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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
At the lake this morning, Magnolia snaps her toenail down to the quick and bleeds long red curlicues into the sand. The lakers coming in. “King Cargo,” on the Lake, is some 51 million tonnes of iron ore: the entire “industrial might of this nation.” One “Laker” can carry as much ore as 700 train cars, 2800 trucks. I have tried to learn their names—the Paul R. Tregurtha and Wilfred Sykes; the American Century and American Integrity and American Spirit—and on the clearest mornings, when they pass within sight, I have tried to learn their silhouettes. They have become minor celebrities. “What white castlework,” Lorine Niedecker wrote.2
“There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks,” Melville writes, “lost in the infinite series of the sea,” the sun slanting, the ship lilting. Ishamel has climbed to the mast-head, his what. for “a dreamy meditative man,” he continues, “it is delightful.” The slow, “blending cadence of waves with thoughts.” you become one with the world, dissolving into its gentle motion until there is “no life in thee, now,” but what the sea imparts; and “with this dream on ye,” Melville continues, 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.”
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 all around us; something “oceanic, as it were.” This “oceanic” feeling is the wellspring that nourishes all faith, he claims, “independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organizations, all Sacred Books.” It is more than a what, it is a question of scale. To capture it, he turns to nautical metaphor: the great, oceanic sensation, he writes, is like a “sheet of water which I feel flushing under the bark.” In 1865, Rolland had studied the distant religions and mysticisms, contemplated the universe as monad, mustard seed, cosmic egg, and mirroring jewel, and begun researching a biography of Ramakrishna, where he discovered the image of the ocean. In one lesson, Ramakrishna teaches 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 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 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, Freud asserts, the “oceanic feeling” is no more than the sublimated desire “for a father’s protection,” but where organized religion channels this longing into the image of the father, Rolland’s ‘oceanic feeling‘ remembers a time when the child was its own God. It is “a primitive ego-feeling,” he writes, like the sense, as in a nursing child, that the world is not an “outside” but a continuation. Indeed, man is not born an island. Once upon a time, our world is a shoreless ocean of experience, nothing what, where it is unclear whether there is no I or whether there is nothing else. Restore a world once again commensurate in scale. The oceanic feeling, Freud concludes, seeks “something like the restoration of limitless narcissism”: 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. Something. Too dense. Glaser was the ‘Prince of Put-it-Together,’ the ‘Hobby Model Kit King,’ presiding 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 those miniatures was an affirmation he could not discover “on a psychoanalyst’s couch” but in small things alone. It is an “ego-satisfaction,” Glaser claims: the immense, enchanting power of seeing the world as one’s own. Claude Levi-Strauss called it power diversified over a homologue of the thing. Gaston Bachelard called it “domination at little cost.” At the domestic scale, it is something else. “It was as if he had a prophetic vision he would die young,” his wife said: he 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
According to Bachelard, there is a distinction between miniatures and models. A model models, while a miniature is. As Ertl. Models belong to the “folk” and minaitures what a more emotional engagement. The miniature is an emotional object, demonstrated in the extraordinary, intimate care miniature-modelers extend their objects over months, sometime years. 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”; what. 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
Robert Hooke, the microscopist, who turns, as his peers, to what, himself. In XYZ he micrographia, selecting as the first object in his program the point of a needle. Just as mathematicians must begin with the “Mathematical point” and work up, so must we, he claims, begin in Natural history with “a Physical point; of which kind the Point of a Needle is commonly reckon’d for one.” He does not announce its personal meaning. The “Needles” are the name of the rough chalk cliffs which rise from the ocean near Hooke’s family 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 took root, as he clambered along the rocks to watch the ships come and go. In 1705, when Robert Waller began to gather Hooke’s work for publication, he discovered Hooke’s personal diary, and “there found a beginning of his life.” Until he was seven, the diary revealed, Hooke had been gravely ill, forced to spend his time alone, holed-up indoors, constructing “little mechanical Toys” as totems of his desires. First among those “Indications of a Mechanick Genius,” Hooke recalled, was his 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.”
8
In Germany today, the topic is taken up by Modell Werft magazine; in Poland, Modelarstwo Okrętowe; in Japan, ネイビーヤード; in the U.S., by Model Boats. Once there was Model Shipwright, Ships in Scale, and Model Ship Builder, which now can be acquired on a USB-drive from The Nautical Research Guild, headquartered in Westmont, Illinois, along with their own quarterly journal, The Nautical Research Journal. Their online message board, Model Ship World, is the largest on the internet. The scope of its detail is immense, designs and dimensions dug up in arcane reference like On the Stowage of Ships and their Cargoes and A Treatise on the Anchor. The stakes are epistemological: “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.” Revell is the largest manufacture plastic model kits. “You have to have something that a boy can vicariously project into,” Lew Glaser said: airplanes, tanks, warships. Attempts at catering to a “girls market” saw Revell producing plastic animals—Sassy the Kitten, Perri the Squirrel—which sold poorly and proved, in their eyes, that “model building was just not something girls liked to do.” As Lew Glaser wrote, Revell was building “tomorrow’s men with patience and plastic.”
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.” tomorrow’s men.
10
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. In 2009, Revell Inc. released the Colombo Express as a model kit in 1/700. It largest on the what. What.
11
I am building the Colombo Express. sanding, gluing, painting, piece after piece. I can what; I can hear naval men at work in the radiator clanging.
12
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°.
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. “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 announced: on its deck stood 58 shipping containers, in Texas, 58 trucks awaiting them. International commerce would never be the same. On the morning of April 26, what, the shipping industry gathered to watch as globalization slipped from its berth in Port Newark. By the time the Ideal X reached Houston, just five days later, with its containers in order, it greeted a world that had already begun to shrink. Its owner, Malcom McLean, named his new company the Sea-Land Corporation.
14
Malcom McLean, the “Father of Containerization,” was born in the small town of Maxton, North Carolina, in 1913. He had been the what: McLean trucking. He liked to tell stories about his upbringing which were not entirely true. According to one, he was so poor he paid the toll with an old wrench; according to another, what. In practice it was familial connections which placed him in to what, his, the McLean Trucking Co. In 1951, McLean Trucking had, the , the entire seaboard. Yet even this was not enough; like so many others, Malcom 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
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°.
16
The TEU is a standard cargo container, a “twenty-foot equivalent” (TEU) about 20’*8’*8’6”. It weighs two full tons 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. A 4’3” container is “half-height”; a 9’6” container is a “high cube,” nearly scraping the overpasses. The TEU is not an object, in other words, but a unit of measurement: both equal 1 TEU. A two-TEU container is an FEU (”fort foot equivalent). Almost all international trade is transported in such units, passing from ship to train to truck to plane, collapsing air, sea, and land into an intermodal horizon. This is how the empirical world reproduces—48,000-banana-sized volumes circulating through the global bloodstream. It is the cell which carries the global body its nurtient desires: shipping lanes, highways, railroads; televisions, salt, books, cars, kitchen appliances, coal, oil, rubber ducks, seeds. Sand, toys, guns, bananas. “Our Cargoes Become the Products of Your Daily Lives,” the Chamber of Maritime Commerce puts it.
17
“I want today to outline why I think globalization is undoubtedly a ‘good thing’,” Anne Krueger beings her address as Acting Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Her lecture is titled “Economic Growth in a Shrinking World.” “I used the word shrinking in the title of my talk,” she says, 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. Things come closer, get smaller, are replaced with ciphers: the shipping container, the Suez-canal, the Flag of Convenience. “We’re sitting here today in one of the richest parts of the richest countries in the world,” something, California, but “of course,” it must be assumed “there will always be those who lose out, whose job disappears without being immediately replaced by another.” “The modern-day opponents of globalization are a disparate group,” she allays, “not united in their aims, nor, I think, in their understanding of the global economy. * * * Thousands of years ago, the trading nations of the Mediterranean knew what globalization was, even if they would not recognize the term.”
18
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 trees to summon Themba and his invisible canoe: “Themba, bring over your canoe,” the Vunikalou shouted three times, beckoning his cosmic transport across the water. In Saqqara, Pharaoah Unas, asleep in his grave, recites Utterance 270 from the walls of his tomb and summons the ferryman Sees Behind Him. Outside the pyramid, slaves dug two boat-shaped pits 100-feet long. King Tutankhamūn was buried with a fleet of thirty-six miniature wooden boats and twelve model oars. Djehutynakht and his wife were buried with fifty-eight. Queen Ahhtoep I, Ahmose I’s mother, was buried with two: one silver and one gold.
19
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.
20
When the “Father of Containerization” dies of a heart attack in 2001, container ships across the world sound their horns.
21
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 in transporting German emigrants across the Atlantic. It was on Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Kaiser Wilhelm II that Alfred Stieglitz took his most famous photograph, The Steerage, in 1907. He had just stepped from his first-class cabin onto the upper decks when he glimpsed 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, Stieglitz replied.
22
“The Image we have here ehxibited in the first Figure was the top of a small and Very Sharp needle,” Hooke writes of his miniature experiment, “whose point nevertheless appear’d through the Microscope above a quarter of an inch broad, not round nor flat, but irregular and uneven.” It is appeared at all: duller than “hairs,” “hairs of leaves,” “bristles,” “claws,” “thorns,” and “crooks”; wide enough “to have afforded a hundred armed Mites room enough to be rang’d by each other.” It was not a needle’s point, in other words, an entire world writ small. “An evident argument,” he writes, “that he that was the Author of all these things, was no other than omnipotent; being able to include as great a variety of parts and contrivances in the yet smallest Discernable Point, as in those vaster bodies (which comparatively are also called Points) such as the Earth, Sun, or Planets.” It was not but a new worlds. The microscope makes us, “with the great Conqueror,” a what, “producing new worlds and Terra-Incognita’s to our view.” makes us “with the great Conqueror.” When Hooke publishes his observations in the Micrographia, he presents the images as he saw them, framed by the round vignette of the lens, as though he were God looking down on the world beneath Him.
23
“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. He is unable to sleep in his hammock, the rain pouring down; 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 condition. How at length he had built himself 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. How he had made homemade shovels to dig caves and build castles, woven baskets from reeds, remembering “standing at a basket-maker’s in the town where my father lived.” Then he remembers his father’s admonition on the eve of his departure, 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”; “that if I did take this foolish step, God would not bless me, and I should have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his counsel…” It was not a storm that wrecked his slaving expedition, Crusoe 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.
24
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, he wakes to realize the dream was not 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, and then he kneel’d down again,” 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.”
25
On these worlds,
“I Do here most humbly lay this Small Present at Your Majesties Royal feet,” Hooke dedicates his Micrographia to Charles II. “Amidst all those greater Designs, I here presume to bring in that which is more proportionable to the smallness of my Abilities, and to offer some of the least of all visible things, to that Mighty King, that has establisht an Empire over the best of all Invisible things of this World, the Minds of Men.” He subtitles the volume Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, and sets before Charles II his new world teeming with “minute” subjects.
26
Glass-bodies
the bodies of Air, Water, Earth
pretty bodies
terrestrial bodies
the Celestial bodies at what distance they please
all kind of solid Bodies also
stony bodies
Animal bodies
little oblong transparent bodies
those bodies I newly described
those bodies lay yet conceal’d
the greater bodies of the world
27
Years later, long past the Needles, it was Gov. John Winthrop who received the earliest 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 departed to Bermuda with seventeen indigenous captives as cargo.
28
ANOTHER BODIES
21
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°.26
Daniel Foe, Robinson Crusoe’s author, was born at St. Giles Parish in London, sometime c.1660. The “De” in “Defoe” he added years later, and accompanied with a noble heritage he invented. In actuality, his father, James, was a local tallow chandler, and about his mother, Alice, near nothing is known. Defoe would author more than 300 works under at least 198 distinct pen names, but another life exercising his entrepreneurial spirit outside writing altogether—as a spy, an investor, a businessman. He underwrote marine insurance and traded in cows, tobacco, tile, honey, hosiery; he pursued disparate and dangerous investments, in diving bells used to locate buried treasure and in special civet cats used to produce perfume. His success was checkered. He was bankrupted twice, appointed to debtor’s jail at least seven times, and once owed more than £17,000 to 140 separate creditors. For a time he would only appear in public on Sundays, when English law prevented his arrest. Despite these disappointments, Defoe authors what is perhaps the first English business manual, the two-volume Compleat English Tradesman. In all but name it 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…”
30
“A growing boy, as any parent knows, is a bundle of curiosity. A mass of questions. He pieces together his world out of any answers he can find. 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.”
31
In Japan, employee Al Trendle noted that 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. “We don’t need American movies as much as we do Revell kits,” a retailer in Mexico City implored. “They’re real American history.”
32
At 8:43 A.M., Sep 2, US General Douglas MacArthur stepped onto the 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…”
33
In the news this morning, the United States has launched more than 100 missiles at Yemen in response to shipping blockades 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.”
34
looking at bodies
Many burnt bodies
bodies before and after
looking at bodies
Many burnt bodies
bodies before and after
35
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.
36
the bodies they are
their bodies
minute
37
Tonight the completed Colombo Express sits on the mantlepiece. It has taken me 6 months and two apartments to complete. In the nights I wake up over and over, just quickly, to write one-word notes about what may or may not constitute a miniature. I consider the sweet-tasting rubber glove pressed to the roof of my mouth by a kindergarten speech therapist. I consider the stick ‘battleship’ my dad and I would float into the canal and bombard with stones. I write “argument,” “tulips.” I write “desk space.” I write “the Lake.”
38
As I write this,
39
As I write this,
40
As I write this.
41
As I write this, the real Colombo Express is en route to Rotterdam on its long detour around the Cape. Off the starboard side lies St. Louis, Senegal; 95°. The wind does not blow.42
When asked his thoughts on the Ideal X on April 25, 1956, one man said, “I’d like to sink the son of a bitch.”43