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.
I used this image in my talk at Farleigh Dickinson today to talk about the purportedly living forest of Birnam Wood in Macbeth and, by extension, the dream of a green pastoral ecology — a place of natural stability and sustainability that can serve as a kind of model for human practices.I then went on to talk about a “blue” or oceanic ecology based on change & disorder, using this image 
As I was talking about these two visions of nature in the play, I admitted that they are caricatures or cartoons, but I also got a great question, after the talk, from a grizzly old guy who, apparently, hadn’t wanted to raise his hand in the full Q&A.
“I live in the woods,” he said. “It looks nothing like that picture. The woods are messy, chaotic, with things falling & breaking & dying everywhere you look. That picture isn’t a real woods. It’s something somebody planted.”
Sounds right to me. The green world, the green pastoral utopia that will heal all our ills, is a fantasy projection.
I suppose that implies that the blue world is too.
As a quasi-reply to my first batch of student papers, here’s an offering of my own, a few paragraphs out of an oceanic reading of Macbeth that I’ve just finished. This version will be published in a Forum on “Shakespeare and Ecology” next year in *Shakespeare Studies*. I’ll be giving a slightly different oral version atthe Annual Shakespeare Colloquium at Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, this Saturday at 1 pm. Come by if you’re in the area! It’s free & open to the public.
The ecological humanities have been drawn to Shakespeare in part because he’s the biggest fish in the Anglophone literary sea, but also because his long and living stage history provides tangible evidence of canonical texts engaging contemporary dilemmas. The current surge of ecocritical Shakespeare, however, risks seeing only the happier side of nature, a beach where the weather is always good. Sustained attention to the Shakespeare’s “green” should not occlude his dramatization of a harsher “blue ecology” that locates itself not in cultured pastures or even marginal forests but in the deep sea. Shakespeare’s literary works can’t get us all the way into this massive blue body – the most basic feature of the world ocean is that humans don’t live there – but they can serve as a fictive beach house, providing us with a beguiling window onto an inhuman space. The view from Shakespeare’s beach house shows the void next to which we perch our fragile bodies. It locates us right at the boundary which we can only temporarily cross. Like other beach houses, it’s vulnerable to coastal storms, and probably built on sand. It’s a place to which we return because of (not in spite of) the disorder in front of it.
Shakespeare’s dramatization of this inhuman, oceanic ecology appears in two intertwined tropes in Macbeth. The play’s “green” ecology imagines Scotland as a troubled agricultural land, husbanded by King Duncan, violated by the Macbeths, and eventually renewed by Malcolm. Against this now almost-traditional eco-reading, a “blue” ecological countercurrent exposes the play’s fascination with the inhospitable ocean. References to the sea teem in this land-locked drama. The bloody Captain analogizes battle to “shipwracking storms” (1.2.26); the Weird Sisters assail the merchant ship Tiger (1.3.7-26); and Macbeth himself rejects the “sure and firm-set earth” (2.1.57) for “multitudinous seas” (2.2.66). Even Lady Macbeth’s fantasy that water can wash away murder represents a fervent plea that the liquid element might serve human purposes. The play’s blue ecology combines the Weird Sisters’ inhuman perspective with the topos of the mind-stretching sea, which, as Auden observes, “misuses nothing because it values nothing.” The green and blue in Macbeth represent different visions of how humans live in the natural world, with green sustainability first displaced by Macbeth’s oceanic ambitions and then finally re-asserting itself after the tyrant’s death. For twenty-first century Shakespeareans living in an increasingly oceanic and disorderly world – the summer of this essay was the summer of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – supplementing green narratives with blue incursions feels urgent.
I wrote, with a little help from Shakespeare & Melville, about the sunken treasure that’s at the bottom of all of our literary excursions in Shakespeare’s Ocean —
They wink up at us from the depths, skulls with be-gemmed eye-sockets, wedges of gold, encrusted anchors, heaps of pearl. Fish-gnawed men and what’s become of a thousand fearful wracks. Treasures of the slimy bottom. Captives of the envious flood. What we’re looking for.
I’ve been thinking about those slimy treasures while reading my students’ essays this week.
The hardest thing about literary & literary-critical writing in any form — and I’m pleased to see a very wide formal range in these papers, from pedagogical plans to theatrical outlines, intertextual readings, and archival historicism — is trying to make sure you get down to some real and meaningful bottom, even while knowing you’re not likely to reach firm ground. Often in reading these papers, which are of course just early drafts or hints of what’s to come, I wanted you to dive deeper, to press harder, & to make a lunge at the analytical or pedagogical or creative pay-off that seemed just out of reach. There’s a certain recklessness and risk in literary writing — there’s no real way to be sure of what Shakespeare meant, at this historical remove, just as there’s no real way to be “sure” of any literary text. I’d like to see more risk-taking, and more self-aware speculation about risks & rewards, in the final versions of these papers.
I’m looking for papers & projects that get us a little bit closer to that ungraspable bottom & its glittering treasures. But I should remember, as I also wrote
It’s to the bottom of Shakespeare’s ocean that this book takes you, except for one thing: we never get to the bottom.
I’m looking forward to reading your short papers, which should start rolling into my email inbox any hour now. As we all get ready for our next meeting, on Oct 19, here’s a link to our special guest Derek Owens’s 2001 book, *Composition and Sustainability*. The whole text is online. Read as much as you like, but at least the preface plus the first & last chapters. (That’s a good model for dipping into a scholarly book, btw — first chapter, then the last, then see what you need from the middle.)