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| south coast of Maine, looking towards Wells |
I recently posted the opening to my short piece for Steve Mentz's forthcoming collection Oceanic New York. Yesterday Jonathan posted his utterly beautiful contribution to the same project. I cursed him on Facebook for scooping me on bibliography (though that also allowed me to cut some of mine) and for creating something much better than I have.
Oh well. It stinks to have a brilliant colleague.
Below, please find the draft of the rest of my piece. I'm not 100% happy with it yet, but it's getting there. You'll notice I tried to give an undulating quality through the frequent repetition of a few key terms, and the bobbing along the surface of some key oceanic texts ...
II. Confluence
“I say to you, Put wax in your ears rather against
the hungry sea / it is not our home!”[i]
When currents convey storms and savage waves as well as ships and savage tropes,
the sea devours. Abyssal depths are silence and forgetting. Of marine hazard
Steve Mentz writes eloquently:
[The sea] is the place on earth that remains
inimical to human life … The most fundamental feature of the ocean, for poets,
scientists, fishermen, and swimmers alike, is neither its immutable form nor
its vastness but its inhospitality.[ii]
The
sea is hostile to human life, and yet (hazardous provision and sublime excess)
a trigger to human thriving. No less spurred to poetry than William Carlos
Williams, Mentz limns his fine description of saltwater inhospitality with the
quiet work of those who take from the hungry deep their sustenance, “poets,
scientists, fishermen, and swimmers.” The ocean wrecks, engulfs, pulls to cold
oblivion. To navigate you must like the sailors who companioned Odysseus stop
your ears against its invitation to swim, to swallow, to cease. But the ocean
also fosters: a bounty of cod, crustaceans, shellfish, stories, transport, lyric,
metaphor. Esurient, unaccommodating, nothing like a home, the ocean allures,
buoys, preserves, saturates. Its shanties trace the littoral between prosperity
and despair, sustenance and starvation, song and silence. Appositional gyres.
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell map how the
Mediterranean has over the millennia gathered long coasts, small islands, and
heterogeneous microclimates into human unity, a space for fluctuating
mobilities and enduring transport, military and commercial.[iii]
What we persist in labeling “the Earth’s Middle” [medius + terra], that omphalos
of an ocean, centers shifting terrain.[iv]
Its tumult of languages provide durable vocabulary for navigating waters and
narratives.[v]
Deluge, deforestation, earthquake, ash, and landslide are so constant as to be
unremarkable, so that to the Mediterranean belongs “an environmental history
without catastrophe” (Corrupting Sea 338).
Whether human or ecological, “little or nothing is permanent” (339). Perhaps
when poet-voyagers like Isaac Aboab sailed to Atlantic shores (Amsterdam,
Brazil, New York) they conveyed the imprint of diurnal catastrophe, a language
of sea-swallow, wreck and story’s ruin released on less bounded shores.[vi]
Barry Cunliffe collects the seaboard sweeps of the
Atlantic and the roiling of its cold waters into a similarly turbulent community.[vii]
This ocean likewise fosters contact (war and trade), desire (for voyage, for
distant goods and bodies), communication (stories, shanties, poems, a saltwater
lingua franca to resound across small and landed dialects). Resisting the
scholarly habit of isolating geographies into linguistic differences and brief
chronological spans, Cunliffe maps how the shared experience of dwelling at a marine
verge sustained vast, connective flows over long durations. But an ocean is
more than a medium for human collectivity, more than a force for fashioning
some universal pidgin of whorls. Aqueous matter is history rich metaphor, a
marine-poetic transport mechanism that runs in many directions at once, sometimes
in perilous cascade. Across spiraling planes (current, conveyance) as well as through
vertical engulfment (drowning, oblivion), the ocean is transport and catastrophe.
All
scatt'red in the bottom of the sea.
Hazard the waters as you will, plumb the depths with fervor, and nothing static
responds. What dreadful noise of waters
in mine ears. A dream of death by drowning, a sounding of poetry on
seafloor.
III. Who by water
The long Jewish history of New York begins with
the community Isaac Aboab abandoned. They reached the Hudson without him. It is
a chronicle of troubled sea voyage, and a chronicle of seas of trouble. A few
weeks before I spoke a version of what you now read to a gathering of fellow
navigators in Queens, Jews throughout the world gathered in synagogues and twice
recited Unetanneh Tokef, a litany of catastrophes to come:
Who shall perish by water and who by fire?
Who by tremor and who in plague?
Who by suffocation and who by stone?
Who shall have rest? Who shall wander?
Unetanneh
Tokef humbles me, and not because I believe in God; this world offers sufficient
seas of trouble. But in a time of anthropogenic climate change and superstorms
that obliterate, of death by fire and death by water, any poem of apocalypse
rings true. Yet I like Leonard Cohen’s 1974 version of the piyyut better. His song is cheeky in its secularity, poignant in
its wonder, heavy in metaphoric transports:
Who in these realms of love, who by something
blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?
The
telephone of that insouciant last line brings to present interrogation a distant
voice. A transatlantic call? A trans-temporal message conveyed through the soon
to be lost technology of a landline? Or a failure of communication, story not
transported, a wrong number, try again?[viii]
“I say to you, Put wax in your ears
rather against the hungry sea / it is not our home!” But even if you fail to
stop your ears against the sea’s hungry song, even if your shanties cannot
drown the pull, know that to be swallowed by waves is not always an oblivion.
The sirens fashion their drums from the ribs and stretched skin of the drowned.
Bones to coral, eyes to pearls. You may suffocate in the brine. You may sink to
depths beyond recovery. But you may also become a material-historic conveyance
device for the resounding of maritime tropes, metaphors, poetry, songs and
stories – the literal become littoral.[ix]
An intermingling or material-linguistic crosscurrent. The anthropologist Alphonso
Lingis describes an organism as a failure of solitude, “a dense and
self-maintaining plenum” that takes energies from its environment, to transform
and release as forces and passions.[x]
This flux far surpasses the bare requirements of survival, so that every
creature is an apparatus for the production of excess. Organisms in this way imitate
their environments, which are themselves
full of free and nonteleological energies—trade
winds and storms, oceans streaming over three-fourths of the planet, drifting
continental plates, cordilleras of the deep that erupt in volcanic explosions,
and miles-deep glaciers piled up on Antarctica that flow into the sea and break
off in bobbling icemountains” (2).
Lingis
composes these lines on Easter Island, not New York. They suggest, however,
that every organism conveys littorally: takes water, air, minerals into itself
and releases its own vitality, sometimes as art or story. But as the New York’s
confluences make clear, some organisms release the toxic leavings of landed things:
chemical detritus, a flow of poison the sea swallows but cannot obliterate.
Stories are easier to liquidate than refuse.
Despite tempests, rogue waves, massacre and
extermination, despite long stretches of hungry sea, some stories convey. Isaac
Aboab left a poem to link Portugal, Brazil, Manhattan, Europe, a vector of water-clasp.
But what of the Lenape, people who held New York before Europeans and their
bacterial companions arrived? Lenape voices are more difficult to hear in
oceanic New York, but sometimes they resound. The Hudson was Muhheakunnuk, a river that flows in two directions,
a coming that is a going.[xi]
Back farther now still. The lower Hudson is a material text inscribed by twelve
thousand years of human habitation, long thriving at the land’s verge.
Estuaries and shorelines convey bodies, connect buildings, engender lasting
flows, matter-device for story. Some tales are the recovery of archeology,
others a diligence for linguists. Most are swallowed. Some linger as wake.
Convoys transport more than humans.
What of animals, timber, trade goods, parasites, stowaways, ballast and
anchors? What of oceans not made of brine?
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| castle |
IV. Stone is slow water
The earliest humans in what is for the moment called
New York hunted mastodons, timber wolves, and giant beavers. They knew the grate
of glaciers, water solidified into hard conveyance. Wander Central Park and
eventually you’ll arrive at ancient grey stone, bare mounds around which the
landscape arranges. These are outcroppings of Manhattan Schist, 450 million
years old. The grooves cut deep into their surface are glacial inscription, watery
text etched when ice slid their surface. Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth
call what unfolds in such moments of encounter “geopoetry,” the meeting of
story-obsessed witness with a “repository of mineral intelligence.”[xii]
Unfractioned idiom, that writing of
stones.
Panta
rhei. Glacial text on New York’s stone
do not announce that rock rests immobile while even solid water flows. Manhattan
Schist dates from the formation of Pangaea, perhaps the sixth supercontinent to
have formed and dispersed. Oceanic New York becomes a geologic New York, and
continents become conveyance-machines of their own. Earth and water together
demand an elemental New York. Matter and metaphor mix. We are mineral and
aqueous excrescences, airy breath and fiery heat, a transport device for the fourfold
elements in their wandering. Earth, air, fire and water are matter makers, story
triggers, an ebb and a flow and a vanishing.
And
obscure as that heaven of the Jews / Thy guerdon. Or at least your shanty’s
end.
[i] William Carlos William, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992), p. 200.
[ii] See At the
Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009) 5. Mentz’s
formulation of a “blue cultural studies” and a “swimmer’s poetics” here and in
his capacious scholarship has been essential to my own work.
[iii] The
Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000). Horden and Purcell aim to extend the work of Fernand
Braudel, The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976). See the thorough appraisal and detailed
explication their ongoing project in Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The Persistence
of Philology: Language and Connectivity in the Mediterranean,” A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic
Role in Medieval Literary History, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla
Mallette (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) 3-22.
[iv] Through a comparative analysis David Abulafia
foregrounds the sea as a mechanism for cultural intermixture in a way that
Horden and Purcell do not in his essay “Mediterraneans,” Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W. V. Harris (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005) 64-93. His emphasis on ocean as a kind of verb
resonates with Stuart Elden’s recent work on territory as process, “made and
remade, shaped and shaping, active and reactive” (The Birth of Territory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013]), 17.
[v] I am thinking especially here of Jonathan Hsy’s
work on the ocean as linguistic connective space in Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013) and Sebastian Sobecki on the sea
as a connective space across which tropes slide from one genre to another in The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2008).
[vi] Amsterdam would be part of the “Mediterranean of
the North,” a designation used by Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950– 1350 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976) to link Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, and
Flanders with the Baltic. “Mediterranean Atlantic” could describe Brazil’s
situation, and is from Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to
the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1987). Such multiple Mediterraneans are at the heart of Abulafia’s argument,
which emphasizes dynamic interconnection of a kind that can render even a
desert a kind of ocean (“Mediterraneans”). Oceanic space is, in his account,
always unbounded.
[vii] Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000BC–AD 1500
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Cunliffe has also written on the
fluidity enabled through a multi-ocean nexus in Europe Between the Oceans: Themes and Variations, 9000 BC – AD 1000 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). I have examined Cunliffe’s work previously
in my introduction to Cultural Diversity
in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 4.
[viii] This series of questions is inspired by the
brilliant work of Richard Burt and Julian Yates in What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), especially 17-45.
[ix] On the soundings that enable such littoral
transport see Allen Mitchell’s contribution to this volume.
[x] Dangerous
Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 2
[xi] See Lowell Duckert and Jonathan Hsy’s
contributions to this volume.
[xii] Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, Geologic City: A Field Guide to the
GeoArchitecture of New York (New York: smudge studio, 2011), sites 7 and 8.
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