Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Short Beach in Storm

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I took this picture of my swimming beach a bit before high tide (11:05) on Sunday.

Here’s a YouTube video looking back toward the seawall that also gives a sense of it:

Short Beach in front of Pentacost

Some of the worst damage was from storm surge, down the street on Beckett Ave, where our neighbors’ garages, basements, and a couple of ill-parked cars (underwater in this photo) were washed out.  The storm hit us right at a 7′ spring tide, coinciding with the new moon.

 

Added: Video of us rescuing our dog, who ran into the still-surf covered road.

Global Irene

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Watching the weather like everyone else on the East coast makes me think about storms and wet globalism.  The storm that’s churning toward Short Beach right now is following the inescapable path of the North Atlantic Gyre, the clockwise rotating system of winds and currents that has been structuring transatlantic travel at least since Columbus rode it south and west from Spain.  (The Vikings rode a slightly different gyre, farther north.)

Like all Atlantic hurricanes, Irene started to form in the warm water off the west coast of Africa, slowly rode the North Equatorial current westward toward the Caribbean, and then built in size and power over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.  It’s following that raging river in the sea right now, but seems unlikely to turn east after Cape Hatteras.  That immense wind and current system moves storms the same way it moved conquistadors, rum runners, navies, and slave ships.

I recently read a good book on the history of human understandings of the Gyre, Stan Ulanski’s The Gulf Stream, about which I’ll blog a bit later.

But waiting today for the winds and rain, I’m thinking about the long human history of the Africa-Caribbean-North American coastline triangle.  It keeps on coming, directly at us.  History isn’t dead.  It’s flowing.

Breathing

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Coach Frank told me this morning, during a fairly awkward 3500-yd workout in the pool after my 10 days in Maine, that my freestyle breathing was a little off.  He wants me to angle my head farther forward, exhale sooner while my face is underwater, and breathe forward, while reaching down and out with my right arm.  Right now I’m a bit cock-eyed, with my left arm plunging ahead and my right never quite catching up.

He also said that, as I sit just under 8 weeks out from the Bermuda swim, that improving my breathing is the biggest change I can make in my swimming before the race.

Breathing in the water is the key point, the thing we mammals can’t really do that well, the thing that reminds us we’re not well-suited to the water.  Turning my head, and following it with the trunk of my body, every stroke or three impedes my forward thrust.  When it’s working, I get a decent side to side action along the keels of each side of my ribs.  But it doesn’t always work, esp when I’ve been out of the pool for a week or so.

Thinking hard about breathing while swimming reminds me of a great Ozzie novel, Tim Winton’s Breath (2008), set in the wild surf country of Western Australia.  It’s a rich, moving, intense story of physical danger and the lure of the ocean, following two friends, Picklet and Loonie, who compete at holding their breath underwater and then end up surfing remote breaks with sharks and a mysterious American surf-loner.  It takes an odd but moving turn toward other kinds of asphyxiation in its second half, in sexual games and, eventually, in Picklet’s adult career as an emergency medic.  An exhausted, deeply felt melancholy broods over the second half of the novel.

But at its center is a hymn to surfing as a way of being-in the world ocean that’s as gorgeous as any I’ve read —

I will always remember my first wave that morning.  The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub.  The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air.  How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears.  I leant across the wall of upstanding waters and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind.  The blur of spray.  The billion shards of light.  I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated.  And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.  (35)

Losing and not-quite recovering that youthful joy structures the novel, for Picklet and Loonie and for the American couple Sando and Eva.  The final image of the novel returns to Picklet as a 50-year old divorced surfer with slightly opaque relationships with his two daughters and his former self, but still aesthetically connected to moving salt water —

 My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed.  Out there I’m free.  I don’t require management.  They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances — who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.  (218)

It’s the sort of thing that makes an old swimmer like me want to take up surfing.

Maine 2011

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A few pictures from a great week at Labrador Pond, followed by a three-day excursion with just Ian to the Skowhegan Fair, Mt Desert Isle, and Great Gott Island.

The Big Thirst

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downloadGot this one as a gift from my awesome  bro-in-law Maury Sterling, who heard the author on an NPR story & thought he sounded like the Michael Pollan of water.  Sounds good to me, though perhaps a tall order.  Fishman’s got great material and a lively, slightly breathless, prose style, but not quite Pollan’s speculative range.  I do like the watery focus.

I especially like the second chapter, “The Secret Life of Water,” which reminds us that our planet’s water originally “came from an interstellar cloud somewhere in the Milky Way” (29), that liquid water is concentrated on the planet’s surface, except that roughly 5 times as much water as flows above ground is stored inside rocks within the planet , which perhaps explains the relative stability of the depth of the oceans (39), and that all the water on the planet has been circulating for a very long time — each glass of water we drink or drop of rain that hits our skin fell or flowed during the age of the dinosaurs, and much earlier also.  Water is also, as he reminds us, the essential chemical for life as we know it.

There’s some very nice reporting here from Australia, working through a brutal 10-year drought that’s drained the Murray River, and India, with perhaps the most dysfunctional domestic water policy of any large, growing-rich, nation.  Mike Young, who teaches at the U of Adelaide, has an elegant scheme for proper water use allocation: first, “maintenance water” (enough to keep the rivers flowing), next “critical human needs” (washing and drinking), then “high security water” (which is somewhat expensive), and last “low security water” (which is fairly cheap, but on dry years might not be plentiful).  He estimates that the first 2 categories will take 20% off the top in most years, then a price system will allocate the high v low security needs of agriculture, industry, etc (281-87).  It rationalizes the currently haphazard system: “Allocating the opportunities to use water gives us the quality of life we have” (287).

Thinking about fresh water, which is the bulk of water use policy questions, also leads Fishman to a striking aphorism

There is no global water crisis, because all water problems are local.

Simply b/c it’s so hard to move water, and so much water is lost in transit, this watershed-centric mantra suggests that we might need to push back against our globalist views.  I’m reminded of the sage of Middlebury’s vision of local energy and food economies.

I wonder if we might want to revise that aphorism a bit —

All fresh water is local; all salt water is global.

That doesn’t quite work for the fresh water moved by clouds and rainstorms, in which water molecules spend an average of 9 days in gaseous form, but it’s an interesting way to think about local/global issues.  Or maybe what Fishman means is that all water shortages are local — the only way to repair them is to clean & reuse the water that’s already near at hand.  The planet-wide circulation of salt water, which drove global commerce and settlement in the Age of Sail, doesn’t really speak to irrigation or “thirst,” except perhaps via big desalinization plants like the one Fishman describes in Perth.

Fishman also takes pains not to sound too gloomy — here he reminds me a bit of the “least depressing book on fishing” that came out last year — and he cites Las Vegas’s strict recycling system, recently constructed in the face of massive population growth and very little water, as a model.  Despite resistance to “toilet to tap” cleaning systems, he seems pretty convinced they are the wave of the future, as in a two-tier systems providing drinking water and also “purple-spigot” water for outdoor use.  Farmers especially needs to improve water policies, whether in the Murray Basin or the Imperial Valley of CA: “Agriculture needs a blue revolution to follow its green revolution” (303).

 

Poetics of Distortion (4 of 4)

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We see the world most often through a thin gaseous medium, and although air bends the color spectrum, it’s when light passes through water that we see the most spectacular affects.  Rainbows, partial-reflections, magnification, prism-bending: the things water does to light comprise a catalog of aesthetic shifts.  A poetics of the sea begins here, where lights bends and colors separate.

The point isn’t only to connect underwater vision with high modernist experimentation, though I’m very much looking forward to Margaret Cohen’s ongoing project connecting these two things.  It’s also, in historical periods that precede underwater photography, a way of coming to grips with a medium that occludes, distorts, radically shifts our terrestrial experience.  The ocean is the surface of the world, and the biosphere, to a rough degree of approximation — but for land creatures like humans, returning to an aqueous medium entails making everything visual unclear.  It’s a sea-change, but not always a pleasing one: the pearls that were his eyes are hard to see underwater.

Maybe that’s what captures the Homeric imagination about “wine-dark”: the epithet glimpses the sea at its least see-through, when light fades and the waters shift from translucent to light-stealing, as if a door into Mediterranean bottomlessness has suddenly shut.  It’s the shift from visible to opaque, from open to shut, that the poet captures.  Or tries to capture —

The sea is a forgetting,

a song, a lip;

the sea is a lover,

a faithful response to desire…

On dark shoulders

the waves are enjoying themselves.

Luis Cernuda (trans from Spanish by Brian Cole)

 

Literary and Maritime Craft (3 of 4)

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Odysseus the master-mariner was also a canny negotiator, clever talker, unscrupulous tactician, and hand-crafter of the Great Bed of marriage.  His heroism captures a deeply hand-ed, not to say handy, way of working with things in the world, an embodied and physical knowing-how as opposed to knowing-what.  The master of “cunning intelligence” and maritime know-how combines mental & physical practices, like  John Davis, inventor of the Davis staff, navigator, and mathematician.

The Greek word for Odysseus’s kind of knowledge is metis, and one translation of this term in English maritime literature is “craft.”  That’s Conrad’s favorite word for seamanship, as Margaret Cohen has explored nicely in her recent book.

Maritime literary studies can build on the basic homology between craft in the maritime context, a combination of knowledge, skill, performance, and social acumen, and craft in the context of poetic making and shaping.  Recent studies of embodied cognition have been pushing back against  hyper-intellectual and abstract culture of postmodern thought.  Connecting “the way of a ship” — the complex mixing of social, physical, intellectual, cultural, natural forces into a constantly-errant voyaging body — to the way(s) of a poem seems a worthwhile task.

I’m working on a version of this overlap in two chapters of the Shipwreck book on professional mariners and amateur poets Jeremy Roch and Edward Barlow.  It’ll also inform the lyric poetry chapter that begins with Donne’s “The Calm” and “The Storm.”  The Bookfish itself is a physical and poetic object.

In Shakespeare’s Ocean I said I wanted a poetics of the sea, and I still want it.  This will be one way to get there.  First a poetics of craft, then a poetics of swimming, then…