Steve Mentz

About half a minute into the performance, when  Jonathan Cake’s impossibly tall and shirtless Antony strained heavenward while commanding Rome to melt into the Tiber, my eleven-year old daughter Olivia, seeing the play for the first time, whispered to me: “This guy is completely insane.”

She loved the show, which calmed down after a frenetic start — but she also had a point. Divine intoxication, giddy love, prophecies, Caribbean music, the loyalties of shrewd underlings from Menas to Enobarbus: the best parts of this production grabbed things and then tossed them aside. “Here is my space!” Antony roared. For this production, the space was Saint-Dominique, 18th century Haiti before the revolution, complete with lovely creole music and a final turn by Enobarbus as voodoo ghost.

Toto Bissainthe

With a cast of nine, it was the most intimate Antony & Cleopatra I’ve seen. Roaming around the small space of the Public’s renovated theater, the bi-national cast — four Brits and five Americans, under the direction of McArthur grant wunderkind Tarell Alvin McCraney — worked multiple parts to bring the emotional intensity. Maybe the most engaging element of the show was the four-piece band that played in an upper corner of the stage, including a haunting, repeated version of “Dey” by the 20c Haitian singer Toto Bissainthe. (Click the link and listen!) It’s become standard-issue to stage this play in the British colonial Empire, and dressing the Romans in 18c European costumes wasn’t the freshest move I’ve seen. But I enjoyed the sonic shift to Francophone Haiti, and especially the music.

The most radical changes to the text, beyond the usual assortment of cuts, involved Chukwid Iwuji’s Enobarbus. He opened the play by narrating, from a position in the audience, the famous description of the barge Cleopatra sat in, “like a burnished throne” (2.2.200-27). Throughout the play Enobarbus served as narrator and scene-changer, as well as Rome’s primary Egypt-praiser. Even his death, in which he bemoaned his treachery to Antony until his heart broke, did not stop him from continuing to announce the final scenes as a ghost. He also spoke two major speeches that the play gives to other characters. He appropriated the Roman solider Philo’s opening attack on Antony, “Nay, but this dotage of our general’s / O’erflows the measure” (1.1.1-10), which Enobarbus spoke a little later in the action, after a short scene introducing the lovers. Finally, at the end, Enobarbus grabbed Caesar’s play-closing lines, “No grave on earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous’ (5.2.355-65). These additions to his part seem strange to me: Enobarbus, who not incidentally was the only actor of African descent to play a Roman part, though all the Egyptian-Haitians were dark-skinned, clearly seemed intended to span the cultural divide. When he (as Philo) attacked Antony’s folly just after he (as Enobarbus) had celebrated Cleopatra, I felt the dissonance. I like imagining Enobarbus as the emotional heart of the play, and Iwuji’s performance was charismatic and persuasive. Perhaps he was asked to do too many different things? Or was that the point? That living in and loving both sides of this pre-colonial bi-cultural drama is always too much?

The driving force of this play is always  the two lovers, and here I think the Anglo-American cast worked well. Unlike the Bridge Project, which at times seemed  an exercise in showing off British strengths and American weaknesses, the combination here of the tall, commanding, English figure of Cake’s Antony against the short, dark, powerfully empathetic first-generation Angolan-American Joaquina Kalukango as Cleopatra was great. At first the height differential was so vast as to seem ludicrous — this Antony could almost look his Cleopatra in the eyes while on his knees before her — but the actors played up each other’s forcefulness. Each was most effective when lamenting the other’s absence: Antony in Rome telling Egyptian tall-tales, and Cleopatra back in Egypt, imagining the “happy horse” that bears the weight of Antony.

Mr Darcy might say of this Antony that he smiled too much, but I think Jonathan Cake’s gorgeous smile — wide, gleaming, inviting — made his performance. Why not have one other gaudy night, he seemed to say? A cure for all his sad captains, Cake’s Antony bounded across the stage, performing rage and botched suicide when necessary, but at his best when smiling.

Caesar dancing

Joaquina Kulukango’s Cleopatra lacked height, and perhaps political gravitas — the small scale of the production emphasized emotional connections, not realpolitik — but I loved her fast-changing emotional power. Olivia’s favorite scenes involved Cleopatra and the Roman messenger, who was coached in how to describe Antony’s new Roman wife Octavia by an Egyptian character who might be Alexas (as in the text) but was played by the same actor as the Soothsayer and Mardian the eunuch. Why not play along, coached this Egyptian figure, who also sang the Haitian music at other points in the production? Why not just play? The core temptations of this Haitian Egypt were music, water, and volatility.

They lose the world to Caesar, who never smiles and never plays, but really the world always belongs to Caesars. Samuel Collings as Octavius was direct, well-dressed, and narrow in both physical form and in attention. Perhaps his strongest moment came after Antony’s death, when he came onto a stage full of mourners and asked, “Which is the Queen of Egypt?” (5.2.111). He was all focus, no distractions. What difference  could it make to him which one was Cleopatra?

The worst cut of the production was the Clown, who never showed up in the final scene.  Charmian brought in the asps in water, hold the figs, and I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to seeing Kulukango’s intense focus directed one last time at a disorderly subject. She hit Cleopatra’s “immortal longings” perfectly: still, haughty, tense as a guitar string. I would have liked to have seen her work harder for release.

Overall, great stuff, especially the music and the two mad leads. Get down to Lafayette St before March 23! 

Back when it was really cold out, wedged between #RisingWaters and “Cry, Trojans,” I had a great visit with Marina Zurkow to discuss our collaboration for the Oceanic New York book. I’ve been meaning to write up my notes since then. Busy times!

As treasures start rolling in from Oceanic depths, I’m thinking more about the shape of this book project. There’s no way to capture the fluid dynamism of the event itself — but formal play and poetic experiments can gesture toward that multiplicity in different media. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

My notes say Marina & I were thinking about “Instructions” as a generic term — I was thinking about Marvell’s political satire “The Last Instructions to a Painter” (1657), and Marina was talking about a project she’s working on with Una Chaudhuri that will appear, in some form, at BABEL 2014. In the Oceanic New York context, I like the idea of instructions as imperatives: this is what we must do now, in our watery city. Not to save it, but to live in it.

So: a half-dozen waterlogged thoughts, based on my notes from 1/23/2014:

1. To make marshlands a pastoral space, add boats. Plus some shepherds. A few songs?

2. Look closely at asphalt borders: curbs, potholes, parking spaces, driveways. The way in is the same as the way out.

3. The best way for making soft edges on squares is friction. Lots of friction.

4. Look at Newtown Creek and see History. (Ignore the smell.)

5. If you’re floating in an inflatable raft in Buttermilk Channel during a hundred-year’s flood, and you’re blowing as hard as you can into a little plastic nozzle in order to keep the raft full and buoyant, you’re matching two fluid flows against each other. The idea is to use the flow of air from your lungs into the plastic raft to counter the flow of salt water into New York Harbor. It might be possible, for a little while.

6. Drowning, as Sebastian Junger explains in The Perfect Storm, is a form of radical experimentation, being up against the “Zero-Limit Point.” “Holding our breath is killing us,” Junger reasons the body might say to itself when underwater, “and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in” (142). He’s describing New York City as well as George Clooney.

At some point I’ll want to think more about porousness, marshlands, that messy mid-point between Utopia Parkway and dystopian visions. There will be more instructions to come. Maybe some swimming lessons too?

The aggressive, over-the-top staging of Maria’s wedding to Sir Toby near the end of Pig Iron’s great production of Twelfth Night down in the Lower East Side almost ended up with Charleigh Parker’s big body in her wedding gown — an inspired bit of casting to see a true “giant” in this role —  lurching into my too-long legs as they stretched out into the aisle. Parker’s Maria  launched herself down from the stage and I pulled back my legs as she blasted up the aisle. It was that sort of show: loud, fun, physical, not just in your face but almost in my lap. I’ve never seen this wedding staged before, never felt a production so clearly committed to putting the gullers and drinkers at the play’s heart.

Minute to minute the show floated for over three hours on sheer brilliance from The Only Band in Illyria, a six-piece wonder of Balkan gypsy magic.

Sir Toby

The band started up right in front of my seat in the front row and played for 20 minutes or so before the opening curtain. Violin, stand-up bass, accordion, two different drums, tuba, and trumpet. During the show the musicians kept hiding under staircases & popping out to punctuate the comedy. I bought the CD at the interval & listened on the foggy ride home. My favorite tune, of course, is “Salt Water Thief” — but it’s hard not to love “Nothing But Madman (Toby’s Tango).”

I’ve seen a lot of good productions of this play, including two brilliant all-male versions, from Propeller and more recently the Globe’s traveling version with Mark Rylance. Pig Iron didn’t hit Propeller’s melancholy, and none of the players quite matched Rylance’s coiled-spring intensity. But the fun they (and we) had! I especially loved the company’s principal members, director Dan Rothenberg, James Sugg as a wonderfully louche Sir Toby, Dito van Relgersburg as a towering Orsino who managed to be both charismatic and goofy. Sir Andrew sported a faux-hawk and rode a tricycle to deliver his challenge to Cesario: really, what’s not to like?

The Only Band in Illyria

Sir Andrew, Olivia, Maria, Cesario

The Times review seems to have fallen under the spell of Chris Torn’s Malvolio and his slow burn-into-rage in the final moments. I was more taken by his first smile, when reading Maria’s letter has convinced him that his mistress loves him. He reads in a post-script that she wants him to smile, and so he tries, painfully, slowly, the movements spreading, cracking, opening up his face. It made him look like a fool — but that’s the best thing to be in this play.

Nothing quite like a truly festive comedy. Get down to Grand Street before Sunday if you can!

I’ve been looking for the last piece of the theoretical puzzle for the shipwreck book, and I think this big book on “anthropotechnics” might help me out. Peter Sloterdijk’s not writing about catastrophe, nor about the early modern ocean, but his focus on practice and vertical distinctions, on “the distinction between the practising and the untrained” (3) strikes a chord. “It is time,” Sloterdijk writes, “to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition” (4). “[T]he future should present itself under the sign of the exercise” (4). He’s not writing about seamanship or the shaping force of maritime labor exactly, but…

By anthropo-technics, Sloterdijk means a labor of self-shaping, of cultivating a repeated practice or set of habits as a way to transform or transfigure the human condition. It’s a “de-spiritualisation of asceticism” (61), a form of “acrobatics” (125) or a reworking of “philosophy as athletics” (194-96). Self-shaping labors create a bridge between natural limits and cultural forms: “In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge, the practising life” (11).

The models for these techniques come from ancient monastic and athletic orders, but the rebirth Sloterdijk uncovers comes through a series of late 19c figures: Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” from which he gets his title; Nietzsche’s Ubermensch as bridge or transition; Foucault’s “care of the self”; Kafka’s “Hunger Artist“; even the revitalization of the Olympics in 1896. At times this somewhat rambling book, which touches on a massive variety of references, from Hercules at the cross-roads (“the primal ethical scene of Europe” 417) to post-Communist eastern Europe, implies that this human-shaping process is distinctly modern, or at least that its forms are changing as we enter the 21c. For Sloterdijk, Nietzsche alone in the later 19c “unconditionally embraced the primacy of the vertical” (177), and it is that vertical impulse, the desire for self-mastery, and the consequent “de-passivizing” (195) of human existence, that this book celebrates.

I don’t buy the now-you-see-it historicist novelty, but the value Sloterdijk’s analysis accords to incremental efforts of skill and practice that gradually, perhaps invisibly, shape the way the body engages its nonhuman environment, seems important. I think of the ocean-going sailor, that favorite literary symbol from Odysseus to Ishmael, and the way these figures use technology-driven alliances, networks, human and nonhuman creatures and objects working in concert and in tension to survive in unfriendly waters. The mariner’s metis is an anthropotechnic practice, though perhaps it owes more to its surrounding environment than, say, the acrobat’s balance.

Reading seamanship in moments of crisis as an anthropotechnics, an attempt to follow the unrefusable command the fractured torso of Apollo gives Rilke — you must change your life – suggests that shipwrecked sailors shape themselves in two senses: they become vessels of survival, body-sized rafts in turbulent waters, and they also become vessels of meaning, symbolic buoys in violent seas. Think of Ishmael, on the “margin” of the Pequod’s wreck, “slowly drawn towards the closing vortex” but entangling himself with that last vertically-moving object, the “coffin life-buoy” that “shot lengthwise from the sea” to preserve him. His odyssey of practice matches a slow accumulation of skills and knowledge alongside his doomed captain’s quest. To survive alone, to escape to tell the tale, is a form of life-changing.

It’s a tribute to the spell of any major theoretical work that while you’re reading it, it seems universally applicable. I’ve been seeing anthropotechnics everywhere, from my local YMCA pool to the crowded lanes of I-95. Isn’t this what literature and philosophy is for: to teach us how to live?

Sloterdijk’s massive book ends with a plea that a practiced life respond to “the global crisis” (444) through the “return of the sublime” (446). He asks that we invoke not the lost Golden Age of perfect abundance but instead imagine a new Silver Age, one step down the ladder but still above Iron and Lead. “Critique,” he notes, sounding somewhat like Latour (who he cites just once), “is replaced by an affirmative theory of civilization, supported by a General Immunology” (425). As a way of responding to the ecological and human disasters Sloterdijk links to globalization (447-48), General Immunology has an utopian flavor, including a pun on the ethical heart of the Marxist left, “co-immunism” (452), which he connects to a “horizon of co-operative ascetisims” (452).

I’m not clear exactly how he moves from individual anthropotechnic practices to these massive co-operative forms. But it’s fun to imagine it!

First printed map with image of Bermdua, 1511

[From chapter 3 of Shipwreck and the Global Ecology]

No island is an island.

They are undeniably real things, out there in the ocean, but they do not mean what we want them to mean. Visible, solid structures of coral, rock, and dirt assert stability amid the tumult of great waters. Over human lifetimes, islands remain fixed. But they are never isolate, not since the oceans have become trade’s highways. Isolation is impossible on the global ocean. The symbolic force of islands, their role as havens and helps for lost sailors, never tells the full story. Islands appear as wished-for sanctuaries for shipwrecked sailors, but as in the The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe they often prove as treacherous as the waters themselves. In John Donne’s phrase, “no man is an island” because there is no separation of any human from the divinely-ordained whole: “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” Donne’s famous phrase describes human coextension as a landed, continental phenomenon, in which human belonging to a divine whole fashions a corporate “Europe” matched against the “washing” pressure of the sea. The sailor in the poet perhaps recognized an oceanic countermeaning, in which isolate existence founders not just on continental unity but on thalassic interconnection. The geographic and cultural histories of islands insist that these remote places cannot remain isolated. The pressure to connect that characterizes maritime space, which Mediterranean historians Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell describe through the term “ready connectivity,” helps reimagine oceanic vastness as a system of nodes and spokes. Islands in the deep oceans, their locations mapped onto shipping lanes by the patterns of the trade winds, became newly visible and connected in transoceanic context. Isolated and connected, these islands both cause shipwrecks and rescue survivors.

No location in early modern English history reveals the paradox of the oceanic island more clearly than Bermuda. It appears in historical and poetic records less as island than sea-land, a collection of rocks that is also part of the ocean. The imaginative history of these islands from their poorly documented entry into the European record in the early sixteenth century to their status as long-lived English colonies in and after the seventeenth century produces a literalized metaphor of dual connection to sea and land. As English sailors expanded onto the Atlantic rim, many writers and propagandists extolled the supposedly fertile soil of the New World. Bermuda’s beaches and reefs provide an oceanic counterpoint to this fantasy. The history of Bermuda adds salt-water particularity to England’s early colonial experience, supplementing land-based legends with a story that was disoriented by the ocean, marked by shipwreck, and never straightforwardly progressive. A mid-Atlantic chain of islands and reefs geographically separate from both the connected arcs of the Caribbean islands and the river-fed hinterlands of the North American continent, Bermuda sat near the heart of the early English experience of the Atlantic world. It was the land-sea on which England’s North American ventures first wrecked, and the strange strand on which they salvaged themselves.

George Somers, 1610

Richard Norwood, c 1618

The key to a Bermuda-inflected analysis of early English settlement on the North Atlantic rim is the power of oceanic disorientation. As the shipwrecked arrival of the first English settlers shows, this space confounded expectations, resembling neither the utopian fantasies of Virginia Company propaganda nor the riches of Spanish Mexico. The bare sand beaches and gentle climate sheltered the survivors of the Sea-Venture wreck in 1609, and even provided them with enough provisions to rescue the starving colonists at Jamestown when they arrived there, nine months later. But the redemptive narrative of Bermuda that the Virginia Company would trumpet in subsequent years overlooks the alien qualities of the island. Bermuda would become England’s second New World colony, and remains today its oldest colonial possession, but it never produced the bounty the Company wanted. As Michael Jarvis puts it in the opening pages of his award-winning history of the island, In the Eye of All Trade, Bermuda’s perspective on the Atlantic system was comparable to the view “from the deck of a ship.” From this unstable platform, the Americas appear as oceanic as continental. Bermuda’s maritime connections, and eventually its short-lived prosperity during the tobacco book of the 1620s, connected the island to the English economy, but it remained a wet, disorienting outlier.

Two aesthetic treats a week ago Thursday: #RisingWaters at the City Museum, and Cry Trojans by the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage. In different ways, both about the cold pressure of beauty, both a bit disturbing, and both still have my head spinning.

“Cry, Trojans” has stirred up some controversy among my fellow theater-goers, and my thinking about it owes much to the spirited FB-insightfulness of Holger Syme, Karl Steel, and Alison Kinney, though in the end I liked the show more than each of them did. Plenty of reasons not to like it: it is slow, opaque, and willfully cavalier, filled with hackneyed Native American stereotypes. The Woosters play the Trojans, in this compressed version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, as Red Indians, complete with singing and dancing. (The show originated in 2012 in the UK, when the RSC played the Greeks. I blogged about it then, thinking about the controversy it caused among the Shakespeare conferencers. The New York version mostly cuts the Greeks, showing short clips of the 2012 performance to fill in the plot, and having a few actors briefly assume Greek parts with masks. The action is all in Troy.)

Tom Cartelli smartly parsed the Wooster 2012 show in a Shakespeare Quarterly article that explores the company’s willful strangeness, disorienting strategies, and efforts to re-make the Trojan War through a film about an Inuit Legend. I pretty well agree with him, but I also thought a lot, this time especially, about what Splendor in the Grass, the 1961 Elia Kazan film featuring the gorgeous young stars Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, was doing. Scott Shepherd’s Troilus stares up at Warren Beatty on video monitors with a quizzical look: am I doing it right? Is this what love is?

The Red Indian caricatures are pretty extreme, but, as the 2012 program noted, the Woosters are thinking partly about the fantasy America of the German novelist Karl May, who wrote late 19c novels about the American West without traveling there. I also think about Kafka in Prague and his “Wish to Be a Red Indian”:

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone

“Cry, Trojans” seems to me an experiment in extreme mediation. I love its intensity, its manic energy, its recklessness. In 2012, I argued into the night about how the Wooster-method speaks to our age’s deep engagement with video screens as self-structuring devices. What else do wee see in our iPhones? This time, without the RSC Greeks and their professional counterpoint, I thought about the love story. The Wooster lovers are knowing and smart, but still can’t help being steamrolled by the oldest love story in the book. As in Shakespeare’s play, I think the Wooster production is partly about the overwhelming power of generic forms, even (or especially?) after we’ve stopped fully believing in them.

Or maybe I enjoyed the show so much because I was still in the afterglow of #RisingWaters at the City Museum?

There’s more to tell about last Thursday, the start of my spring semester. My day started at 5 am, when I turned the shower knob, and nothing happened. Frozen water in the pipes: some metaphor for the first day of class!

After teaching, and remotely helping with plumbers (all thawed nicely by mid-afternoon), I got to #RisingWaters around 3 pm, driving through a small snowbank to find street parking on 99th and Madison. I love the Museum of the City of New York, up on 103rd St., teetering on the northern fringe of Museum Mile. This show drew its images from an open call for photographs of Sandy that generated 10,000 images from over 1000 photographers, professional and amateur. The show opened on October 29, the anniversary of the hurricane’s landfall, but I’ve only now been able to get to it. Disturbingly gorgeous, raw, intimate. I’m plotting my next trip there already.

Mirror of the Sea?

Two pictures in particular  struck me, both from the Rockaways. (The show has images from all over New York and New Jersey, including some heartbreaking images of Mantaloking, NJ, where I spent many happy summer days at the beach as a kid.) One was taken from inside a porch or maybe front room of a small house, looking out from inside a screen door. The screen’s gone, and water cascades over and through the lower half of the door in a glimmering, curving arc. A beautiful waterfall, pouring into someone’s home.

The other picture I remember was simpler: on a beach in Far Rockaway the day after the storm, someone arranged driftwood to form a pattern in the sand where a house used to sit: “THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING.”

I bought two catalogs, Amy Medina’s Salted Wounds and the Wyatt Group’s #Sandy, a book of iPhone photos. Much to look at and think about. What is the relationship between beauty and destruction?

Driving downtown after the show, thinking about Sandy, I stopped for a half hour on E. 79th street. It wasn’t my idea. A couple guys double-parked a blue van, grabbed paint cans & a ladder, and went into an apartment to do some work. I came along a few minutes later, but couldn’t get past them. A snow plow maybe five cars in front of me couldn’t get its blade in between the double parked van on the right and the parked cars on the left. So we waited, maybe 20 cars spilling westward all the way to Park Ave. A couple of us got out of our cars, talked to each other, talked to the snowplow driver, tried to convince him to back up and pull behind the blue van so that the rest of us could pull around. That didn’t seem to be working at first, but eventually he agreed to give it a try. While the plow was trying to back up the guys with the ladder came back, loaded up, and we all drove away. Block party in Manhattan!

I made it downtown on time for green matcha tea at Cha-An on East 9th street, around the corner from the apartment I lived in during the early 1990s. Talked there with Marina Zurkow about some collaborative writing we’re doing for Oceanic New York about flood, disruption, engaging with environments. I came away with a few good ideas: “Instructions” as a genre. Soft-edged squares. Blowing water into an inflatable raft during a flood, which means physically expanding one small fluid body until the expansion of a bigger fluid body subsides. We talked about marshes, barrier islands, the Rising Waters show, an amazing petro-project she has going up at Rice this spring.

I parked in the snow in front of the Performing Garage at 33 Wooster for the 8 pm show. A delicious rye and orange bitters martini put me in a perfect mood, despite the cold wind outside and small folding chairs in the theater.

Some parts of the show were the same as in 2012, though I wasn’t surprised this time by the weird, half-alienated charisma of Scott Shepherd’s Troilus. I spent more time, this time around, thinking about Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. Doomed Hollywood lovers as models for  classical literary avatars? If Hollywood, Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and any number of other artists and genres were getting mashed together in the small space of the Performing Garage, why was I moved by such a hyper-technical, ultra-referential performance? The show stopped for 10 minutes in the middle of the first act because of technical difficulties with the very complex sound system. Not a problem at all, at least for me.

The German Wild West

The new title, “Cry, Trojans,” comes from Cassandra’s mad lament, her foreknowledge that the city will burn. It matches our foreknowledge of the destruction of Native American culture and its transformation into global kitcsch like May’s novels. But the lingering force of the play for me was in Troilus and Cressida’s semi-expressive faces looking up at Beatty and Wood on the glittering screens, matching their bodies into the stars’s postures, fitting desires and emotions into pre-arranged molds. They might not want to do it — we might not want to admit to it — but it happens. This show, in all its strange, at times awkward, mannered presentation, insists that there are no unmediated stories.

I left energized, happy, driving home in the snow after a long day.

Last Saturday night in Manhattan I saw two icons of beauty: a young girl with (to quote Jane Austen) “fine eyes,” and an actor in drag. Not sure which was more bewitching.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is visiting NYC while her home in the Maruitshuis is undergoing renovations. She’s been at the Frick since October, packing in the crowds. The line outside the museum on Sat afternoon snaked around 70th street and halfway up the next block of 5th Ave, filled with dueling umbrellas and fractious children.

It’s an odd thing to stare intently at a small canvas in a crowded room, seeing for the first time the original of such a familiar image. What do we see, or seek, in those luminous eyes, reflecting the light of the over-sized pearl hanging from her left ear? Stillness after motion, as she turns ambivalently to look at us. To sit for a portrait is to release your face into History. With getting too Tracy Chevalier, Vermeer’s Girl looks as if she’s hiding something.

I was struck by the oddly dynamic shape of the eyes-pearl triangle,  three moons pulling my gaze across and downward to the right, away from her expressive face. The gallery notes emphasize that no pearl of that size has been discovered in Vermeer’s inventory, so presumably it’s a symbol. The soul of great price or South Sea pearl divers? Must be both, always.

Knowing what to do, we left in time to grab dinner in mid-town and arrive early at the Bellasco Theater, where we watched the actors get into costume. The costumes were made mostly with period technologies, and the female outfits were especially elaborate, long dark gowns and high ruffs, powerful armor against the world as the household retreated in mourning for a lost brother. Mark Rylance’s Olivia stood perfectly still and straight when being dressing, luxuriating in the power and stillness of her stiff black dress.

I was expecting a lot from Rylance, in a role that so many critics have celebrated. I wasn’t disappointed. I wanted to try to figure out how he does it. Protected by costume, make-up, and crown, his performance hid from us at the start. Playing Olivia’s intense desire to retreat from the world, and the sudden upending of that desire when “Cesario” speaks to her, Rylance focused our attention on tiny, revealing movements: her gliding feet invisible under the dress, the halt in her voice when she desires Cesario to come again even though his errand for the Duke is hopeless, the show-stopper later in the action when she swings a 10-foot halberd to discourage Sir Andrew from fighting her page-boy love. My favorite moment was her little two-footed hop when, near the end, she sees both twins, Sebastian who she’s secretly married and Cesario who she’s been wooing for much of the play, on stage together: “Most wonderful!” (5.1.225). Give me excess of it!

It makes me think that powerful acting isn’t only about communication or making emotions accessible — I think by contrast of Derek Jacobi’s needy, petulant, child-like Lear — but about the struggle of human character to reveal itself. Much of what we see and react to is concealed emotion, the just-legible bits leaking out around the edges. We feel it most when we barely see it. Audiences are like Malvolio: pleased to discover things that have been invented for us.

The overall production, which traveled to Broadway from the Globe in London, was excellent in a down-the-middle modern Globe way that didn’t challenge my notions of the play: a fine, tall, goofy Andrew Aguecheck by Angus Wright, whipsmart Maria by Paul Chahidi, as engaging a singing voice by Peter Hamilton Dyer as Feste as I’ve ever heard in the role, Stephen Fry’s Malvolio made livelier by his recent turn as the Master of Laketown in Hobbit 2: The Interminalness of Smaug. But Rylance’s performance, especially its controlled moments early in the play, when his Olivia still wished to mourn alone, and then the precise, just-visible cracks that came with the impress of love from Cesario’s face and voice, produces a (non-directorial?) interpretation: Twelfth Night‘s about how mourning ends. Neither black gowns nor desperate grief can smother life. That spark is what we like to watch.

Sir Toby has it right: “I am sure care’s an enemy to life” (1.3).

Which brings me back to Vermeer’s Girl. When working on a New Year’s purge of files from my overflowing home office a few weeks back, I found the paper I wrote for Baroque Art, with Professor John Martin, back in 1988 (or so), about Vermeer. Not the Girl with a Pearl Earring, which I’d never seen before last week, but her companion a few blocks uptown, Young Woman with a Water Jug. My essay, typo-saturated I’m sorry to say, explored “allegory as technique,” by which phrase I was trying to get at the overlap between the painter’s intense realism and the painting’s equally potent symbolic charge. The pearl that is is both soul and eyes, the girl’s eyes that are both pearls and unique signifiers of a particular self, the water jug and map and shimmering light that are both real things and inescapably metaphoric. I’m after the same things a quarter-century later.

The liveliest thing about art, from iconic paintings to vanishing performances, is the pressure it can put on places and objects and bodies, the way it insists on the dual force and fundamental unity of material and metaphor.

Rachel Carson in 1951:

When I think of the floor of the deep sea, the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I always see the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer — a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of yeas, that will go on as long as there are seas and continents….the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the earth has ever seen (75).

Edouard Glissant in 1990 (trans. 1997)

We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments. The poetics of duration (another leitmotif), one of the first principles of the sacred, founding books of community, reappears to take up the relay from the poetics of the moment. Lightning flashes are the shivers of one who desires or dreams of a totality that is impossible or yet to come; duration urges on those who attempt to live this totality, when dawn shows through the linked histories of peoples. (33)

They use the same phrase: “the accumulation of sediments.”

A female American scientist and a male poet from Martinique. Her book a bestseller in English in 1951, his globally transmitted in French in the 1990s. Physics and poetics.

Carson calls this accumulation “epic poem of the earth” (76). Glissant calls it “creolization” (34) and “limitless metissage” (34).

Sediments are real things, rocks and silica and “billions of billions of tiny shells and skeletons, the limy or silicious remains of all the minute creatures that once lives in the upper waters” (76). Sediments are also stories “that explode the scattered lands into an arc” (33).

This is the key point: all physical and scientific accumulations have a poetics. And all poetic and narrative forms reach toward physical things.

The task is to think them together, the lyrical scientist and analytical poet. In the disorienting swirl of the global ecology we swim with both.

A 252

The first book I finished in 2014 is going to be a hard one to top for sheer beauty. The Gorgeous Nothings is a reproduction of Emily Dickinson’s “envelope poems,” drafts and fragments that she wrote mostly late in her writing life, using the shapes and countours of the bits of paper to guide her experiments. It’s the sort of thing that takes your breath away. My favorites are the little triangular bits, tiny scraps of paper that confine the poet and also release her:

In this short life

that only last an hour

how much — how

little — is

within our

power

In this case, the “much” outvies the little, perhaps  because the little contains much, presses on it and holds it tight with loving fierceness.

A few other snippets, including this one, which sounds like a New Year’s poem to me —

Look back

on time

with kindly

eyes

He doubtless

did his best.

How softly

sinks his that

trembling Sun

In Human

Nature’s West (A278)

And another triangle scrap —

There are those

who are shallow

intentionally

and only

profound

by

accident

(A 539 / A 539a)

The editorial work is done by Marta Werner and Jan Bervin, and the excellent production by Christine Burgin / New Directions, in association with Granary Books (who published a limited edition in 2012). Marta Werner has also edited Radical Scatters, a subscription web-database of Dickinson’s fragments hosted by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Thirty-eight posts, unless I manage to finish my blog-review of Julie Taymor’s Dream later today.

12,700 page-views and 6500 unique visitors. (I still mostly think of this space as me writing to myself!)

Most posts in a month: 5 (January and April). Least: 0 (July).

Most of my posts were recaps of some of the great academic events of the past year: SAA in Toronto, Ecologies of the Inhuman in DC, Elemental Ecocriticism in Tuscaloosa, my first trip to Kzoo, ASLE, Oceanic New York at St. John’s, and most recently Contact Ecologies in DC.

In swimming, I did the 10.2 km Little Red Lighthouse Swim in the Hudson River in September, and my total milage was about 110 miles through mid-October, which is when I trailed off before having surgery for surfer’s ear. That’ll keep me high and dry, alas, for another few months, until March 2014. Not sure what my swimming plans will be in 2014 yet!

I swam 106.59 miles by the end of September, and then didn’t log any more swims in the last quarter, though I did get in the water occasionally in October and early November:

Another big chunk of my 2013 posts were theater reviews. I didn’t review everything I saw, but did get some good ones: The Suit at BAM, Synectic Tempest in DC, Paul Giamatti’s Hamlet in New Haven, Alan Cumming’s one-man Macbeth on Broadway, the Donmar Warehouse all-female Julius Caesar in Brooklyn.

Some good-looking shows in NYC for early 2014 too: Arin Arbus’s Lear at Tfana’s great new space in Fort Greene (March 14 – May 4), the RSC’s Antony & Cleopatra at the Public Theater (Feb 18 – March 23), another Lear at BAM with Frank Langella (Jan 7 – Feb 9), Branagh’s Macbeth at the Park Ave Armory in June. Plus I’m taking Alinor to see Mark Rylance as Olivia in Twelfth Night on Jan 11!

Overall a  good Bookfishy year. Maybe next year a little more from the Shipwreck book, now (and finally, I think) titled “Shipwreck and the Global Ecology.” And a few more book reviews! Maybe I’ll try to keep a record of the books I read this year. Goodreads?