It was a great evening under a full moon last night at Avery Point, talking “Swimmer Poetics.”  I always enjoy speaking to a mixed audience; Avery Point is a maritime studies campus, with an emphasis on marine science and public policy as well as a growing but still modest humanities presence.  I was introduced by my old friend Mary K. Bercaw-Edwads, a blue-water sailor and Melville scholar, but there weren’t many other literary types around.

What everyone shared, though, was a deep personal commitment to the ocean.  One of the really great questions I got after the talk was about how differently a less-ocean focused audience might reaction to the idea that swimming and poetry are essentially ecological practices and ideas.  It’s a question I might revisit at SAA, though my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar will be filled with dual-focus types like me, interested in poetry and the sea, wanting to use the one to get at or into the other.

Early in the talk I rehearsed something that I wrote in the first few pages of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, the claim that the sea is receding from our cultural imagination.  I still basically believe this, having taken the point in part from Robert Foulke, but I also think it needs refining.  The sailor and the sailing ship have been receding in our imagination since Conrad, whose novels comprise a kind of requiem.  Perhaps maritime shipping and the ship as such are as well, with the exception of the cruse ship.    But the beach is our public property, and ocean swimming has, almost certainly, become much more common in the past few generations than ever before.

The distinction between sailors and swimmers, between being “on it” or “in it,” was the refrain of my gallery talk at the Folger back in June 2010, and I wonder now if I should go back to that frame as a way of separating out two different versions of the human-sea relationship.

The other great question I got after the talk, asked by a former competitive swimmer who’s recently started coaching a high school swim team, was about the morality of swimming.  As I was thinking through it during my answer, I tried to lay out a distinction between the ship, which has been an emblem for social bonds and political order since antiquity — Plato’s Republic uses it, and I think Antigone also — and the solitary swimmer, head down underwater, who, to paraphrase Frost, cannot see out far and cannot see in deep.  I’m pretty focused on the wisdom of the swimmer, the knowledge that comes from living in an inhuman and untenable environment — but what’s the social politics associated with this practice?  What’s the morality?

The best thing about bringing new work somewhere is getting unexpected feedback.  The shipwreck book, which is nearly done — I’ll be able to use some of the material about Donne’s “The Storm” that I talked about last night in the chapter on the lyric, and an expanded version of the Crusoe in the surf bit also in the “Castaways” chapter, and those are the last two that I need to write — is feeling more and more like a hinge book, a way into the water where I’ll be swimming for a while.

Swimmer Poetics isn’t a bad book title, I suppose.  I’m going to use it for a short talk at a Maritime conference in Cape Cod in April, and also for an eco-theory piece for O-Zone.  Unless I decide I need to save that phrase.

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A couple paragraphs out of the talk I’m giving tonight at U Conn Avery Point, as part of the Coastal Perspectives lectures series –

It happens in three stages.  First, immersion.  The sudden shock of getting into the water.  It’s a phase change, really, a transition from being in the air, which, depending on location and temperature, contains quite a bit of water vapor, into heavier, viscous liquid water.  You’re out, then you’re in. Nothing quite like it.  After that, buoyancy.  Our bodies need just a little help to pop up to the surface.  We can relax and float, for a little while.  This is the hopeful moment.  Last, exertion.  Moving our arms and legs in practiced patterns, we stay at the surface, even move around from place to place.  Nothing lasts forever, but there is short-term stability and pleasure, for a while.

And a little later –

Swimming matters because humans can learn how to do it, even do it very well, but it’s always dangerous.  Eventually you need to get out of deep water.  A minor character in Conrad’s Lord Jim emphasizes that swimming is, at bottom, futile:

Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns….No!  I tell you!  The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep, sea keep you up.

 

The “exertions of your hands and feet” provide a bleak a vision of human insufficiency, but it puts off drowning.  Conrad’s character is a native German speaker, and his jumbled syntax parallels the awkwardness of human swimming itself.  As Conrad knows, as all swimmers and sailors know, there is no long-term survival plan for swimmers in the deep ocean.  But the immersive experience, being in the “destructive element,” is precisely what poetry helps us understand.  Poetry is good at imagining radical change, and good at making readers enjoy it.  Literary criticism has a name for this technique: the poetic sublime, which I’ll explain shortly.  My focus tonight is on the way that poetic forms provide models for enduring inside a hostile environment.  The world after global warming is not the future – it’s the present – and making sense of that present requires a poetic, oceanic imagination.

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It’s nice to have great students!  Here’s a link about some new productions featuring St John’s doctoral student Tara Bradway, and her theater company, the Adirondack Shakespeare Co.

With the “Justice Project,” the company will bring two plays to the St. John’s campus, Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice, playing in rep the next Fri and Sat nights, first on the Manhattan campus (Feb 10-11) and then at the Law School in Queens (Feb 17-18).  They are also putting on a panel about law and performance on Fri Feb 17 around noon.

More details can be found via Tara’s blog.

Please come!  I’ll be there at least next Sat night for Merchant with my daughter Olivia, who loved their production of The  Tempest last winter.

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One of my favorite Christmas gifts this year was a copy of John Hattendorf’s new edition of Lawrence Wroth’s The Way of a Ship, first published in 1937.  It’s a wonderfully-written, smooth and generous outline of the history of navigation in the West.  Its old-fashioned and in spots probably out of date — but it’s a great introduction and review of material that’s close to my heart.  If I’d had it when I was putting Lost at Sea together, it might have saved me some time.

 But no matter what national preferences may have been between cross staff and astrolabe, English and Latins alike were agreed that the astrolabe was, to meet certain conditions, an essential part of the ship’s equipment.  In its use it was not necessary, except in hazy weather, to gaze directly upon the sun; it was held by its ring upon the thumb and its revolving arm was manipulated until a beam of the sun passed through the slits in the vanes at either end of the arm.  There remained but to read the figure on the scale, found in the outer edge of the instrument.  (39)

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He’s a hard guy to look at close up.  Ralph Fiennes’s presentation of Caius Marcius Coriolanus hits with murderous intensity.  He is, as his make-up artists worked hard to show us, a “thing of blood.”

Transposing the Roman Republic to a faux-Bosnian contemporary warzone works surprisingly well, with the scruffy citizens as a rebelious mob, the Tribunes as Party Bosses, and Coriolanus and his fellow aristocrats as well-dressed generals in battle fatigues and bespoke suits.

Much of the film, esp. the early scenes in Corioles, is close-up action following the hero as warrior, heavily burdened by 21st-century battle gear, but still fighting intimate, hand to hand battles.  When he comes out of the mortal gates of the city, alone and covered with blood, it’s easy to see why he carried the day.

Fiennes is brilliant, and his movie-star face beneath make-up scarring and lots of blood communicates both Coriolanus’s powerful public inhibitions — the general seems physically unable to play to the crowd — and also his over-powerful heroic charisma.  He cannot be consul, he must be consul — and then suddenly he’s not.

The other performance that resonated was Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia.  I’m not sure she hit the final confrontation as powerfully as she might have — the famous pause, “holds her by the hand, silent,” wasn’t quite as wrenching as it might have been — but in the early scenes her palpable combination of pride, blood-lust, and maternal intimacy was gorgeous and hard to watch.  ”He is wounded,” she said with a sly smile that you almost felt you weren’t supposed to see, “I thank the gods for it.”  The production cut my favorite over the top line about the breasts of Hecuba and Hector’s Achilles-split skull, but the wolf mother’s brutal pride and terrible grip on her son was wonderfully visual.

But the hero’s isolation was the main visual point.  He was a general with no allies, no connection to family or country or troops.  Even the love-fight with Aufidius was never, in this version, an attraction of near equals, but instead a lonely dragon’s futile attempt to find someone in the world as violent as powerful as him.

I saw a little trace of Voldemort only once, in the film’s final moments when, after Coriolanus has betrayed his Volscian allies and saved Rome, Aufidius’s men murder the Roman on a deserted road.  The hero opens his moth spits his final words like the Dark Lord taunting Harry –

Alone I did it.  Boy!

As good a modern Shakespeare film as I’ve seen in a while.  

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This is the way the Bridge Project ends: with a star chewing the scenery, not an international ensemble.  While past productions in this bi-national Atlantic-spanning series of productions have almost seemed allegories of American and British acting styles, here the big man of stage and screen carried all before him. 

He really was great fun to watch.  He twisted his body like a ruined athlete, making this a Richard whose martial prowess and physical threat seemed plenty convincing.  When crowing to himself alone onstage or working his way through a crowded council table, Spacey was in complete control.  The performance wasn’t dazzling, like McKellan’s Lear, or intensely moving, like Jacobi’s.  Maybe it’s the impending Super Bowl this weekend — I’m trying to figure out a way to root against both the Giants & the Pats — but I kept thinking I was watching a superstar athlete, someone who makes it look so easy.  He was faster, better, stronger than anyone else.

The play doesn’t give much room for co-stars, and with the possible exception of some brief flashes from resisting women — Annabel Scholey’s fiery Anne, Gemma Jones’s wandering Margaret, and later Haydn Gwynne’s Elizabeth (all Brits, btw) — nobody could really play with Richard on this stage.  Chuk Iwuji’s Buckingham had a nice turn as a political crowd-pleaser / revival tent speaker when convincing the people to make Richard king, while Spacey’s face was projected onto a large screen on the back of the stage.  The close-up of Richard’s expressive face recalled the greater physical intimacy of the camera, and the formal tension between Buckingham’s frantic play downstage and Richard’s subtle, measured acceptance on power on the screen provided a glimpse into what it must be like to work across different media.  When Richard came back to the stage, Buckingham lost his ability to match him.

The early scenes, esp the first soliloquy and wooing of Lady Anne, were the highlights, and Howard Overshown’s rendition of Clarence’s dream of drowning had real grandeur and was certainly the best Spacey-less scene.  But the production lagged just a bit, and the split-stage rendition of the Richmond / Richard parallel experiences of the night before the battle were a bit predictable.  I loved watching Richard wrestle with himself to the very end — “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I” — and that famous line about the horse allowed Spacey to amp up the volume one last time.

I’ve had some good nights with the Bridge Project since 2009, particularly in their uneven but fun Winter’s Tale with Simon Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall and Stephen Dillane’s brilliant Prospero.  I’m not sure I always buy Sam Mendes’s direction, but I’m sorry to see this series of plays past.  What’s coming to BAM next winter?

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The latest image from NASA.

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The story of the Costa Concordia‘s  wreck off the Italian coast grows more Conradian by the day.  The Coast Guard officer yells at the stupefied Captain to get back on the ship and direct the rescue.  The captain claims he hadn’t meant to get into the lifeboat but tripped and fell in.

Lord Jim knows what really happened:

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you.  It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.

The Times also has the story.

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Alone, masked, and silent: that’s the way to see a play.  For a couple hours last night, while wandering through six stories of a Chelsea warehouse on W. 27th that had been transformed by Punchdrunk into a Macbeth/Hitchcock noir horror fantasy, I was thinking about how elusive the theatrical transaction can be.

The place was full of great stuff, a candy shop, hospital wing, detective’s office/taxidery shop in which a fatal (stuffed) raven was disembowled to reveal a tickertape with one of the few Shakespearean lines I heard all night:

It will have blood, they say.  Blood will have blood.

There were three distinct sets of people inside: audience members like me, wearing white masks; theater staff wearing black masks and blocking access to certain rooms and stairwells; and maybe 8 or 9 actors, without masks, doing various things.

Audiences want stories, so when we saw actors doing things — dancing, packing suitcases, trying to wash their bloody hands and faces in one of many bath-tubs, or smothering King Duncan with a pile of pillows — we gathered to watch.  The scenes were brief, often powerful, and always fast: when the actors hurried on to the next room, they trailed clouds of awkwardly jostling masked audience members in their wakes.

The set was really the star, because you could play with it.  I picked up pieces of paper, sometimes founds line from Macbeth on them, examined bird skeletons, ate hard candy, played a card game with one of the actors, though he did not choose me to give a shot of (apple juice?) whiskey at the end of the game.  The soundtrack, from old Hitchcock thrillers, was gorgeous.

Some rooms were full of matter, overflowing with detail and debris.  Oothers were airy and empty.  One was a maze of leafless trees, another a spare half-grid of collapsing brick walls, thigh-high, with fake Baroque sculpture.

We wanted to see things happen, all of us in the white masks, & we hustled and wandered and sometimes broke into a jog as we tried to catch up to whatever was going on.  We saw highlight scenes from the play  – mine were the banquet, which I saw twice, the murder, the uncovering of the raven’s prophecy.  We also saw lots of not-very-Shakespearean stuff: men fighting, couples dancing, a strobe-lit orgy featuring nudity and lots of stage blood, card games, and letters being written.

Diffuse and sometimes disorienting, the performance didn’t feel like a performance.  The cast spoke little and seemed more dancers than anything — balletic, physical, intense.  When I think back to this performance I feel certain I’ll remember the McKittrick Hotel more than any of the humans inside it.  

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