Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Bloomsday 2012

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What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its sudsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial of Capricorn: the multisector stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosion of peninsulas and islands…

— Ithaca (17; p549)

Swimming the Chesapeake

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For just a bit under 3 hours yesterday, between the spans of the Bay Bridge, I was Aquaman, Cap’n Metis, and Mr. Nemo. Just me, the water, and about 600 other swimmers.

Like all long swims, it was an attempt, partly successful, to maintain form inside formlessness. Not to impose my form on the moving water — no chance of that — but to insert my form-creating body into the Bay, finding my way through the repetitive churn of stroke after stroke, breathing mostly on the left but also on the right, kicking just enough to keep my body streamlined in the water. When the chop hits you in the mouth, or your stroke misses, it’s hard to return to form, but it’s only through form that you can make your way through the water.

I spent a lot of time thinking about currents. The swim started at 11:15 toward the end of the flood, which means I swam into the tide to get between the shadows of the bridge towers before turning across its current to start swimming east. At the end of the swim, when I ducked outside the bridge for the final 1/3 mile onto the Eastern Shore, the ebb pulled me hard southwards. To get out from under the shadow of the eastbound span, I just floated for 10 seconds and let the tide carry me.

I thought about literature, as I always do. Two lines in particular. First, Shakespeare:

 whilst this machine is to him (Hamlet, 2.2)

That’s what I thought about myself as I noticed how automatic my stroke became, how little my mind seemed to control arms and legs. Breathing was a bit less mechanic; I had to chose to breath left or right, trying to balance in the sometimes choppy water and also judge my position by the bridge towers. “This machine” is the phrase the prince uses for his body in his love-letter to Ophelia; it’s what I felt like in the water.

Also —

mobilis in mobili (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)

I thought about Nemo’s motto, moving inside mobility, and its paradoxes, esp late in the swim when I had to fight the current to keep myself inside the bridges. 

Highlights of the course included two deep shipping channels, the larger of which I swam through at slack tide before I was too tired, at about mile two; two anchored paint barges the stuck their sterns into the course so that we had to detour around their anchor chains; and the sickly warmth of the last 500 yards in shallow, sheltered water leading up to the marina: it made me realize how much cleaner the moving water in the center channel had been. Plus by then I just wanted to get out.

Looking up at the bridge spans from the water made me think of Thoreau hearing the railroad whistle from Walden Pond (Ch 4). No separation from made-things even in the water. The Bay is still in many ways like it’s always been, but bridges and boats and hundreds of churning human bodies mark the water, even if the imprints don’t last.

My arms hurt and my back is sunburned — but what a great way to spend a Sunday in June!

 

JCB Fellows 50th

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I’m heading south on Amtrak now, after spending the last two days at the JCB Fellows Program 50th  Conference. I always love going back to Providence — as Ralph Bauer said during his talk yesterday afternoon, every time we one-time fellows walk back to Thayer St it feels like home. The conference itself was an odd and intriguing mix, mostly historians — my panel and Ralph’s were the only sessions chaired by literary scholars, and mine the only one with a substantial proportion of literary rather than historical folks on the panel. The keynotes, by Bernard Bailyn and Rolena Adorno, were really about the history of the JCB and the Brown family since the 18c, and also of the Fellows program since 1962. It’s great stuff to know about, esp. after collaborating with the JCB on the Hungry Ocean conference last year, but not the same as an academic conference that’s going to change the way you think and do your work.

My panel, Salt Water in the Archive, was great fun. We ran it as a real round table, with no one speaking for more than 4-5 minutes at a time, as we went three times round describing our favorite items from the collection, our most valued insights from current oceanic studies, and our hopes for its future. Some interesting paths opened up: Hester Blum sent me toward Gayatri Spivak’s argument for “planetarity” as an alternative to “globalization,” as outlined in her 2003 Death of a Discipline where she writes “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe” (72). While I’m not sure the planet/globe binary maps as precisely onto her political nexus as she might want, I do think that, as with Ursula Heise’s presumably related “sense of planet,” the oceanic, alien, and inhospitable element of our globe can best emphasize the scattered and disorienting nature of the global/planetary imagination.

Some other very good stuff by Mac Test in his Latourian reading of New World commodities in Old World economies, including his pointed reminder about the present of two Algonquin natives in Harriot’s house when he wrote his Brief and True Report of…Virginia. John Hattendorf reminded us that the AHA has recently added “maritime history” to its official list of categories; Mary Fuller mentioned several fascinating collaborative projects she’s working on with scientists at MIT; and Chris Pastore gave a fascinating glimpse of ecological and cultural boundaries of Naragannsat Bay in the late 17c. The Q&A was very lively and spilled us over the time; several people including Robert Foulke, who I was very happy to meet for the first time this weekend, wondered if we had any plans to expand maritime studies as a sub- or inter-discipline, and David Armitage had a wonderfully focused closing question about depth and the unfortunate tendency of maritime history to stay on, or near, the surface of the ocean.

There were quite a few strong talks in the part of the conference I could stay for, including some very interesting observations about comparative history in the Americas and several wonderful spculative talks & performances about early modern music and the European-Native encounter. I hadn’t known that some northern FL Indians apparently remembered for a generation or so a French hymn they had learned from a Huegenot colony that had been subsequently massacred by Spanish Catholics. Some very interesting methodological speculations about the early modern musical landscape also: many more performers, but much less music than our iPod-connected world.

It’s especially great always to see the JCB community, including many of my fellow Fellows from 2008-09, though not Vin Caretta alas, and the great curators and staff. Maureen O’Donnell sounds fired up for Hungry Ocean 2 in 2013 or 2014 — though I need to finish the book attached to the first conference first!

 

Three Views of Venus

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Like Lucretius I think Venus rules the universe. It was great to have the chance to see her this past week. I was especially lucky to have three chances to see, even though Transit Tuesday was cloudy in Short Beach —

Here she is via my old high school buddy Dan Gelfand’s picture of the celestial lady crossing the stage.

 

Here’s what I came up with, via emergency napkin camera, by the side of the road when the sun briefly came out:

 

And here’s another view, of my son dressed as Aphrodite in the school play:

 

 

 

 

 

Transit of Venus

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It’s cloudy in Short Beach, so I’m not sure if I’ll bother to assemble my pin-camera. But I’m amazed by the upcoming Transit of Venus, and can’t wait to see astronomical pix. I think I’ll check in via the SLOOH Space Camera once I drop Ian off at soccer practice.

During the 17c, observations of the Transit were a worldwide scientific craze. But we literary types know it best via Mason & Dixon, the pair having made observations of the Transit from the Cape of Good Hope in 1761 and 1769. In the novel, Mason takes the opportunity of the Transit to lecture the lovely ladies of the Vroom family:

‘Ladies, Ladies,’ Mason calls. ‘– You’ve seen her [i.e., Venus] in the Evening Sky, you’ve wish’d upon her, and now for a short time will she be seen in the Day-light, crossing the Disk of the Sun,– and do make a Wish then, if you think it will help. — For Astronomers, who normally work at night, ’twill give us a chance to be up in the Day-time. Thro’ our whole gazing-lives, Venus has been a tiny Dot of Light, going through phases like the Moon, ever against the black face of Eternity. But on the day of this Transit, all shall suddenly reverse, — as she is caught, dark, embodied, solid, against the face of the Sun, — a Goddess descended from light to Matter.’ (92)