Steve Mentz

After watching & re-watching & thinking obsessively about Alice Oswald’s Oxford Professor of Poetry public lecture at the end of June, I rationed myself by slowly reading her most recent book. Nobody is a book-length “collage of stories” in dialogue with and from Homer’s Odyssey.

Oswald’s a genius of precision and vision, possibly the greatest poet working in English today. She’s a trained classicist, who in her book Memorial compressed the Iliad into just death-scenes. She’s also a superlative water-poet. Her Oxford lecture brought together three images of tears: a poem by Jericho Brown about Emmet Till’s mother, the moment in the Odyssey when the hero breaks down while being feasted by the Phaeacians, and John Donne’s “Valediction: Of Weeping.” Her stunning book-length poem Dart (2002) traces the West Country river through time and space.

Nobody is her ocean book, which makes it especially fascinating for an Ocean-thinker like me. I’m not sure after just one reading that I can respond cogently to the scope and dizzying range of the poem, which juxtaposes Odysseus with a nameless poet marooned on a solitary island after the Trojan war. (See Od 3.267). So instead I’ll cite some of the most gorgeous sea-phrases, in which the poet gets us a little closer to the oceanic heart of things —

what does it matter what he sings

there is all this water between us

and it is blind a kind of blind blue eye (3)

made of nothing and yet it will outlast everything

because it is deep it is a dead field fenceless

a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling

which in its patience always wears away the hard things (5)

How does it start the sea has endless beginnings (13)

even now a stranger is setting out

onto this disintegrating certainty this water

whatever it is whatever anything is

under these veils and veils of vision

which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken (15)

This is one kind of water when it hangs over him

a man is a nobody underneath a big wave (23)

…the pleasure-crinkled sea (31)

and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water

a morsel of ice a glamour of oil

and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal

and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings (32)

but the sea itself has no character just this horrible thirst

goes on creeping over stones and shrinking away (39)

tell me muse of this floating nobody (50)

it is human to have a name but you seem unsolid somehow

almost too porous to be human I would say

some repetition has eaten into you

as water eats into metal this is what happens

whenever love is mentioned your whole heart liquifies

and the character of water stares out through your eyes (63)

there seem to be two worlds one is water’s

which always finds its level one is love’s which doesn’t (69)

The final paragraphs of David Gange’s glorious historian’s adventure, The Frayed Atlantic Edge, arrive with startling clarity. We must change the way we think about nature, the sea, and “Romanticism.” Gange distinguishes his immersive practice from naive or sentimental forms of Romanticist thinking:

It isn’t romanticism that needs to be cleared from perspectives on these places, but the assumption that these communities somehow belong to the past, not the future, and are merely hazy places to escape to.

In rejecting Romanticist nostalgia, Gange asks instead for a future-oriented engagement with oceanic edges and humans that make their lives across watery borders:

…the journey had shown me that a romanticism which delves into the natures of humans and their fellow species, finding wonder while rooted in the real, might not be so naive after all.

That’s right, I thought to myself as I closed the book last night. That’s exactly right. The practice of immersive contact with humans and nonhumans, watery and windy spaces, generates in this book what we might call a material romanticism that connects the “wonder” with the “real.”

Thinking about that insight this morning has me recalling the risks and hazards of immersion, from physical danger to sentimental stories. Gange’s journey by kayak along the Atlantic coasts of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall ended with him fleeing the tourist mecca of St. Ives to spend a landless night keeping his kayak afloat at the Seven Stones, which appeared to his waterbound perspective as “less like a wall in front of waves and more like a knife blade thrust into ocean.” This starkly Romantic moment, in which the solitary boatsman holds himself upright all night through the painful exertions of tired arms, anticipates the book’s final turn toward a new romanticism of material connections and future orientations in the final pages.

Bruno Latour wrote several years ago that the “successor to the sublime is under construction” during our Anthropocene era. That project of assemblage or re-making seems to me the urgent task of our day. To replace the ego-dwarfing separations of Wordsworth and Shelley with something smaller, harder, more abrasive, directly material, and more obliquely emotional may enable a new poetics of the encounter for Anthropocene days.

[Note to self: extended quarantine might be a good time to sketch that long-deferred history of the literary sublime, from Longinus to Shakespeare & Milton, Melville & Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon & Toni Morrison… Sounds a bit like boring lit crit, as I churn out the list, but maybe…]

But now, before the Zooms of the day, a few thoughts on The Frayed Atlantic Edge, its insights and its joys.

Structure seems so essential: Gange’s book constructs itself through eleven mostly-solo journeys by kayak along the Atlantic shoreline from Shetland (July) to Cornwall (the following July). Each adventure combines paddling with reading, plus inspiring descriptions of local poets and communities. A few touchstones emerge along the rocky shorelines.

“If timelessness exists anywhere on earth, it is not in sight of the sea,” Gange writes while off the Orkney coast. Dynamism and physical experiences of change typify these violent spaces.

Another important argument asks us to re-orient the history of the British Isles away from inland cities and toward ocean-facing coasts. Drawing on the inspirational work of Barry Cunliffe, Gange emphasizes the ancient patterns of exchange that have dominated seaboard life since the Mesolithic period. He speculates that the dominance of collective agriculture and urban population centers have produced a series of myths through which “‘we Mesopotamians’ have constructed the separation of people and nature.” Against that fundamental agricultural split — on which point see also Tim Morton’s eco-theory and James Scott’s pre-history — Gange hazards that “Mesolithic seafarers … [may be] the only humans in the whole of time and space who are not the ‘anthro’ in Anthropocene.”

At the core of this book’s coast-centric vision is a rejection of what Gange calls the “thalassophobia” of modernity, especially urban modernity. The villain in Gange’s history is clearly the railroad, which re-orients local travel and commerce inland rather than along the crooked and inviting shoreline. To write ocean history, he suggests, is to write against grand narratives of conquering nature and toward what Rachel Carson calls a “sea ethic.”

I’ve been reading this book during prolonged swim-less quarantine. The local pools are all closed, and an especially chilly April and early May has kept me out of Long Island Sound’s gray-green embrace. Soon — maybe this weekend? — I’ll start back in with my daily high tide swims. Immersion will help me organize my summer, which was supposed to include swim trips to the Irish Sea among other places, into a more local swim-write-sleep-repeat pattern. I think a lot about the offshore perspective afforded by the blue humanities and its dream of immersion. Reading The Frayed Atlantic Edge during these dry quarantine weeks recalls the edge-feelings that writing at its best can pry out from subconscious and submarine depths, and the fraying pressure of material experience. Gange’s willingness to embody his academic practice, and also his precise, wistful, evocative prose provides a thrillingly immersive model in the wake of which many of us are likely to be paddling more a long time.

I miss the conversations.

With so much suffering surrounding us, including brutal news piling up every day from New York City especially, it feels selfish to admit feeling the loss of our yearly gathering of Shakespeareans. But I do feel it, mostly for the unexpected joys of ancillary conversations happened-upon, which are always the best things about SAA.

One year — maybe in the mid-aughts? — I happened to chat with Ewan Fernie in a hallway about the then-new Shakespeare Now! series. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to think that conversation at that moment — that random collision of two people from different continents, with all of our viral and human contact-traces also interacting (can you imagine?) changed my career and my life. I might well have written about oceans in any case, but the particular form of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean was enabled by the SAA-matrix and its connection-making swirl.

No such chance meetings this year on Zoom. But the Zoominar itself, ably organized and hosted by Nic Helms, with whom it was a real treat and pleasure to work as co-organizers of the Watery Thinking seminar, was both intense and enlightening. We got almost the full group together on-screen, wifi-ing ourselves in from locations that ranged from California to England and Ireland, spanning around eight hours of time zones, with only one fake-Zoom background that I noticed (of Lake Huron?), as well as an assortment of crowded bookshelves, blank walls, and other interior spaces. We even had a hearty crew of maybe a half-dozen auditors, some of whom lasted the full ninety minutes and hung around to ask excellent and pointed questions.

I often feel the in-person hours represent just a visible spout above the hidden cetacean bulk of most SAA seminars. This year’s Zoominar probably accentuated the split between what happened when we were all on screen together and what got asynchronously distributed through e-conversations, comments on papers, and a bunch of still-active threads on our seminar’s Google Classroom page. We missed being able to raise a glass or perhaps some fried seafood appetizers together, but perhaps in Austin there will be a reunion? That’s assuming, as I’m sadly not sure we can assume, that we’ll be ready, willing, or able to travel in spring 2021. The future is another country, as somebody said. (Zadie Smith, sez google? Is she quoting someone else?)

Each year when I’m blogging and flying home from SAA I try to think both locally about my own seminar or paper and also collectively about what the SAA is and may yet become. I don’t have as clear a snapshot this year of the SAA-in-progress. I know lots of people e-attended the brilliantly-named Alone Society Dance on Saturday, but I kept my now quarter-century long streak of non-dancing alive. I saw lots of notices of great-sounding seminars on social media, but didn’t get myself organized to audit any. For me, at least, #shax2020 dispersed itself between two poles: the close and intense intellectual work of the seminar, and the maximally distant blips of social media postings. Both were great, if a bit disconnected from each other.

Feeling nostalgic for my community, I’ve gone back this morning to re-read to the overlong blog posts I wrote during the post-SAA glow over the past few years. Here are some bloggy ruminations after our gathering in NOLA in 2016 for Shakespeare’s jazz funeral, in Atlanta in 2017 when our numbers were decimated by #shakenados, in Los Angeles in 2018 when I supplemented my seminar’s vision of community by swimming in the Pacific alongside a harbor seal, and last year in DC, which featured the debuts of the #SAAllies lanyards, the #shaxgrads group, and a searing #shaxfutures panel about professional marginality that I felt didn’t quite get the attention it deserved, though I very much include myself among the people who haven’t been generous enough to contingent faculty and other at-risk people in the academic world.

Thinking collectively about the past five years of SAAs, it seems to me that my experience, perhaps like that of many other SAA-ers, bears witness to the intertwining of personal academic and other obsessions — in my case, blue humanities, ecocrit, and seeking out open waters in which to swim as often as I can every time I travel — with a desire to think about SAA as a collective and an institution. Starting with a seminar I co-lead in 2016 with Matt Kozusko about “Shakespearean Communities,” continuing through helping initiate the #shaxfutures panel as part of the Program Committee for the Atlanta 2017 conference, co-leading another self-reflexive seminar with Carla Della Gatta in 2018 in Los Angeles about “Shakespeare, the SAA, and Us,” and last spring in DC picking up the bar tab for the first meeting of #shaxgrads, I feel as if I’ve been part of a growing desire among members to make the SAA more responsive to its own status as an institution and its duties to the least powerful and secure members.

I’m worried about how institutions will weather the current covid-storm. My first attention right now goes to my students, whose circumstances in and around New York City over the past month include harrowing stories of illness and loss of life. I’m concerned about how a tuition-dependent and lower income-serving University like my own St. John’s will manage the upcoming months and years. I’m worried about my local community in Connecticut, where our hospital resources are massively under strain. But I think it’s also worth thinking about SAA, and similar scholarly societies, as we consider what will last and what must change in these disorienting times.

I won’t presume to speculate, or to give unsolicited advice to the SAA leadership, whose judgement I trust and dedication to the association I recognize. But I hope that as we move forward, we keep foremost in our minds ways that the SAA and its membership can support, value, and advance the paths forward of those in our communities who most need our help.

[Guest Post by Lowell Duckert, commenting on the “Forms of Water” group of papers]

First, a note for everyone: I hope you’re doing well in your respective shelters,both physically and mentally. Second: thank you.Meditating on your “forms of water” proved to be the perfect exercise for my cooped-up mind. To my “Flake,” I add:

[Bodies:] Gwilym Jones, “‘As you to water would’: Staging Wet Bodies”

[Memories:] Bill Kerwin, “River Memory”

[Recipes:] Rob Wakeman, “Thinking Through Biodiversity on the River Trent”

An underlying current in my “Forms of Water Group” was a mutual affinity for incomplete forms. “Form,” as we see it, is a slippery thing—completion, an illusion. Water’s states do not shift, Proteus-like, from one fully-defined state (solid, liquid, gas) to another. Flux is part of the de- and re-formation of watery things: it’s built in to the wetware, and it’s not finished working.

I point out that the principle behind a snowflake’s six-sided symmetry remains a secret to this day. To early modern observers like Olaus Magnus and Frederick Martens, this tiny star-shape possessed a magical ability to radiate (“flake” out) into assemblages of human and nonhuman forms, seemingly without end. This cold type of cogitation (“flake-thinking”) could come in handy at the moment: “The radiating quality of the snowflake models the sort of interdisciplinary inquisitiveness necessary for addressing today’s most pressing problems, inspiring collaborations that may diverge into more-than-human modes of thinking.

Jones leaves us gazing into the eyes of wet onstage bodies in Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge’s A Looking-Glass for London and England. Jonah and the shipwrecked sailors – thinking themselves drowned – experience the feeling of damnation and salvation at once, and the resulting sense of survivor’s guilt is unbearable for the sunken prophet. Jonah bids his eyes, “Weep so for grief, as you to water would.” “Would” a spectator of drowned worlds do the same?  When “the organ of perception gives way to the organ of emotion,” as Jones puts it, we realize that grief is unquantifiable—that a liquifying sphere could have no bottom.

Kerwin develops his notion of “river memory” – “a kind of distributed cognition . . . that falls largely into the control of the non-human world” – from (“Watery”) Michael Drayton’s chorographical poem, Poly-Olbion. Personification, however, resists siding with the human; his anthropomorphism is more expansive than that. But since Drayton “does not” – cannot – “give us the non-human world completely,” the rivers resist complete access. The nymph Sabrina/River Severn, the poem states, “[s]tarts, tosses, tumbles, strikes, turnes, touses, spurnes and spraules, / Casting with furious lims her holders to the walles.” Poetic lines can only follow a riverbank so far, and only if the water stays its course—what’s memorable (now), may swiftly be washed from the “wall[e].”

Finally, the “last storgon” in the River Trent: a waterway named for the “thirty” species of fish that were in decline (or absent altogether) in already in the seventeenth century. River-to-table recipes, according to Wakeman, supplied a fleeting sensation of ecological security. Listing serves a valuable function; it “evidences a desire for a structured wholeness in a world that is receding, just as the recipe books long for the perfect recipe that will never be achieved.” And yet, he maintains, the bound recipe book managed to (literally) incorporate newness in the face of loss: “the acentric organization of the manuscript household recipe book – with its many hands, with its many stops and starts, its many blank pages – imagines a different kind of ecology, a world of continuous revision and metamorphosis, a world without finality. Contingency is spelled out on the open page.

Dwelling on water’s protean forms – crystal (flake), eyeball (body), river (memory), food (recipe) – only deepens our awareness of its mutability. These are all shapes that refuse to finish their trans-formations. But shiftiness, as these papers suggest, should also be an invitation – as well as an imperative – to create (to branch, emote, remember, cook). I look forward to Zoom time; until then, I would like us to focus on a single thought:

As a substance whose form chronically escapes delimitation, what forms of ecological thinking does water not only sponsor, but also demand?

[Guest Post by Nic Helms, Co-Neptune of the “Watery Thinking” Seminar]

It’s time for SAA 2020! It’s time for “Watery Thinking”!

At least, insofar as time still exists in the Time of COVID-19. It’s certainly more fluid, less about discrete chunks of time and more about flow. The Shakespeare Association of American 2020 conference has of course been canceled due to the ongoing pandemic. The work of SAA members continues, not in any normal way, but in fits and spurts, seeping through the cracks in between masked trips to the grocery store and far too many hours in Zoom meetings. Speaking as a current renewable-contract Instructor, for many of us that has always been where research happens: not in the Sea of Productivity, but in the underground streams, the culverts, the forgotten wells of stolen time.

Here’s our plan going forth. Months ago, we divided our seminar members up into the following groups:

Drowning On Stage

• Lianne Habinek, “Ophelia with Spectator”
• Tony Perrello, “Monsters of the Deep”
• McKenna Rose “Muddy Waters”
• Myra Wright, “Sink or Swim”

Fluid Cognition

• Benjamin Bertram, “Richard’s Furnace-Burning Heart”
• Andrew S. Brown, “Sweet Waters”
• Douglas Clark, “Water is Best?: Cognitive Flux in Shakespeare”

Forms of Water

• Lowell Duckert, “Flake”
• Gwilym Jones, “As you to water would”
• Bill Kerwin, “River Memory”
• Rob Wakeman, “Biodiversity in the River Trent”

Submersive Tendencies

• Christopher Holmes, “Prospero’s B(ark)”
• Lyn Tribble, “An Alacrity in Sinking”
• Ben VanWagoner, “Capillary Imagination”

Our seminar members have shared their small group responses with the entire seminar as a way to get discussion flowing asynchronously on our Google Classroom page. In the next few days (and perhaps weeks, as time runs), we’ll hold much of our conversation online in that space. Due to the in-progress nature of much of our written work, this space will only be open to seminar members.

On Friday, April 17th, from 1:00 to 2:15 PM EDT, we’ll hold a synchronous Zoom session to approximate what would no doubt have been a lively conversation in Denver! This session will be open to auditors. Rather than post a public link, however, we’re asking that interested auditors RSVP by email to myself (nicholashelms@gmail.com) or Steve (mentzs@stjohns.edu). The first sixty minutes of the meeting time will be devoted to the seminar members and auditors will remain muted. The last fifteen minutes of our time will be open to auditor questions. We’ll use the “raise hand” feature of Zoom to organize the Q&A.

If you can scoop enough time into your cupped hands, join us to discuss wet environs and wetter minds!

What can you send to a beautiful baby boy who’s three thousand miles away during a global lockdown?

Poetry! What else?

This past Sunday 3/31/20, my nephew Ford Bryant Sterling was born in Los Angeles. Thanks to the kindness and dedication of the health care workers at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, he is home now with his parents in North Hollywood. The way things are looking, it’ll be some time before I can go see him in person.

Last night, after hardly being able to read at all during the first several weeks of our Covid-frozentime, I was thinking about Baby Ford when I picked a new book off the disorganized pile at my bedside: Habitat Threshold, the latest book of poetry by the brilliant Craig Santos Perez. Eco-poetry and sea lyrics, these poems narrate the story of Perez’s family in Hawai’i, his native Guam, and California. A touching cover photograph shows the poet’s father dipping his granddaughter’s feet in gentle surf. The poems explore bringing new life into a broken world, the intersections between children and climate change, and the suturing power of the World Ocean.

I’ve contacted the independent publisher Omnidawn to order a copy to be sent to Baby Ford, c/o his parents, who will need to hang on to it for him until he learns to read. It’s a small gift, and one that Ford won’t be able to understand for years. But these poems seem the right present to offer to this new presence in the world.

Habitat Threshold combines a bleak and accurate view of eco-crisis and the polluted ocean with the salty blue taste of hope. Its images of Perez and his family are heartening in this dark time. They make me think of the world we are making and breaking and passing on to our children.

My favorite line in the whole book might be from the lovely poem “Echolocation,” which concludes that “love is our wildest / oceanic instinct.”

The book overflows with witty pastiches, including Wallace Stevens’s thirteen blackbirds reprised as melting glaciers and William Carlos Williams’s cold plums recast as Impossible burgers. The poem “Love in a Time of Climate Change” channels Neruda rather than Garcia Marquez, reframing the great Chilean writer into eco-immortality, “in the nitrogen-rich compost of our embrace.”

Two structuring spines of the collection appear in the longer poems “Chanting the Waters” and “Praise Song for Oceania.” The first, dedicated to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and “water protectors everywhere,” sprawls out water’s physical meanings — our planet is 70 percent water, our skin is 60 percent water, our eyes are 95 percent water, “because mountains embrace ocean into blessings of rain” — that echo like a home-marking drum.

The closing poem, “Praise Song for Oceania,” has already been turned into a gorgeous and lyrical short film, created by Hawaiian filmmaker Justyn Ah Chong. Dedicated to World Oceans Day (June 8), the poem gathers together so much of what draws us to the great waters, what collects us near tidepools and beaches, and what resists our final knowing. “praise your capacity for birth,” says the poem to the Ocean and to Baby Ford. “praise your capacity to remember,” it says to me and to Baby Ford’s scattered relations. “praise your capacity for communion,” to us all, separated as we are today.

The Praise Song even includes a generous nod toward the idea that when we look at the Ocean we should “praise your blue humanities.” This line recasts the phrase that many people, including me, use as a description of a group of scholars & writers & teachers. In Perez’s song, the blue humanities swim outside academic and intellectual cultures to become the plural humanizing features of the World Ocean itself, insinuating its green-blue fingers into our minds & onto our bodies.

So, with thanks to the poet and the many tentacles of the World Ocean, from the cold gritty beach down the street from my house in Connecticut to the wide shores of Santa Monica and Venice near Ford’s home in Los Angeles to the warm waters where Craig Santos Perez dips his daughter’s toes in the Pacific in Hawai’i, these poems are my gift in absentia to Baby Ford, newly arrived in this moment of crisis in our world.

Live happy in this habitat, little one. I look forward to seeing you someday soon!

Music filled my socially-distanced hours yesterday, which was good. Two very different songs, both from aging masters who’ve been crooning a soundtrack to my life for decades. They could not have been more different.

Bob Dylan’s new seventeen-minutes of melancholy and bitter wistfulness has a title from Hamlet, “Murder Most Foul.” It circles around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and meanders with typical Bob-mania into, through, and around a psychohistory of America in rhymed couplets that drop one after the other, sometimes doggerel but at other times hitting true, with Dylan’s distinctive off-kilter slice —

The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son
The age of the Antichrist has only begun.”
Air Force One coming in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at 2:38
Let me know when you decide to thrown in the towel
It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul

The other song I listened to a few times yesterday turns out, upon inspection, to be a 2019 recording of Robbie Robertson, Ringo Starr, and an all-star international cast performing a gorgeous, uplifting rendition of The Band’s old standard, “The Weight.”

Which one’s the right one to put on repeat right now?

It’s hard not to love the Robertson/Starr ensemble’s gorgeousness, put together by Playing for Change, an international collaboration dedicated to using music to advocate for peace. The YouTube splices together musicians from many beautiful places in the world, from Jamaica to Los Angeles to Africa, Bahrain, and a close-up of what looks like my long-ago haunts of Venice Beach in California. It’s a wonderfully uplifting recanting of this great old tune, and I have every intention of listening to it many more times. I might even chase down each of the individual artists.

Dylan’s project is harsher and darker. Inhabiting the role of JFK himself, he ventriloquizes something like the shock of the modern. He name-checks lots of old time rockers and pop stars, from the Kingston Trio to The Eagles, Jelly Roll Morton, and “the great Bud Powell.” His gravel-voice sounds sad, smooth, nostalgic. He tells an old story, about possible futures lost:

Tommy, can you hear me? I’m the Acid Queen

I’m riding in a long, black limousine

Riding in the backseat next to my wife

Heading straight on into the afterlife

I’ve been through the 17 minutes about a half-dozen times now. My first thought was that the song was a semi-reprise or extension of his great song “Tempest,” from his 2012 album of the same name, which narrated a fantasia of the sinking of the Titanic in thirteen minutes of dirge-like waltz. It’s an old habit or maybe intentional practice of Bob’s to leave some songs off an album, including great songs like “Caribbean Wind” (left off Shot of Love) and “Blind Willie McTell” (left off Infidels).

The timing seems acute. “Murder Most Foul” pours into our ears a dark vision of a crisis past, dropped by our living Nobelista during a present crisis. Is November 1963 when it all started to go sideways? The song concludes with a long, patient, insistant litany of songs to play, from “Misty” and “Old Devil Moon” to, last of all, “Murder Most Foul” itself. Are we meant to find the melancholy sad clarity that sometimes can beaccompanied by art, a way of looking at the nightmares of history without looking away. It’s a hard vision that the singer puts in front of us:

Freedom, oh freedom. Freedom from need
I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free

There’s also a lot of Shakespeare to chew on, from the title, which quotes the Ghost of the dead King (Hamlet 1.5) to call outs to both “Merchant of Venice” and “Lady Macbeth.” Should this go on my summer syllabus? If my course runs?

There’s an ice-hard clarity and even just a glimmer of joy in full-throated tragedy, in leaning in to the crisis and refusing to avert your eyes. Each time I listen to Bob’s latest, it sounds warmer, more human, more capacious. It’s good to hear from our artists in dark times.

“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl

Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul.

My mostly-virtual, socially distanced world these days finds me surrounded by books and words on screens. Few phrases have rolled off more typing-fingers than variations on the title of Love in the Time of Cholera, the Columbian Nobelista Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great novel, published in Spanish in 1985. I pulled my 1988 Knopf hardback off my shelf last night to read and think about the phrase that’s been sloshing through my mind and my email inbox. What does cholera have to do with love? What does time have to do with either?

This lush, gorgeous, sentimental novel is also one of very few that I can remember rushing out to buy after reading a newspaper review. As a junior English major at the time, I remember picking up the New York Times on April 10, 1988, where I saw my literary hero Thomas Pynchon, who I’d worshipped since high school, gushing about the latest novel by the Latin American master I’d encountered more recently. Returning to that review now, I remember two passages in particular. In one quotation, Pynchon and Gabo together perhaps anticipated all my decades-later scholarship in the blue humanities about humans and bodies of water. When the hero protests that he cannot do his job as river navigator because he only thinks about love, his wise uncle replies, “The problem is, without river navigation, there is no love.” Love and Navigation — have I found a title for my next book?

And, at the review’s end, Pynchon rhapsodizes the novel’s final chapter:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs ”Love in the Time of Cholera,” this shining and heartbreaking novel.

The rhythms of that final chapter, re-read in our plague-y present, feel like a re-imagining of time, as if the true subject of Gabo’s late masterwork is not just love and cholera, whose symptoms the novel draws together, but time, itself, “this river we all know,” as Pynchon calls it. Time’s a strange place now, under semi-quarantine, cut off from other people. It’s worth asking this novel about it.

So — a few ideas about time, the river, infectious diseases, and love, as these things call to me from the young man who was first transfixed by this novel in the spring of 1988, and whose heart still moves with it in these dark spring months of 2020. It’s a story of love against time, and also, to my surprise, a story about environmental devastation, and about the physical labor of writing.

Love against time: Throughout the novel, the hero-lover Florentino keeps track of the exact time elapsed since his love Fermina Daza rejected him when they were young. The final tally, on the book’s last page, is “fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights” (348). Some kinds of time crave measurement. There’s something mad about Florentino’s precision.

The broken river: When Florentino and Fermina in the final chapter at last cruise up the river together on one of Florentino’s steamers, the riverboat operator is shocked to witness the destruction his boats, foraging ashore for wood, has visited on the environment: “Captain Samaritano explained to them how fifty years of uncontrolled deforestation had destroyed the river: the boilers of the riverboats had consumed the thick forest of colossal trees” (331). I didn’t know what the environmental humanities were when I read this book in 1988 — but I now see love’s manic cost, and the bitter price of modernity, in those denuded riverbanks.

The power of quarantine: When Florentino and Fermina, illicit lovers at an embarrassingly old age, seek to conceal their affair from passengers who want to board the steamer, they hide themselves under the yellow flag of cholera. “The ship would be quarantined,” they conspire with the Captain, “it would hoist the yellow flag and sail in a state of emergency” (342). The novel plays throughout with the interchangeable symptoms of love and cholera: fever, isolation, misery. In the end love hides itself under fever’s flag.

Having arrived downriver, trying to conceal his false yellow flag from the harbormaster, the Captain snipes at Florentino: “And how long do you think we can keep up this goddam coming and going?” He describes a time of iteration, “coming and going,” step by step, moment to moment. It reminds me of today’s inside-time. What is our steamship’s destination?

The lover has his answer ready: “Forever” (348).

I can still dimly remember what it felt like to be 20-ish years old and reading for the first time that dazzling declaration. I remember shutting the book and rushing to stare out my window at that twentieth-century spring day. (I think I remember finishing the novel for the first time during a sunny afternoon, looking out my dorm room window at flowering trees. But maybe I’m imagining that?) The novel wears its lovesickness on its sleeve, and states outright on the last page that “it is life, more than death, that has no limits” (348). I feel that power still today.

But today, in the shadow of a new infection, with three more decades behind me and in unsettled times, I think also about the connection between Florentino’s ruthless love and the desecration of the riverbanks. I think about how counting the days, months, weeks might mean missing something about time’s river, and about other rivers. I think about Shakespeare, with whose works I was (briefly) bored as an undergrad: “Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come” (Sonnet 116). I think about multiple times crossing and mingling: Florentino’s calendar, the river’s downstream flow, the Captain’s “goddam coming and going,” today’s confined hours of corona-quarantine, the wayward and love-filled years that have passed beneath the keel of my own boat from then-student to now-professor. I think about times of cholera, of anger and fragility, about invisible forces in the air.

When I re-opened this novel after many years that it sat closed on bookshelves in different apartments and houses, I remembered the boat trip, and the incandescent final lines. What I’d forgotten about the close of the novel was the epistolary exchange. To re-start his courtship, after Fermina Daza’s judge-husband dies during an extraordinary scene involving a tree and a parrot (which really you might want to read for yourself), Florentino teaches himself to type so that he can correspond with Fermina without the evidence of handwriting. He builds or rebuilds love through one-finger typing, the mechanical muse of the modern writer.

I am thinking now about how we are writing today in covid isolation, as I read about Florentino’s old man’s love letters, laboriously typed on a machine he was just learning to use. I think about Thomas Pynchon, who was more or less in hiding from literary fame when he wrote that review in 1988, and who remains mostly hidden today, somewhere in virus-filled Manhattan, after having published a few more brilliant novels of his own. I am thinking about my students, separated in their homes and their disrupted lives, communicating with me through fingers-on-keyboard language and glitchy video-chat, making sense of poetry and catastrophe and Othello and literary theory though the awkward, hard to use, ungainly tools of language and time.

Writing opens the heart and the mind, in times of cholera and in this time of COVID-19.

Be well, everyone!

About halfway through the glorious romp of Ethan Lipton’s “Tumacho,” which I saw for the third time last Saturday night amid the drip, drip of quarantine notices and university closings, the beleaguered citizens of the “one horse town, where the horse broke down” ask for a little help. The town Doctor’s hands are covered in blood, the saloon is empty, the last living dog turns out to be a coyote, and an ancient demon-spirit of mayhem may have just taken over the body of the last decent person in town. They all sing together, in harmony —

We need a break,

Give us a break!

Simple stuff, but it sounded just right.

It’s not easy to put my finger on what I love so much about this play. I first saw it back in the summer of 2016 during its early workshop, at which point I deemed it a “hopalong Oresteia” that joked and sang against the gun-worship so central to ideas about the American West. That still seems right, and I might broaden my sense of the play now to suggest that the story of a town confronting its gunslinger demon might even parallel another revenge tragedy that does not believe in revenge that’s been playing in New York this month. (I guess the great Irish production of Hamlet starring Ruth Negga has just closed.)

Tumacho, unlike Hamlet, rolls out a joke a minute, interspersed with easy-listenin’ ballads and sentimental songs by a wondrously balanced cast including Hamilton-star Phillipa Soo in the lead role as Catalina Vucovich-Rio Lobos, a female gunfighter who transforms herself from revenge-seeker to village redeemer, with a few other stops along the way. The songs bring out Ethan Lipton’s distinctive combination of goofy earnestness and emotional heft. When Catalina faces a gunfighter whose son she has accidentally shot, his warbling song confronts her with half-baby talk, half profundity:

Rub your tummy

Pat your head,

There can be no justice for the dead.

I’ve been watching Ethan Lipton’s plays and songs since the 1990s, when he was part of a theater troupe in Los Angeles with my brother in law. More recently in New York, his No Place to Go and The Outer Space have been among my favorite things to see at Joe’s Pub. “Tumacho” shifts the genre from lounge-singer fantasia to a sendup of Western tropes and cowboy tunes. I don’t think I was the only old guy in the audience who hummed along with Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs when it played over the sound system as we too our seats!

Art’s hard in the best of times, to say nothing of today’s anxiety-inducing world of viral infections and institutional fragility. “Tumacho” sings out, in one of our nation’s basic idioms, a song of solidarity, humor, loss, and unexpected joy. These are good things to remember in viral times.

Go see it during the next two weeks, even if we’re supposed to stay away from large gatherings. The Connelly Theater on Avenue B is cozy and not too crowded. Plus the patrons don’t seem to mind if you work your way all the way through the “Out, damned spot” speech while washing your hands!

Two more weeks!

[Guest Post from Douglas Clark]

[Written on a non-striking day from the United Kingdom]

Steve and Nicholas asked the participants of the ‘Watery Thinking’ seminar to explore the role that water ‘as a metaphor and feature of the environment’ took in early modern representations of cognition.[1] This stimulus offered an opportunity for the group to blend together scholarship from cognitive studies and the blue, or oceanic, humanities, to refine or perhaps redefine our understanding of period’s literature. Lyn Tribble’s previous blog post encouraged us as a group to reflect on the staging of immersion in early modern drama, and the broader interplay of ‘imagination, physiology, skill and affect’ in literary ‘waterscapes’.[2] The papers in the ‘Fluid Cognition’ sub-group address the presence of hydrological thinking in early modern historical writing and the dramatic presentation of watery ‘perturbations of the minde’ in Shakespeare’s canon.[3] 

Andrew Brown’s paper on ‘Memory, Loss, and Infrastructural Thinking in Early Modern Texts’ examines John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) and Marc Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609). Brown neatly demonstrates how the ‘extraction and management’ (page 2) of water is used in these texts to memorialise London’s past, and to frame the interaction between French colonists and their attempted mastery over the environment of Nova Scotia. Fresh emphasis is placed on the role that subterranean waterflows take as active agents in the reformation of London’s environment, in addition to the potential connections that may be made between the ‘aquatic entertainment[s]’ (page 8) produced in early seventeenth-century London and the French colony of Port-Royal. Attending to the shifting flow of waters in England and the new world may illuminate how key ‘infrastructural thinking’ (page 11) was to the early modern civic and colonial imagination. Taking Brown’s thesis into account, I wonder what further work needs to be done to address the importance of hydrological thinking in early modern European historiography and literature. Brown’s work opens up some exciting routes for future research to take.

Benjamin Bertram’s paper, on the other hand, addresses a classic problem associated with character studies of early modern drama: how should we approach claims for the presence of psychological realism in Shakespeare’s canon, and what place should the pursuit of identifying the genesis of “authentic” modes of subjectivity take in the field’s development? Bertram places emphasis on the humoral and elemental construction of Richard of Gloucester’s dramatic subjectivity through the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with the aim to ‘rethink the human-centered narratives of Richard’s development’ (page 12) in line with an ecological understanding of emotional turmoil. Combining Bertram’s approach with the scholarship already completed on grief, anger, and emotional affect could be profitable.[4] Bertram’s stimulating reappraisal of Richard’s psychogenesis also chimes well with the resurgence of critical interest in character studies, and the difficulties associated with appraising the psychological complexity of dramatic personae.[5] Bertram’s work shows how the artifice of interiority presented in dramatic works may be further understood by attending to the liquid imagery associated with the presentation of self-knowledge.

My own paper addresses the terms that we use, and that early modern writers used, to describe and define mental activity. I suggest that we may re-orientate the way we understand the texts of the period by attending to the definition that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers made between cogitation and cognition. Take John Florio’s entry for these terms in his A World of Wordes (1598) for instance: ‘Cogitatione, musing, thinking,cogitation … Cognitione, an acknowledgement, a recognison.’[6] This kind of distinction between ‘cogitation’ as ‘thinking’ and ‘cognition’ as the ‘recognison’ of knowledge is found in a range of early modern works. My paper attends to the place that concepts of cogitation take in early modern philological and philosophical texts, as a way to appraise incidents of mental disturbance and mind travel that centre around watery environments in Cymbeline and Merchant of Venice. Ultimately, I query what new directions may we take in our examination of the history of the mind by examining the cogitative principles of early modern writing.

All three papers in this sub-group address the preoccupation that early modern texts had with mental, corporeal, and environment disturbances caused by the flow and flux of water. I hope that this group’s efforts help the seminar as a whole to think more fluidly about the place that watery modes of cognition took in the literature of the period.

---

[1] See the entry for Seminar 58: http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-meetings/seminars-and-workshops-2/.

[2] See ‘Watery Thinking 2: Submersive Tendencies’: https://stevementz.com/watery-thinking-2-submersive-tendencies/.

[3] James Perrott, The First Part of the Consideration of Humane Condition (Oxford: 1600), sig. G3^v.

[4] See: Elizabeth Hodgson, Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008).

[5] Nicholas R. Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (London: Palgrave, 2019); Jelena Marelj, Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

[6] John Florio, A VVorlde of Wordes (London, 1598), sig. G2^v.