Just be Reasonable - Science, Toeing the Line, White Supremacy ... and Robert Henryson

Bruce Nauman, Some Illusions: Videos and Drawings

by KARL STEEL

Michael Camille prize here. Don't forget to submit!

This morning, I got a bug in my ear to look into Nick Land again. Full confession: I wasn't into him in the 90s, like a lot of gloomy types; I wasn't ever into him; and the very first I heard of him was not long ago, in association with something called the "Dark Enlightenment," a movement that grows at once more frightening and more hilarious the more I learn about it. For treatments, see here (which may be a dubious source, but it makes a great story) and especially here. There you'll learn about this movement's hatred of democracy and social justice movements, its love for "ancestral neopaganism" (to which, as a medievalist, I ask: what are your sources? and could you share them with us?), and especially their championing of HBD, or "Human Biodiversity," about which Land says:

HBD, broadly conceived, is simply a fact. It is roughly as questionable, on intellectual grounds, as biological evolution or the heliocentric model of the solar system. No one who takes the trouble to educate themselves on the subject with even a minimum of intellectual integrity can doubt that.

On the one hand, sure, humans are biologically diverse. On the other hand, it's clear, very clear, that HBD is just a cover for white supremacism. At least that was the case with everyone I tweeted with today. For more, keep reading.

Feeling frisky, I took some time on twitter to mock the movement, for example, simply by linking to a poll that asks, hilariously? pathetically?, "How long until the paradigm of political correctness / Cultural Marxism is destroyed in the West?" (options: 1) Less than 15 Years; 2) 15 - 50 Years; 3) 50 - 100 Years; 4) More than 100 Years). Here's another sample tweet:

Evo-psych/HBD doing that previously unheard of thing of vindicating old prejudices with the magic of 'science.' Genes are the new phlogiston
— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) March 5, 2014

And if you're waiting for medieval content, hang on. It's coming. Below. First, though, the reactions, which were thick (in all senses of the word) and which still continue. They got really nasty very quickly. It wasn't just the befuddlement over me being a professor and a medievalist; it's not just that they tried to convince me that religious belief is genetically inheritable; nor just that a bunch of mostly white guys -- or at least twitter personae presenting as white men, living or dead -- tried to get me, a non-geneticist, to argue with them, non-geneticists, about genetics; nor that they believe in some kind of immemorial animality that's the real truth of humankind (is this Freud or Nietzsche they're borrowing?); nor that they combine this belief in the deep truth of human nature with their certainty that they're the real defenders of culture (to which, what?); nor is it that I'm a "feminized," "state school" (?), "unwashed prog" who is a "faggy New York Jew who attends [?] liberal art colleges" (I wish! some of my favorite people are faggy New York Jews).

It's that they're horrified by a "rising tide of diversity" (edit for example, this banner) and that they believe that the only bulwark against it is something they call SCIENCE. For example.

I'm not here to debate science or human potential (but, you know, here and here and here and EDIT especially (b) here and, why not keep going: here, here, and here (whose abstract doesn't really do it justice), and, since they believe nonscientist journalists might be convince me otherwise, here too), because there's no point in legitimizing this crap by carrying on the debate on the terms they demand. I'm more interested in the white supremacists' insistence that I face facts and be reasonable.

I've been thinking about that phrase "be reasonable" since I taught Robert Henryson's Fables. Now, there are other lessons we can take from the Fables to combat the white supremacists, namely, that the racist certainty about what constitutes "intelligence" (coupled with a refusal to define it) runs counter to the fables' pragmatism, where corporeal- and neurodiversity thrive more than any singular "intelligence," with the lion needing mice, the strength of wolves being useless before the quite different strength of lions, and so on. Since this counterargument would tend to support the way they wield HBD, I see a stronger counterargument, though, in the whole issue of "reason." Over at my animal studies course wiki (about which more in a later post), I observe:

"Reason" works oddly in the Fables. Reason is of course that thing that separates humans from animals. But what is it? When Henryson says that Aesop's fable had "ane sentence according to ressoun" (1894), what does that mean? If animals have only inclination and not discretion, as Henryson tells us in the opening to the "Cock and the Fox" (398-9), then they don't have choice. They're mechanical creatures, bound by the laws, essentially, of physics, while we at least have choice. Supposedly.

But there's another meaning of "reason," namely, when someone says "be reasonable," that is, "accord with the fact as they stand." Here "reason" is perfect description, perfect measure, and thus the very opposite of that "extra" something that reason-as-choice would seem to grant. This is the reason that is "according to ressoun," like Aesop's writing, which perfectly matches its circumstances, like water in water.

Given this, what animal is the "most reasonable" in the fables? The fox, with its craftiness (or is its "inclination" just to be excessive?)? The sheep clever enough to disguise itself as a dog (but not clever enough to resist the brave dogginess that the disguise grants it)? Or the country mouse, whose life accords best with the mousy way of life and indeed the contempt for worldly glory Henryson's morals preach ad nauseum?

Or maybe there's no one reason whose character we would know in advance?

To take this further, the demand "be reasonable," in purpose, the same idiom as "face facts." It's a demand to give up on trying, to stop fighting back, to just go along with the single option that's available. It's the certainty that there's only one right solution to a problem. It's an abandonment of creativity, an abandonment of skepticism, an abandonment of, well, hope, which might account for why the white supremacists and their Dark Enlightenment allies are so very, very gloomy.

If there's a lesson we should draw from the fable tradition, particularly if we free it Henryson's mostly dreadful Christian moralizations, let's not face facts. Let's work with them, instead, and see what we can do. Let's get pragmatic, in the more hopeful sense Tom Tyler gives the word. And let's not abandon our decisions to a mechanistic science that we let do all our thinking for us. Reason, in the best sense of the word, demands we do otherwise.

Edit: for an exercise in completely missing the point, see this response here. There's something fascinating about the post's contempt for my field of study, and for the middle ages as a whole, when we combine it with the same writer's own wish that he "should’ve been a goddamn Viking."

Here's how it ends, spectacularly missing the point and neatly proving my argument simultaneously:

And here’s the thing about facts: there really is “one right solution”. That’s pretty much what truth means.

You know he's a serious Viking because italics.

ANNOUNCEMENT: 2014 Biennial Michael Camille Essay Prize [postmedieval]

by EILEEN JOY

As was noted by Arnold Van Gennep, one of the first anthropologists of the edge, "the attributes of liminality are necessarily ambiguous since [they] elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space."

~from Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art

Myra Seaman, Holly Crocker, and I are thrilled to announce that it is time once again for the Biennial Michael Camille Essay prize, jointly sponsored by postmedieval, Palgrave Macmillan, and the BABEL Working Group, and the deadline is: JULY 31, 2014.

The competition is open to early career researchers: those currently in MA/PhD programs or within 5 years of having received the Ph.D. (that will include those graduating in 2009 or later). Although the contest is inspired by and dedicated to the memory of an art historian, essays in all disciplines are encouraged, and we are especially interested in work that, similar to Camille's, is cross-disciplinary, theoretically-informed, and attentive to the ways in which the medieval inhabits the modern. The prize is for the best short essay (4,000-6,000 words) that speaks to the 2014 theme: MEDIEVALISM AND THE MARGINS (conceptualized and imagined in any way the author sees fit). The award for 2014 will include: publication in postmedieval, 250 dollars, and one year’s free print and online subscription to the journal.

During Palgrave Macmillan's ACCESS ALL AREAS month (March 2014), you can read and download the previous winning essays by Haylie Swenson, David Hadbawnik, and Alison Hudson HERE.

The prize is named after Michael Camille (1958-2002), the brilliant art historian whose work on medieval art exemplified playfulness, a felicitous interdisciplinary reach, a restless imagination, and a passion to bring the medieval and modern into vibrant, dialogic encounter. In addition, we wish to honor Camille for his attention to the fringes of medieval society -- to the liminal, the excluded, the ‘subjugated rabble,’ and the disenfranchised, and to the socially subversive powers of medieval artists who worked on and in the margins. The prize is also named after Camille because his work was often invested in exploring ‘the prism of modernity through which the Middle Ages is constructed’ and because, as his colleague at the University of Chicago Linda Seidel said shortly after his death, he had ‘a mind like shooting stars.’

Submissions will be judged by a panel of scholars selected from postmedieval’s Editorial Board, and the winner will be announced at the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, to be held October 16-18 at University of California, Santa Barbara. Please send submissions, to include a cover page with all contact information -- name, affiliation(s), mailing address, email address(es), title of submission, and with no identifying information on essay itself (formatted in Word and following Chicago Manual, author-date format with endnotes + list of references at end) -- to the editors at postmedievaljournal@gmail.com. If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact Eileen Joy at eileenajoy@gmail.com.

The Sea is a Conveyance-Machine II

south coast of Maine, looking towards Wells

by J J Cohen

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?

 

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.

Watery Metaphor: Much-Belated Meditations on Oceanic New York

by JONATHAN HSY

In this blog post, I’m trying out some ideas in response to Oceanic New York. See an excerpt from JEFFREY’s contribution to (what is now) a book project HERE and this recent update/meditation by Steve Mentz, the “Prime Mover” of the event and related book project (see HERE). [NOTE: The images and captions only impressionistically relate to the text.]

One of most compelling aspects of Oceanic New York was how its varied presentations aimed to explore and rethink metaphors of connectivity. The ocean is a conveyance-machine, a life-sustaining environment and agentive force in its own right, a dynamic medium/mode of transport that enacts the flow of matter, languages, and cultures. Emerging as another theme across the presentations was the idea that ocean invites us to adopt fluid modes of temporality as well. As I listened to the presentations, it became increasingly clear that thinking about the ocean requires a capacity to sustain different notions of scale concurrently. In a blog posting soon after the event (see HERE) Steve recalls “Nancy Nowacek’s direct statement that we must live in more than one temporal register at the same time.” Indeed, these presentations moved into multitemporal registers through a variety of approaches: eco-theoretical, linguistic-poetic, philosophical-scientific, aesthetic-artistic, architectural-communal. As Mentz observes: “There’s no way to capture the fluid dynamism of the event itself — but formal play and poetic experiments can gesture toward that multiplicity in different media.” What I hope to offer in my response is a more deliberate consideration of the “fluid dynamism” of the event, exploring my current (pun intended?) thoughts on its multiplicity and play.
   

[Above: Oceanic New York, St. John's University, Sep. 26, 2013.  EILEEN, displaying her love of #disasterporn, shows an image of a sublime green wave overtaking New York City.]

Linguistic Registers

A certain delight in wordplay and poetic experimentation with metaphor characterized many of the Oceanic New York presentations. In his etymological wordplay, JEFFREY (read THIS) evinces a transtemporal oceanic contact zone, and he does so in a writing style appropriate for relating the dispersal of peoples across time and thinking about the watery spaces they traverse.

Jeffrey’s multitemporal experimentation with etymology and near-puns implying motion and polyglot vessels of transport (“convoy, convey, convoke”) makes me ask how transportable different oceanic theories of connectivity become when they are expressed through poetic tropes (i.e., wordplay or metaphors). The transportability of oceanic paradigms (the question of whether a way of thinking about the ocean that derives from one context can carry over to another) is something that premodern scholars have contended with for some time. Indeed, it would appear that there is now a "critical mass" of different connectivity paradigms in play that are each to some extent unmoored from the specific oceanic spaces that generated them. I'm thinking of Sebastian Sobecki’s (2007) work on South Pacific connectivity and its (admittedly cautious) application to a networked medieval Irish Sea and North Atlantic (The Sea and Medieval English Literature, 14-15); or Jeffrey's previous work (2008), where archipelagic modes of thought migrate from the Caribbean to the British Isles; or explorations of connectivity informing the British archipelago to emerge in a forthcoming (2016) issue of postmedieval issue ed. by Sobecki and Matthew Boyd Goldie. Very recently, Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Malette’s wonderful co-edited collection A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (2013) has helped Anglophone readers to revisit connectivity via the profoundly intertwined literary histories of languages and cultures throughout the medieval Mediterranean.

Akbari engages with recent work by David Abulafia (2011) on the longue durée history of the Mediterranean and Horden and Purcell’s seminal The Corrupting Sea (among others) to break out of constraining monolingual approaches to literary history; she finds in the medieval past a more expansive mode of (re-)de-territorializing discrete linguistic, literary, and national traditions. Most importantly for this discussion, Akbari also entertains how theories of connectivity that derive from this particular sea’s “enclosed” quality and movement of currents might actually transfer to other landed medieval “Mediterraneans”— such as the vast Sahara, or diverse terrain of the Silk Road (4). If there is a single global ocean (as this issue of PMLA posits and Steve Mentz entertains HERE in his article on blue cultural studies) then an “Oceanic New York” just happens to be one locality among many in a contiguous terraqueous globe. Rather than perpetuating a rigid distinction between land and sea, “both/and” orientations take connectivity as a feature traversing all spaces (a point I suggest in a different way in my own work – see footnote if you're interested).[1]

[Stone marks former site of glacial pond. St. John's University, Sep. 26, 2013.]

Watery Motion

In A Sea of Languages, Karla Mallette pinpoints an excellent linguistic metaphor to suggest new ways of thinking across different scales of time concurrently. In “Boustrephedon: Toward a Literary Theory of the Mediterranean,” Mallette puts Classical writing and reading practices in conversation with the medieval Mediterranean Sea for the benefit of modern-day readers. “Boustrophedon,” she notes, is a Greek adverb denoting “turning as the ox plows,” and insofar as the adverb denotes motion it provides a model for conceiving the back-and-forth transit of texts, languages, and ideas. As Mallette states, a “tidal rhythm of ebb and flow” implicates “our contemporary entanglement with the Arab world to the medieval Mediterranean,” a globe where Arab and European worlds implicate one another (260). This back-and-forth mode of thought registers — however unexpectedly — with Lowell Duckert’s presentation on “glacial erratics” and the flow of ice, and the Iroquois name for the Hudson (entity of water) as the “river that flows both ways.”

I love what these models of back-and-forth-transit achieve and would add that the materiality of the “boustrophedon” metaphor warrants further consideration, as it weirdly enacts an amphibious leap across land to water. That is, “boustrophedon” originally refers to the motion of a yoked ox in a profoundly landed, agricultural context— and it is being extended by analogy to a sea and the fluid modes of conveyance it enables. The landedness of the “boustrophedon” metaphor renders it simultaneously alien to and appropriate for limning the surfaces of an enclosed sea.[2]

           

As we test the flexibility of oceanic metaphors to structure thought, we are eventually faced with Heather Blum’s dictum: “The sea is not a metaphor” (670).[3] Or rather (as Steve suggested in his presentation) the sea is not only a metaphor. Adopting a spatial metaphor that thinks not in terms of back-and-forth surface motion but plumbs the ocean’s watery depths, Blum observes: “Oceanic studies calls for a reorientation of critical perception, one that rhymes with the kind of perspectival and methodological shifts ... seen [in] influential conception[s] of history from the bottom up” (671). In this shift to a vertical/horizontal orientation, Blum cannot help but wax poetic with a metaphor of her own: the conceit that one critical orientation “rhymes” with another.

[Moments in time: Spencer Finch's The River That Flows Both Ways (2009) documents a single day's journey along the Hudson through snippets of color. Finch photographed the changing colors of the Hudson once every minute. This combination of two photos was taken at the High Line on Sep. 28, 2013.] 

Waves (Sound and Water)

Blum’s use of “rhyme” to indicate critical orientations that resemble one another brings me ultimately to one physical, kinetic feature of the ocean: waves. And here I mean waves of water and of sound. Each of these presentations (in its own way) manipulated sonic phenomena to suggest the materiality of oceanic metaphors and watery poetics. Wordplay and the poetic effects of cadence and rhyme not only help transmit to ideas but they also implicate sound as a key mode of idea-conveyance. Sound, to adopt modern scientific discourse, is a vibration that propels itself as waves through a medium (be it water or air). It might not be surprising, then, that we can resort to stylized patterning of sound-waves to convey how we — terrestrial, air-breathing creatures — conceive transit through a water-filled environment. To communicate some sense of transit through waves and currents of water, we create verbal and linguistic “waves” (in medieval acoustic theory, sound breaking air) to enact analogous motion. As Patricia Yaeger observes, a contemporary “rush of aqueous metaphors [across oceanic studies] lends materiality to a world that becomes more ethereal every day, to a discourse that has taken to the air, that threats iPhones like oxygen saps, as if our very lungs and sinews could be extruded into cyberspace” (523).[4] I might tweak this observation slightly to say that attending to the materiality of metaphor and sound exposes how the ocean facilitates thought in a global (literary, linguistic, temporal) scale.

Oceanic New York has helped me to think more carefully about materiality of metaphor, or — to put it another way — to confront the physicality of thought. Sonic patterns and verbal tropes are one strategy for making ideas perceptible to the senses, so it is fitting that thinking about the ocean and diverse watery environments would provoke such varied concurrent modes of expression. These presentations in the original “event” of their oral-aural-sonic delivery and in their printed manifestation in graphic form cover a range of topics, but collectively they achieve a shared effect: they seek to embody varied modes of transit through space and time. (By the way, such embodied linguistic mimicry is not limited to sound: H-Dirksen Bauman’s work on Deaf literary theory notes the ASL gesture for the verb FLOW manually enacts a downward motion resembling water, enacting a “kinetic model of the world.”[5])

These acts of watery thinking in all their variety instill an attentiveness to the terraqueous worlds we inhabit. These concurrent critical modes — and ludic exploration of metaphor and language — reveal the manifold functions of the ocean and attend to the perpetual motion of all that participates in it, with it, and through it.

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[1] In my own work on polyglot spaces, I’ve encouraged a similar “both/and” orientation toward the transit of tongues and people: a critical mode that attends simultaneously to landlocked (local, grounded) conditions of literary production as well as oceanic connective trajectories; see Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State UP, 2013), especially chapter 2 and the coda.

[2] The capacity of “boustrephedon” to connote concurrent temporal registers is a feature of fictive realms too. The constructed Antlatean language, which re-creates a proto-Proto-Indo-European language with non-PIE elements, is written in boustrophedon to evoke “back-and-forth movement, like water” (says the creator Marc Okrand, who also happens to be the creator of extraterrestrial Klingon).

[3] Hester Blum, “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 670-677.

[4] Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 523-545.

[5] H-Dirksen Bauman, “On the Disconstruction of (Sign) Language in the Western Tradition: A Deaf Reading of Plato’s Cratylus.” In Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-Dirksen Bauman (U Minnesota P, 2008), 127-145, at 141.