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”)

While listening to the last lecture at the Hungry Ocean a few weeks ago, I was flooded with anticipatory nostalgia: soon the weekend would be over, and would the rush of ideas and implications be salvageable?  Would the intensity last?  The short answer, almost always, is not quite — but as I said then, Patsy Yeager’s final keynote on Latourian networks as a counter-love — wonderfully personalized — to Marxist dialectic created a framework in which to think ocean-sized thoughts.

Latour’s ANT-filled landscape of human and nonhuman actants isn’t quite a vision of the world ocean — Latour in fact writes relatively little about oceanic things, even if he claims to be tempted to substitute “fluid” for “network” sometimes.  There are two revealing maritime turns of phrase in We Haven Never Been Modern.  First, Latour compares the end of modernist linear time to “a great ocean liner that slows down and then comes to a standstill in the Sargasso Sea” (77).  Next, he diagnoses conservative “antimoderns” as attempting “to save something from what looks to them like a shipwreck” (123).  In both cases, as Patsy’s talk reminded me, Latour gestures toward his no-long-post-or-not-post modern vision as metaphorically maritime.  Serres, of course, has more along this current.

For Patsy’s talk, however, and perhaps for us Hungry Ocean-ers, the payoff of the Marx-to-Latour move is a renewed sense of poetic possibility, a hope that poetry can represent (“capture” seems wrong) the fluidity and interconnectedness that the ocean constructs in physical and metaphorical ways.

This networked fluidity drew together (“assembled” might be Latour’s term, maybe in-gathered, to borrow a phrase from Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, is better) many of the conference’s talks: Jake Mattox’s literary vision of Maury’s Physical Geography, Dan Brayton’s world-spanning whales swimming alongside the Doty lyric, Bryan Since’s wonderful evocation of “The Man without a Country,” a story I don’t know.  I also think about the “peculiar” nature of sea literature, borrowing the phrase Siobhan invoked, and I wonder if the connection to Latour makes oceanic materials less “wet” and distinctive — Latour’s examples are as often as not desks and rocks and television sets, rather than waves and currents.

There was also a fine moment in the Q&A in which Patsy suggested that, after moving into Latourian freedom, to finish the analysis — talking here about Kona Blue?  I’m not sure — she needed to return to Marx, to the force of his critique of labor & value.  There might be a land-sea shifting & exchange model at work here, reminding us — as Sara Crosby’s paper also did, in a different way — that there’s really no “line” in any coastline.

Driving home from the Hungry Ocean on Sat night, I ran into dense fog that got me thinking.  At the Folger last summer and then again at MLA in Jan, I described the basic features of the ocean as being opaque, being hungry, and being transformative.  The fog, which Margaret Cohen’s talk reminded us is an ocean also, reveals a slightly different maritime property: distortion.

You cannot see out far, you cannot see in deep (to butcher Robert Frost’s great poem), and when you’re inside fog you lose perspective.  Everything is up close, soon lost, shifting.  It’s a great metaphor for post-conference speculative swirling.  Good thing I had lines to follow on the pavement.

Might the sea’s first property be a distorting lens rather than a cultural mirror?  So that oceanic attraction builds through the lure of difference and change?  What might this do to any utopian glosses we’re tempted to give to the sea?  If it’s distortion all the way down…

Fog is different from ocean in that it’s a mixture of water and air, and it’s, in most places, the exception, not the rule.

It makes me think of the foggy conclusion of Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice.  Doc’s heading south on the Santa Monica Freeway when the fog “began its nightly roll inland.”  It insinuates him out of LA into a Pynchonist vision —

At first the fog blew in separate sheets, but soon everything grew thick and uniform till all Doc could see were his headlight beams, like eyestalks of an extraterrestrial, aimed into the hushed whiteness ahead, and the lights on his dashboard, where the speedometer was the only way to tell how fast he was going.

In the “hushed whiteness” Doc and his I-405 buddies form a “temporary commune” on his way south toward Gordita Beach.  The ending amounts to an understated plea for oceanic transformation, when, perhaps, all that’s on offer is distortion —

Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he’d take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets.  He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he’d lost the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide.  Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he’d have to keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody.  Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait…. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him.  For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride.  For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.

Is Pynchon asking for more ocean here?  Or less?

A map from Dudley's Arcano

I was wondering until the last minute if we’d have enough students to justify this “undergraduate seminar” featuring the JCB’s collection of maritime atlases, but it turns out I should not have worried.  We pulled in about 10 eager Brown students, mostly from Jean Feerick’s Shakespeare class, and one intrepid voyager from U Conn Avery Point, who came with his professor, Mary K Bercaw-Edwards.  We also drew in a few other Oceaners who had arrived early, the JCB’s rare books curator, and all in all the room was pretty full.  Atlases are big!

Susan Danforth, the brilliant and deeply knowledgable maps curator, led a tour that started with a hand-colored 1480s Ptolomy, then quickly showed the shock of discovery in a gorgeous 1511 Italian Portolan chart, that showed how old Mediterranean cartographic habits struggled to make sense out of the strange new vistas of Africa and the West Indies. 

This is not the portolan we saw

A few of my favorites were on display — Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, which some call the most beautiful of all 17c atlases, and the less opulent Altas Maritimus & Commercialis, which was purportedly ghost-written by Daniel Defoe and about which I built a web-interactive site for the Folger show last summer.

A map from the Altas Maritime & Commercialis, 1728

These huge, ungainly books show the technical challenge posed by the maritime: the ocean and its coastlines are simply too big and complex to represent simply.  I take these atlases to diplay on a very literal level the shock of the transoceanic turn, and the effort of early modern cartographers, sailors, and others to transform watery disorder into something legible, usuable, and even marketable. 

A good way to start!

I’m not exactly sure how to fold these programs — products of the design genius of Leslie Tobias-Olson — but here’s the final version of this week’s conference, from the u/g seminar on Th through the final keynote on Sat night.

Hungry Ocean Program Page 1

Hungry Ocean Program Page 2

Plus another image of the flyer, because I can’t resist —

Please join us!