Big Tree Down
Some approximate numbers: about 40 feet tall, 60″ around at chest-height, 20″ in diameter. According to the growth multiplier for white pine, that means roughly 100 years old. Which takes us back to 1912, before my parents were born and before our house was built. I imagine the tree was planted to mark the northeastern corner of the rock wall that now borders our property. When it was built it marked the edge of the estate that then filled up almost all of our neighborhood, before smaller properties were carved out of it after WWII.
This tree’s life was not quite on a nonhuman time scale, but it’s been through a lot of storms, including some bigger than Sandy: Gloria in 1985 and the great storm of 1938, among others.
I’d been worried about storm surge, which turned out to be a bit less than Irene, though it still produced major flooding just a bit downhill from us. We’re all fine, but it’s odd that our damage came from being high, not low. This tree was probably one of the highest points in our little neighborhood, which exposed it to the full force of the east wind. We’re very lucky it didn’t fall on the house, though a little playhouse we put in for the kids years ago is underneath it. Still standing, as far as I can tell.
The tree came down around 7 pm, two hours after the power cut out. I was sitting on that side of the house with the kids telling stories when we heard a muffled thump and then a sharp bang. We jumped up away from the window, but the bang turned out to be just the power cable getting ripped off the wall. It was dark and hard to see, but as we peered through the glare of our flashlights, we eventually could make out the dark outline of a huge shape, lying sideways along the yard. We figured out what it was by looking at the hole in the skyline, visible by the full moon, on the corner of the property where the tree had been.
A few hours earlier, in the last of the power, I’d watched the Fangorn scenes from The Two Towers with the kids. Eald enta geworc, goes the Anglo-Saxon verse line from which Tolkien invented his tree-herders. The old work of giants.
Sandy from Space
Globalization and Ideas of Mexico in “Merchant of Venice”
I’ll share the opening and closing paragraph out of my talk at EMU last week, which is the early stirrings of a project on Shakespeare and the Pacific that’s rumbling beneath the other things I’m working on now. After claiming that this play has Shakespeare’s “perhaps unique” reference to the Pacific via Mexico, I remembered Rosalind’s invocation of the “South Sea of discovery” in AYLI 3.2 — but that’s as a place infinitely far away and unreachable. Which may be part of what the Pacific means to the Elizabethans.
In any case, here’s the opening of the talk —
I’ll start by noting that The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s only play to mention “Mexico,” a word that came into English in the mid-sixteenth century via Spanish, probably from a Native American language (Nahuatl, OED). The play twice explains that Antonio has ships bound for this New World territory. The first time, Shylock includes Mexico among several destinations, including Tripoli, the Indies, and England. Later Bassanio elaborates an even wider network, repeating Shylock’s three and adding Lisbon, Barbary, and India. Spanish Mexico, with its gold mines and brutal history of conquest, spans the early modern Atlantic and Pacific worlds, so these references comprise not only one of Shakespeare’s rare mentions of the Americas but also perhaps his unique gesture to the Pacific.[i] Using worlds and oceans conjured by Mexico, I want to re-examine economic readings of this play. Merchant has long been the favorite play of economic critics, New and old, Marxist or not.[ii] I suggest that among the many binaries that distinguish the play – usurer and merchant, Christian and Jew, male and female, gift and market economies in Karen Newman’s essay – we should add the contrast between two different models of maritime trade. The first system, associated with Shylock’s Rialto, the economic history of Venice, and Mediterranean sea-lanes, establishes a local network of connectivity and inter-dependence. The second system, associated with Antonio’s dispersed fleet, Mexico, and the European encounter with the Americas and Asia, creates a deterratorialized, planet-sized oceanic world of immense potential wealth but little certainty. The play’s critique of economic exchange needs to consider the differences, as well as connections, between these two versions of maritime expansion.
[i] The only use of the term “America” comes metaphorically in Errors (3.2). “Indies,” a term that could indicate both East and West, appears in Merchant, Errors, Henry 8, Merry Wives, and Twelfth Night. “Bermuda,” an ambiguously American island, famously appears in The Tempest only. Other New World names such as Virginia and Peru do not appear at all.
[ii] For a collection that surveys the field, see Linda Woodbridge, ed., Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (London: Palgrave, 2003).
And here’s the truncated but eventually will become rousing conclusion, via Charles Olson —
I’ll conclude my talk with a very brief suggestion about what a “Pacific Shakespeare” might look like, taking Merchant’s gestures toward Mexico as points of departure. In asking for a reading of Shakespeare that embraces our planet’s largest ocean, by far the biggest single thing on our watery globe, I’ll employ the poet Charles Olson’s visionary reading of “Pacific Man.” This figure represents “the NEW HISTORY,” a radical expansion of space, reconfiguration of the past, and “confirmation” of a new future.[i] Olson celebrates Magellan’s discovery of the Pacific as exceeding Columbus’s of America, because in that new ocean “3000 years went overboard” (116). Against ancient worlds that were “locked tight in River Ocean which encircled it” – here Olson draws on classical geography – the Pacific represents the last opening, “the end of the Unknown” (119). This expansive vision inverts the anxiety and disorientation that both Shylock and Bassanio figure through Mexico. The global expanse that Shakespeare invokes only obliquely becomes, for Olson, an ecstatically globalized trajectory. Antonio’s ships, after sailing Pacific waters, come to road mysteriously, bringing nothing we hear of to Belmont. But the play also gestures toward a Pacific future, a world joining Mexico to Venice to England, and all of these waters to the English merchant ships that float, then and today, on all the world’s oceans. The imaginative presence of these alien waters suggests that hidden paradises cannot remain forever in isolation. I wonder what the merchant’s ships brought back from Mexico.
Very Like a Whale
“Shakespeare thought in pictures,” reports Mike Witmore in his oracular voice, and a swirling array of books, photographs, and objects that have grown out of that perception are now overflowomg the Folger gallery. I made a quick trip to DC last Monday for the opening of the show he’s co-curated with Rosamond Purcell, “Very Like a Whale.” Now I’m speculating about whether I can get back there before the show closes in early Jan 2013.
I knew what to expect because I taught an undergraduate class last spring using their collaborative book of photographs and Shakespearean snippets, Landscapes of the Passing Strange. The magic, as Rosamond explained to the audience in the Folger theater, is in the bottles. Her large framed photographs, which were on display throughout the hall, were all taken of the reflections of ordinary objects in these old mercury-lined glass bottles, which were originally used to store light-sensitive dyes. The results dance right up to and past the line between representation and abstraction: they are photographs, which is to say real visible things, but also changed, sometimes beyond recognition.
The book contains just the images and fragments from Shakespeare but the show adds objects from assorted collections and from the Folger Library. Highlights include a case entitled “All the Whale’s a Stage,” which gets its title from an image of a man playing bagpipes on top of a massive cetacean body, a burned page of The Tempest from one of the Folger’s many Shakespeare Folios, an automaton (!), and many other things.
“Wood from Shakespeare’s house in the Caliban case,” claimed Rosamond during the curators’ talk. “From the property behind the house,” clarified Mike. Which led to a wonderful exchange in which Rosamond admitted her own identification with the poetic monster who finds scamels in the rocks, and suggested that Mike be cast as Prospero.
After discovering the book at MLA back in Jan 2010, I built an undergrad Shakespeare course around these strange images during the fall of 2011, including setting up an exhibition of photographs at St. John’s and having Mike and Rosamond come for a memorable visit in October. The charge of these images is the strange push they give to your imagination as you look at them, the mobile and unexpected ways they ask us to reconsider Shakespeare’s language and the imaginative art of seeing. As I said when reflecting on the visit to Queens last year around this time, it’s good to share strange things.
That sense of radical play dominates the larger exhibition at the Folger right now. It’s a hard show to take in, especially on opening night when the hall is full of people to catch up with, meet, and congratulate. But when I stood there making academic small talk and looking at the automaton, or peering into the gorgeous array of books on objects in the “Wind” case,” I considered the larger project of putting such strangeness inside an academic institution. I remember my students being at first amazed, then a bit bewildered by the photographs in Passing Strange. But when we lingered in front of an image — I remember a great liquid desert portrait paired with lines from Antony & Cleopatra, which I did not see at the Folger Monday — things would swim into the imagination. The gambit is that such strangeness speaks to the same part of the mind that’s moved by Shakespeare, and it certainly works for me.
You could make a case that the Folger exhibition hall is overfull right now, with photographs and objects spilling out of every window-nook. But if you have all this wonderful stuff, why not give us excess of it, and more besides, and something else we’re not expecting?
If you can’t get to DC during the rest of the fall, here’s the mobile tour of the show. But you really should get there if you can.
More on Dylan’s Tempest
A few weeks ago I noted that Bob Dylan just released a soundtrack for my work in progress on shipwreck. Now that I’ve been through the album a half-dozen times, plus had a look at the lyrics for the long title track about the Titanic, I think my joke was pretty right on. I’m sure I’m not the only academic of a certain age for whom Dylan’s been providing an intellectual soundtrack for some decades, but it’s quite amazing to find that razor mind directed at my current obsession.
I’m tempted now to hijack the song “Tempest” for my shipwreck project, and maybe weave it into an eco-presentation for GWMEMSI this coming spring. Who knew that shipwreck ecologies was a waltz?
So: a few preliminary notes on the song, and incidentally on Shakespeare too.
Amid the usual character-salad the song presents, from “Leo” (we know who that is!) to Wellington to Jim Dandy to the gamblers “Calvin, Blake, and Wilson” (also theologian, poet, and soon to-be US President when the great ship went down?), the key figure in the song is “the watchman.” He’s the one who appears four time as semi-chorus and structures the long narrative ramble. None of the other figures gets a return visit, except Leo by which point “he’d lost his mind already / Whatever mind he had.”
Each watchman verse starts the same way, “The watchman, he lay dreaming…”, which of course sends us Shakespeareans right to Prospero in Act 4. When this eyes-closed figure “dreamed the Titanic was sinking,” in the other repeated line, 3rd in the 4-line stanza, he sounds like a magus who’s lost his art. Familiar? I thought so.
The movement across the four watchman stanzas takes us from “ballroom dancers” and a vision of “the underworld” (stanza 6) to the watchman’s and ship’s bodies tilted together “at 45 degrees” (stanza 16) to recognizing that “the damage had been done” coupled with a futile desire at this point “to tell someone” (stanza 37) to, in the concluding stanza, a vision of loss and possibility:
The watchman he lay dreaming
Of all the things that can be
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the deep blue sea.
The watchman traces the disaster from distant knowledge to bodily experience, epic possibility to unanswered need. He watches, but he can’t tell.
Why a watchman? In historical metaphor he’s the one who missed seeing the iceberg, but in Shakespearean terms, or maybe I should say in my terms, it’s a demotion of Prospero from all-controlling magus to passive dreamer. In Dylan’s world, shipwreck must be all and only divine —
There is no understanding / Of the judgement of God’s hand
The wizard makes another brief appearance in stanza 32 — “In the long and dreadful hours / The wizard’s curse played on” — which phrase has a darkly playful taste of a bad theater or performance review. But I’m struck by how much the song writes Prospero out. A song without a hero. (Which, come to think of it, is what Thomas Hardy does with the Titanic also.)
The eco-point, perhaps, might be about how the direct encounter between human bodies and the ocean generates a powerful intellectual craving for distance, perspective, a story that explains the cause of the disaster. Tell me the cause, Muse! We, like the people Dylan sings about “at the landing,” retreat from the disaster and “try to understand.” But the wetness of the encounter — the brute physicality of shipwreck — won’t let us. “There is no understanding,” which is to say, in my terms, no final dryness. This song, this disaster, the oceanic history that stories like the Titanic open up, won’t let the living reach a stable rest. Or, to put it another way, the only stability in shipwreck is on the sea-floor.
Our revels are now ended, but at sea there are no easy roundings.
Dylan must have been reading my mind or my blog, b/c his characters provide a who’s-who of my shipwreck project. Another character, Davey the brothel-keeper, sees the shipwreck as a historical hinge, “the changing of his world.” The bishop accuses the heavens, just like Anthony Thacher and Parson Avery in 1635. The “many, many others” see what I see in stories of shipwreck —
The ship was going under
The universe had opened wide…
Good music for thinking.
BABEL 2012
What happens when you rip open a supposedly “open system”? That’s the question I find myself asking in the aftermath of BABEL, my head spinning & imagination charged. Hard to think of an academic event that contains and produces so much joy (pun intended). I’m more and more interested in performance and pleasure as essential academic virtues, which means that clearly I was in the right place.
I arrived mid-day Thursday & caught the first set of panels before that night’s plenary and reception. Started off with “Getting Medieval,” a round-table that featured the journalist and role-playing fantasy game participant Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, who wanted to know if we’d see the Hobbit trailor. Not yet — it only came out the day before. His insider enthusiasm was an odd fit among the professors, since his love and commitment overshadowed the fairly thin critique of industry or modernity he finds in the worlds Tolkien wrought. Thinking back on that first panel, Gilsdorf, with his almost-wizardly name, might unfairly be cast as an Uninterpretive Dragon at the gates of an imagined caricature anti-BABEL, a monster of sloppy affection and enthusiasm unattached to academic habits of analysis, pressure, or rhetorical gloss. The point, as I understand it, is to let ourselves play inside and across our academic fields and enjoy that playing — but also to find or create meanings in play itself.
But it’s not fair to pick on non-academics for not playing like academics, all the more so since the breadth of participants is one of BABEL’s real strengths. Gilsdorf also showed an interesting slide of a map he drew in the early 1980s as part of a D&D game, which he started to read as a coded representation of his earlier self. I wanted more of that — maybe b/c I too sketched such maps in those years.
A strong “Going Postal” panel about networks, anonymity, the death of a thousand cuts, Derrida, and Milton — alas no Crying of Lot 49, my favorite work on postal systems — brought us to the first set of plenaries, with talks by earth scientist Lindy Eakins-Tanton from the Carnegie Institute in DC and Jeffrey Cohen of GUW. Lindy opening with a dazzling drawing out of geologic time, the 4.568 billions of years since the earth formed. Using this video she provided a time line for the age of the earth, which she then broke down into the scales of human lifetimes, then larger, larger again, and eventually all the way up to the full frame. Catastrophic events — Lindy works on the Permian Extinction, possibly caused by a massive meteor strike in Siberia over 250 million years ago — interrupt our lives, but viewed toward the geologic scale they assume regular patterns, even aesthetic forms. Seeing the structure of our lives as “between catastrophes” challenges our imaginations — this is the way earth science is like poetry — to at least provisionally span multiple time scales, human and nonhuman, realms of stone and flesh. Exhilarating stuff.
(When I think of the age of the earth I’m usually with Joseph Conrad —
If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.
but I like this method too.)
Jeffrey Cohen began with flesh, some Polynesian, naked, and painted by Gaugin, and also his own historical body, which, he tells us, used to sit in front of this great paintingat the Musuem of Fine Arts when he was a graduate student & contemplate big questions. His typically elegant talk traced the human stories activated by stone, including a geologically young rock that he brought back from Iceland, got the audience to pass from hand to hand, and then, after explaining each of our hands had undergone a physical exchange with that rock, leaving real traces on itshard surface, he presented the hand-out to Eileen as a keepsake. The first, but not the only bit of emotional stagecraft of the weekend.
Jeffrey concluded with a rhetorical flourish that highlighted BABEL itself as living community and mobile “now” in a world that is “not for us” but which we inhabit nonetheless, and then he and Lindy sat down for a fascinating exchange that was a model for how conversations between humanists and scientists can really happen. Hard questions were asked — “What are the big questions of your research?”, asked Lindy to an uncharacteristically & only momentarily silent Jeffrey, and “What is the role of beauty in science?” passed the other direction. I was vastly impressed by the willingness to engage that was on display; Lindy’s courage to brave the pre-modernists in their den made my own occasional forays into historical, maritime, or Chaucerian circles seem timid. Jeffrey’s curiosity helped the discussion become a real exchange, in which things appeared that no one expected.
These plenaries activated for me what was the central unspoken backbone of the conference, which is to trust the intellectual and human encounter, the moments that different things come together, to reveal things you didn’t know before. It wasn’t just the factual information in the two talks, much of which I knew or had heard in a not-very exact sort of way, but the bringing together of voices & disciplines, human beings and planetary and subatomic time scales.
The next morning was about Intellectual Crimes, a panel I put together about the ways in which we never own our ideas, even when we use them as professional currency. I talking about stealing from old sailors and colleagues with the help of a stray bit of marlin twine, Craig Dionne laid out the fine art of punking with the precision of an old hand at cony-catching games, Sharon O’Dair put envy and ressentiment on the table as the seldom-spoken masks of class in the academy, and Adam Zucker told a wonderfully multifacted narrative of a fateful footnote and the relationship between mentor and graduate student. We were all, in different ways, thinking about how to bypass excessive claims about originality and ownership, and to re-imagine vexed relationships through which knowledge and professional status circulate. No reform plans were articulated, but it was nice to pull back the veil a little.
The mid-day panel was a BABEL highlight, “Impure Collaborations”, which featured six pairs, one solo respondent, and so much energy I thought my pencil would burst into flames. To summarize in the bedlam rush that I experienced it all: two sisters talking about the famous/notorious Indian girls who’d been raised by wolves, maybe, and their own interdisciplinary practices; a staged debate between “Eddie” and “Princess” about anthropological field work and post-colonial ethics; a husband-wife pair talking about how his work in game design and theory infiltrated hers in 14c French musical forms; a feminist re-wiring of sexual practice through overlaid reading of Nashe and Cavendish; a discussion of the “we” in collaboration by two collaborating scholars; a deeply felt evocation of dedication, love, and community by Anna Klosowska & Eileen Joy, and Michael O’Rourke’s response in monologue. Taken whole, washing over the audience, it was a show-stopper. If Gilsdorf was an uninterpreting dragon, and Eakins-Tomlon and Cohen curious interdisciplinary rovers, this panel was about self-articulation, the joy (sic) of performing in space and in public.
There are risks along with the rewards of such an approach, and Eileen’s reading of a cautionary email from a senior colleague articulated some of them. I also wondered, perhaps because one of my own hobby-horses, Thomas Nashe, received rather abrupt treatment, about the tension between intellectual force and performative display. I always want both, but academic culture thinks it only values the former, so it’s important for events like BABEL to be overt about performance and the positive values of mobility. The best bits for me, always, are places where the spark lands on just the right tinder, so that things start burning before you know it. At the risk, of course, of the whole place going all Fight at Finnsburg on us.
Next was the Ecomateralisms project which assembled for this occasion an elemental mix of fire (Cohen + Stephanie Trigg), water (Sharon O’Dair), air (me), abyss (Karl Steel), and glacier (Lowell Duckert). I’d read everything before except Lowell’s new meditation of glacial dreaming, but it was great to hear it all together, and a pleasure to be surrounded by such great writing. We talked a bit about the elements as human-scaled, neither too small (quantum physics would be part of that night’s plenary) nor too vast (the age of the earth), which also reflected back on Lindy’s plenary. We were all working, in our different ways, on elemental intimacies, ways that nonhuman forces and objects touch & shape our minds & bodies. I do wonder, though, about the lure of time scales beyond the human, which infiltrated all or most of our talks. Makes me think that the typically human response to scales, temporal or physical, is to want at least two of them.
Jane Bennet’s plenary that night re-purposed Paracelsus’s ideas about universal sympathy via a lively reading of Walt Whitman’s presentation of human posture. That slight tilt of the head, the incantation of “I, too –“, helped her imagine democracy also as driven by a process that moves from below consciousness into consciousness. Agency at a distance in this model seems as much poetic as alchemical, and I’m curious to see how this model develops. David Kaiser of MIT gave the paired keynote, “How the Hippies Saved Physics,” about quantum theories alternative culture from Berkeley to Big Sur. It was a wonderful, & professional presentation, though not as speculative as I really like. I did perk up when Werner Erhard turned up as quantum physics’s sugar daddy, largely b/c of the stories my in-laws love to tell about Werner coming to dinner in their house in Sausalito in the 60s & the crazy world he brought with him. I suspect there’s a larger story of the artistic imagination’s entanglement with science that could also be spun out of Kaiser’s research.
I missed much of theBeowulf reading, alas, and I wasn’t among those who closed down the bar at 3 am, but I did make a reasonable showing for an old early modernist. If the longboats headed out for waters north of Boston, however, I’m afraid I missed them.
Sat morning morning I had to cut short my personal BABEL, with assorted soccer games calling from CT, but I did get to an intense panel on Synaesthesia which featured not only very smart talks about multiple modes of perception but also some juicy quotations about liquidity from The Faerie Queene, than which little is more pleasing to the ear after long days and nights among medievalists. The final panel on “Parts and Wholes” featured some interested philosophical and biological puzzles, from slime molds to the biotic flora that inhabit each of our bodies.
Hard to get a single sum from that maze of ideas, performances, and engagements, and in the spirit of plurality maybe it’s best not to try. BABEL’s both a utopian vision and an intervention in the existing structure of scholarly practice, and its plurality never works alone. I like Chris Piuma’s pithy summation of one of its strands: More creation. Less critique.
I still like critique a little bit, but there’s no doubt that creation the real thing.
Swimmer Poetics
Here’s the opening couple paragraphs of my ecology piece for O-Zone, which thinks eco-literary thoughts while narrating the Great Chesapeake Bay race last June.
Into the warm salt water splashed the six hundred. Not all of us knew we were diving into a theoretical paradigm.
We crowded up to the water’s edge like figures in a Robert Frost poem. Or whale-killing philosophers in Battery Park. We were swimmers, come to Chesapeake Bay in June 2012 to race four-point-four miles from western to eastern shore. Covering that distance in the water carves out a nice block of time, a discrete chronology to feel fluid dislocation on an intimate level. I wasn’t there to win. I wanted to think some things through.
My hope, then and now, is that swimming can model or inspire a dynamic ecological poetics for our age of crisis. The prolonged experience of immersion, its difficulties and pleasures, parallels how we must learn to live today. Being in the water forces the physical realities of this terraqueous globe onto your skin, adding urgency to the need to move beyond comforting green eco-visions. The blue world ocean, as literary culture has long taught us, is unstable, dynamic, and inhospitable. But the gray-green silty waters of Chesapeake Bay proved survivable, even pleasurable. Dare I say philosophical?
Dylan’s Tempest
Listening to the just-released soundtrack to my shipwreck book —
The ship was going under,
The universe had opened wide…
The watchman he lay dreaming,
Of all things that can be.
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the deep blue sea.
Heroism, Marine Ecology, and Literary Culture
Here’s a few bits from an essay that will introduce a section of the forthcoming volume, Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History. The book originated in this great conference, about which I blogged here. I’m introducing a cluster of essays on Steinbeck, Hemingway, and American Maritime Revivalism.
What makes an ecological hero? Can heroic self-assertion ever be compatible with ecological interconnectedness? These three essays on maritime literature and historical ecology suggest ways to bring the special insights of literary culture to bear on these questions. In a broad sense, the problem of the hero is the problem of human-centered thinking. All human heroes, by virtue of being human, exacerbate the problem of anthropocentrism. To the extent that humans want to see examples of ecological heroism in people like us, we resist the full force of the ecological thought that de-centers the merely human. But literature, to a degree, may be flexible enough to respond to this dilemma. Literary works both reflect and modify existing ideas about what human beings are and how we interact with large-scale natural systems. The massive surge of ecocritical readings of literature since the 1990s suggests that the human-nature relationship has become an essential topic of literary interest in the present. Literary culture may help unravel, or at least illuminate, the conflict between the cultural force of anthropocentric narratives and the counter-pressure of ecosystemic thinking.
The problem of the hero remains potent for all strains of ecological thinking, but perhaps especially so in the blue oceans of maritime ecocriticism. While the green world of traditional environmental studies has always had room for the humans who till the soil and tend pastures, the oceanic world is less hospitable and, in human terms at least, less sustainable. The ocean is not really a home for people. But despite or perhaps because of the difficulties of living in or near the great waters, the sea has always been one of the most fecund sites of literary invention. To explore blue voyages instead of green kingdoms requires imagining ways for humans to endure hostile, changeable ecologies. The heroes we need, as I have argued elsewhere, are swimmers and sailors, not warriors or conquerors. These oceanic heroes, who exert themselves in intimate and dangerous contact with the fluid element, may provide models for surviving the present era of ecological crisis and disruption. Humans crave both heroes and ecological order, and it may be that we cannot have both, at least not in either’s current form. This cluster of essays suggests new currents of maritime ecological thinking that can do justice to the mind-challenging world ocean and find ways for humans to thrive in contact with salt water.
As both scientists and literary scholars know, ecology represents a system of relations in which no single part takes precedence over the inter-relating whole. To embrace ecological thinking entails refusing singularity, attempting insofar as it is possible to think outside solitary human perspectives. Heroism works in the opposite way. The hero, the example of human greatness, invites attention and focus, so that the heroic body itself becomes a vessel for transcendent values. The history of art provides probably our clearest examples of how heroism becomes embodied. Michelangelo’s famous sixteenth-century sculpture of David, poised nude just before his combat with Goliath, visually presents the singularity and physical force of human heroism. The hero, the shepherd boy about to slay the Philistine giant, stands out from the crowd. Rather than being defined by relations, the hero exceeds them. Imagining this figure as just a participant in an all-encompassing network seems difficult, and perhaps undesirable. The tension between the human desire for exemplary heroism and an opposed but also strong penchant for harmonious exchange marks the field of ecological literary criticism. Literary scholars have no easy answer for this dilemma – we want both sides of this coin also – but literary culture contains a host of figures who try, and at times do not entirely fail, to combine these value systems.
It is tempting to answer these questions with some names from recent ecological activism: Rachel Carson. Bill McKibbon. Aldo Leopold. Sylvia Earle. Al Gore. These and others combine in different ways human heroism and ecological insight. But the search for heroic models, for exemplary humans, on a basic level works in tension with ecological ideas that de-center human primacy and advance inter-relation rather than solitary exemplarity. To be heroic, to stand out from and dominate a crowd, on some fundamental level is a non-ecological act. Heroism, the human desire for power and display, may be part of what got our watery planet into its current ecological mess. Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, in an ecological light, tells a story of human ambition in doomed conflict with the boundless sea. At the close of Melville’s novel, the waters close over Ahab and his whaleship and “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” A collective body drowns heroes. Only the philosophical Ishmael, who represents a different kind of heroism, poetic and speculative rather than epic and violent, survives to tell the tale. In Melville’s literary model, oceanic forces frustrate or reshape human ambitions. But in our age of climate change and ocean acidification, it no longer seems clear that the sea itself can remain what it has been.
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