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I.
Minute Bodies
Minute Bodies
“A curious analogy could be based on the fact that even the hugest
telescope has to have an eye-piece no larger than the human eye,”
Ludwig Wittengstein,
Culture and Value
1.
At the beach this morning, as the American Integrity appears on the horizon, Magnolia snaps her toenail down to the quick and bleeds long red spirals in the sand. The ships are endemic, never leaving. “King Cargo,” on the lake, is 51 million metric tonnes of iron: the entire “industrial might of this nation.” I have tried to learn their names—the Mesabi Miner and Frontenac; the American Century, American Integrity, and American Spirit—and on the clearest summer mornings, trembling above the water, to learn their silhouettes. “What white castlework,” Lorine Niedecker wrote, watching them on Lake Superior. 2.
“There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks,” Melville writes, “lost in the infinite series of the sea.” The sun is slanting, the ship is lilting; the mast-head towers over an endless plain of blue, “with nothing ruffled but the waves.” For “a dreamy meditative man it is delightful”: there is “no life in thee, now,” but what the sea imparts, rocked into what. “Yes, as everyone knows,” Melville writes, “meditation and water are wedded for ever.” High at the mast-head, Ishamel, looking down on the endless unrolling of “watery pasture” appears “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.”
3.
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 and all around us; something “oceanic, as it were.” He claims this feeling is the wellspring that nourishes all faith, “independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organizations, all Sacred Books, all hope in a personal survival.” It is the “simple and direct fact of the feeling of the ‘eternal,’” a “rich and beneficent” connection to the whole. In order to capture it, Rolland turns to nautical metaphor: this great feeling, he says, is like a “sheet of water which I feel flushing under the bark.” In 1927, preparing to write the letter, Rolland scoured the distant religions and mysticisms for metaphors, weighing the universe as monad, mustard seed, cosmic egg, and mirroring jewel, when, in his studies, he discovered the “ocean of the Spirit, boundless, dazzling,” in the teaching of Sri Ramakrishna. In one lesson Ramakrishna spoke 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.” It is a question of scale, and so it is an ethics. “Then,” Ramakrishna asks, “who has to come back to tell the ocean’s depth?”
4.
“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 feeling has “nothing to do” with his “personal yearnings”—(“personally I yearn for eternal rest,” he claims)—Freud, as is his wont, claims it can concern nothing else. Indeed, he argues, Rolland is describing little more than the sublimated desire “for a father’s protection,” yet where organized religion channels this sentiment into the image of the father-figure, Rolland’s “oceanic feeling” remembers a time when child was its own god. Man, after all, was not born an island. His present ego-feeling, autonomous and marked-off, Freud claims, is the mere “shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.” This “primitive ego-feeling” is preserved within the adult ego, as in the man who, “against all evidence of his sense,” tells his lover “that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one.” Rolland’s “oceanic feeling,” the dream of a world commensurate in scale, is the dream of a man who confuses his domination for love. It seeks “something like the restoration of limitless narcissism,” Freud writes: not to become one with the world, but to become the world.
5.
“I’ve never forgotten pressing my nose against the glass cases in the Los Angeles County Museum as a small boy,” Lewis Glaser told Coronet magzine in 1956. He was the “Prince of Put-It-Together” and “Hobby Model Kit King,” presiding, as CEO of Revell Inc., over “more automobiles than all of Detroit, more planes than all the air-craft manufacturers, more vessels than all the shipyards in the world.” In the museum miniatures he had felt an affirmation he could never discover “on a psychoanalyst’s couch” but in small things alone. It was an “ego-satisfaction,” he tells the interviewer: a story of the self built with the hands. Claude Lévi-Strauss called it power diversified “over a homologue of the thing.” James Roy King called it “courage and heroism.” Gaston Bachelard called it “domination at little cost.” Lew’s spouse, Royle, called it nuisance. “It was as if he had a prophetic vision he would die young,” she said; Glaser was possessed, working through the night and nodding off through dinner, waking up again at one or two A.M. to “write and calculate with his slide rule—his most treasured tool.”
6.
The same confused passions echo in detail of the extraordinary, intimate care miniature-modelers extend their objects over months, sometimes years. It is a deep, personal contact with the things of the world: “the happiness of adding the last plank”; “the melancholy that sets when a model is completed”; “the question of the stove hearth: should I place it on top of the planking or plank up to it?” “You've spent countless hours, months, perhaps years building your masterpiece. She has occupied and consumed your every awakened hour of every day and night. You go to bed thinking of the next step of construction. You dream of her...” For some, this labor comes from an interest in war, ships, history. For others, it draws on a personal punctum: “lobster fishing with my granddad in the Northumberland Straights”; “working on my kid-sized bench building models alongside my dad”; “my first plastic model from my father of the morning of Christmas.” For these, it is a spell against time. “I suppose I can go back to the age of about six or seven, walking in the City of London and seeing model ships in insurers’ shipping companies’ windows. Huge, most wonderful intricate steamships,” Pat Howard remembers. “There aren’t many times when I’m not fiddling and working with a model, when I’m not transported back and I can walk down Fenchurch Street in my mind again…”
7.
In 1704, as Robert Waller began to collect Robert Hooke’s papers for posthumous publication, he discovered Hooke’s personal diary, and “there found a beginning of his life.” Until he was seven, it revealed that Robert Hooke had been gravely ill, forced to spend his time alone, holed-up indoors, constructing “little mechanical Toys” as totems of his desires. The most wonderful machination, Hooke reminisced, was a wooden model boat: he had designed it “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,” just as he had seen coming into Yarmouth Harbour. As Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, Robert Hooke would return to that model ship at Gresham College, on May 20, 1663, as he looked down through his most treasured tool, the microscope, at the “point of a Needle.” He did not announce to the Fellows the personal meaning of his observation. The “Needles,” he remembered, were the name of the rough chalk cliffs which rose from the ocean near his family home, on the Isle of Wight, and their vista, overlooking the English Channel, was called “Needles Point.” It was there, at 13, that his miniature imagination had taken root, clambering along the rocks to watch the distant ships come and go, stealing home with plans for a wooden model boat “about a yard long,” as an invocation of the wider world.
8.
In Europe, the pastime has been taken up by Frog, Heller Hobby GmbH, Eduard Model Accessories, spol. s r.o., Italeri S.p.A., Ente Scambi Coloniali Internazionali, and Airfix Products, Ltd.; in China, Zhongshan Trumpeter Model Co., Ltd. and Meng Model Co., Ltd.; in Japan, Tamiya Inc., Hasegawa Corp., and Aoshima Bunka Kyozai Co. Ltd.; in Russia, by Zvezda LLC. In the “Golden Days” of plastic model-kits, the U.S. hosted Model Products Corp., Pyro Plastics Corp., and Aurora Plastics Corp.; Renwal Co., Adams Models, and Jo-Han Models, Inc.; in Chicago alone—Hawk Model Co., Lindberg Products Inc., and Monogram Models Inc. Lewis Glaser’s Revell Inc., founded in 1943 as Precision Specialties, owned more than half the market-share, producing more than 30-million annual units. The distinguishing character of Revell models, according to Glaser, was the sterling detail of their tooling and the fidelity of mass-reproducible, injection-molded plastic. “We put shoelaces on figures only one inch high and rivets on the fuselages of 12-inch airplanes,” his chief moldmaker explained. The fruits of his labor were attested to when Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, in 1961, implied it had encroached on national security: “If I were Russian,” he said, “I would be most grateful to the United States for its generosity in supplying such information for $2.98.” REALISM. Something.
9.
On April 8th, 1630, John Winthrop and his Puritan immigrants sailed past Hooke’s Needles and across the Atlantic on the way to their New World. “About six in the morning,” Winthrop wrote, “we weighed anchor and set sail, and before ten we got through the Needles.”
10.
On maps today, cargo ships number hundreds, thousands, swarming through the narrow channels and the expanses between continents, and Hapag-Lloyd’s 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 family 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. In 2009, Revell Inc.’s German subsidiary, Revell GmbH, released the Colombo Express as a 1:700-scale model. 1:700 is the smallest standard scale, applied to the largest things: a human at the same scale would be a gnat in the air; the Empire State Building would stand 25” tall. The completed plastic model, 226 pieces, measures 18.8”*2.5”*XX and weighs 12 oz. It comes in a cardstock box bearing a painting of the Colombo Express containing an instruction manual and Hapag-Lloyd decals for each miniature cargo container. Among them are Standard General Purpose Containers measuring 2.591mm*6.058mm*2.438mm, and Standard High Cube General Purpose Containers measuring 2.895mm*13.716mm*2.438mm. The instruction manual recommends 10 seperate colors—white, purple red + rust, ‘Lufthansa’ yellow + orange, carmin red + rust, black, leaf green, luminous orange, brass, steel, and ochre brown. “They really do have all those colors,” one modeler wrote. “Used to drive the NJ Turnpike past Port Newark.”
11.
I am building the Colombo Express, sanding, gluing, painting: joining the hull, marking the waterline, seating the rudder, laying the deck, coating the body, placing the gangways, setting the aerials, assembling the bridge, raising the superstructure, mounting the funnel, fitting the lifeboat, positioning the anchors, adding the decals, taping the containers, priming the containers, fixing the staircases, painting the containers, weathering the portholes, and painting the containers. I can hear the low music of the Union Pacific through the window, hauling its intermodals north to Minnesota. I can hear naval men at work in the radiator clanging. I can remember the first model ship I ever built: a stick “battleship” my father floated into the canal to bombard with stones.
12.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is travelling down the Red Sea toward the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The wind is 23kn. The temperature is 23°.
13.
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. On the morning of April 26, 100 dignitaries gathered at Port Newark in the rain to watch globalization slip from its berth. “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 its decks stood 58 silver shipping containers, loaded in less than 8 hours. International commerce would never be the same. By the time the 58 containers reached Texas, 5 days later, the world that had already begun to shrink. “We had seen thousands of tankers in Houston, but never one like this,” one longshoreman said. “Everybody looked at this monstrosity.” Its owner, Malcom McLean, named his new company the Sea-Land Corporation.
14.
Malcolm Purcell McLean, “the Father of Containerization,” was born in the small town of Maxton, North Carolina, in 1913. He liked to tell stories about his upbringing which were not all in truth: that he had learned business selling lettuce with his mother; that he was once so poor he paid the toll with a wrench. In point of fact it had been familial connections which allowed him to open the McLean Trucking Co. in 1934 and secure his first contract hauling dirt for the WPA. 20 years later, McLean Trucking ran more than 126 trucks to the eastern seaboard and back with cigarettes; when the company reached 1,700 trucks, the fourth-largest motor-carrier in the United States, Malcolm removed the second “L” from his name and became “Malcom.” Yet even this was not enough; like so many others, he harbored an oceanic feeling. It was while watching longshoremen work the docks in Hoboken that he envisioned “not just one trailer, or two of them, or five, or a dozen, but hundreds on one ship.”
15.
“I concluded there must be neer eleven hundred of them, or somewhat more than a thousand in the length of an Inch, and therefore in a square Inch above a Million, or 1166400. and in a Cubick Inch, above twelve hundred Millions, or 1259712000,” Robert Hooke wrote in April 1663. He had taken “a good clear piece of Cork,” holding it under the microscope, “and with a Pen-knife sharpen’d as keen as a Razor,” sliced it open to discover that the world, which had seemed so solid, was really no more than a “great many small Boxes.” It was “all perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb.” Hooke was the first to see these “enclosed little Boxes,” and he named them “cells,” after the small, ascetic cellula where monks practiced their habit.
16.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is en route to Charleston (USCHA) carrying containers of powderized guar gum, hand tools, iron and steel-carbon pipe fittings, cotton terry towels, 100% cotton comforter sets, and spools of 1.90mm plastic filament.
17.
The TEU is a standard ISO cargo container: a “twenty-foot equivalent” (TEU) about 19’10”*8’*8’6”. It weighs 4,850 lbs. when empty and “works” for 20 years. The interior is 1,172 cubic feet: 48,000 bananas, 25,000 tin cans. The entire unit is an approximation. Containers share a standard width—8’—but are variable in height and length: a 4’3”-tall container is “half-height”; a 9’6”-tall container is a “high cube.” Both occupy the same the basic footprint within the maritime cellular grid: one TEU. The measurement is not an object but a mathematics: 2 TEU make an FEU (“forty-foot equivalent”), a 53’-long container is 2.65 TEU. The Colombo Express can hold 8,749 TEUs at once; its top shippers—Expeditors International Inc., UPS Supply Chain Solutions Inc., DB Schenker Inc., Pudong Prime Int’l Logistics Inc., and Beijing Kang Jie Jong International Cargo Agent Co. Ltd.—fill the them with “cartons,” “bags,” “pallets,” and “cases” of cargo for consignees to receive at foreign ports. An HS code classifies the contents by type; a bill of lading produces a paper double. Almost all international trade is subject to these terms. It is the language through which the empirical world is reproduced, moved in TEUs like cells through a sprawling arteria of shipping lanes and highways to carry the global body its nutrient desires: 2,354 pieces of Coca-cola soft drinks, 128 cartons of roofing nails, 50 packages of chassis racks, 30 packages of composite hollow insulators, 112 cartons of folding knives, 9 pieces of beech lumber, 1,330 cases of Quinto Reserve malbec, 34 cartons of men’s blazers, 40 packages of empty glass bottles. “Our Cargoes Become the Products of Your Daily Lives,” the Chamber of Maritime Commerce advertises.
18.
“I want today to outline why I think globalization is undoubtedly a ‘good thing,’” Anne Krueger tells the Pacific Council of International Policy in 2004. Her lecture is titled Economic Growth in a Shrinking World. “I used the word shrinking in the title,” she explains, because “that is what, in a real sense, globalization means”: the once-limitless horizon of the world reducing to the rational order of the globe. It is a “shrinking world”: shrinking time, shrinking space. Things draw closer, get smaller, are integrated. The economic benefits are in abundant evidence here, “in one of the richest parts of the richest countries in the world,” near the Port of San Diego. This, she says, is what “makes the rise of the modern anti-globalization movement such a puzzling phenomenon.” The mass protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization conference “just a few hundred miles north of here” still hang the air. These “modern-day opponents of globalization are a disparate group,” Krueger allays, “not united in their aims, nor, I think, in their understanding of the global economy.” “Thousands of years ago,” she says, “the trading nations of the Mediterranean knew what globalization was, even if they would not recognize the term.”
19.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is moving through the Mediterranean Sea carrying stainless steel washers for Captain’s Fasteners Corp., stainless steel swivel elbows for Stainless Hose Fittings Inc., cotton woven tank dresses for Giftcraft Ltd., leather boots for English Riding Supply LLC, and fender assemblies for Harley Davidson Inc.
20.
Across cultures and world empires appear so-called psychopomps, angels or demons or spirits or gods, whose job it is to shepherd the most precious shipment, the human soul, into another world. There are Ḫumuṭ-tabal and Urshanabi in Ancient Mesopotamia; analogues in Myanmar, Samoa, Australia; Charon in Ancient Greece. In 1881, Rev. Lorimer Fison described the Fijian Nakelo climbing the trees to summon Themba and his invisible canoe: “Themba, bring over your canoe,” the Vunikalou shouted three times, beckoning his cosmic transport. In Egypt, Pharoah Unas, asleep in his grave, recites Utterance 270 from the antechamber of his pyramid and summons the ferryman He Who Sees Behind Him. He Who Sees Behind Him is the Pharaonic soul, carrying them across the Winding Waterway to the Field of Reeds, heralding them to Ra on the dawn bank, where he will be free from pain and suffering. In Spell 397 of the Coffin Texts, He Who Sees Behind Him instates a ritual test wherein the deceased must reassemble his boat, “taken to pieces and placed in the dockyard.” “(What about) her cable?” He Who Sees Behind Him asks. “It is the nrw-serpent which is in the hand of Hemen,” the deceased replies. “Where shall I put it?” “Put it in her bilge-water.” And “(What about) her gunwales(?)” he continues. “They are the sinews of him of whom all these are afraid.” And “Who are you who have come?” He Who Sees Behind him asks. “I am a magician,” the deceased replies.
21.
RECITATION:
May you awake in peace:
Face Behind Him, in peace; Sees Behind
Him, in peace; the sky’s ferryman, in peace;
Nut’s ferryman, in peace; the gods’ ferryman,
in peace.
Unas has come to you that you may transport him in the ferryboat in which you transport the gods.
Unas has come to his side like a god’s coming to his side;
Unas has come to his proximity like a god’s coming to his proximity.
22.
When the “Father of Containerization” dies of a heart attack in 2001, container ships across the world sound their horns to him.
23.
Hapag-Lloyd, the Colombo’s monumental operator, began in two pieces, as Hapag, a passenger line in Hamburg, 1837, and its northern competitor, Norddeutscher Lloyd, a passenger line in Bremen, 1856. Their business was made not in moving cargo but humans, transporting German emigrants across the Atlantic to the new world. It was on Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Kaiser Wilhelm II that Alfred Stieglitz took his most famous photograph, The Steerage, in 1907. He had stepped from his first-class cabin onto the upper decks to glimpse the crowded steerage deck beneath him. “I longed to escape from my surroundings and join these people,” he claimed—“I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.” When he returned to his cabin hours later, his wife reproached him for speaking as if he “had been far away in a distant world.” I was, he replied.
24.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is departing Meishan (CNMSN) to Yangshan Deep-Water Port (CNYSA) in Hangzhou Bay.
25.
“You have to have something a boy can vicariously project into,” Lew Glaser said. A plastic model was more than entertainment; it was an education, “supposed to give a child a picture of real life,” David Riesman wrote. “Added to boys’ toys, for example production-imitating equiptment like trucks and steam shovels,” he noted in 1950, was “a whole new range of objects modeled after the service trades: laundry trucks, toy telephones, service stations, and so forth.” The small scale of the works belied a larger vision: the modeler learned his role in the process of the world, felt the “ego-satisfactions” of holding it in his hands. It is not the toy which is built but a social actor. As Glaser advertised, Revell was “creating tomorrow’s men with patience and plastic.” “A growing boy, as any parent knows, is a bundle of curiosity. He pieces together his world out of any answers he can find, and the wise parent tries to provide as many of these answers as possible. But these days there are things that a parent—even a wise parent—doesn’t know. For we live in a new world, with new frontiers to explore and new machines to use.”
26.
“The revolution—the use of containers—has superseded longshoremen’s arms with the mechanical arms of giant cranes and has replaced teeming waterfronts full of wooden crates and burlap sacks with vast, stark marshaling yards packed with sleek, steel boxes,” the New York Times reported during a dock strike in October 1977. The International Longshoremen’s Association had staged repeated walk-outs in 1959, ‘62, ‘64, ‘68, ‘71—the latter stretching more than 130 days. As the Ideal X pulled from Port Newark for the first time in 1956, a reporter asked a union man his thoughts. “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch,” he answered.
27.
“We therefore trusted ourselves to the mercy of the waves, and in about half an hour the boat was overset by a sudden flurry from the north,” Lemuel Gulliver recounts. He had wanted to remain in London, spending time with his family, in XYZ, where he opened a surgical practice “hoping to get a business with the sailors.” It was economic necessity that compelled him back shipboard. “Having therefore consulted with my Wife, and some of my acquaintance,” he says, “I determined to go again to Sea,” where the throes of fate carried him “by wind and tide” to the shores of Lilliput. “I felt something alive moving on my left leg,” he realizes, waking in the sand, “and when bending my Eyes downward as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human Creature not six Inches high.”
28.
“I sat up till two o'clock in my chamber reading of Mr. Hooke's Microscopicall Observations, the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life,” Samuel Pepys wrote in his journal. On November 3, 1664, Hooke had presented to the Royal Society at Gresham College an advanced copy of his microscopical studies in a volume titled Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. with Observations and Inquiries thereupon. His illustrations demonstrate a radical inversion in the scale of the world, bringing the reader, like Melville’s great “stone, iron, and bronze men,” to discover “new worlds and Terra-incognita’s” beneath them, encircled, like planets, by the round vignette of the lens. “I Do here most humbly lay this small Present at Your Majesties Royal feet,” Hooke dedicated his findings, presenting to King Charles II all the “little Boxes” and “minute bodies” his microscope had discovered “under our feet.” “It is said of Great empires,” he wrote, “That the best way to preserve them from decay, is to bring them back to the first principles, and Arts, on which they did begin.”
29.
It was Gov. John Winthrop, long past Hooke’s Needles, who received the earliest recorded slave shipment to New England on an American ship named Desire. “Mr. Pierce, in the Salem ship, the Desire,” Winthrop wrote, “returned from the West Indies after seven months. He had been at Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos.” Seven months prior, the Desire had departed to Bermuda with seventeen indigenous captives as cargo.
29.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is being loaded with containers in Karachi (PKKHI).
30.
floating bodies
fluid bodies
firm bodies
powder’d bodies
all bodies
other bodies
hard bodies
smooth bodies
close bodies
most bodies
stony bodies
some bodies
small bodies
those bodies
tinging bodies
ting’d bodies
Cany bodies
coloured bodies
comprest bodies
congrous bodies
compressing bodies
sulphureous bodies
extended bodies
homogenous bodies
dissolved Bodies
dissoluble bodies
Celestial bodies
saline bodies
contracting bodies
percussing bodies
encompassing bodies
Vegetable bodies
Mineral bodies
minute bodies
metalline bodies
combustible bodies
Animal bodies
Animate bodies
thin plated bodies
stiff, sharp bodies
small long solid bodies
Simple and uncompounded bodies
fiery burning Bodies
Hexangular prismatical bodies
curiously figur’d bodies
divers artificial bodies
Tenacious and Glutinous bodies
highly esteem’d bodies
laminated pellucid bodies
putrifying or fermenting bodies
prettily shap’d bodies
horned and tufted bodies
two small oblong bodies
round, cylindrical, transparent bodies
slender conical bodies
exceedingly differing bodies
Spongie fibrous bodies
little oblong transparent bodies
small conical bodies
floating bodies, as Bubbles, Corks, Sticks, Straws
bodies of Air, Water, Earth
bodies of Mercury, Air &c.
the bodies of the Sun and Starrs, and the Planets
bodies of Insects
bodies and motions
bodies and wings
Antipathy of bodies
the bodies of Metals
black Bodies like seed-cods
bodies, as Pink and Verdigrese, which are Greens, the one a Popingay, the other a Sea-green; then Lac, which is a very lovely Purple
bodies, as Marble, Woods, Bones, &c., and of Dying Silks, Cloaths, Wools, Feathers, &c.
bodies very violently mov’d
bodies, as the ceiling of a room
bodies, spun out into very fine parts
Bodies for our tast
Bodies, petrified
bodies, almost upon every change of Air
31.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is in the North West Atlantic Ocean 1d 15h and 57mins from New York (USNYC). Distance travelled: 762 NM. Distance remaining: 1086 NM.
32.
“I ran over the whole history of my life in miniature, or by abridgement, as I may call it…,” Robinson Crusoe reports sometime in the 24th year of his isolation, unable to sleep in his hammock. That morning, he had seen a footprint in the sand and been thrown into panic. He remembers his marooning, how the Bible had helped him find the providence in his “primitive” condition; how at length he had assembled a little world from scratch, glued it together piece by piece: clothing from goat-hides and candles from goat grease; a vacation house, a farm, a wooden boat; shovels for building castles and baskets woven from reeds, remembering “standing at a basket-maker’s in the town where my father lived.” He remembers his father’s warning, that “it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise,” and that “if I did take this foolish step, God would not bless me, and I would have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his council.” It was not the storm that wrecked his expedition, he reflects, but “the excellent advice of my father, the opposition to which was, as I may call it, my Original Sin.” Exhausted, the rain pouring down, he falls asleep.
33.
In his dream, Crusoe looks down onto a beach to see “two canoes, and eleven savages coming to land,” bringing with them a captive. The man is in desperate need, and Crusoe, murdering his captors, takes him into servitude. A year and a half later, Crusoe awakens to realize the dream had not been a wish, but a vision: from his castle he spies a man running up the beach, just as he imagined, and conspires to enslave him. “At length he came close to me,” Crusoe says of the stranger, “kiss’d the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave forever.” Crusoe names the man Friday, teaches him “Yes,” “No,” and “Master,” and shows him how to eat bread and drink milk—“his very affections,” Crusoe glows, “ty’d to me, like those of a child to a father.” When Crusoe returns to England, he returns a rich man, “master all on a sudden of about £5,000 sterling in money, and had an estate, as I might well call it, in Brazil, of about a thousand pounds a year, as sure as an estate of lands in England,” to learn that his father has died.
34.
SPELL FOR BRINGING A FERRY-BOAT IN THE REALM OF THE DEAD.I am one beloved of my father, whom my father greatly loves.
I am he who awoke my sleeping father.
O Mahaf, awaken Aken for me, as you are endowed with life;
see, I have come.
35.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is reaching Thames Port (GBLGP). The temperature is 61ºF. It is drizzling.
36.
When Alfred Stieglitz reached land in the summer of 1907, he no longer recognized that “deepest human feeling” which had so overwhelmed him on board. The Steerage would languish for three years among his negatives until a friend uncovered it. It was not the image he remembered, without “the feeling of ship and ocean and sky” to move him.
37.
In addition to Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe produced more than 300 works under at least 198 distinct pen names, but his true passion, he claimed, was business. He underwrote marine insurance and traded in cows, tobacco, tile, honey, hosiery; he pursued disparate and dangerous investments, in diving bells to locate buried treasure and special civet cats to produce perfume. Around 1695, he changed his name from “Foe” to “Defoe” in order to seem better-heeled: his father, James, was a local tallow chandler, and about his mother, Alice, near nothing is known. His success was checkered: he was bankrupted twice, appointed to debtor’s jail seven times, and once owed more than £17,000 to 140 separate creditors. For a time, he could appear in public only on Sundays, when English law protected him from arrest. His death saw him holed-up in a lodging house just yards from his childhood home, evading his creditors. Despite these disappointments, 7 years after Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe authored what is perhaps the first English business manual, the Compleat English Tradesman. In all but name, it, too, is a Robinsonade. “Here,” the handbook claims, the reader “will be effectually encouraged to set out well, and to avoid all those rocks which the gay race of tradesman so frequently suffer shipwreck upon…” 38.
In the alps near Grenoble, France, the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Center has reduced the commerical ocean to a 13-acre lake where students can rehearse the dance of the maritime economy using manned-model boats. Forests shelter the lake from winds; current generators simulate sea conditions; miniature harbors have been to built to replicate Esso Bay, Cape Horn, Manhattan Island, the Strait of Magellan, and the Suez Canal. The Port Revel training fleet contains 12 1:25-scale model vessels. The Spirit of Port Revel simulates a 21,000 TEU cargo ship at 78,125-times less power: twelve minutes inside it corresponds to one hour of real ship-time. In 60 years, the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Center has seen more than 6,500 student pilots sail its miniature ocean, sitting onboard the models and maneouvering them through excercises in fast anchoring, emergency stops, shallow water turning, and constricted overtaking. “On the way to Port Revel in the van this morning,” John McPhee wrote, the pilots “told stories about dreaming of ships. Andy said he has had a recurrent dream for some years in which he tries to climb a mountain in a ship. He has the anchor out before him as piton. They dream of taking ships through the streets of cities, going hard to starboard at Thirty-fourth and Fifth. Kenny dreams of parking his ship in a mud puddle at a Kmart.”
39.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is docked in berth 7 at the Garden City Terminal in Savannah (USSAV).
40.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is being loaded with unglazed ceramic tile, automobile passenger tires, strawberry preserves, tajadas de platanos, floor panels, coffee goods, frozen pork bung, floor panels, and cotton t-shirts.
41.
In 1986, Revell Inc. purchased one of the largest model manufacturers in the US, its main competitor, Monogram Models Inc., to form Revell-Monogram. “Just as our products are built to the exact scale of real cars, planes, and ships,” Glaser said, “it is our desire to make our company a model, built to the scale and detail of a big corporation.” Over 43 years, Glaser’s vision had grown from the private dream of a “true-to-scale car” into a string of international subsidiaries—Revell Great Britain, Ltd., Revell Switzerland and Australia, Revell Plastics, GmbH. “We don’t need American movies as much as we do Revell kits,” a retailer wrote him from Mexico, “They’re real American history.” In Japan, employee Al Trendle noted, the most popular Revell kits were the B-29 Bomber plane—which had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the USS Missouri—which had hosted Minister Shigemitsu and the Japanese surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945. At 8:43 A.M., Sep. 2, US General Douglas MacArthur had stepped onto the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay and announced his dream to a global audience: “It is my earnest hope—indeed the hope of all mankind,” he announced, “that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world founded upon faith and understanding…”
42.
In the news this morning, the United States has launched more than 100 missiles at Yemen in response to blockades on container ships in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. At a press conference in Washington D.C., reporters ask the President how well the counter-bombing is “working.” “Well,” he responds, “when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
43.
3 Kill’d at our first shot from the tree.
2 Kill’d at the next shot.
2 Kill’d by Friday in the boat.
2 Kill’d by ditto, of those at first wounded.
1 Kill’d by ditto, in the wood.
3 Kill’d by the Spaniard.
4 Kill’d, being found dropp’d here and there of their wounds, or
kill’d by Friday in his chase of them.
4 Escap’d in the boat, whereof one wounded if not dead.
21 In all.
44.
SPELL 99.
O you who bring the ferry-boat of the Abyss to this difficult bank,
bring me the ferry-boat, make fast the warp for me in peace, in peace!
Come, come; hurry, hurry, for I have come in order to see my father Osiris.
O Lord of Red Cloth, the Male who navigates.
45.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is departing Busan (KRPUS) with stainless steel cutlery, plastic tableware, and bibles (Harper Collins).
46.
In June 1851, just before the publication of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne about the spontaneous religious feeling Romain Rolland had called “oceanic.” Melville performs the roles of both Rolland and Freud in the same letter. “In reading some of Goethe's sayings, so worshipped by his votaries,” he wrote, “I came across this, ‘Live in the all.’ That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one, — good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself... What nonsense!” he objects. But he cannot make up his mind. In a post-note, he adds: “This ‘all’ feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.”
47.
Tonight the Colombo Express sits on the mantlepiece. It has taken me 6 months and two apartments to complete, assembling, gluing, and painting each shipping container, stairwell, and bannister to ensure a “ship-shape.” In the nights still I wake up, just quickly, to write one-word notes about what may or may not constitute a miniature. I write “argument,” “tulips.” I write “desk-space.” I write “the Lake.”
48.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is sailing through the Tsugaru Strait and into the North Pacific Ocean at 95.7° east-southeast.
49.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is docked at APM Terminals Pacific Ltd. in Los Angeles (USLAX).
As I write this, the Colombo Express is docked at APM Terminals Pacific Ltd. in Los Angeles (USLAX).
50.
As I write this, the Colombo Express is en route to Rotterdam (NLRTM) on its long detour around the Cape. Off the starboard side lies St. Louis, Senegal; 95°F. The wind does not blow.51.
“Ah, trade,” Richard Brautigan wrote, “one country exchanging goods with another, just like in grade school.”52.