Steve Mentz

It was a great evening under a full moon last night at Avery Point, talking “Swimmer Poetics.”  I always enjoy speaking to a mixed audience; Avery Point is a maritime studies campus, with an emphasis on marine science and public policy as well as a growing but still modest humanities presence.  I was introduced by my old friend Mary K. Bercaw-Edwads, a blue-water sailor and Melville scholar, but there weren’t many other literary types around.

What everyone shared, though, was a deep personal commitment to the ocean.  One of the really great questions I got after the talk was about how differently a less-ocean focused audience might reaction to the idea that swimming and poetry are essentially ecological practices and ideas.  It’s a question I might revisit at SAA, though my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar will be filled with dual-focus types like me, interested in poetry and the sea, wanting to use the one to get at or into the other.

Early in the talk I rehearsed something that I wrote in the first few pages of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, the claim that the sea is receding from our cultural imagination.  I still basically believe this, having taken the point in part from Robert Foulke, but I also think it needs refining.  The sailor and the sailing ship have been receding in our imagination since Conrad, whose novels comprise a kind of requiem.  Perhaps maritime shipping and the ship as such are as well, with the exception of the cruse ship.    But the beach is our public property, and ocean swimming has, almost certainly, become much more common in the past few generations than ever before.

The distinction between sailors and swimmers, between being “on it” or “in it,” was the refrain of my gallery talk at the Folger back in June 2010, and I wonder now if I should go back to that frame as a way of separating out two different versions of the human-sea relationship.

The other great question I got after the talk, asked by a former competitive swimmer who’s recently started coaching a high school swim team, was about the morality of swimming.  As I was thinking through it during my answer, I tried to lay out a distinction between the ship, which has been an emblem for social bonds and political order since antiquity — Plato’s Republic uses it, and I think Antigone also — and the solitary swimmer, head down underwater, who, to paraphrase Frost, cannot see out far and cannot see in deep.  I’m pretty focused on the wisdom of the swimmer, the knowledge that comes from living in an inhuman and untenable environment — but what’s the social politics associated with this practice?  What’s the morality?

The best thing about bringing new work somewhere is getting unexpected feedback.  The shipwreck book, which is nearly done — I’ll be able to use some of the material about Donne’s “The Storm” that I talked about last night in the chapter on the lyric, and an expanded version of the Crusoe in the surf bit also in the “Castaways” chapter, and those are the last two that I need to write — is feeling more and more like a hinge book, a way into the water where I’ll be swimming for a while.

Swimmer Poetics isn’t a bad book title, I suppose.  I’m going to use it for a short talk at a Maritime conference in Cape Cod in April, and also for an eco-theory piece for O-Zone.  Unless I decide I need to save that phrase.

A couple paragraphs out of the talk I’m giving tonight at U Conn Avery Point, as part of the Coastal Perspectives lectures series —

It happens in three stages.  First, immersion.  The sudden shock of getting into the water.  It’s a phase change, really, a transition from being in the air, which, depending on location and temperature, contains quite a bit of water vapor, into heavier, viscous liquid water.  You’re out, then you’re in. Nothing quite like it.  After that, buoyancy.  Our bodies need just a little help to pop up to the surface.  We can relax and float, for a little while.  This is the hopeful moment.  Last, exertion.  Moving our arms and legs in practiced patterns, we stay at the surface, even move around from place to place.  Nothing lasts forever, but there is short-term stability and pleasure, for a while.

And a little later —

Swimming matters because humans can learn how to do it, even do it very well, but it’s always dangerous.  Eventually you need to get out of deep water.  A minor character in Conrad’s Lord Jim emphasizes that swimming is, at bottom, futile:

Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns….No!  I tell you!  The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep, sea keep you up.

 

The “exertions of your hands and feet” provide a bleak a vision of human insufficiency, but it puts off drowning.  Conrad’s character is a native German speaker, and his jumbled syntax parallels the awkwardness of human swimming itself.  As Conrad knows, as all swimmers and sailors know, there is no long-term survival plan for swimmers in the deep ocean.  But the immersive experience, being in the “destructive element,” is precisely what poetry helps us understand.  Poetry is good at imagining radical change, and good at making readers enjoy it.  Literary criticism has a name for this technique: the poetic sublime, which I’ll explain shortly.  My focus tonight is on the way that poetic forms provide models for enduring inside a hostile environment.  The world after global warming is not the future – it’s the present – and making sense of that present requires a poetic, oceanic imagination.