Steve Mentz

Here are the brief remarks I made to the Zoom-sea at an event celebrating the works and legacy of John Gillis.

[And here’s the full 90 min Zoom, featuring many fabulous people!]

I presented four quick snapshots about what John’s work means to me –

1. I first met John through Islands of the Mind, which I must have read around 2006 or so, as I was making an oceanic turn in my own literary scholarship. John’s introduction of islands as a “third place” between settled land and chaotic sea, and his presentation of “islomania” as recurring cultural dream have stayed with me. But my favorite thing in this great book is the historian’s gesture toward the poetic imagination. The book’s subtitle, “How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World,” set up descriptions of the entanglements among real islands, from Iceland to Bermuda to Tahiti, and fictional ones, from St. Brendan’s isle to the island of California to Utopia. Beyond its erudition and range, what I cherish most about this book is its generosity. Like the sailors it chronicles, the book invents as it explores – half create[s] and perceives, to adapt Wordsworth’s formulation. I love its open-ness.
2. My second snapshot takes me and my then 10 year old son Ian to visit John and Tina at Great Gott Island, Maine, in 2011. I’d met John through the Fluid Frontiers conference, and he kindly invited us out to their private paradise. “Islands are not utopias,” he cautioned us as we tromped through mossy paths around the island. (Here’s a picture of Ian and John, heading into the woods.) It was a charmed day, with a special fisherman’s magic: I caught a juvenile mackerel on my first cast from the “apron” of granite that surrounds the island, and Ian caught another on his last cast of the day, as we were about the leave the dock that Tina calls the heart of the island, the place through which people come and go. I can still feel the thrill of accessing secret knowledge and oceanic experience in that summer’s day off the coast.
3. Back to scholarship – I’ve probably never been so touched at having been cited by another scholar than when I read John’s web-essay “The Blue Humanities,” which appeared in the NEH journal Humanities in 2013. At that point I wasn’t myself sure what the blue humanities was, though I’d been using the phrase for a few years. John showed me. His essay reflected back to me what happens when you let the waters in, to stain and suffuse scholarship. As it happens, during this hell-year of 2020 I’ve just last month signed a contract with Routledge to write a book called, “An Introduction to the Blue Humanities.” It’s a labor of love for me that has crystallized through John’s hearing and reimagining that phrase back in 2013.
4. My last snapshot features me in a sleeping bag, surrounded by my family, on the living room floor of our house on the CT shoreline. We’re huddled together in the dark waiting for Hurricane Sandy to descend upon the coast. I’ve got a headlamp on, and I’m eagerly reading The Human Shore. I like to read Gillis books during hurricanes. I had read Tina’s great book Writing on Stone during the blackout after Hurricane Irene one year earlier. What do the Gillises have to do with global storm systems that rotate counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere? It’s not that their work and legacy resembles a hurricane’s violent disruption. Although…if we think Superstorm Gillis as an organizing principle, a system whose structures have global reach, oceanic origins, and planet-sized scale…well, I don’t know. It might not be the worst symbol of this great scholar’s work and influence!

Plus some bonus bibliography:

John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (Routledge 2004)

Christina Gillis, Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life (2008)

• I read this one during a blackout after Hurricane Irene (August 2011)

John Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (2012)

• I read this one during the blackout after Hurricane Sandy (Oct 2012)

“The Blue Humanities” Humanities 34:3 2013

John Gillis and Franziska Torma, eds., Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History (2015)

In the middle of the disorienting fall term of 2020, I signed a contract for a new book project that will keep me occupied for the next many months. I’m very excited about this book, as the term “blue humanities” seems to be splashing around so many discourses and practices in so many places. I’ll have more to say about the project here at the Bookfish, and other places, but I wanted to announce the project first, and also ask a small favor of the #bluehumanities gang.

As I get started on the book, I am hoping to reach out to some #bluehumanities people around the world to see what they think, write, create, teach, and do with the term.

Here’s a link to my Blue Humanities Survey.

I’m hoping to be suprised by some of the things I hear back!

[With thanks to Anna Intere and the Sea Library I ran across this sea-poem by Borges this morning, right after I took this sea-picture. John Updike’s translation, in Borges’s Selected Poems (2004), is very good. But I thought I’d do an early November translation myself too.]

Before the dream, or the terror, it interweaves

Mythologies and cosmographies.

Before the time unweaves itself into days —

The sea, always, the always-sea, it was and was.

Who is the sea? Who is the violent

Ancient creature that chews earth’s sandy pillars,

One and many sea-mouths gnawing,

And abyss and splendor and chance and wind?

Who sees it sees it for the first time

Always. With elemental wonders drawn out, sad evenings,

Bright moon, cooled embers from last night’s bonfire on the beach.

Who is the sea? Who am I? I will not know it until

After the last succeeding wave-days and pain.

“El Mar” from El otro, el mismo (1964)

In the gorgeous short film that closed out a long, varied, and stimulating Zoomafternoon with the Urban Soils Symposium, the puppet artist Olmstead — half of the puppet theater-reconceived as film-makers duo Alex & Olmstead — offered an eco-koan. “Life exists,” she voice-overed, “because there are six inches of topsoil, and it sometimes rains.”

It made me think of Bruno Latour’s recent book Down to Earth, in which he emphasizes the thin-ness of life on our planet, all of which exists, and always has existed, confined inside the “critical zone,” a narrow 1-2 km thick band of “biofilm” above and below the planet’s surface. In a lecture-performance in New York in 2018 — back when people went places and sat next to people we don’t know! — Latour introduced his notion of “terrestrialism,” which asks us to train our attention away from both the heavens and the planetary core. The world we need to understand is at our feet. It’s soil.

At the Zoomposium on Friday, I presented some ideas toward a “poetics of compost” about what we talk about when we talking about soil-creation, drawing mainly on Shakespeare and Ovid. My title, “Soiling the World,” asks us to think about how soil soils — what actions and processes happen in the living earth, how we understand and fear and depend upon these processes, and how poets and scientists should explore these long histories. Soil includes death and decay, and the renewal that emerges through soil requires a closer engagement with mortal vulnerability that is often comfortable. That’s where we need poets alongside soil scientists.

The baker’s dozen of presenters who spoke together via Zoom yesterday spanned a wide range of approaches, expertise, and modes of presentation. The event was one of favorite kinds of academic/para-academic events, the kinds that toss people together who don’t normally encounter each other — let’s say engineers who design “technosols,” an activist who leads an urban garden in Pittsburgh, puppeteers-turned-filmmakers, textile artists, investment managers… Actually, I think I should make a list. Let’s start at the beginning —

Early Afternoon Sessions

• Maha Deeb started us off a great & detailed presentation about the physical properties of various urban soils, and the projects required to amend them.
• Vlacheslav Vasenev Zoomed in from Moscow to describe a soil research project about how to create “technosols” for the widely different climates in different parts of Russia.
• Moreen Willaredt & Thomas Nels brought the “earthworm engineers” to the party in a slick video presentation of their research into soil manufacturing and productivity. Thomas Nels then joined live to make a great comment about how a productive manufactured soil can be disassociated from land ownership, thus bringing the benefits of soil to an increasingly urban (and non-landowning) population. Given how much of the brutal legacy of settler colonialism structures itself through land ownership, it’s an inspiring vision.
• Raqueeb Bey pivoted us toward political activism with a powerful presentation about BUGS — Black Urban Gardeners Society of Pittsburgh – and their efforts to use soil to advance social and racial justice.
• I rounded out the morning session with differents versions of making-compost, from what will happen my own body after my death to Timon’s cosmic vision to Apollo’s assault of Daphne. H/t to two great new feminist translations of / responses to Ovid by Jane Alison and Nina MacLaughlin!

We had a half-hour of Q&A after these five talks. The exchange was great, and it also reminded me of how challenging it is to get people to speak across disciplines. The Urban Soils hosts did a great job bringing us together, but the first 20-ish minutes were largely dominated by shop talk among the scientists, who all knew each other from the soil world. I posted a question in the chat about politics as a potential connecting discourse to bring the five talks together, but it got passed over. Eventually I figured out how to raise my hand on Zoom (small triumphs!) & was able to use the question of politics to make the hand-off to Raqueeb, who spoke eloquently about how to get political figures to listen when you have a good idea. The time closed before we really got to speak across the humanities / science divide, though I hope later follow-ups will manage that, to an extent.

The truth is — it’s super-hard to germinate those conversations, and we need to have them. To dig into the metaphor, we need to cultivate the rich soil that can grow them from seedlings. One of the most successful such conversations I can remember was between the planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton and medieval literature scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library at the Creating Nature event I organized in May 2019, and to some extent I think I just got lucky. The Urban Soils Symposium clearly supports these kinds of conversations. I had to drop off before the afternoon Q&A, and the afternoon session featured a wider range of speakers, so they’ve probably got more great things recorded by now already!

Later Afternoon Sessions

• Kate Douglas guided us into a coffee break with a five-minute “Meditation on Rot – Maybe Dead is Just a Word People Say When They’re Scared.” The virtual coffee break for me included a quick trip down to the beach with the dog.

• The first session after the break featured Heather McMordie’s artistic project “Marsh Senses,” a textile and performance piece created in relation with the threatened salt marshes in her Rhode Island home. A creature of salt marshes myself in coastal CT, I found this piece beautiful and mesmerizing. I want to see / smell / feel more!
• Wendy Aringa, a landscape architect from Brooklyn, spoek about the Gowanus Canal, a post-natural space that people like me who are obsessed with the watery landscapes of New York City love in the complicated ways that one loves toxic and polluted places. I thought of my St. John’s colleague the painter Elizabeth Albert, and her ongoing illustrated project Gowanus Muskrat!
• Microbiologist and designer Paige Whitehead gave a brilliant talk that asks us to think about the violence done to nonhuman environments by road-building. She included a vision of the Indigenous networks of communication and connection that preceded the pavement, and that might be possible again if the tarmac were lifted. Such a great talk!
• Steve Godeke added financial discourses to the mix with an excellent presentation about green investment strategies. It’s good to have money people at the table!
• The puppet duo Alex & Olmstead closed us out with the film I mentioned at the top of this overlong blog post. Another great vision of earthworms as collaborators, and a different way to engage with soil

The fun continues this Halloween afternoon at 2 pm, but in truth my Zoom fatigue will likely send me toward pumpkin-carving and maybe a nice long walk into the salt marsh along the old trolley tracks. I’m very pleased to have connected with this ambitious and omnivorous group — and I look forward to future collaborations, especially once people can be in places together again!

It’s hard to get away from the news these days. During a week that started with “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck” of a debate and ended up with the most powerful man in the world hospitalized, I found myself wanting a break. But it turns out that spending time with the Public Theater’s radio play of Richard II, which is what I’m teaching right now, was less a break than a lens. Shakespeare’s play about a hostile transfer of power makes a powerful, painful response to my regular doomscrolling of news updates. The scene in the middle of the play after Richard returns from Ireland (3.2) felt like a spotlight shined onto today’s news.. One moral of Richard’s reversal of fortune, that power doesn’t last, seems too simple to feel profound. But later in the scene, Richard reveals the human pain of suddenly-visible mortality. That’s the moment that might give us a glimpse into our infected President in this uncertain time.

To be clear, I don’t want to connect the President to Shakespeare’s bad king in order to criticize. We don’t need Shakespeare for that. It is true that many of the things of which Shakespeare’s King Richard appears guilty — manipulation of his peers, abuse of power, dishonesty, an eye for personal gain — will ring familiar to consumers of American political news in fall 2020. The moments I’m thinking of now, however, happen when Shakespeare’s portrait of a king reveals “God’s substitute” (1.2.37) to be a man who encounters his own human limits, perhaps for the first time. That’s the moment that makes me wonder what kind of thinking has been going on inside Walter Reed Hospital this weekend.

We obviously can’t know what to expect from any single case out of the over seven million Covid-19 infections we have seen since in the US since this past spring. We have good reasons to hope and expect that expert medical care and early detection will lead to the President’s recovery. But it’s hard not to think of the risks, and it’s impossible not to think that he, himself, might be feeling the cold breath of mortality. He may not want to tell us what he’s experiencing — but maybe Shakespeare already has?

National leaders don’t extemporize in iambic pentameter these days, but I wonder how many of Richard’s thoughts might be running through his mind.

When Richard arrives back on English soil and hears that a rival has taken the field against him, he first claims to trusts the mystical power of his own authority:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

3.2.54-55

So far, so confident. Richard, like other leaders we might hink of, likes to interrupt when others try to speak, as we’ve seen in the first two acts. He’s in control, so far. Or at least he thinks he is.

But the king’s forces melt away. His Welsh allies head home (2.4). His powerful uncle York, whose ambivalence when caught between his king and his nephew Bolingbroke carries the whiff of political cowardice, shifts to the side of the rising Bolingbroke. “I do remain as neuter” (2.3.159), pleads York at first, before effectively casting his lot with Bolingbroke. These betrayals push Richard to self-dramatized misery:

Of comfort no man speak!

3.2.144

At this moment Richard voices an anxiety and self-doubt that no political leader wishes to reveal. I can’t help hearing these lines, as performed by the charismatic Andre Holland, as a kind of secret human history of our virus-stricken President, the words he won’t — can’t — utter, perhaps not even to himself:

Throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonius duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while.

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus.

How can you say to me I am a king?

3.2.172077

“Subjected thus” — what does it mean when a ruler who feels himself invincible suddenly becomes vulnerable? The depth of feeling seeps out from Andre Holland’s gorgeous American voice. These lines speak what we have not been allowed to hear this past weekend. We know it must be true: he must live with bread, feel want, taste grief, needs friends. But will he show it?

My students and I have been listening all week to this spring’s brilliant and searing production of Richard II, dedicated to Black Lives Matter and featuring a mostly non-white cast. Director Saheem Ali frames his production as an interrogation of Shakespeare and the place of theater in American culture during the hinge of 2020. The podcast episodes feature interviews with the actors and with Shakespeare experts including the amazing Ayanna Thompson, among others. Might the play make a better way to think about current events than refreshing Twitter?

So far, my students haven’t missed much about how topical this play feels. We spent some time last week interpreting the thoughts of Miriam Hyman, the Philadelphia-based actor and rapper who plays Bolingbroke, about the moment in which the rebel-who-will-become-king dedicates himself to “Mine innocence and St George” (1.1.84). She describes hearing this line during rehearsal and then imagining Bolingbroke the “exile” as a spokesperson for George Floyd and the BLM protestors. In her searing, powerful performance, she makes this four century-old play speak to 2020 urgencies. Miriam Hyman’s Bolingbroke is here for the same storm that my class started the semester with, in Claudia Rankine’s poem “Weather,” written while the protests were happening this spring. “We are here for the storm / that’s storming,” Rankine writes. Richard’s personal corruption, his glee at the passing of John of Gaunt (a Duke, not a Supreme Court Justice, but it seems close enough…), his manipulation of his subjects: it all seems a bit too on the nose.

So, how to you resist the king? “Vote him out,” one student said, an anachronistic if understandable response. “Peaceful protests?” wondered another. Miriam Hyman performs Bolingbroke’s version of the #resistance as a powerfully direct, in the streets response that reminds me, somewhat, of a more conclusive version of the Women’s March of January 2018.

Just who exactly is writing the script for 2020?

In the hot days of mid-July, at long last I slipped into the phase of quarantine that includes re-reading Camus’s The Plague. Early on, when everything seemed new, I listened to an audio version of Boccaccio when I drove to DC to extract my son from his college dorm. In the confusion that followed , I skimmed Defoe, and turned through some fragments of Dekker’s Wonderfull Yeare. I indulged myself by blogging about Love in the Time of Cholera in late March.

But until now I’ve been avoiding Camus. It’s a book I remember falling deeply into when I read it during my junior year of high school. I still have that 37-year old copy, slightly worn, with not always decipherable notes. Even then, I seem to have figured out that the “most imp. line in [the] book” came early: “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way” (36). Yes, it does.

[My teenage self in the ’80s surely could never have imagined that virtually any quotation of The Plague right now reads like a subtweet of the USA in 2020. Not that anyone knew what a subtweet was in 1983!]

Much of what I remember of the novel I found again, as lucid as before: Camus’s moral urgency, his compassion for a wide range of (mostly male, as I don’t think we discussed in class back then) characters, and his patient, slow unfurling of the progress of plague through the town of Oran. I remember the novel’s insistence on clear understanding as the key to moral living: “The soul of the murderer is blind, and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness” (124). A bit of a know-it-all as a teenager, I liked the idea of values built on knowledge.

But though the worship of “comprehension” and semi-scientific clarity remains, in particular via the doctor-hero Rieux, a second thread through the novel seems more striking to me now. The additional cardinal virtue besides individual knowledge is social obligation: “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency” (154). Or, as the narrator describes the sick city a bit later, “This business is everybody’s business” (194). The implications for America in 2020, divided against ourselves by the very leadership whose job is to unite us, seem too obvious to detail.

Living during our own plague-time now, I feel these two imperatives — to know, and to be decent — as rival twins. The urge to be clear-sighted has me, like many of us, swallowing down huge gulps of information: statistics, epidemiology, public health theories, and other technical fields in which I’m not competent to form a reliable opinion. But at the same time, behind the numbers that I scan daily from Florida, Texas, Arizona, California — a few months ago the numbers were from New York, Boston, New Haven, and before that Italy, Wuhan, Tehran — I feel an enormous urge toward compassion and decency, though I can’t always tell how to put those feelings into action. What does it mean to act decently toward someone who’s lost their parent, their business, their life’s work? How does decency interact with comprehension? Is wearing a mask an act of comprehension — because we know now how the virus spreads — or of decency — because it shows a collective care for our neighbors? Can everything be both of these things, always?

In re-reading The Plague I also remembered what seemed to teenage me, and to some extent still to old guy me, a central conflict in the novel, between the Jesuit Father Paneloux’s desperate faith in divine order and Dr. Rieux’s refusal to moralize. “Perhaps we should love what we cannot understand,” urges Paneloux, to which Rieux responds with his own articulation of absolute truth: “I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture” (203). What seems most admirable to me now about Rieux is his modesty, his acceptance that he might not be able to find any “scheme” at all, once he casts off traditional structures such as the Church and the law. Decency might be better than any scheme.

There are a lot of figures in Camus’s novel who present mini-arguments for how to endure the pandemic: Grand the clerk and failed artist, Tarrou the intellectual, the journalist Rambert, the petty criminal Cottard, and others. I remember that I tried, back in ’83, to lay out a sort of “which one’s plan works best” reading of the novel. But this time through, I don’t know — there was something a bit schematic about each of the figures, even the most intellectually complex such as Tarrou and Rieux. Their stories are engaging, meaningful, diverting, varied. All the usual things a novelist makes us feel, we feel. But the core driving force of the novel isn’t human at all. “What’s natural is the microbe,” Camus emphasizes. “All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like) — is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention” (235-36). Another subtweet of 2020, this time not to governmental stupidity but instead a challenge to our own tired, almost-six months in spans of attention? How often does your attention lapse these days? How long can our attention stay sharp?

Who in Camus’s novel is that “good man,” who infects almost no one? The doctor interacts with his patients and even brings sick people into the apartment he shares with his mother. Tarrou volunteers to organize a sanitation crew whose work does not sound very “socially distant.” None of the citizens of Oran appears to be isolating as a matter of course, though one heart-wrenching scene divides a sick child from his family. (The child dies in the hospital with Rieux; the father, a magistrate, ends up wanting to volunteer at the isolation camp rather than return to his government job.) Crowds pile into church to hear Father Paneloux’s sermons, and a stranded-by-quarantine opera company even performs “Orpheus and Eurydice” to packed houses once a week. All the cafes are open. The pervading horror of 2020 — that we know how to “stop the spread,” and yet are failing as a collective body to do it — isn’t quite the sickness the novel describes.

I mostly agree with critics who say that it’s too simple to think of The Plague as an allegory for fascism, or even for the four-year suffering of France under Nazi occupation. But the mysterious fading away of the illness, which in the famous final words of the novel, may yet “rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city” (287), clearly has a political flavor. Perhaps, yet again, the jab is applicable to the USA in 2020 as well as Camus’s France in 1947? Vigilance, “attention,” and a clear eye for rats seem essential tools to maintain decency in the body politic.

One new discovery of the 2020 reading was a salt-water interlude. The moment comes just before Grand’s recovery marks the start of the city’s turn away from plague — and also shortly before the one-after-the-other deaths of Tarrou and Dr. Rieux’s wife conclusively isolate our hero. The two friends, Tarrou and Rieux, talk their way past the lockdown guards and go for a sea-swim by the empty pier. It’s an understated, faintly homoerotic, deeply resonant moment of physical escape: “For some minutes they swam side by side, with the same zest, in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, at last free of the town and of the plague” (239). In a novel with few consolations, except Grand’s unexplained recovery and the at-least-temporary withdrawal of the disease, the night-swim, which is almost the novel’s only moment outside the city walls, marks a dive away from infections and an imaginary engagement with another environment.

The water in Long Island Sound was too cold for me when corona-time started in March, but since late May I’ve been swimming every day. I follow the tide around its circuit, since it’s nicer here to swim within an hour of so of the high-water mark. Today the 9:35 am tide put me in the water around 10, in between a few rain squalls, loving the bouncy disjunction of being in slightly rough water. I sneak away each day into the grey-green flood, not so much to be apart from the pandemic, because of course I don’t forget the world when I swim, but because the act of immersion, of clogging my eyes and ears and nose to everything around me but salt water, works like a tiny meditative practice.

Today when I swam through choppy swells I was thinking with Rieux and Tarrou. About comprehension, and how hard it is to live up to that pitiless goal. And about decency, and how much I hope our world can find it again.

After watching & re-watching & thinking obsessively about Alice Oswald’s Oxford Professor of Poetry public lecture at the end of June, I rationed myself by slowly reading her most recent book. Nobody is a book-length “collage of stories” in dialogue with and from Homer’s Odyssey.

Oswald’s a genius of precision and vision, possibly the greatest poet working in English today. She’s a trained classicist, who in her book Memorial compressed the Iliad into just death-scenes. She’s also a superlative water-poet. Her Oxford lecture brought together three images of tears: a poem by Jericho Brown about Emmet Till’s mother, the moment in the Odyssey when the hero breaks down while being feasted by the Phaeacians, and John Donne’s “Valediction: Of Weeping.” Her stunning book-length poem Dart (2002) traces the West Country river through time and space.

Nobody is her ocean book, which makes it especially fascinating for an Ocean-thinker like me. I’m not sure after just one reading that I can respond cogently to the scope and dizzying range of the poem, which juxtaposes Odysseus with a nameless poet marooned on a solitary island after the Trojan war. (See Od 3.267). So instead I’ll cite some of the most gorgeous sea-phrases, in which the poet gets us a little closer to the oceanic heart of things —

what does it matter what he sings

there is all this water between us

and it is blind a kind of blind blue eye (3)

made of nothing and yet it will outlast everything

because it is deep it is a dead field fenceless

a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling

which in its patience always wears away the hard things (5)

How does it start the sea has endless beginnings (13)

even now a stranger is setting out

onto this disintegrating certainty this water

whatever it is whatever anything is

under these veils and veils of vision

which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken (15)

This is one kind of water when it hangs over him

a man is a nobody underneath a big wave (23)

…the pleasure-crinkled sea (31)

and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water

a morsel of ice a glamour of oil

and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal

and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings (32)

but the sea itself has no character just this horrible thirst

goes on creeping over stones and shrinking away (39)

tell me muse of this floating nobody (50)

it is human to have a name but you seem unsolid somehow

almost too porous to be human I would say

some repetition has eaten into you

as water eats into metal this is what happens

whenever love is mentioned your whole heart liquifies

and the character of water stares out through your eyes (63)

there seem to be two worlds one is water’s

which always finds its level one is love’s which doesn’t (69)

The final paragraphs of David Gange’s glorious historian’s adventure, The Frayed Atlantic Edge, arrive with startling clarity. We must change the way we think about nature, the sea, and “Romanticism.” Gange distinguishes his immersive practice from naive or sentimental forms of Romanticist thinking:

It isn’t romanticism that needs to be cleared from perspectives on these places, but the assumption that these communities somehow belong to the past, not the future, and are merely hazy places to escape to.

In rejecting Romanticist nostalgia, Gange asks instead for a future-oriented engagement with oceanic edges and humans that make their lives across watery borders:

…the journey had shown me that a romanticism which delves into the natures of humans and their fellow species, finding wonder while rooted in the real, might not be so naive after all.

That’s right, I thought to myself as I closed the book last night. That’s exactly right. The practice of immersive contact with humans and nonhumans, watery and windy spaces, generates in this book what we might call a material romanticism that connects the “wonder” with the “real.”

Thinking about that insight this morning has me recalling the risks and hazards of immersion, from physical danger to sentimental stories. Gange’s journey by kayak along the Atlantic coasts of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall ended with him fleeing the tourist mecca of St. Ives to spend a landless night keeping his kayak afloat at the Seven Stones, which appeared to his waterbound perspective as “less like a wall in front of waves and more like a knife blade thrust into ocean.” This starkly Romantic moment, in which the solitary boatsman holds himself upright all night through the painful exertions of tired arms, anticipates the book’s final turn toward a new romanticism of material connections and future orientations in the final pages.

Bruno Latour wrote several years ago that the “successor to the sublime is under construction” during our Anthropocene era. That project of assemblage or re-making seems to me the urgent task of our day. To replace the ego-dwarfing separations of Wordsworth and Shelley with something smaller, harder, more abrasive, directly material, and more obliquely emotional may enable a new poetics of the encounter for Anthropocene days.

[Note to self: extended quarantine might be a good time to sketch that long-deferred history of the literary sublime, from Longinus to Shakespeare & Milton, Melville & Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon & Toni Morrison… Sounds a bit like boring lit crit, as I churn out the list, but maybe…]

But now, before the Zooms of the day, a few thoughts on The Frayed Atlantic Edge, its insights and its joys.

Structure seems so essential: Gange’s book constructs itself through eleven mostly-solo journeys by kayak along the Atlantic shoreline from Shetland (July) to Cornwall (the following July). Each adventure combines paddling with reading, plus inspiring descriptions of local poets and communities. A few touchstones emerge along the rocky shorelines.

“If timelessness exists anywhere on earth, it is not in sight of the sea,” Gange writes while off the Orkney coast. Dynamism and physical experiences of change typify these violent spaces.

Another important argument asks us to re-orient the history of the British Isles away from inland cities and toward ocean-facing coasts. Drawing on the inspirational work of Barry Cunliffe, Gange emphasizes the ancient patterns of exchange that have dominated seaboard life since the Mesolithic period. He speculates that the dominance of collective agriculture and urban population centers have produced a series of myths through which “‘we Mesopotamians’ have constructed the separation of people and nature.” Against that fundamental agricultural split — on which point see also Tim Morton’s eco-theory and James Scott’s pre-history — Gange hazards that “Mesolithic seafarers … [may be] the only humans in the whole of time and space who are not the ‘anthro’ in Anthropocene.”

At the core of this book’s coast-centric vision is a rejection of what Gange calls the “thalassophobia” of modernity, especially urban modernity. The villain in Gange’s history is clearly the railroad, which re-orients local travel and commerce inland rather than along the crooked and inviting shoreline. To write ocean history, he suggests, is to write against grand narratives of conquering nature and toward what Rachel Carson calls a “sea ethic.”

I’ve been reading this book during prolonged swim-less quarantine. The local pools are all closed, and an especially chilly April and early May has kept me out of Long Island Sound’s gray-green embrace. Soon — maybe this weekend? — I’ll start back in with my daily high tide swims. Immersion will help me organize my summer, which was supposed to include swim trips to the Irish Sea among other places, into a more local swim-write-sleep-repeat pattern. I think a lot about the offshore perspective afforded by the blue humanities and its dream of immersion. Reading The Frayed Atlantic Edge during these dry quarantine weeks recalls the edge-feelings that writing at its best can pry out from subconscious and submarine depths, and the fraying pressure of material experience. Gange’s willingness to embody his academic practice, and also his precise, wistful, evocative prose provides a thrillingly immersive model in the wake of which many of us are likely to be paddling more a long time.

I miss the conversations.

With so much suffering surrounding us, including brutal news piling up every day from New York City especially, it feels selfish to admit feeling the loss of our yearly gathering of Shakespeareans. But I do feel it, mostly for the unexpected joys of ancillary conversations happened-upon, which are always the best things about SAA.

One year — maybe in the mid-aughts? — I happened to chat with Ewan Fernie in a hallway about the then-new Shakespeare Now! series. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to think that conversation at that moment — that random collision of two people from different continents, with all of our viral and human contact-traces also interacting (can you imagine?) changed my career and my life. I might well have written about oceans in any case, but the particular form of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean was enabled by the SAA-matrix and its connection-making swirl.

No such chance meetings this year on Zoom. But the Zoominar itself, ably organized and hosted by Nic Helms, with whom it was a real treat and pleasure to work as co-organizers of the Watery Thinking seminar, was both intense and enlightening. We got almost the full group together on-screen, wifi-ing ourselves in from locations that ranged from California to England and Ireland, spanning around eight hours of time zones, with only one fake-Zoom background that I noticed (of Lake Huron?), as well as an assortment of crowded bookshelves, blank walls, and other interior spaces. We even had a hearty crew of maybe a half-dozen auditors, some of whom lasted the full ninety minutes and hung around to ask excellent and pointed questions.

I often feel the in-person hours represent just a visible spout above the hidden cetacean bulk of most SAA seminars. This year’s Zoominar probably accentuated the split between what happened when we were all on screen together and what got asynchronously distributed through e-conversations, comments on papers, and a bunch of still-active threads on our seminar’s Google Classroom page. We missed being able to raise a glass or perhaps some fried seafood appetizers together, but perhaps in Austin there will be a reunion? That’s assuming, as I’m sadly not sure we can assume, that we’ll be ready, willing, or able to travel in spring 2021. The future is another country, as somebody said. (Zadie Smith, sez google? Is she quoting someone else?)

Each year when I’m blogging and flying home from SAA I try to think both locally about my own seminar or paper and also collectively about what the SAA is and may yet become. I don’t have as clear a snapshot this year of the SAA-in-progress. I know lots of people e-attended the brilliantly-named Alone Society Dance on Saturday, but I kept my now quarter-century long streak of non-dancing alive. I saw lots of notices of great-sounding seminars on social media, but didn’t get myself organized to audit any. For me, at least, #shax2020 dispersed itself between two poles: the close and intense intellectual work of the seminar, and the maximally distant blips of social media postings. Both were great, if a bit disconnected from each other.

Feeling nostalgic for my community, I’ve gone back this morning to re-read to the overlong blog posts I wrote during the post-SAA glow over the past few years. Here are some bloggy ruminations after our gathering in NOLA in 2016 for Shakespeare’s jazz funeral, in Atlanta in 2017 when our numbers were decimated by #shakenados, in Los Angeles in 2018 when I supplemented my seminar’s vision of community by swimming in the Pacific alongside a harbor seal, and last year in DC, which featured the debuts of the #SAAllies lanyards, the #shaxgrads group, and a searing #shaxfutures panel about professional marginality that I felt didn’t quite get the attention it deserved, though I very much include myself among the people who haven’t been generous enough to contingent faculty and other at-risk people in the academic world.

Thinking collectively about the past five years of SAAs, it seems to me that my experience, perhaps like that of many other SAA-ers, bears witness to the intertwining of personal academic and other obsessions — in my case, blue humanities, ecocrit, and seeking out open waters in which to swim as often as I can every time I travel — with a desire to think about SAA as a collective and an institution. Starting with a seminar I co-lead in 2016 with Matt Kozusko about “Shakespearean Communities,” continuing through helping initiate the #shaxfutures panel as part of the Program Committee for the Atlanta 2017 conference, co-leading another self-reflexive seminar with Carla Della Gatta in 2018 in Los Angeles about “Shakespeare, the SAA, and Us,” and last spring in DC picking up the bar tab for the first meeting of #shaxgrads, I feel as if I’ve been part of a growing desire among members to make the SAA more responsive to its own status as an institution and its duties to the least powerful and secure members.

I’m worried about how institutions will weather the current covid-storm. My first attention right now goes to my students, whose circumstances in and around New York City over the past month include harrowing stories of illness and loss of life. I’m concerned about how a tuition-dependent and lower income-serving University like my own St. John’s will manage the upcoming months and years. I’m worried about my local community in Connecticut, where our hospital resources are massively under strain. But I think it’s also worth thinking about SAA, and similar scholarly societies, as we consider what will last and what must change in these disorienting times.

I won’t presume to speculate, or to give unsolicited advice to the SAA leadership, whose judgement I trust and dedication to the association I recognize. But I hope that as we move forward, we keep foremost in our minds ways that the SAA and its membership can support, value, and advance the paths forward of those in our communities who most need our help.

[Guest Post by Lowell Duckert, commenting on the “Forms of Water” group of papers]

First, a note for everyone: I hope you’re doing well in your respective shelters,both physically and mentally. Second: thank you.Meditating on your “forms of water” proved to be the perfect exercise for my cooped-up mind. To my “Flake,” I add:

[Bodies:] Gwilym Jones, “‘As you to water would’: Staging Wet Bodies”

[Memories:] Bill Kerwin, “River Memory”

[Recipes:] Rob Wakeman, “Thinking Through Biodiversity on the River Trent”

An underlying current in my “Forms of Water Group” was a mutual affinity for incomplete forms. “Form,” as we see it, is a slippery thing—completion, an illusion. Water’s states do not shift, Proteus-like, from one fully-defined state (solid, liquid, gas) to another. Flux is part of the de- and re-formation of watery things: it’s built in to the wetware, and it’s not finished working.

I point out that the principle behind a snowflake’s six-sided symmetry remains a secret to this day. To early modern observers like Olaus Magnus and Frederick Martens, this tiny star-shape possessed a magical ability to radiate (“flake” out) into assemblages of human and nonhuman forms, seemingly without end. This cold type of cogitation (“flake-thinking”) could come in handy at the moment: “The radiating quality of the snowflake models the sort of interdisciplinary inquisitiveness necessary for addressing today’s most pressing problems, inspiring collaborations that may diverge into more-than-human modes of thinking.

Jones leaves us gazing into the eyes of wet onstage bodies in Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge’s A Looking-Glass for London and England. Jonah and the shipwrecked sailors – thinking themselves drowned – experience the feeling of damnation and salvation at once, and the resulting sense of survivor’s guilt is unbearable for the sunken prophet. Jonah bids his eyes, “Weep so for grief, as you to water would.” “Would” a spectator of drowned worlds do the same?  When “the organ of perception gives way to the organ of emotion,” as Jones puts it, we realize that grief is unquantifiable—that a liquifying sphere could have no bottom.

Kerwin develops his notion of “river memory” – “a kind of distributed cognition . . . that falls largely into the control of the non-human world” – from (“Watery”) Michael Drayton’s chorographical poem, Poly-Olbion. Personification, however, resists siding with the human; his anthropomorphism is more expansive than that. But since Drayton “does not” – cannot – “give us the non-human world completely,” the rivers resist complete access. The nymph Sabrina/River Severn, the poem states, “[s]tarts, tosses, tumbles, strikes, turnes, touses, spurnes and spraules, / Casting with furious lims her holders to the walles.” Poetic lines can only follow a riverbank so far, and only if the water stays its course—what’s memorable (now), may swiftly be washed from the “wall[e].”

Finally, the “last storgon” in the River Trent: a waterway named for the “thirty” species of fish that were in decline (or absent altogether) in already in the seventeenth century. River-to-table recipes, according to Wakeman, supplied a fleeting sensation of ecological security. Listing serves a valuable function; it “evidences a desire for a structured wholeness in a world that is receding, just as the recipe books long for the perfect recipe that will never be achieved.” And yet, he maintains, the bound recipe book managed to (literally) incorporate newness in the face of loss: “the acentric organization of the manuscript household recipe book – with its many hands, with its many stops and starts, its many blank pages – imagines a different kind of ecology, a world of continuous revision and metamorphosis, a world without finality. Contingency is spelled out on the open page.

Dwelling on water’s protean forms – crystal (flake), eyeball (body), river (memory), food (recipe) – only deepens our awareness of its mutability. These are all shapes that refuse to finish their trans-formations. But shiftiness, as these papers suggest, should also be an invitation – as well as an imperative – to create (to branch, emote, remember, cook). I look forward to Zoom time; until then, I would like us to focus on a single thought:

As a substance whose form chronically escapes delimitation, what forms of ecological thinking does water not only sponsor, but also demand?