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 — 

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.

 Slide 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.

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 –

Audio: 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.

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.

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?