate a few treacherous puddles as I made a U-turn around the LaGuardia exits. Allegories abound in wet places: was I replaying the show, or extending it, or asking for a slight variation?

The Unisphere

The skies hadn’t been clear when I got to the Queens Theater a little before 7 pm to meet my students, but my Dark Sky app thought the storm might hold until midnight. I did arrive to an amazing water-show: the fountains surrounding the Unisphere, the 140′ high globe constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, were switched on. I’d never seen them flowing before. I walked partway around the massive orb — the downwind side was torrential — and it was an amazing site. The massive sphere was dedicated in 1964 to “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — which, come to think of it, makes an interesting comment on the ideological fantasies under examination in The Tempest. The jets of water shooting maybe 75 feet into the air resembled so many wet Ariels, performing the best pleasures of the wizards who built the Unisphere.

I heard a great World’s Fair story last night too: it turns out that a retired man who’s been auditing my Shakespeare classes off and on for the past few years, via a St. John’s community outreach program, had worked as a waiter in the Indonesian pavilion when he was a high school student in the summer of 1964. He described taking a motorized scooter home each night from the Fairgrounds to Forest Hills weighed down with change from tips, which would eventually overflow his sock drawer at home. He wore his marathon entrant’s cap last night, as he was getting ready to run his twenty-fifth consecutive (!) New York City marathon this Sunday.

Astrida Neimanis at Whale Creek

Unisphere motto = “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”

The highlight of Titan Theatre’s Tempest was Devri Chism’s compellingly nonhuman Ariel. She opened the show by dancing the storm into shipwreck, and throughout the night she repeatedly controlled the audience’s attention. Perhaps her most memorable trick was a subtle practice of holding her face at an oblique angle to the other actors on stage, emphasizing the intensity and partial incomprehension of her gaze. While many of the other performances were open and accessible — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more innocent rendition of Miranda than Ann Flanigan’s — Chism’s Ariel was the one performance who kept us asking for just a little bit more.

About the enter the Nature Walk

I came to the stormy show after an afternoon in post-Nature, walking my favorite toxic pathway on the borderlands between Greenpoint and Long Island City on the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. I’ve not been back for a while, but all my favorites were there: the epochal steps, the sludge barge, the hidden oil mayonnaise deep below. I was lucky to have been able to convince one of my most-admired blue humanities scholars Astrida Neimanis to join me for the walk. She’s a brilliant and inspiring eco-hydro-feminist based in Sydney, Australia who I just learned a few days ago was in New York for a talk on Thursday at the Pratt Institute. I’d got the news too late to get to Pratt, but it was fantastic to finally meet her in person. We talked about Newtown Creek, about post-Nature and the sublime, about an amazing-sounding project she’d put together last summer with Cate Sandilands in Canada. It’s hard to catch up with our fellow environmental humanists who live so far away, and I felt lucky to have managed it. Plus Newtown Creek is where I want to bring all my academic friends — I actually had a plan to drag an MLA panel out to it last winter, but sub-zero temps trapped us in midtown.

Driving home through the storm, I tried to salvage Terry Layman’s Prospero. As a student suggested to me after the show, he looked right — tall, white-bearded, Gandalf-ish. He garbled some lines and stepped on enough of his fellow actors’ cues that I wondered if it was intentional, a way of signaling the bully-Dad’s desire to control his human and nonhuman children. But they played his love for Miranda conventionally, and even Caliban got forgiven in the end. I wasn’t fully convinced: Prospero is a tough part to play well in these ambivalently post-imperial and I-wish-we-could-be-post-patriarchal days. I’m still waiting for someone to hit it just right.

Steps under water at Newtown Creek

The show is up for another week, and very much worth a trip to Corona Park! Go early to walk around the World’s Fair grounds and think a little about the “Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — it’ll put you in the right mood!

Near Newtown Creek

 

Water City Bristol!

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Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon

If you don’t fix things in words, they might float away. So, briefly, a skeletal accounting —

  • 3 open-water swims
  • 2 workshops in maritime writing
  • 1 public lecture
  • 1 trip up the canal locks to Saltford
  • 2 days at #MT2018 (Marine Transgressions Conference)
    • 2 keynotes
    • ~ 12 panels
    • 1 Blue Humanities roundtable
    • 2 receptions
    • [a poetry reading that I missed]

And many half-garbled memories, starting in the middle —

Toxicity, the Ocean, and Urban Space (Wed)

I was trying some new things for this public lecture, knowing that the audience would swirl together academics with non-academics, be mostly composed of city-dwellers, and further include mostly those with a particular interest in the sea. Unpicking the knots of writing and thinking I’ve been chasing down in the wake of Oceanic New York, my talk splashed through some recent watery adventures, included images of Thanos the purple God of demonic Malthusianism, strayed into verse in three of my own poems, and — maybe? — crossed wild water to make landfall with hopeful gestures toward Ocean citizenship. How can our Cities and our bodies prepare themselves for and live with rising waters? I’d like to speak that as a not-only tragic story.

Public lecture at the University of Bristol

The Llandoger Trow, where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk

The Henleaze Swimming Club (Mon)

On Monday afternoon, jet-lagged and still-missing my baggage from the overnight flight in via Dublin, I bought a replacement suit & goggles from the hotel & Uber’d up to Henleaze, a former quarry that’s been a private swimming club since 1919. This gorgeous, narrow, fresh-watered lake now overflows with people, half with swimmers and half fisherfolk. What better anti-jet lag tonic can be?

Underwater Bristol (Tues)

Building on the perpetual inspiration of underwaternewyork.com, I hatched a plot with members of the U of Bristol English faculty to incubate some to-emerge-later responses to Bristol’s waterways. So many glorious things! A sailboat named Svendgar that I spotted a few days later for sale in the harbor. Brown mudflats. The kayaks that were paddled around the Bay by the Inuits kidnapped in Frobisher’s Second Voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. A football pitch next to a Cadbury Chocolate Factory that I’d seen earlier that morning while riding a canal boat up five locks to Saltford. Plastic. Breeding eels. What will they all become?

A secret monastic pool (Wed)

Bristol Harbor on the last night

Having been promised a bit of true English wild swimming on the condition that I not mention the name or location of the waters in which I would plunge, I suppose I was a bit surprised to come around the corner of the quiet country lane to discover maybe sixty students lining the pool’s far bank, sunning themselves in post-exam freedom. The secluded pool, built “in the Middle Ages” to store fish for the Abbey of St. Augustine (founded 1140), now hosts lily pads, a gorgeous 15-foot tall purple rhododendron, supposedly a few tench, and — alas! — some horseflies that enjoyed landing on my bald head. It’s an excellent place for an afternoon’s swim. Thanks to my hosts for taking me there!

Sea-themed creative writing workshop (Wed)

I was deeply impressed by the almost-dozen enthusiastic  Bristol undergrads who submitted maritime poetry and prose works for an post-term bonus workshop. I was joined also by Shakespearean Laurence Publicover and poet David Punter, and we spent a thrilling two hours wrestling with the joys and frustrations of writing with and into oceanic spaces. The student writing was gorgeous and wonderfully ambitious, from a narrative built from fragments of a diary from the S.S. Great Britain to a brilliantly post-Agatha Christie cruise montage, a boat-launching story, several quite lovely lyrics about blue spaces, and a hashing of Pip’s dream of drowning from Moby-Dick that spoke to my Melvillean core.

Clevedon Marine Lake (Fri)

Diving into Clevedon Marine Lake

Located as far upstream as big boats could travel the tidal Avon, Bristol today is water-filled but brackish rather than salt. Much of my time there was semi-marine, from the walks along the harbor to the floating bar the Marine Transgressions Conference decamped to after our final keynote. But though the Avon is tidal for a long distance and boasts (I am reliably assured by tide-guru Owain Jones from the Environmental Humanities department at Bath Spa) the second-highest tides in the world, there’s not a lot of open salt water in the city. I wanted to swim in the Bristol Channel (still known in Wales as the Severn Sea), so the morning of the conference’s last day I met swimographer Vanessa at an early hour that precluded other swimming companions, and we Uber’d out to the Clevedon Marine Lake. I’ve seldom or never seen a more starkly ideal swimscape. The pool is built, framed in by concrete and stone, but at high tide the swell tops the wall and fills the pool with ocean water. The tide was near the ebb when we arrived that morning, and over 100 yards of brown mudflat extended below the “lake,” reflecting the gray sky up toward us. The water was perfect — cool but not cold, salty but not bitter, manageable even thought I’d forgotten my goggles in the hotel, and a generous 250m per lake-length. One of the few other swimmers who was also there on a grey misty morning was a man training for 70km in Lake Geneva. He churned in slow circles around the lake and planned to swim through dinner time. We had panels to rush back to in Bristol, but I was tempted just to keep swimming.

#MT2018 Marine Transgressions Conference (Th & Fri)

In front of Nancy Farmer tiles with Vanessa Daws at Clevedon

My visit to Bristol was fortuitously timed with an interdisciplinary conference on Marine Transgressions — a geologic term of art for moments in which the sea invades the land. Packed in to the last two days of my stay, the conference’s turbulent energy kept me going even when my own energy flagged. From Helen Rozwadowski’s amazing opening keynote on Jacques Cousteau and utopian fantasies of homo aquaticus in the 1950s and ’60s all the way through Tim Dee’s gorgeously lyrical evocation of the human and avian intertwinings of gulls and landfills, #MT2018 was an stirring mixture. I can’t do justice to all the great panels and papers that I heard over the two days, but I was struck by the variety of disciplinary perspectives — lots of poetics, history, and environmental humanities, but also marine law, policy, science, technological remediation, and other things. All these were joined together by a shared passion for the oceanic “blue” — though of course we all know, and we repeated as a kind of refrain over two days, that the ocean is also and meaningfully green, gray, purple, and many other colors — including gold, in the memorable image of the geochemist Kate Hendry describing the glimmer of microscopic diatoms on the salt flats of the Severn estuary at low tide.

Blue Humanities Round Table (Fri)

Foot selfie at secret swimming spot

The best parts of a small conference come from listening to new things, and also from catching an extension of someone’s work over a beer at the floating bar after the day’s sessions. But in addition to many great discoveries, I’ve seldom had more fun at an academic presentation than I did chairing a Blue Humanities Round Table near the end of the second day. The amazing panel of disparate thinkers and makers included Owain Jones, whose hydrocitizenship project connects Bristol’s to its people and its past; Vanessa Daws, swimographer and immersive artist; Kate Hendry, a biogeochemist whose fields work takes her to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields; and my friend from the CT Shoreline Helen Rozwadowski, historian of science and founder of the Maritime Studies Program at UConn Avery Point. I started us out with a general question — “What can you do because of your focus on the sea that you could not do otherwise?” — and our conversation waterfalled down through several memorable twists and turns into a fantastic question period. With thanks to Alexandra Campbell and her twitter-agility, here’s a partial reconstruction of the ship we built as we sailed along:

  • The sea is not a metaphor (quoting Hester Blum) — except that sometimes it is, and sometimes its metaphors rub against and into the real salt water.
  • The sea is history (not-quite-remembering to quote Derek Walcott) — and given a few generations of blue humanities historical scholarship it should hopefully become more richly historicized.
  • The sea disorients and distorts, always and relentlessly, even as humans respond partially to that disorientation.
  • Is water alien? Does it come from outer space or from inside the earth’s core? Why might it matter? (in dialogue with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)
  • The sea’s lack of visibility redoubles its its moral challenge, informs the cultural history of its monstrous depths, and increases the force of its alien elements. (I rambled here about the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” poster art on the walls of Catch-22, the fish & chips place where I ate my first Bristol meal.)
  • Does the weakness of human eyesight underwater attenuate our moral connection with sea creatures? (A Levinas-ian question, though we didn’t mention his name)
  • Can science “illuminate” (Kate’s word) the sea in ways that increase its ethical claims on human subjects?
  • What are the politics of the interdisciplinary ocean? How can the sea speak to social justice, especially remembering the twin horrors of the slave trade and transoceanic capitalism (which two things might actually be parts of the same thing)?
  • Can the sea be a space of hope? (Last question, I think? We said yes. But I’m not sure that we’re sure.)

    Selfie with mermaid and Vanessa Daws in Clevedon

“Under the sea everything is moral”

The hardest and most evocative phrase of the conference came when Helen quoted Cousteau or one of his fellow sea-utopians in her opening keynote. What might it mean for “everything” to be “moral” beneath the waves? “It’s all subtle and submarine,” says Walcott, thinking about Atlantic slavery and Caribbean beauty. Owain quite rightly objected that the underwater industriousness for which Cousteau was a booster has fouled our waters. The panel speculated together about the morality that emerges from the shared vulnerability of terrestrial human bodies in deep waters. I thought about, but did not share, a terrifying vision of drowning and struggle from Macbeth —

Doubtful it stood / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art (1.2)

There’s another way, it occurs to me now as my big green metal bird arcs past the southern tip of Greenland, in which the undersea might be “moral.” It’s not that all undersea activities are permitted or approved, but that the questions we face — what we talk about when we talk about oceans — become starkly and painfully ethical. As mer-scholars, academic selkies, blue humanists, we swim into hard questions about disorientation, about buoyancy, about living-with alien lives. We face questions of social justice and tragic history, of oceanic dislocation and ongoing violence. Moral urgencies splash into marine lakes in the West Country and haunt overcrowded refugee boats in the Eastern Med.

The sea supports and threatens human life. What moral dilemmas fix us from the cold glaze of a fish’s eyes?

Floating bar

Thanks to all who were there this week, and in particular to my hosts at the University of Bristol, the Perspectives on the Sea cluster run by Laurence Publicover, the Brigstow and Cabot Institutes, and all the people who made Marine Transgressions possible! I’m looking forward to my next visit to Bristol already.

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift

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DriftThe first story in this amazing book is one I always love: an old sailor on icy seas, looking for home but not finding it because “seafaring is seafodder heart / humbling” (26).

I can make my sorry tale right soggy truth. (25)

Blow wind / blow, anon am I. (25)

The second story is the true history of the “Left-to-Die Boat,” packed full of Algerian refugees, seen but not rescued by assorted NATO vessels in March 2011.

Show me the wind. (46)

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift was my first post-grading book of the summer. It was so good that I stayed up late to finish it, then re-read it twice more the next two nights. Gorgeous, intricate, impassioned writing. Bits of it may figure in my NCS talk in July, which is also about the Seafarer — but for now I want to luxuriate in its rawness, its ambition, and its willingness to engage.

Let the tides shake your life. (110)

There’s so much to love in this mash-up of of twenty-first century tragedy and Anglo-Saxon lament. Bergvall mines the medieval poem “The Seafarer” for the core experience of oceanic disorientation, the bitter flavor of that “salt of the mind” (159), the partial recompense of the “ship of song” (144),

Page 6

Page 6

For a minute there I lose myself. (42)

She starts with some line drawings before the poem begins.

One of the places she takes us is “hafville.” “Did not know where I was going hafville. Had fear wildering hafville” (42). We are not alone there:

Major Tom hafville

Li Bai hafville

Rimbaud hafville

Shelley hafville

Amelia Aerhart hafville

Jeff Buckley hafville

Spalding Gray hafville…

Later on, in the Log section, she tells us what hafville is: “sea wilderness, sea wildering” (153).

To north oneself. To come to song. (156)

B. readingShe paints my favorite picture, the image of shipwreck, with words. The word-wreck starts with a few lost letters:

We mbarkt and sailed but a fog so th but a fog so

th but a fog so th th th th thik k overed us that we could scarcely see

the poop or the prow of the boa t (37)

A few pages later everything’s lost (40-41).

Pages 40-41

Shipwreck (Pages 40-41)

And eventually found again:

For a minute there I lost myself Totally at sea lost myway tossed misted

lost mywill in the fog hafville my love (42)

I also love the long set of Navigation instructions (140, 142, 146, 158 (x2), 160). They range from the practical

Stay calm (14)

to the historical, in her last entry, “Medieval navigation” (160), which finishes with

No NATO Naval and Aeriel monitoring

no coffee

no cocoa

All together, it’s the best new sea-poem I’ve read this year.

Let me come in from the cold cold way, Seafarer (166)

BergvallRead it! And go see the performance if you’re in London in July.

 

Shipwreck: Ecologies of the Inhuman

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With my mind still whirling from the Ecologies of the Inhuman event last Friday, and while greatly enjoying all the post-event e-discussions — helpfully curated by Jeffrey at In the Middle — here’s my talk on shipwreck, Dylan’s new song “Tempest,” and post-equilibrium ecologies. The soundtrack to my talk was the title track of the new album, also named “Tempest.” I won’t paste in the audio clips I played, but I’ll show in the the images with their (now non-functional) audio prompts. I do recommend giving his 35th album a listen.

My talk opened with an instrumental clip, and then goes like this — Slide1

That’s the opening to Bob Dylan’s new waltz about the Titanic, titled “Tempest,” which will be my main text. But I’ll start with Michel Serres: “I live in shipwreck alert,” Serres writes. “Always in dire straits, untied, lying to, ready to founder’’ (124). I like this sentiment, but lately it’s been bugging me. It’s not quite right. It names my very deed of love for our inhuman environment but, as a Lear’s middle daughter might say, it comes too short

Shipwreck isn’t something to prepare for, something that’s about to happen. It’s happening. Now. We’re inside it, not waiting for it.

It’s not so bad inside shipwreck. It becomes easier if you stop hoping that there is solid ground somewhere. My point is that shipwreck — by which I mean the sudden shocking awareness that the vessels that have carried us this far are coming to pieces under our feet — represents a perfectly ordinary way to live. My stalking horse is global warming, but the underlying facts of disruption and disorder precede the anthropocene. Humans have been floundering about inside disorder for a long time. We’ve gotten good at inventing ways to reimagine disorder as order. As I’ve said elsewhere, that’s one of the things literature does well.

Living inside shipwreck sounds less comfortable than “shipwreck alert,” and one key difference involves attitudes toward change. In alert, we’re animated by paranoia and fantasies of structure. We’re pole-axed with dread, afraid of impending loss, melancholy with nostalgia for things we believe we have now. Inside shipwreck, by contrast, as the ship comes apart and water pours in, we’ve no time to waste and an urgent need to get used to being wet

Several things follow from global shipwreck. I’ll focus on three, via Dylan’s new song: The watchman. There is no understanding. The universe opens wide.

 Slide3Slide and audio: The Watchman

He’s Dylan’s Prospero, appearing four times in this crowded song to guide disaster into artistic order. “The watchman, he lay dreaming…” goes the refrain: “He dreamed the Titanic was sinking.” The four watchman stanzas transform disaster into story, distant knowledge into bodily experience, epic possibility into unanswered need.

He watches but can’t tell.

In the historical metaphor the watchman is the one who missed the iceberg, and this figure demotes Prospero from controlling mage to passive dreamer. Shakespeare’s wizard captures fantasies of power, but Dylan’s watchman seals this figure up in an isolated crow’s nest. Nothing to do but watch.

Slide: No Understanding 

Shipwrecks are hard to narrate. As a different Shakespearean daughter bullies her father into acknowledging, the human response is sympathy: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” (1.2.5-6). Miranda asks her wizard-watchman-father to feel with her, and with us, to attune ourselves to what sailors fear.Slide4

Dylan’s “Tempest” sings Miranda down:

Audio: No Understanding

They waited at the landing

And they tried to understand

But there is no understanding

For the judgments of God’s hand.

No understanding. God’s hand behind the wizard’s curse. This is Bob’s Old Testament thunder-growl, but it sounds oddly freeing. Might it mean we don’t have to be on alert anymore? That we can turn to something else?

Slide: Opens Wide

No understanding is a dour sentiment, and maybe it’s just me who hears aesthetic hope in these lines. I don’t think the song leaves us in despair. That’s not the final force of shipwreck ecology. What if we turn from watchmen and from understanding and focus on overflowing abundance? Everybody’s on board the doomed ship: there’s Leo and Cleo, Wellington and Jim Dandy, Calvin, Blake, and Wilson, Davy the brothel-keeper, Jim Backus and the bishop, even “the rich man, Mr Aster.” The story unfolds through excess – who every heard of a 13-and-1/2-minute pop song, much less a waltz? It’s too much, too many fragments of story and experience and feeling. But it adds up to something –

Slide4Audio: Opens Wide

The ship was going under

The universe had opened wide…

There’s a basic eco-point here. Shipwreck names the core experience, the shock and pressure of the inhuman world on human skin. Being-in-the-world means living inside shipwreck. It’s the story we need to explain, can’t explain, and must tell. A direct  encounter: ocean liner meets iceberg, human bodies splash into cold salt water. We want and can’t have distance, perspective, narrative, a story that explains and insulates.

We want the source. Tell me the cause, Muse! But we never get it.

The wetness of the encounter, the brute physicality of shipwreck, won’t let us understand causes. This song, this disaster, the oceanic histories and snatches of poetry that events like the Titanic open up, resonate without rest. The only stability is on the sea floor.

A shipwreck ecology, however, needn’t be a place only of horror or nostalgia. There’s ecstasy in the waters too. Not the relief of having survived or the satisfaction of figuring it out: those things don’t last. But an intellectual tingle that ripples out into the physical world, a willingness to confront the inhumanity of our environment, and an appetite for experience that doesn’t mind getting wet. That’s the direction named reality. And ecology. Also shipwreck.

Owls Head by Rosamond Purcell

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This is the best book on objects I’ve read in a long time.  I’m not deeply read in Object-Oriented Ontology (yet), but I think this gorgeous book on garbage has something we all need to listen to.  Here’s Rosamond Purcell on books that have decayed almost — but not quite! — past recognition:

 

There must be some evidence of narrative inside these books.  I get to work.  The pages are delicate, sealed in clumps, with the hollows between webbed with chitinous shrouds.  There is no way to penetrate the pages without destroying them.  Inside is a story of organic processes unintended by any author.  I peer into these transitional hollows where the elements have been traded — type for ash — and wherever such a translation occurs I search for some visible resolution of decay.  I am examining this fulcrum of decrepitude as if it were a thing.  Inside these small-scale caves I observe a process of dissolution that is going on, all the time, in the cosmos everywhere — from words to worms to stars.  (185)

Owls Head tells the story of Rosamond Purcell’s twenty-year friendship with the junk dealer and eccentric William Buckminster through a series of explorations into Buckminster’s property near Rockland, Maine.  The above description takes place in Purcell’s studio, where she’s prying into a shelf full of old books that had been left out in the rain for decades and which became, weathered and slumped together on the shelf, a post-textual artifact.  But this kind of object — like all objects, in time? — is always temporary, always in the process not just of becoming some new thing, but also not-becoming — ceasing to be — the thing that it is.

I love the way this book makes us look at discarded things.  “Who knew how Roman trash can be?” (116).  Sometimes she uses lists, other times photographs in place of footnotes.  She tries to give an order to the “bounty” she brings back from Buckminster’s land to her studio outside Boston —

I consider some of the museums that might appear in this room:

Museum of Obsolete Tools

Museum of Wires

Museum of the Croquet and Musket Ball

Museum of Natural Disasters

Museum of Ruined Landscapes

Museum of Failed Attempts

Museum of Filthy MailMuseum of Bisected Objects

Museum of Corrosion  (142)

It’s hard sometimes to know what to make of this collection of brilliance and waste.  The reader sometimes feels like Purcells’s friend Margary, invited up to Owls Head for some weekend antiquing, in the hope that she will “find something she might like.”

“Wonderful array of frying pans,” she said politely on the first floor of the barn, as I shone a flashlight into the rafters; “terrifying chaos,” she said on the drive home. (122)

 

Shipwreck is History

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I’ve been thinking about shipwreck and other oceanic matters while reading the papers and responses for what looks like a great SAA seminar coming up in Boston in two weeks.

Since I have just a few free hours this week, I thought I might return to an article that’s not due until late April, but which sings the same salty chorus.  This chapter will eventually be part of the intro to the shipwreck book, though I first wrote this material for a great conference at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in fall 2010.

Here’s a little bit out of the beginning, which starts with this wonderful broadside, Richard Younge, The State of a Christian (1636) —

 

My Body is the Hull; the Keele my Back; my Neck the Stem; the Sides are my Ribbes; the Beames my Bones; my flesh the plankes; Gristles and ligaments are the Pintells and knee-timbers; Arteries, veines and sinews the serverall seames of the Ship; my blood is the ballast; my heart the principall hold; my stomack the Cooke-roome; my Liver the Cesterne; my Bowels the sinke; my Lungs the Bellows; my teeth the Chopping-knives; except you divide them, and then they are the 32 points of the Sea-card both agreeing in number…[i]

 

 

That manic voice insisting that human bodies and wooden ships occupy the same space is Richard Younge, from his broadsheet The State of a Christian (1636), a single-page work that also appears as a preface to Henry Mainwaring’s Sea-man’s Dictionary (1644).  Its mania suggests how intensely and how physically oceanic experience stimulated the early modern imagination.  Younge hurls human body parts, Christian souls, and nautical terms together.  The resulting conceptual soup provides a frame through which to consider how shipwreck narratives reveal the dynamic meanings of the ocean in early modern English culture.  Early modern shipwreck narratives were symbolic performances through which writers tested their own, and their culture’s, experiential knowledge of the ocean.  Narratives of maritime disaster lay bare the tremendous practical and symbolic stress that the transoceanic turn created in English habits of orientation.  Representations of shipwreck provide a resonant but unfamiliar model of cultural change in early modern English culture.  To recast a celebrated modern poetic phrase about the sea, shipwreck is history.[ii]


[i] Richard Younge, “The State of a Christian, lively set forth by an Allegorie of a Shippe under Sayle,” appears as an introduction to Henry Mainwaring, The Sea-Man’s Dictionary, (London: John Bellamy, 1644), sigs. A3 – A3v.  The passage is included in some copies of Younge’s The Victory of Patience (London: M. Allot, 1636).  It was also published in a single sheet broadside as The State of a Christian (London, 1636).

[ii] I adapt Derek Walcott’s “Sea is History,” Selected Poems, Edward Baugh, ed., (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) 137.

 

 

 

Histories of the Sea

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I ran out of reading material last week when facing a 8+ hours on the plane — LHR->DAA, DAA->JFK — so I ended up looking through the used book display in front of the British Film Institute on the South Bank.  Ended up with a couple of sci-fi oldies.  Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island was a fun & fast read laying out the ancient boys & dolphins love story.  Some improbably Cold War allegory about dolphins & orcas agreeing to live in separate parts of the oceans.  But the fun part for me was the scientist’s dream of a “History of the Sea” that dolphins would have handed down over generations orally.  An old story of a UFO was at the heart of it — sci fi in the 60s, after all — but also a glimpse of something we’re still working on, “historicizing the ocean,” some people call it.  Important stuff.

The other plane read was Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the title of which (I hadn’t remembered) refers to 20,000 leagues around the globe, measuring distance, not depth.

Very odd to remember that this book appeared less than two decades after Moby-Dick, to which Verne alludes early on, though Verne’s colorless harpooneers Ned Land makes a pale Queequeg indeed.  Verne, too, wants Nemo’s device to help his professor write “the true book of the sea” & he gestures hopefully toward the oceanographic work of “the learned Maury” as a model.  Nemo’s world-ocean is a fantasy about human potential, in which “the sea supplies all my wants” and oceanic life creates visionary possibilities.  “The earth,” says Nemo, “does not want new continents, but new men.”

The end of chapter 17, “Four thousand leagues under the Pacific,” contains a gorgeous description of an underwater shipwreck that the Nautilus finds —

The keel seemed to be in good order, and it had been wrecked at most some few hours.  Three stumps of masts, broken off about two feet above the bridge, showed that the vessel had had to sacrifice its masts.  But, lying on its side, it had filled, and it was heeling over to port.  The skeleton of what it had once been, was a sad spectacle as it lay lost under the waves, but sadder still was the sight of the bridge, where some corpses, bound with ropes, were still lying.  I counted five: — four men, one of whom was standing at the helm, and a woman standing at the poop, holding an infant in her arms.  She was quite young.  I could distinguish her features, which the water had not decomposed, by the brilliant light from the Nautilus.  In one despairing effort, she had raised her infant above her head, poor little thing! whose arms encircled its mother’s neck.  The attitude of the four sailors was frightful, distorted as they were by their convulsive movements, whilst making a last effort to free themselves from the cords that bound them to the vessel.  The steersman along, calm, with a grave, clear face, his grey hair glued to his forehead, and his hand clutching the wheel of the helm, seemed even then to be guiding the three broken masts through the depths of the ocean.

Good 19c sentimentality.

The wet and the dry

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Thinking back on a great weekend in the van de Velde room, I’m going to report a version of my westbound flight ruminations and espirit d’avion.  Trying to process the whole range of shipwreck representations we looked at, from early Buddhist images to post-modern narratives and contemporary art, I want to hazard a theory about two discursive modes in presenting shipwreck, the wet and the dry.

Wet narratives present disorder, disorientation, rupture, chaotic and variable experiences in which the usual ways of doing things get broken or fragmented.  I think of the sailors in “The Wreck of the Amsterdam,” especially those in the water, and Emma’s “potentiality of failure” in her readings of Ader and Dean.  Also a haunting sentence in Sarah’s talk on Buddhist narratives that I don’t have a good source for: “we don’t know the fruits of our deeds.”  The lines from Verne that Stephen quoted, which I also have to track down, describe a “wet” revision of the old story of looking at a wreck.  I also might add the instants of immersion in the early modern stories Joe & I each explored.

Against these immersion tales, we also heard about a powerful generic infrastructure of “dry narration,” which attempts to make sense and meaning out of shipwreck.  Lucretius’s “shipwreck with spectator” paradigm, as several of us noted via Blumenberg, uses shipwreck to emphasize the stabilty created by watching (reading, viewing) wrecks.  In Blumenberg’s words, which mesh nicely with my reading of Pet and Thacher, “shipwreck is a didactic drama staged by Providence.”  Beyond the religious frames, Christian for the early modern panel & Buddhist for Sarah, this “drying out” of shipwreck and deriving of lasting meanings from it assumes a variety of other forms: literary canon-formation (Ranja), imperial  or popular identities (Carl,  Kirsty), American masculinity (Robin), Cold War nationalism (submarines), etc.

My take-away from this perhaps too schematic summary might be that the wet-dry tension works as continuum rather than binary, that even the most doctrinaire sermonized version of a shipwreck narrative has at its core the “wet’ experience of radical disorientation and exclusion, even if temporarily, from dry earth.  I suppose that’s what I meant by thinking about shipwreck as a response to and representation of radical cultural change.  Perhaps also we can trace a historical shift from narratives that cling to “dry” visions like so many spars, in the religious narratives that we explored, and those that revel in the wet for its own sake, like Ader’s conceptual art or perhaps some of the paintings (which have a different attitude toward narrative progress than stories do).  Though I’d also say that even an avowed explorer of the fragmentary and incomplete like Ader (or Life of Pi, perhaps) still posits, at least on the imaginary or unreachable level, a “dry” or “miraculous” counterforce, a hoped-for order glimpsed through and also beyond immersion.  And the more overtly religious narratives, even Herbert, also invoke the frisson of inhuman chaos.

I might have more to say about Life of Pi, since I like it more than Michael does (though this side of idolatry, still).   I certainly take his point about the hash Martel makes out of his many acknowledged and unacknowledged sources.  But I wonder — surely one challenge for any shipwreck writer in the past few millennia is that these tales are so thoroughly already-written?  The Booker committee may have praised Pi, foolishly, for originality, but surely we needn’t judge by such criteria?  I wonder if the awkward but emphatically open structure of the novel’s ending(s), for me the weakest parts of the book, might be attempts to keep the novel inside the “wet” world of shipwreck, rather than succumb to the drying out of narrative closure?