From left to right, that’s Mayor David Carmodel, Chris Hernandez, a kind of ambassador & jack-of-all-trades for Grand Isle, and a liaison to BP who goes by the nickname, “Moose.” Three very interesting folks, about whom I’ll post a bit more later.
They are standing on stage in the high school gym. The waterline after Katrina (or maybe it was Rita?) was up to about waist high on the stage.
I could say that I spent last week on the coastline of southern Louisiana, but being down there reminds me that there’s no line on that coast. Instead, we’ve got a watery borderlands into which everything solid slowly oozes. I don’t think of Auden as a poet of the American South, but his lines were rolling around in my head all week —
…the silent dissolution of the sea
Which misuses nothing because it values nothing.
The human struggle down there is all about “use” and “value” — the conflicting needs of the Mississippi, which wants to jump its banks & shift its mouth over to the Atchafalaya River Delta; the needs of the oil & gas industries, who service their off-shore rigs through Port Furchon, which will soon be an island; the needs of fisherman both commercial & sport; the needs of people whose land is slowly reverting to open water. It’s a landscape that looks like a seascape. 
More to come…
Here’s where I am this week: Cocodrie, LA. Down here at the end of the road where the land is dissolving into the sea…
The high tide was too tempting a few minutes after noon today, & I took a brisk plunge. Hard to swim very much when the water’s that cold. Will this be the last swim of the season? Or will the wet suit get me a birthday swim in early Nov?
At some point I’ll make time to post about Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno & the lure of the “last cigarette.”
I think I’ll get at least one more in.
I remember this time of year — that awkward pause between the last swims of fall and the closing-in of the season. I don’t really want to go to the pool, b/c that would be admitting that’s where I’ll be all winter, but I can’t easily get into the water. Olivia says she’s got a swim or two left in her this year, but the tide wasn’t right last weekend.
So I’m running instead, & left home this afternoon around 2 pm under bright sunshine. Heard a slow rippling grumble as I passed the post office. A sharp crack at Sweet Bears, our local coffee-shop-cum-ice-cream outfit. The sun blazed off the sound to my right & I thought I’d get my short run in before any storm came. The wind had been off the water when I’d left home.
The rain started as I was running down Double Beach Road toward the headquarters of CT Hospice (formerly the Double Beach Club & still a great place to swim — long story). The wind now came from the northwest, inland. It blew hard, making a cold, sharp staccato on my shoulders and back.
Hail mixed in as I turned into the Turtle Bay condo complex, & I started to think about the physical properties of water. All three states surrounded me: liquid rain, solid ice, and water vapor. Shakespeare talks about a “sea of air” somewhere, Timon I think. No need to get in the Sound to get wet today.
By the time I got home I was soaked, and the sun was shining. What was it Mark Twain said about the weather in CT?
Here’s a preview of the soon-to-be announced St. John’s English Deptartment Blog, for which most of the real work will be done by Tara Bradway and Danielle Lee.
Here’s a link to a great Shakespeare and Performance conference, to be held next fall at the rebuilt Blackfriars indoor theater in Staunton, VA. It’s a replica of the indoor theater in which The Tempest was staged, and the conference includes lots of performances as well.
There will be performances of The Tempest, Tamburlaine, Hamlet, Henry V, and The Importance of Being Earnest during the conference.
Jeffrey Cohen takes time out from his pending trip to Catalonia to respond to my repsonse to his beach thoughts, and say some nice things about my book.
I especially like the two-prongedness of his emphasis on beaches as spurs to physical activity (though he does not mention swimming), and also reminders of the relative weakness of the human bodies performing those activities —
If I say I find the sea calming in its agitation, that’s not because I sit at its edge with sun lotion and an alcoholic drink. For me the sea’s edge is for beachcombing, hiking, exploring. It’s a place of constant realization, of possible danger, of frequent reminders of death (empty shells, broken crabs, sea life suffocated in sand). The immensity of the sea reminds me of the small place of humans alongside its flow. Vastness gives perspective. That’s what I find calming: my own small agitations dissipate under those relentless waves, those sudden vistas and unexpected glimpses of life, all that noise so saturated with meaning it is chaos itself. Beautiful chaos, chaos as art.
I also like his thoughts on the “insinuating” quality of the ocean in shared human histories.
Today’s bloggy text comes from that medievalist exemplar of academic blogging, Jeffrey Cohen (inthemedievalmiddle.com ). He was posting while on family vacation in Bethany Beach last weekend —
And is there anything more beautiful than the noise of the water upon sand? I was reading Michel Serres’s short book Genesis just before I left, and I keep thinking about his obsession with the creative spur that marinal disorder yields. I believe it. There is nothing so calming as the ceaseless agitation of the sea.
It may seem churlish to pounce on such musings, & I certainly love a trip to the beach as much as anyone, but I’m struck by the closeness of “calming” to agitation and to Serres’s “creative spur.” Do academics go to the beach to work, or to forget? I sometimes joke that I’ve structured my whole recent academic focus so that every time I go to the beach — and I live at the beach, albeit not a surf beach — it’s a work trip for me. But is that b/c I try not to be too calm when I hear oceanic noises?
Three things seems possible. Maybe all three at once.
First, our 21c experience of beachy calm is historically contingent, a function of our culture’s loss of the sea’s full terror and danger, partly b/c of the marginalization of sea travel & also, perhaps, because so many more of us are taught to swim reasonably well than was historically the case. I certainly think the “meditation” that Ishmael claims 19c New Yorkers connect with the sea in Moby-Dick is a more fraught thing than today’s calm recreation.
Second, writerly types like to conceal disorderly thinking under a calm facade, so that the agitation of the surf covers up the ceaseless churn of (imagined? inchoate? real?) intellectual productivity. Perhaps this is a happy fiction?
Third, maybe it’s our separation from the natural world, not any potential union with it, that “spurs” human creative work. The distance between us & the sea motivates.
Is it a different love than we feel for tall mountains or wildflowers or Tintern Abbey? I think it is.