The latest from NASA’s Earth Observatory. Apparently, the larger than usual ice cover — this image was taken March 19 — has been caused by northerly winds more than lower temperatures. In the rest of the Arctic ice cap, especially on the Atlantic side, sea ice has been thinner than usual.
Metis
I’m thinking about maritime know-how, metis, craft.
My favorite of these words is Homer’s, metis, the particular kind of hand-knowledge and skill associated with Odysseus. It includes everything from sailing to boat- (and bed) building, not to mention fast talking. But it’s particularly associated with technical maritime skills and labor. It’s what Conrad calls “craft,” and what he thinks creates a bond among sailors. Some of the best writing I’ve seen on this topic comes in Margaret Cohen’s great recent book, The Novel and the Sea, which I e-reviewed on the Bookfish a little while ago, here. “Experience is better than knowledge” was the line I pulled out from the book, which Cohen took from Samuel Champlain’s manual on seamanship she does such great work with in her first chapter.
I’m wrestling with seamanlike metis, a set of tactics that improvisationally transform disorder into order, in a chapter of the book I’m writing on shipwreck from The Tempest through Robinson Crusoe. The metis chapter focuses on Jeremy Roch, a 17c mariner, amateur poet, and astrologer whose ms. journals are in the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich — a particularly wonderful place to do maritime research, by the way.
The picture above show’s an exploit Roch is espeically proud of: sailing in a open boat from Plymouth to London with only a boy and a dog, “one as good company as the other to me for any help I had need of,” as he notes.
Here’s a little snippet out of the current draft of the chapter —
Faced with disaster, sailors respond with work. Skilled, technical, hard to understand maritime labor becomes paramount in moments of crisis, which is why these episodes tend to fill with jargon. The Boatswain in The Tempest, whose lines provide the epigraphs for this chapter, provides a familiar example. His language interposes a host of sea-terms – yare, topsail, “room,” topmast, “bring her to try,” “main-course,” among others – alongside his resonant political and philosophic claims. While Shakespeare’s command of sea-terms was imperfect, he recognized the dramatic power of opaque, technical language in moments of crisis. The “cunning intelligence” and skill with technology that The Odyssey calls metis characterizes the core physical response of mariners to shipboard crisis. Metis is both a physical and an intellectual practice; it represents seamanlike labor and also an imaginatively-charged exploration of physical reality. As ships founder and rigging snaps, sailors struggle to maintain orderly forms of action and thought. The order-salvaging task of the sailor resembles the task of the shipwreck writer. Representing the jeitzteit crisis moment in poetic or descriptive language requires matching the physical labors of the mariner with the formal shaping of the writer. Performing metis requires hands, tools, and language.
Whirlpools
I’m thinking about whirlpools.
Specifically the Maelstrom off the coast of Norway but also whirlpools in general. These fairly regular features of the supposedly featureless ocean arise from the interactions of powerful tidal currents around narrow channels. They’re a bit like tidal bores, which show up in rivers and estuaries and feature in a wonderful scene in Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.
Here’s an early modern image of the Maelstrom —
I’m wondering if this oceanic feature can partially displace the beach as our primary physical symbol for land-sea interaction?
Whirlpools, like beaches, get formed when the sea & land come crashing towards each other. Both are structured by tide and time, both are fairly predictable, but mathematically complex. Neither was well understood in the early modern period. The downward force of maelstroms, as Poe reminds us, asks us to think of them as descents into the ocean rather than movements towards land. Homer’s whirlpool has a monster inside it.
Thinking of whirlpools or maelstroms as oceanic forms, features that are in their way as typical of land-sea interaction as the beach or other contact zones helps shift us imaginatively off-shore without entirely forsaking land for deep water. The whirlpool is an inhuman and inhospitable place, but it’s still created by land, at least in part. It’s not a human contact zone like a beach or a ship, but it’s a site of interaction.
Despite Poe and Jules Verne, coastal maelstroms aren’t strong enough to suck down ships or submarines. But what if we think of them as windows into the ocean?
These thoughts are all leading up to the Oceanic Shakespeares SAA seminar early next month, where all such questions will be resolved.
Oceanic Shakespeares
We’re only three weeks away from SAA, and I’ve been happily swimming through the flood of papers for my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar. In the next few days I’ll be responding to the authors individually, but I also want to explore a few larger questions and structures that the papers point toward as a whole.
The single largest question the seminar raises for me is the relation between the two terms in its title: what might it mean to connect the vast world ocean to the works, diverse and poly-appropriated though they are, of a single author? I’m hoping that this seminar can help us move past Will-centricity, not only by opening up the vast array of other materials available to salty scholars of this period, from Camoens to Haywood to Joost Von den Vondel and many others, but also by pushing literary culture up against what Whitman calls the “crooked inviting fingers” of the surf. We’ll talk in Boston about how this might happen.
But first, some short introductions / questions for each of the three groups of papers.
Wet Globalism:
These papers have me returning to questions of the sea as cultural contact zone, a space both “free” in Grotius’s sense and also endlessly connected. They also make me wonder about nationalism and inter-European rivalries, remembering that Grotius’s Mare Liberum was itself part of the Dutch struggle against Spain; free seas are not apolitical spaces.
I also recently ran into a few lines from everyone’s favorite Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, that captures an Anglophilic vision of the oceanic globe that we Shakespeareans are perhaps more familiar with from John of Gaunt —
The case of England is in itself unique. Its specificity, its incomparable character, has to do with the fact that England underwent the elemental metamorphosis at a moment in history that was altogether unlike any other, and also in a way shared by none of the earlier maritime powers. She truly turned her collective existence seawards and centered it on the sea element. That enabled her to win not only countless wars and naval battles but also something else, and in fact, infinitely more—a revolution. A revolution of sweeping scope, of planetary dimensions. (Schmitt, Land and Sea, Simona Draghici trans.)
I don’t think we need to believe all or even any of that in order to use it to consider the legacy of oceanic English globalism from Shakespeare to Conrad and beyond. But I think it’s worth talking about.
Salty Aesthetics and Theatricality:
This is my sub-section as respondent — Joe Blackmore has Wet Globalism, and Jeffrey Cohen Fresh Water Ecologies — and it’s leading me to my favorite salt-water theorist, Eduoard Glissant, who writes about the sea as a place of “rupture and connection,” and also a “variable continuum” (Poetics of Relation, 151). His vision is also historical; he talks about the slave trade as the defining core of “creolization in the West…the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality” (6). To live in the post-Columbian West, for Glissant, means inhabiting and traversing oceanic space.
The pressure of maritime exchange and metaphor on aesthetic forms makes up the common subtext of this sub-set of papers. Water proves slippery; it’s hard to pin wetness down, on the Shakespearean stage or in anti-theatrical discourse. I wonder if these papers, and the seminar as a whole, might want to push toward some specific suggestions about the aesthetic force of the oceanic: it’s an agent of change, flowing and shifting, a threat to fixity or rigid conceptions of form, but also — and here I think there’s an interesting counter-current in these papers — something that’s mostly not-quite present, at least not fully. Aesthetic forms dive into the ocean but also surface and leave it. We see wet bodies on stage but not the ocean itself.
Fresh Water Ecologies:
The third group wonderfully focuses our attention back to dramatic particularities — two of the three essays are on Hamlet, which I’m currently teaching — and on the function of fluid spaces in eco-political demarcations. The sea and rivers in these essays comprise ecological and political challenges, with the pirate’s legacy looming large in Denmark. Reading several figures from Shakespeare as deeply watery or maritime — Hamlet, Ophelia, Hotspur — these papers connect watery spaces to human experiences. They make me think, as several other papers do also, about plot and principles of narrative connection. Northrop Frye once joked that in Greek romance, shipwreck was the “primary means of transportation.” What happens when we historicize the plot-ocean of classical romance so that it becomes, very literally, the stage of history?
The oceanic structure of the vortex or coastal whirlpool figures in both of the Hamlet papers, though somewhat differently. I wonder if this recurrent feature, produced by the encounter between mobile ocean and steadfast land, might serve as a metaphor for the disruptive but aesthetically patterned consequences of bringing land and sea together. We often think of this encounter in terms of the beach, which Greg Dening has done so much to turn into a rich metaphor for cultural encounters. Vortices have a different, less friendly aesthetic; they are less human places. We might be able to do something with them.
Twenty Shadows
Nonhumans in Michigan!
Great things are happening in Ypsilanti next week! I’ll be in Queens, but wish I could be at Eastern Michigan U for this —
Here’s what Craig Dionne, the host, has to say about it:
“Nonhumans: Ecology, Ethics, Objects.” EMU’s Journal of Narrative Theory (JNT) will sponsor an annual guest lecture focusing on themes currently shaping the humanities, Thursday, March 15, 5-6:30 p.m., Room 310A, Student Center.
This year’s JNT dialogue will focus on posthumanism, specifically its philosophical roots in what is termed the new school of “speculative realism” or “object-oriented ontology.” This is a challenging new paradigm of philosophy in the humanities that defines a generation of ecological theory and practice. Guest speakers include Timothy Morton, professor of English at the University of California-Davis and Jeffrey Cohen, professor of English and the director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at the George Washington University. Eileen Joy, associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University, will moderate.
We the Drowned, Apollo’s Eye, and Aquatic Apes
Books piling up on my desk must be shelved now that spring break is over! Here are mini-reviews of three I especially liked —
A gorgeous multi-generational novel about the Danish island of Marstall from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of WWII, We the Drowned won the big Danish prizes before being translated into English in 2010 and appearing in the US last year. A big fat sea epic that’s worth its weight, this one comes with the usual allusions to Conrad and Melville, but unusually it’s not the big whale but Whitejacket that’s on the author’s mind. The men of Marstall are fishermen but also maritime warriors, and the progenitor of the novel, Laurids Madsen, seems to have sailed with Melville on board the Neversink.
A few quotations highlight the novel’s vast, powerful sweep —
The future that lay ahead of us consisted of more thrashings and death by drowning, and yet we longed for the sea. What did childhood mean to us? (90).
He learned a song that he sang to us for many years. He said it was the truest song every written about the sea:
Shave him and bash him,
Duck him and splash him,
Torture him and smash him,
And don’t let him go! (97; song also returns on 674)
Perhaps the most intriguing character is Klara Friis, a sea widow who inherits a shipbuilding business and then plans to save the population of the island by bankrupting its fleet. Writing to her son, who has (of course) run away to sea —
What does…a man do when he is held underwater? Does he fight to get up? No, his pride lies in his ability to hold his breath (609)
Great seafaring stuff. Worth teaching, perhaps, if it were not so long.
Next, Denis Cosgrove’s Apollo’s Eye, a wonderfully illustrated and brilliant survey of images of the globe from the classical period through today. Empire, he reminds us, is a “cartographic enterprise” (19). “To imagine the earth as a globe is essentially a visual act” (15). I’ll be dipping back into this one for years.
Third, and strangest, Elaine Morgan’s The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which argues that the particular evolutionary path taken by the first humans must have involved a prolonged period of semi-aquatic living, rather than only forest or savanna. She speculates that various features of modern humans, from a layer of fat under our skin to our relative hairlessness to bipedalism to our habit of breathing through our mouths as well as our noses, appear to connect humans to marine mammals as much as terrestrial primates. I don’t know how much credit she has in scientific circles — she writes like a semi-outlaw, without an academic byline — but it’s intriguing and almost persuasive.
Of course it’s not all that hard to convince me of a special connections between humans and seas.
Audio for Poetics of Nothing
I’ve started a page on the blog where I’ll archive audio recordings of my lectures, starting with “A Poetics of Nothing” from last Friday. You can find it under the Pages link on the right hand side of the homepage, or follow the link above.
Post-Nothing Thoughts
…or, what I learned at the Grad Center.
I’m trying to post the talk here as an mp3 file, but right now I can’t manage to, b/c the file is too large (17MB) for the WordPress interface. Techie fixes welcome!
The event was great, with a lively crowd of faculty and grad students who all seemed engaged & asked great questions. Combined with highway meditation while rushing home in rush hour, I’ve come up with a few new things to splice into “A Poetics of Air” before sending off to the hungry hordes at Postmedeival.
About chronology: Expanding on some brief allusions on air as the opposite of history, I’ll talk about dilation and dissipation, and how airy time seems so much less connected and coherent than oceanic or terrestrial time. The sea is history, says the poet. But air is something else.
About hurricanoes: The post-talk gave me the great reminder that Lear’s word describes a New World storm, and that the word “hurricane” comes from a Native American language, first recorded by Oviedo in Spanish before entering English via Eden’s translations of Peter Martyr. Linguistic evidence for Global Winds!
About causation, invisible and material: Might need a little more thinking here. Airy causation’s invisibility is a source of its power, but I’m still mulling a question about how that relates to unseen ideology formations a la Foucault. I think that material invisibility differs from ideological invisibility — but maybe that’s too simple?
More Poetics of Nothing
Here’s a few bars out of the song I’ll be singing tomorrow at CUNY.
What was in premodern air? When writers looked at the empty space between their pens and their pages, what did they see?
This essay hazards its way into a poetics of nothing in the early modern imagination by seeking out in literary and scientific writings the stirrings of an invisible presence. I’ll fit air into three metaphoric containers: Global Winds, Embodied Breath, and Nothing. That’s not an exhaustive catalog of early modern images of this protean substance – more could be said about the airy nothings of the imagination, for example – but these three figures assemble an intertwined system. Global Winds press from outside, carrying ships and humans around the newly-circumnavigated world ocean. Embodied Breath rises up from within the body, exposing a lived experience of fragile inter-dependence and exchange. But even after these two forces reveal the power that winds and breath exert over human bodies, when we look at air, we still see Nothing. We all know what the old King says about nothing.
And a little more from the end of the intro —
Across these three sections I’ll weave brief engagements with the literary text that speaks more directly to my strain of ecocriticism than any other, King Lear. Shakespeare knew much less than Vossius about air-currents, pressure, and the interaction of seas and winds. But in part because of sheer familiarity – Shakespeare is in the air we breathe – and also because of this play’s obsessive engagement with human and nonhuman natures, I continue to mine King Lear’s harrowing vision of mortal bodies in hostile environments. An air-infused voyage through the play, touching on storms and last gasps and apocalyptic nothings, helps unpack the unsettling combination of power and fragility in early modern air. Poetic articulations, no less than scientific hypotheses, were drawn to airy nothings, and both types of writing found in that invisible space challenges and incitements to global and personal forms of order.
So: air is not history. It may be history’s opposite, sheer unintegrated force, roaring through our planet and our bodies. Power we can’t see but must take into account. A palpable and present image of constant change. An emblem for the alterity that underlies a post-sustainability ecology.
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