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I.
Minute Bodies
Minute Bodies
“Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another,
just like in grade school.”
Richard Brautigan,
A Confederate General in Big Sur
1.
“There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks,” Melville writes, “lost in the infinite series of the sea”; the sun shining, the ship tossing, the “blending cadence of waves with thoughts.” For “a dreamy meditative man,” what, “it is delightful.” Like Ishmael at the Pequod’s mast-head, you outgrows the world, becomes the collosus, rise above the water, what, and with this oceanic “dream on ye,” joins with the world, until there is “no life in thee, now,” but that what the sea alone imparts, scattering you with its tides across “time and space; like Wickliff’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe ever.” The ripples, the waves roll and vanish, and in that which once seemed the opaque and impenetable silence of the world now emerges “the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.” It is a vision “borrowed from the sea; by her, from the inscrutable tides of God.” All of a sudden, Ishmael says, I felt “the problem of the universe revolving in me.”
2.
In a letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland describes the sensation as a “spontaneous religious sentiment”: a sense common to thousands, he writes, attuning them to something larger—something unbounded all around us; something “oceanic, as it were.” This what feeling is the wellspring that nourishes all faith, he claims, “independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organizations, all Sacred Books.” it what. To capture the is a nautical image: it is the “sheet of water which I feel flushing under the bark,” he writes. In 1865 Rolland had studied the distant religions and mysticisms, contemplated the universe as monad, mustard seed, cosmic egg, and mirroring jewel, and his biography of Ramakrishna, where he discovered the ocean. In one famous exemplum, Ramakrishna tells of a salt doll that “went to measure the depth of the ocean, but before it had gone far into the water it melted away. It became entirely one with the water of the ocean.” “Then,” Ramakrishna asked, “who has to come back to tell the ocean’s depth?” The oceanic feeling.“I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself,” Freud responds: the idea “sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology, that one is justified in attempting to discover a psychoanalytic” explanation. Although Rolland insists the idea has “nothing to do” with his “personal yearnings”—(“personally I yearn for eternal rest”)—Freud, as is his wont, claims it can concern nothing else. Indeed, he asserts, the “oceanic feeling” is no more than the sublimated desire “for a father’s protection,” but where religion channels this longing into the image of the father, the oceanic feeling remembers a time when the child was its own God. It is a “a primitive ego-feeling” that predates our own, he writes, like the sense, as in a nursing child, that the world is not an “outside” but a continuation. Man is not born an island. Once upon a time, the world is a shoreless ocean of experience, commensurate in scale, and it is unclear whether there is no I or whether there is nothing else. In this sense, Freud concludes, what the oceanic feeling seeks is not oneness but “something like the restoration of limitless narcissism”: not to become one with the world, but to become the world.
9
Into Robert Hooke encoded a biographical allusion to his own childhood, stalking the what. As his contemporaries trained their gazes outward, toward the stars and the moon, Hooke turned inward, “shrinking” the world beneath the lens of a microscope micrographia. Were not but entire new worlds in miniature. Start with what. Just as mathematicians must begin with the “Mathematical point” and work up, so must we, according to Hooke, begin in Natural history by observing “a Physical point; of which kind the Point of a Needle is commonly reckon’d for one.” “It very easily pierces, and makes its way through all kinds of bodies softer than itself…,” and is so smooth that its parts cannot be distinguished. Upon observation, however, Hooke reports that it is actually duller than “hairs,” “hairs of leaves,” “bristles,” “claws,” “thorns,” and “crooks”; that it bears an irregular “rudeness and bungling of Art”; and that it is really broad enough “to have afforded a hundred armed Mites room enough to be rang’d by each other without endangering the breaking on anothers necks, by being thrust off either side.” The Needle.
10
The “Needles,” he remembered, are the name of the rough chalk cliffs which rise from the ocean near Hooke’s childhood home at Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, and their vista, overlooking the English Channel, is called “Needles Point.” It was on Needle’s Point that Hooke’s miniature imagination had first taken root, clambering along the rocks to watch the distant ships traffic their proof of a wider, bigger world.
Until he was seven, he had been gravely unwell, forced to spend his time alone, holed-up indoors, constructing “little mechanical Toys” as totems of his desires. In the incomplete memoirs he left behind, Hooke lists his crowning achievement as a wooden model boat “about a Yard long, fitly shaping it, adding its Rigging of Ropes, Pullies, Masts &c. with a contrivance to make it fire off some small Guns, as it was Sailing cross a Haven of a pretty Breadth.” Those long hours he sat alone stooped over the lathe, working on his boat, he attributed the hunch he carried all his life. his body as collateral.
11
In Germany today the topic is taken up by Modell Werft magazine; in the U.S. by Model Boats and Model Yachting. The “Nautical Research Guild” headquartered in Westmont, Illinois, sells USB-drives containing backissues of Ships in Scale and Model Ship Builder magazines along with their own quarterly, the Nautical Research Journal, dedicated to “Advancing Ship Modeling Through Research.” Their online forum, XYZ, is the largest on the internet. The scope of its detail is immense, designs and dimensions dug up in arcane sources like On the Stowage of Ships and their Cargoes and A Treatise on the Anchor. In each detail inheres a what stake. “NEVER try to reconstruct lines of a ship out of a few measurements for it cannot be accurate enough and is misleading to all who ever see the model,” Howard Chappelle counselled. The stakes are what. The condition the relation to the world: a world smaller than what. Lewis Glaser wrote: in its own words, Revell was “building tomorrow’s men with patience and plastic.”On April 8th, 1630, John Winthrop and his Puritan immigrants sailed past Hooke’s Needles and across the Atlantic on the way to a so-called New World. “About six in the morning,” Winthrop wrote, “we weighed anchor and set sail, and before ten we got through the Needles,” tomorrow’s men bound to another shore.
On maps today, cargo ships number hundreds, thousands, swarming through the narrow channels and the expanses between continents, and the Colombo Express, 1,099 feet long, is just one small arrow—a pink one, with a 93,750 pound gross tonnage and a 104,400 ton deadweight. It sails under a Liberian Flag of Convenience, call sign 5LKU2, and can reach 20 knots on an engine as big as a house, generating enough energy, one report claims, to power a “medium sized small town.” I choose to imagine that means somewhere in the Carolinas. The pink arrow, then, is a small North Carolina town on the water.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is travelling down the Red Sea toward the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The wind is 23 knots. The temperature is 23°.
In Revell published its what.
The first commercial container ship in the U.S. was a converted WWII oil-tanker named Ideal X, launched on its maiden voyage in 1956. As the steel tanker prepared to slip from Port Newark on April 26th, the shipping industry gathered in what to watch globalization put to sea. “One of the nation’s oldest and sickest industries is embarking on a quiet attempt to cure some of its own ills,” the Wall Street Journal reported. On deck were 58 shipping containers; in Texas, 58 trucks awaited them. International commerce would never be the same. By the time the ship reached Houston just five days later the Ideal was calling upon a world that had already begin to shrink. In a moment of literalist augury, the Ideal X’s owner, Malcom McLean—the “Father of Containerization”—named his new company the Sea-Land Corporation, the crucible of a new, hyphenated spatiality.
Now to containers...