Steve Mentz

Some words I expect or hope or imagine that I’ll hear this Thursday evening at Oceanic New York:

• Bridge
• Ahab
• Glacial
• Industry
• Apocalypse
• Ishmael
• Epic
• Citizen Bridge
• Oyster
• Dead Horse
• Swim
• History
• Impossible
• Remediate

A dead body near the Gowanus Canal

What happens when you open the floodgates of the wonderworld and let the ocean onto campus?

Something like Silent Beaches, Untold Stories, Elizabeth Albert’s great show  at the Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery on the St. John’s Campus in Queens until November 9.

I’ve walked through the show twice so far, once with the curator, but I feel I’ve only dipped my toes into its expansive waters. At the bottom sits the rich historical stew of maritime New York. Exploring a series of New York’s forgotten, marginalized, or polluted waterfronts, from Dead Horse Bay to Newtown Creek to Hart’s Island, which still serves as the city’s potter’s field for the burial of unclaimed bodies, the show returns forgotten  spaces to our eyes. Drawing on photographs from the Library of Congress, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Public Library, and other sources, the items on display unveil a dissonant watery history that mingles industrial expansion with sailing ships, steel bridges with wooden boats. I kept looking for a picture of Ishmael at Battery Park, looking south, thinking about whales, facing away from skyscrapers.

Hart Island Project

Bridge in Progress

These watery histories are poignant and powerful, but surfacing these pasts isn’t the only center of Silent Beaches. The historical materials are entangled with the work of  contemporary artists who are exploring maritime New York. The materials include drawings by George Boorujy, a pair of stunning large-scale wood-block prints by Marie Lorenz as well as video from Lorenz’s Tide and Current Taxi project, which has been exploring the city’s waterways since 2005, a looping documentary film by citizen advocate and filmmaker Melinda Hunt, images of Mary Mattingly’s Waterpod project, and more. Moving through the gallery’s striking historical images, including a documentary film of New York’s riverside made by Thomas Edison to the playful and experimental work of twenty-first century artists provides an appropriately marine shock, as if the sands were shifting under our feet.

Art encrusted with local maritime history pushes all my buttons, but two more elements of Silent Beaches  keep running through my head as I continue to think about the show.

The first, which I didn’t quite notice until the curator pointed it out to me last Thursday, is an audio piece, playing from a speaker in the far corner of the gallery. The tinkling, flowing sound was recorded at Dead Horse Beach at low tide, as the gentle surf washied back and forth over the accumulation of trash. The debris at Dead Horse comes from a landfill that’s long-since been capped, so the objects that remain on the beach are those that decompose slowly: glass, ceramics, some plastics. The music of ocean on glass, it turns out, is gorgeous, subtle, strangely soothing.

Dead Horse Beach

My favorite place of all in the exhibition, however, may be a glass case full of objects rescued from assorted New York beaches, many of which come from personal collections or recent scavenging trips. An old life-guard whistle from Staten Island. A couple of guns. The bones of dead horses. Heartbreakingly, a doll’s leg, the mate to which — but not the body — was found a little way down the beach.

A doll’s leg

So far, I’ve spent more time looking at this leg than any other single object in this great show. I like to look at it, think about it, savor its soft tones and the sheen that ocean water has given to its long-submerged plastic. I like to imagine its serpentine voyage from child’s toy to art installation. I’ll read a poem about the leg’s journey at the Underwater New York  poetry reading at the gallery on October 29. A human-and-inhuman limb, returned from the sea, testifying without words.

Try to get to St John’s before November 9!

When schoolteacher-turned-whaleman Ishmael walked the streets of “your insular city of the Manhattoes,” he knew New York as oceanic city and commercial capital. Standing on the Battery looking south, he saw a cityscape “belted round by wharves as Indian islands by coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf.”

Today commerce dominates but the surf lies hidden. This round-table event digs into New York City’s asphalt, pries up the streets, and finds underneath not beach, but – ocean.

Oceanic New York aims to recover traces of the salt-water past that still lies beneath New York’s urban feet. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Albert’s gorgeous and startling exhibition, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories,”  — about which I’ll have more to say soon — we’ll plunge into the urban and the oceanic. “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” entices Ishmael. Everywhere people stare toward water. “Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land,” says the mast-head philosopher. That’s where we want to be.

Dead Horse Beach

The twentieth century witnessed the drying up of New York: shifting the industrial port across the harbor to Newark, exhausting the oyster beds, turning South Street Seaport into a museum,. That’s where the mighty four-masted USS Peking sits today, her 170-foot steel mainmast dwarfed by skyscrapers. The twenty-first century, however, with its ecological crises, extreme weather, and growing recall of oceanic history, is returning to New York’s salt-water identity.

Drawing on the forgotten waterscapes of the city, the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Sandy, and still-wet histories and legends, these talks and conversations surface the oceanic substrata on which New York floats. Oceanic New York goes beyond insular Manhattoes to Dead Horse Bay, Breezy Point, Gravesend, Hell Gate Bridge. Anywhere salt water seeps into our shoes and stains our clothes.

Three weeks from today…

My main event this summer has been working my way through the final bits of my book-in-progress, Shipwreck and the Ecology of Globalization. A  lively side-bar has been exploring a useful theorist for ecological globalization, Peter Sloterdijk.

Peter Sloterdijk

Since my German isn’t up to the task, I’ve been keying off the useful Sloterdijk in English page that I found via Stuart Elden’s blog. There’s lots out there, and more in the pipeline.  Terror from the Air, Rage and Time, and Stuart Elden’s collection Sloterdijk Now (2012) are sitting on my desk right now, and Spheres I is on its way. Neither Sun nor Death made a good introduction to the entire corpus.

The key work for my purposes, I think, will be Spheres vol 2: Globes, which isn’t out in English yet, but I’ve  found a selection from it published as “Geometry in the Colossal: The Project of Metaphysical Globalization” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 29-40. (It’s a translation by Samuel Butler of pp. 47-72 of Spharen II — Globen [Suhrkhamp, 1999].) It’s pretty exciting stuff & will make an appearance in the opening pages of the Shipwreck book, as well as at a talk I’ll give at GW MEMSI this coming fall.

Especially engaging for my purposes is Sloterdijk’s desire to locate globalization both as a historical phenomenon, linked to the maritime expansion of European cultures in the 15-17c, and also to see its influence enfolding in much earlier, and later, eras. It starts with Greek geometry:

If one were to express, with a single word, the chief motif of European thought in its metaphysical age, it could only be ‘globalization.’ The affair of Western reason with the totality of the world is created and unfolds in the symbol of the geometrically perfected round form, which we still signify with the Greek ‘sphere’, or more frequently with the Latin ‘globe.’ (29)

Geometry prefigures geography:

Globalization of sphereeopoise in general is the fundamental event of European thought, one that has not ceased to provoke revolutions in the thought and life relations of humans for two and a half thousand years….Mathematical globalization proceeds [sic] terrestrial globalization for more than two thousand years. (30)

In this  totalizing perspective, which seems exaggerated but stimulating, spherical thinking shapes Western culture:

The representation of the world with the globe is the decisive deed of the early European enlightenment…the radical change to monospherical thought…the unity, totality, and roundness of existence…first comes the sphere, then morality (31).

I like the pressure Sloterdijk gets from abstraction here, the sense that an imagined form — the sphere as geometric absolute, a creature of the mind — puts pressure on lived historical experience. I don’t really believe pre-geometric or pre-Greek cultures were innocent of morality — what could that mean? — but I think the geometric imagination shapes (pardon the pun) cultural ideas about wholeness, centered-ness, conceptions of substance and weight.

This project is interesting to me because Sloterdijk also focuses on early modern maritime globalization. In his sphere-centered understanding, maritime expansion becomes less a question of radical “discovery” than of  putting into physical practice  a vision that has long been accepted & watching that vision assume tangible form:

…the fundamental thought of modernity was articulate not by Copernicus, but rather by Magellan. The fundamental fact of modernity is not that the earth orbits the sun, but rather that money circumnavigates the earth. The theory of the sphere is, at the same time, the first analysis of power. (33)

In making use of this material, I’ll want to tone down and refigure the “modernist break” language here, since globalization seems much more a “time knot” than a historical break: money circled much of the Eurasian / African world before Columbus & Magellan, and the epoch-hunting of “fundamental thoughts” seems a profitless game. But I agree that the conceptual unity of the globe assumes a changed resonance after maritime expansion into the New World, and especially after the establishment of global trade routes between the oceanic basins. It’s not the “invention” of something new, but the progressive re-interpolation or knotting together of old and changing things.

The Farnese Atlas

The core of Sloterdijk’s article / selection is detailed reading of the first-century Farnese Atlas, a Roman statue made after a presumed Greek original, now in Naples. Atlas supports a celestial globe on which half of the known constellations of the ancient world are visible (36); it’s the heavens, not just the earth, on the Titan’s laboring back.

Sloterdijk reads this Atlas as a philosophical athlete, because

a philosopher is one who, as an athlete of totality, is laden with the weight of the world. The essence of philosophy as a form of living is philponia — friendship with the entirety of weighty and worth things. The love of wisdom and the love of the weight of the one whole are unified (39).

In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk has a few nice oceanic nuggets that I might be able to use also —

People born today do not develop any oceanic consciousness — neither in the phobic nor the philobatic sense (239). (Cf At the Bottom, pix-x)

Moreover, from a historical viewpoint, the opposition between thinkers of down-to-earthness and thinkers of maritime situations remains pertinent — it is a contrast that has not ceased to widen since 16000. This division between these two types of thinkers is one of the most important factors in the psychodrama of modern reason….Among the theoreticians of emergent maritime situations the towering authors all lived in port towns — and this is no coincidence — whether we are talking of Montaigne, who, from Bordeaux, had a view of the Atlantic, or of Bacon, who, like a Pliny of early capitalism, even wrote a history of the wind (239).

A collective biography should be written of about the lives of those infamous men of the sea, those newly desolate people for having slipped out of our historical memories (241). (Cf Marcus Rediker)

Terrestrial globalization is the common work of astronomers, mathematicians, trades, mariners, and a plethora of dubious figures (198).

To which last group I’d add poets, playwrights, and other writers.

I’ve got lots more Sloterdijk to read, but it’s fun to get started.

A JPEG of the publicity flyer

The semester is almost upon us! One of the things I’m planning for this early fall is Oceanic New York, a Round-Table and Conversation event at the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s on Sept 26th. I’ll post updates via the Oceanic New York Page on this blog, and probably add a few things here as well.

Here’s the flyer: Oceanic New York Poster

And here’s what the Page has right now —

Welcome to Oceanic New York, a round-table and discussion that will take place in the Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery on the St. John’s University campus in Queens on Th 9/26/13, from 6 – 8 pm.

We’ll be exploring the relationship between New York City and the Ocean, building our remarks variously from artistic, literary, eco-theoretical, or personal perspectives. The participants include academics and artists, sailors and swimmers, bridge-builders and castaways. We’re hoping to uncover watery connections between urban living and oceanic space.

The Gallery space where we’ll meet will feature Elizabeth Albert’s new exhibition, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront.” We’re hoping to contribute to this show’s surfacing and re-figuring of the watery coastlines of NYC.

I’ll post previews and further information to this page as we get closer to the event. The round-table is free and open to the public.

 

Current participants include

Jamie Skye Bianco, NYU

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U

G. Ganter, St. John’s U

Eilleen Joy, BABEL Working Group and Punctum Books

Allan Mitchell, University of Victoria

Nancy Nowacek, Artist

Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Marina Zurkow, Artist

The technical name is a perigee moon, or a perigee-syzygy of the earth-moon-sun system, which means that the full moon tonight brings the silver rock as close to earth on its elliptical orbit as it gets. These extra-full moons happen about every 14 lunar cycles, so not quite once a calendar year. A swimming tide after dinner happens about once every two weeks during the summer around here. Nice to have both together.

The flood tide tonight will be  7.5 feet at 11:58 pm, which means the storm drains on Beckett Ave will flood & we might get water sloshing up over the sidewalk on Clark Ave.

A beautiful evening for the first night swim of the season.

What does the sea feel, I wonder, when that fat moon pulls her up onto shore? Does she notice? The slow piling of water upon water, inching, gathering, surging up, so that  what Fitzgerald  called “the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound” spills over itself?

Even these placid warm waters are part of the great god Ocean, insinuating its fingers around the world. I dive in because I know it, and I like how it feels like on my skin.

What would it take, I wonder, for the ocean to know me? What would I have to be? Ahab? Or 400 ppm?

It’s not a night for storms or strains or hard thinking. Just immersion by silvery light. I took a short swim out to the swimming buoy, spent a moment floating in cool water staring up at the moon, then walked back home.

Prismatics surrounded by green

Look at that green! Surrounding, confining, holding us in. It was beautiful, with the wet lush soggy brilliance that follows two days of violent storms. We’d been thunderstormed out of plans to go kayaking on the mighty Kansas River and had ended up in Clinton State Park, where we wandered around on muddy trails looking for the way down to the lake’s shore. Eileen’s Cole Haan shoes transformed themselves into muddy skis, gliding downhill. In this picture, you can see me and Lowell staring perplexed into the green labyrinth, and Jeffrey sagely consulting the i-Gods.

Since all images are allegories, I think this picture captures the challenge of moving beyond the green, and the aesthetic pleasures of being surrounded.

My first trip to ASLE had something of the disorienting beauty of this woodscape, but also many more simple pleasures. I’ve seldom been to a happier academic gathering, which seems odd given the fairly constant anxiety about eco-crisis. Perhaps it was the infectious high spirits of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, international eco-thinkers who I met for the first time in Lawrence, or the great food & drink in the fun college town, or finally meeting Stacy Alaimo and Simon Estok and Chris Schaberg, or hearing Cary Wolfe on biopolitics for the second time in a month, or closing yet another set of bars with Lowell, Jeffrey, and Eileen  — but in all ways, it was great fun.

On Thursday morning I woke before dawn in coastal Connecticut and somehow made it 1500 miles west to Stacy’s plenary at 10:30 am in the Kansas University Memorial Union. Arguably that place-erasing speed, my pre-dawn itinerary of planes, automobiles, and internal combustion engines, represents an ecological problem. But it was great to get there and think about the eco-poetics Stacy’s finding in submarine depths.

The questions after Stacy’s plenary, which she shared with Cary, were hard to follow. That would become an ASLE pattern. Also a sign of interdisciplinarity?

In a conference filled with questions, I remember the most succinct. At the “Building the Environmental Humanities” roundtable the next morning, it was about the difference between the sciences and the humanities. “They build things, we ask questions.” The panelists didn’t accept that characterization of the “two cultures,” and nether do it. But I do think that there are meaningful distinctions between the sciences and humanities, which make interdisciplinary alliances both productive and challenging. So maybe it’s worth seeking a better way to describe that difference, one that employs a richer understanding of “materiality,” one of the obsessions of at least my strain of this ASLE. We don’t need to flatter the physical sciences by paying homage to direct forces or financial investments, nor conversely to imply that questioning humanists are somehow uncorrupted by modern institutions, economics, and power dynamics. “They” ask lots of questions, and “we” build plenty of things. Might this be a better way to phrase it: “They build models, and we tell stories”? Which perhaps begs the question of what the difference is between testable models and persuasive stories. I’m a narrative-monger myself, though I understand the value of testable models. Perhaps the we/they syntax is too problematic?

Overlooking the reservoir

I also came away with a perhaps cynical historicizing question: has it ever not been true, at least subjectively true, to say that “Now more than ever…we live in crucial times”? What other times might anyone ever live in? Part of the issue with multiple time scales — human, geological, ecological — remains our difficulty in escaping mortal or perspectival boundedness. Maybe that’s not a problem, more of a condition of embodied thinking, which means that whenever we invoke time scales they are always plural, always adding to what we are already experiencing. Times of the self, the fiction, the scholarly talk, the glacier, the rock, the hummingbird, the river, the thunderstorm…

ASLE was the final lap of the five-part conference relay I’ve been running since late March, and I must say I’m exhausted, ready for a slower-moving summer and the shipwreck project. Conferences are, at their best, productive entanglements, which means (in an eco-sense) that they enable new networks, products, processes. Now it’s time to put those networks to work!

Two entanglements I ordered at ASLE

It’ll take me a few days to gather my thoughts about my first-ever trip to Kalamazoo, so as a place-holder, I’ll offer most of my half of the collaborative presentation Lowell Duckert and I did on Sea Change / World change in the GW-MEMSI panel organized by Jeffrey Cohen. The full panel, which brought together six pairs of speakers collectively charged to imagine “The Future We Want,” was as wonderfully mind-bending as anything I’ve encountered since…well, since Alabama, I guess. Except this time compressed into 90 minutes, bewilderingly rapid, and ranging from The Battle of Maldon to multilingual poetics.

These fragments won’t give the full measure of our collaboration, which included daybreak immersion in the icy waters of Lake Michigan and ended (for now) with a public singing of Ariel’s “sea-change.” But if you imagine me as this black-winged bird, you’ll get some of the idea. 

Cormorant in a tree

In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tree of Life overlooking Paradise, which some call Kalamazoo.

“Various” is the word for what I see. “A happy rural seat of various view” (4.247) is the full line in Paradise Lost, but it’s just “various” that I crave. It’s what I roll around inside my bird’s mouth. Various. All of the things that inhabit this Paradise, spread out before me. Not just one thing, but another.

From my crow’s mouth I scream three horrifying truths:

Truth #1: Change fractures our desire for wholeness. It will break, all of it.

Truth #2: A better name for this planet would be Ocean, not Earth.

Truth #3: Salt water tastes bitter, flavored with the recognition that nothing lasts.

I am high enough up to tree to see Heteronyms.

The term “heteronym” refers to a member of a large group of imaginary personae, numbering over 70, in which the great 20c Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote. These authors, each of whom has an individual name, style, biography, and physical characteristics, collectively represent a rage for variety amid the poverty of identity. Multiple names and multiple selves become ways to navigate our over-abundant world. Author-ness and its auctoritee become various, and the original self appears one of many voices, and not the most important one. The most influential heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, also looks over Paradise. “I don’t pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world,” Cairo claims. “I made the greatest discovery worth making, next to which all other discoveries are games of stupid children. I noticed the Universe.”

My question for our future is, how can we become heteronyms? And my answer is, by looking over the world’s change. Variously. 

My crow’s eyes snatch two quick glances out from the Tree of Life over salty vastness.

The first glance finds Bernando Soares, technically a semi-heteronym because of his close resemblance to the biographical Pessoa, and The Book of Disquiet (Livro de Desassossego), his “factless autobiography.” In a fragment that may or may not have been intended for the final work, he writes about human encounters with the ocean:

Shipwrecks? No, I never suffered any. But I have the impression that I shipwrecked all my voyages, and that my salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness.
— A Voyage I never Made (III)

The whirl of heteronyms teaches shipwreck as identity and salvation, that no voyage arrives without disaster. Therefore we embrace suffering and seek “interspaces.”

And one last wet one, my favorite, Álvaro de Campos, from the “Maritime Ode”:

Wharf blackly reflected in still waters

The bustle on board ships,

O wandering, restless soul of people who live in ships,

Of symbolic people who come and go, and for whom nothing lasts,

For when the ship returns to port

There’s always some change on board!

Campos knows what the sea lures us into accepting. Even music won’t hold us in place.

If my cormorant-self had more time looking out over Paradise with all of you, I’d fly toward medieval heteronyms, Mary Magdalene’s various names and identities in The Golden Legend and Custance’s return to her father in the Man of Law’s Tale. 

Can we sing it again, that old anthem? All together?

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange? (1.2.400-402)