Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Salty Language

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For my epsirit d’interstate after a great weekend at Final Frontiers, a conference on maritime environmental history at the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine, I was thinking about Michael Pearson’s challenge to the group to eschew terrestrial language and its metaphors.  Not an easy thing to do, but —

Current (formerly field):  If we re-divide or re-describe ourselves through scholarly / intellectual currents, perhaps we’ll be able to avoid defensive postures and emphasize movement and connection between differences — or perhaps through differences.  I want to write about the Gulf Stream as poetic and historical agent.

Water (formerly ground): Thinking not only about ground / land / earth as metaphors of solidity and stability, but also about the tenor-vehicle relationship itself as the “ground” of a working metaphor.  What if metaphors float on water, rather than resting on ground?  Nothing stays on the surface forever.

Flow (formerly progress): Rethinking movement as flows and circuits, rather than progress or retreat, might make some ideas about intellectual shifts richer.  It is likely to make them more confusing, and less familiar.  Both good things.

Ship (formerly state): We know ships are heterotopias and polyglot fantasies, but what would happen if we started thinking politics through ship-to-ship contacts, rather than the very different metaphorics of the state?

Seascape (formerly landscape): Is the “scape” still a problem?

Distortion (formerly clarity): As I’ve been thinking about for a while, a basic feature of aqueous environments, at least in visual terms, is distortion.  But of course air bends light also, producing rainbows and pretty sunsets, and the earth flows, especially when heated.  So perhaps distortion of various types is a baseline condition?  Is “baseline” a terrestrial or aqueous metaphor?  Water’s tri-dimensionality sometimes orients us on the buoyant top as well as irresistible bottom.

Horizon (formerly horizon): We spent some time thinking about oceanic horizons, sea-marks and landmarks, and elevation in places like Tenerife.  Is horizon one of the metaphor-concepts that’s already present in both green and blue worlds?  Not as a sight of struggle or transition, like beaches of coastlines (“line” is a problematic metaphor there), but as a merging of perspectives.  Horizons of ocean, currents and horizons.  Places from which new things are visible…

More thoughts to come, I hope.

 

10 kilometers around Harrington Sound

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Here I am 3 hours and 34 minutes later, having made my way all the way around Harrington Sound in Bermuda last Sunday.  I was down there for the Race Around the Sound, which gathered together over 150 off-island swimmers plus 75 or so Bermudians to swim a variety of distances: 800m, 2km, 4km, 7.25km, and my race, the full 10km (6.2 miles).

When I started swimming again with a Master’s group in Branford this past January, I hadn’t done any serious swimming since finishing high school in ’85.  I swam a few shorter races this summer, 1 and 2 miles, but this was the longest by far. 

We started at the Aquarium, which the kids later told me was really great, treading water behind a lane line while the outgoing tide pulled us back slightly.  There’s only one entrance to the Sound, so other than at the very start there wasn’t any current.

 

Most of the race was close to shore, in a few places in shallow water above coral, though at the start and again at about the 6km mark we cut across deep bays.  The water was clear and gorgeous.  Lots of fish.

I felt good going out, but it was a very fast field — mostly former or current college swimmers, and quite a few people who compete in US National Master’s meets.  I did not stay with the front of the pack.

For the first couple hours, I thought a lot about bouyancy and what swimmers call “feel for the water.”  Things were feeling pretty good until after the second stop, at 4km to go.  I took an awkward route to get into that check point, because I wasn’t quite sure where to go — it’s hard to see from down in the water — and the wind picked up a bit.  I should have been feeling great — over half-done — but as I started the 4km – 2km leg, going from point to point on the south shore of the Sound, I felt sluggish in the water.  The wind had come up and waves splashed my face whenever I breathed to the right.  I didn’t have any doubt that I would finish the race — I wasn’t going to sink — but for a half-hour or so, I wasn’t cleaving the water as I’d have liked.

But the funny thing was, I got back into my rhythm.  After the final check point at 2km, I felt strong, fast, fluid again.  My shoulders ached, and my mouth was salt-dry, but I could turn over my stroke a bit quicker and got back some of my feel for moving through the water.  It was a long haul up the west side of the sound, past houses and docks, but it was great to finish strong.

Unlike the NYC marathon, which I ran a couple days after my 40th birthday in 2006, I was tired but not broken after.  (This picture, though, is before the start.)

Soon I’ll be ready for another race.  Maybe just a little bit shorter?  Or I hear the Little Red Lighthouse swim in NYC is a 10km but with a current assist…

The Old Man and the Sea

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Just re-read this one for a panel I’ll be moderating  about marine environmental literature at Final Frontiers: Exploring Oceans, Islands, and Coastal Environments, a weekend conference at the Island Institute in coastal Maine in mid-October.  Haven’t been through it since ninth grade, when I found it frankly a bit dull.  Hemingway’s combination of high modernist style and old-fashioned masculinism has grown on me somewhat, or perhaps I’m just a more sympathetic reader now.

As an imagination of the limits and fantasies of human bodies in an oceanic world, it’s quite a rich little prose-poem, and a very promising text for blue cultural studies.  The moment that grabbed me, though, was the old man’s brief vision of an airy rather than oceanic globalism:

It must be very strange in an airplane, he thought. I wonder what the sea looks like from that height? They should be able to see the fish well if they do not fly too high. I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish from above. In
the turtle boats I was in the cross-trees of the mast-head and even at that height I saw much. The dolphin look greener from there and you can see their stripes and their purple spots and you can see all of the school as they swim. Why is it that all the fast-moving fish of the dark current have purple backs and usually purple stripes or spots? The dolphin looks green of course because he is really golden. But when he comes to feed, truly hungry, purple stripes show on his sides as on a marlin. Can it be anger, or the greater speed he makes that brings them out? (71-2)

Hemingway’s a hinge figure in so many ways, but here he reaches forward, from wet to airy globalism.  If you follow the logic of this passage, it starts by a fantasy of altitude — the view from above — and then dives into color-distorting salt water.  Looks green but really golden: the dolphin fish surely allegorizes something.

Graham Harman: Litanies and other speculations

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I can’t seem to sign in to comment on his blog, but Graham Harman very generously replied to my comments on his talk and Speculative Medievalisms II in NYC.  It’s a clarifying & informative comment, & a great example of  how the blog-interface speeds up intellectual exchanges: now I know at least one good way to pronounce OOO (“triple-oh”), and I have another reason to read Meillassoux‘s After Finitude, to source the “great outdoors” phrase I’ve seen in a few places.

Some interesting thoughts too on “Latour litanies,” which I had mis-cited as “Latour lists,” and for which Harman posits a literary genealogy going back to Homer’s catalog of ships, any mention of which makes me want to quote Mandelshtam:

Sleeplessness.  Homer.  Taut sails.

I have counted half the catalog of ships,

That caravan of cranes, the expansive host,

Which once rose above Hellas…

On these lists, however, I wonder if we’re thinking about two slightly different but related versions of the literary catalog.  The Borges lists I was thinking of work by being internally off-kilter; they set up one kind of accumulative logic and then violate or distort that logic, so that the list — perhaps, for Borges, like systematic thought itself? — becomes a dynamic, shifting, unstable system.  The canonical example in Borges, which has generated its own accurate-seeming Wikipedia page, is the one Foucault made famous in The Order of Things, a catalog of possible types of  animals —

  • Those that belong to the emperor
  • Embalmed ones
  • Those that are trained
  • Suckling pigs
  • Mermaids (or Sirens)
  • Fabulous ones
  • Stray dogs
  • Those that are included in this classification
  • Those that tremble as if they were mad
  • Innumerable ones
  • Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
  • Et cetera
  • Those that have just broken the flower vase
  • Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

I’d have to go back to Latour to think about whether his signature style is  list-eating lists a la Borges, or a more straightforward or comprehensive catalog such as Homer’s — though for me at least the corrosive effect of Borges’s lists is to make all such litanies seem unstable or provisional attempts at ordering an inherently disorderly and dynamic cosmos.  My guess is Latour’s litanies work this way too.  Borges certainly isn’t the first to write such thought-fracturing lists; Shakespeare’s “Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk,” one of Borges’s own favorite lines, probably fits into this category despite being a list with only two terms in it.  It would be easy to find other examples.

In some sense, perhaps, might Borges anticipate OOO’s world of withdrawal and circulation?  Or, perhaps, is it just that it sometimes seems to me that Borges started, anticipated, or proleptically critiqued almost all the really interesting intellectual trends I know?

 

Writing on Stone

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When the lights were out after Irene, I had the great pleasure of reading this hybrid memoir-cum-history by Gott’s Island summer resident Christina Gillis.  She and her husband John had just hosted Ian and me for a day-trip to Gott’s Island the week before, at the end of our Maine trip, so I had an eerie sense of recent physical memory of some of the places she describes — the dock, the granite “sidewalk” that surrounds the Atlantic side of the island where Ian and I caught juvenile mackerel, the open-ness of the old center of the village, and the constant presence of history, especially of the early 20th-century agricultural and fishing village that decided, apparently en masse, to vacate the island in the 1920s.

Christina’s book interweaves two painful human stories: the unexpected loss of her son Ben, who died in an air wreck in Kenya in 1991, and the death of Miss Peterson, a solitary Gott’s island resident whose house burned in the winter of 1926, when the island was depopulating.  She also explores the life and works of the poet Ruth Moore, who formerly owned the house in which she and John have spent the past 40 summers.

The books’ central conceit — Christina is very much an English professor, with a specialty in the 18c novel — is writing on stone, the question of how permanent the marks humans make on a rocky coastal island can become.  She spends quite a bit of time thinking and writing about the village cemetery — the cover image is a view of her house from the cemetery — and the book closes with a spare photo of Benjamin Gillis’s gravestone.

It’s not in any way a sentimental book, though as a parent I find the story simply terrifying.  I also can’t help recalling that I’m roughly Ben’s age, and  I also spent 1990-1 worrying my parents with far-off adventures, for me in Asia, Alaska, and Australia, rather than Africa.  The book is a tribute to things that survive, and the limits of how deeply human beings can mark geography.  She’s got a rich, measured tone when she writes about the island —

Never entirely fixed, our gauge of time and tide, the dock reflects the pace of life on the island.  At low tide, with the pool an empty expanse of mud and stones, when the float sits inertly on the pebbly, shell-strewn ooze, the island falls into a lull, as if left to itself, to contemplation, to chores, to life that does not extend far beyond itself.  It seems to wait for the incoming tide that will enable the dock to float and become once again the connecting point with the mainland.  (15)

Ian and I had a charmed day on the magic granite of Gott’s.  Feeling a bit like trespassers as we tromped up the beach with our fishing poles and tackle box, we arrived a low tide, and our boat, piloted by Christiana’s cousin, could not get to the dock.  Islands are hermetic spaces — “not utopias,” Christina’s husband John, author of Islands of the Mind, laughingly insisted as we walked through the remnants of some old houses on the island’s spine, but closed and inward-looking.

That day, something happened that’s never happened to me before in all my years of fishing: I caught a fish with my first cast at our first spot, on the granite sidewalk, not far from the “box on the rocks” where Paul de Man apparently used to spend his summers writing.  Ian also caught one with his first cast in our last spot of the day, at the dock that Christina describes as the heart of the island.

How possible is it to write on the stone of Gott’s island?  The human history of those stones is relatively short, not even a blink inside their geological span.  For the past 80 years or so the human side has only been a summertime story, since no on overwinters these days.  “I hear the crickets on the island,” writes Christina, but “I will not see the frost” (167).

 

Speculative Medeivalisms II

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A shockingly swift jaunt through Queens and the Midtown tunnel got me to Speculative Medeivalisms II in time to catch most of Kellie Robertson’s talk on the changing fortunes of Aristotle.  It was a good sign, a good talk, and a good day.  Traffic is not always the dominant reality.

Part of the draw of this event for a non-medeivalist like me — I sat in the designated early-modern row with Julian Yates & Drew Daniel at first, but we were allowed to mingle later — was to finally see the bio-extensions of some famous folks I’ve heretofore  known only in e-form, especially Karl Steel and Eileen Joy.  Jeffrey Cohen, here pictured explaining how Merlin engineered Stonehenge, also featured in a lively lineup of theoretical, playful, creative work that bubbled up from, and sometimes overflowed out of, medieval studies.  I really like the way this group plays the game.

The intellectual crux of the event for me, though, was the presence of Graham Harman, philospher and guru of OOO (pronounciation uncertain) or Object Oriented Ontology, a model that flattens and distributes object-status, agency, and meaning across all objects in every form. Many of the early talks, esp Kellie’s and Jeffrey’s, presented themselves in dialogue with Graham’s work. Liza Blake’s response to Julian Yates’s Latourian reading of cooking in and out of Titus Andronicus — it’s nerve-wracking, Julian reminded us all, to make home-made piecrust, even if you’re not trying to bake your enemy’s children inside it — imagined an unwritten fourth part of Harman’s Prince of Networks that would put OOO’s reformulation of metaphysics in closer touch with the sorts of things we literary types tend to offer.  (Autobiographical sidenote: I’m pretty sure I was reading Prince of Networks on the Jubilee Line when Speculative Medeivalisms I was going on in London last January.)

Graham Harman’s talk batted cleanup, & he was smart, erudite, eloquent, and thorough, taking us through the history of the object in modern philosophy and showing why his efforts to de-center and de-privledge humanity flow naturally from a right understanding of Husserl and Heidegger, among others.  There wasn’t much time for questions as the day wound down; we were exhausted, the wine was waiting upstairs, many people needed to get to dinner, and I needed to rescue the babysitter in CT.  But while driving home I couldn’t help thinking that the question I had was the one I pose a half-dozen times a day to my students: So what?  What’s next?  What can we do with that insight?

Partly it’s a disciplinary issue: I don’t have a huge stake in the right reading of the history of 20c philosophy, but I am always looking for a philosophical structure or model through which to think about how creatures, including but not only humans, live in a disorderly world.  OOO is great on variety and perspective-shifting lists; Graham calls these “Latour lists,” but I think of them as coming first from Borges.  I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about the blind Argentine and Tlön:

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for truth or even for verisimilitude but rather for the astounding.  They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. (Labyrinths, 10)

In Borges’s story, the astounding as metaphysics is enticing but never really real.  Its fictions encroach upon the given world.  “The world, unfortunately,” he concludes elsewhere, “is real.”  I’m not sure that Borges’s vision, which in Tlön at least is an allegory of mid-century modernism and fascism, quite fits with OOO’s insistent opening up of agency, but I’m not really an OOO-master.  I’ve read, thought about, and cited, Tim Morton’s eco-books, and  I’ve also enjoyed Harman on Latour, but I’ve not (yet) dug deeply into the sub-field.  (Digging may be the wrong metaphor for a model that denies vertical hierarchies.)

The question for me as an omnivorous literary scholar who always wants something to take home from these cross-disiplinary buffets is, what can I do with OOO?  I like its post-human de-centering, its claims for the agency and autonomy and respect due to objects like the Gulf Stream or the process of evaporation or the movement of ballast water.  Like Latour’s ANT(s), it’s a powerfully descriptive and poetic horizontalizing of the world.  I can see why Kellie and Graham both connect it to Aristotle, and I get why Jeffrey and Eileen both dig it.

It’s a good challenge and prod to get outside of humanism, to move to what some other OOO-ers (Levi Bryant?) call the “great outdoors.”  But it also seems to me — and perhaps here I risk outing myself as too humanist to sit with the cool kids at the lunch table —  that’s it’s not quite possible for literary culture to make this move the same way philosophy does.  How far outside our bodies can we really sit when rain and winds lash us and the mad old King “to the skin”?  To know that ourselves, our loved ones, our household pets are no more or less objects than veins of coal or moon-rocks or cows being led to slaughter is salutary, and of course it’s essentially, intellectually, fundamentally true.  But can literature really live that way?  Emotional pulls distort any intellectual field, especially one built around play and pleasure — which is why the question Julian Yates circled around, how do we live a good life?, still challenges or provokes any descriptions of what the real really is.  At the end of the day — or so went my espirit d’interstate yester-eve — I don’t need to know what the world really is.  I want to know what to do.

Perhaps I’m asking for something to supplement our sighs of OOO.  What if we don’t give up all the charms and puzzles of the human in a posthuman object-oriented world?  What if we decide instead to combine a  recognition of a insistently cascading and circulating world of fluid object-states — what the ecological sciences have been calling “dynamic post-equilibrium” for some time — with the constant, changing, niggling, sticky return of human and fleshy embodiment and its extensions, a persistent recognition of the claims of pain and pleasure and the permeable boundary between skin and world?  How might a corresponding AHH moment — an Artifact-Hungry Humanism? — work alongside our OOOs?  A way to remember that bodies are both objects and object-makers, both withdrawn into mysterious autonomy and also eagerly grasping and making.  I don’t mean this as a resistance or debunking, and I certainly don’t want to re-enthrone human perception or consciousness atop any great chain of understanding.  But in the horizontal maelstrom I think one of the things poesis does or wants to do is remember that thoughts come in bio-packages, and they are limited by their limits, hurt by their discomforts, and pleased by their pleasures.

Maybe Graham would say that’s chickenshit phenomenology or backdoor idealim.  And maybe it is.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.  I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary.  I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.  It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature…. I do not know which of us has written this page.  (246-7)

 

Two Theatrical Moments

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I just sent off to Shakespeare Bulletin two mini-reviews of my favorite moments in Shakespearean performance of the past decade.  The first was of the opening scene of a Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC from 2009, and the second the closing scene of the Propeller Winter’s Tale at BAM in 2005.  Here’s the first —

We don’t usually picture big, powerful, ponderous, regal old men dancing in public.  Perhaps it’s imaginable as a careful, discreet display.  But when Stacy Keach as Lear high-stepped his way onto the stage in the opening moments of this production, accompanied by a brass band and hurriedly-assembling dance line, he gave a shocking display of theatrical power and audacity.  The old King’s body staked its claim to center stage physically, forcing his way through the party-goers who crowded around in the decadent, faux-Balkan nightclub setting.  This was a Lear who could still dance, who still wanted to display physical power and virtuosity – the legs kicking up well over waist-high – and who still wanted to play the part of youth.  For that moment, as the King came onto the stage, I saw something renewed in this familiar play: a sharper contrast between age and youth, and a new the irony in the purported desire to “unburthened crawl toward death.”  The reviews at the time mostly talked about the Balkan setting and post-Yugoslav mafia staging in Robert Falls’s violent production, including a long abstract scene in which cloth-wrapped bodies of the victims of the kingdom’s wars were slowly lowered into an on-stage pit.  For me the defining moment was at the start, when the King showed off his still-powerful body, his flair, and his belief that he still owned the world.  The bad daughters and courtiers fawned on him, and the good girl, played in black as Goth hipster, retreated in horror at his poor taste.  More than anything, Keach’s body made palpable the King’s protest against time.  We in the audience knew that his dancing body will be buffeted by inner and outer storms for the next three agonizing hours.  But the high, physical, lusty steps managed to create a power beyond age, at least for a stage instant.

The seated crowd and partying lackeys weren’t the only audience to whom the King was playing in this moment.  Above his head, in a massive gold frame, was a portrait of himself, in full royal regalia, at a younger age.  The contrast between the benevolent, happy monarch who stares down from on high and the charismatic performer strutting below provided a visual touchstone for the play: this old King can never live up to his younger self.  We usually have to wait for Cordelia’s “nothing” to split Lear apart.  In this production, his internal divisions get shown immediately and viscerally.

There were lots of things that didn’t quite work in this high-concept production, and I don’t quite rank Keach among the very top performers of this Lear-filled decade.  But it was probably the best stage entrance I’ve ever seen.

And here’s the second —

What follows resurrection?  The statue has come back to life, the King and Queen reconciled, the two kingdoms resumed their amity, and royal authority even re-constituted so far as to make up a final faux-comic resolution via the marriage of Camillo and Paulina. What’s left?  An awkward pause, perhaps, as the wave of comic unity floats everyone ashore, before Leontes leads away and we can start clapping.

Not this time.  Propeller’s version of “The Winter’s Tale” featured the company’s usual high-jinx, including full brass band numbers for Autolycus’s songs and men in all the female roles, among them the brilliant Simon Scardifield, whose work I’ve greatly missed in Propeller’s recent productions, as Hermione.  This production greatly increased the visibility of Mamillius, who, played by Tam Williams, who later doubled as Perdita, provided a visual through-line in the convoluted story.  In the Sicilian half, he’s everywhere, starting the play alone onstage, listening at doors, playing in corners, watching his father rage and his mother sent to prison.  His toy ship got used to represent his sister’s voyage to coastal Bohemia, and his toy bear eats Antigonus.  The boy who told his mother and her ladies that “a sad tale’s best for winter” became in this production the central figure of narrative continuity within ever-shifting terrain.

He came back, finally, as a ghost.  In a shocking, wordless coda to the performance, the boy Mamillius re-appeared holding a candle after the royal parties cleared the stage for the last time.  His father saw him and returned, his face fractured into disbelief and unlooked-for hope.  As the lights started to dim, Leontes circled across the stage toward the boy, slowly opening his arms for a redemptive embrace.  The King cast a grotesque, large shadow onto the empty stage behind him, looking from where I sat in the balcony like a gigantic bird, spreading wings and opening talons.  Mamillius had his back to the audience, and we could not see his face.  He kept staring at the candle cupped in his hand as his father awkwardly moved downstage toward him.  At the last minute, he looked up at the twisted face straining down at him, and blew out the candle.

Some might think that we shouldn’t cry at the end of this play, but we did.  The play’s loss and disruption flooded out over the shocked audience.  I’ve never felt more palpably the cost of this play’s wayward tale of reunification.  It’s always hard to trust Leontes, who’s too eager to sweep his earlier transgressions under the rug, but it took this stage gambit to make visible the tragic undercurrent for all to see.

Aesthetics of Storm

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It’s not a happy feeling.  It doesn’t feel sociable.  It’s not the sort of thing you like to talk about.  I knew, when I was standing on the wet rocks and leaning into the wind so that I could see the waves smash over the seawall, that things people cared about were getting broken.  We didn’t have any injuries in Short Beach, at least not any major ones, but we lost several trees, porches, and docks.  I won’t even try to put a number on property damage.

I was watching with my neighbor, a contractor and home-builder, and he said what I was thinking: “Isn’t it beautiful?”

The standard intellectual move when faced with the terrible beauty of storms plunges into the long history of the aesthetic sublime, from Longinus to Burke to Kant.  But boundlessness and horror and hurrying the mind out of itself don’t quite match what was happening during the storm.  It wasn’t that the wind and rain and surf were boundless or inconceivable — though I suppose they were, at least to the extent that it was impossible to grasp the experience whole — but instead that the once-stable granite vistas of the Connecticut shoreline became all of a sudden a swirling mass, a moving, living, body inside which my own body was one vibrating part.  A vision of immensity and power — that much the sublime theorists got right — but even more a vision of immersion, embeddedness, embodiment in a visceral and uncomfortable sense.

The storm  strikes us “To the skin,” says old King Lear as he wanders in the  night.  In Strange Weather in King Lear I explored those scenes as performing the boundary between body and environment in a particularly brutal way that might speak to an ecology of crisis.  As Irene soaked me to the skin, I wondered if I’d missed the ecstasy of storm in my emphasis on human weakness.  Michel Serres talks about living in “shipwreck alert,” ready for radical contingency and disorder.  There’s a pleasure — perhaps an inhuman one? — in that.

I’ve also been thinking about John Donne’s “The Storm,” which I spend some time with in my shipwreck book-in-progress.  Donne’s letter starts with a crisis of identity: “Thou which art I,” he writes to his friend, while also noting that the friend is “still thy selfe.”  The friends losing themselves in each other is a humanist trope, but I wonder if in this poem it anticipates the fraying of identity during the storm at sea —

But when I wakt, I saw, that I saw not.

I, and the Sunne, which should teach mee, had forgot

East, West, day, night, and I could onely say,

If the world had lasted, now it had been day.

“All things are one,” the poet says a little farther on, and he portrays the elemental choas as fracturing his sense of self.  But it’s not, I don’t think, the detached pleasure and intellectual phase-shifting of the 18c sublime; instead, it’s a deeply physical, even if intellectually abstracted, sense of being inside a disorderly and disordering world.  Having no way to get out of it or keep it from striking you.  And sucking in the strange beauty of it.

Conrad, as usual, knows just what to say about this sort of thing —

If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in storm.  (The Mirror of the Sea)