This week’s reading was interesting as usual. The blue humanities is a new and foreign concept to me, but since we have started talking about it, I am very curious to know more. I have also been attempting to consolidate a definition of it in my head; a more material idea of it. Steve Mentz writes, “I emphasize these specific oceanic margins because of my commitment to linking human-sized encounters to planetary scales. Bringing a little splash of my local Atlantic into a global scholarly conversation will keep these thoughts tangible and direct” When I read this quote, I thought it was a good example of what I understand to be the meaning of blue humanities: a current (see what I did there) that studies people’s relationship with water. Steve Mentz talks about water in his article “A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis,” but makes a point of grounding (can’t escape it) his musings about this substance in a human perspective. He says that highlighting this relationship is what will keep his thoughts “tangible and direct.” It is interesting how in a conversation about fluidity, distortion, and other unstable qualities of water we find it so necessary to land these ideas onto something more solid, otherwise we won’t be able to understand them. We have to merge the familiar with the unfamiliar to be able to process new knowledge. Our thought processes aim towards finding clarity when water mostly offers distortion, and we fight against it because the water is not our home. Then again, water is transparent, and even though sometimes the ocean is so deep your eyes can’t see the bottom, when you’re there floating in the middle of the great blue, what your eyes detect underwater can only be described as a clarity. Maybe blue humanities can offer us that clarity even though it may not be in the grounded way we are used to.