I have to confess that some of the suggestions that Mentz put forth in his preface made me feel uneasy and uncomfortable to think about. The changes, as he describes in his fourth word “ship,” go so far beyond just a material shift in thinking. What he’s suggesting is a complete turning point for all ways of life, intellectual perspectives, political formats, etc. Going to his sixth word, “distortion,” I could not wrap my brain around why I felt so uneasy with some of these changes. Then, it hit me.
I remembered a point that we made in class last Thursday about how we, as human beings, were not supposed to be in the ocean in the ways that we commonly are. We’re fundamentally land-based, so far as including land as one of our highest central issues in our language, political systems, and ways of thinking. The reason that Mentz’s encouragement to adapt to the “visual distortion” of “any aqueous [environment]” makes me so uncomfortable is that it’s so beyond literally all systems that I was taught.
Mentz writes that “water-thinking makes distortion a baseline condition” and that it “sometimes orients us on the buoyant top and at other times closer to the irresistible bottom.” It’s a change in perspective to focus on flexibility and openness, not a solid interpretation of what’s in front of you. There is a bend and flow of the ocean that Mentz is encouraging us to think about in ways that make our stubborn land-based lifestyles tremble a bit because it’s so different. It’s in this difference between the ways of our lives on land, through “grounded metaphors of the state,” and the movement offshore into the deep blue waters beyond that we find the importance of Melville.
As a reader of this six-page preface, I felt uneasy thinking about the changes that would occur through the “deterritorialization” process, whether it’s through the acceptance of buoyant perspectives or the reformation of something once thought to be so permanent as the horizon. I can only imagine how these changes would feel to someone confined to the oceans and waters. Where I can read about these alterations and try to apply them to my ideological perspectives on my own time, someone like Ishmael was surrounded by them, forced to recognize the movement of the currents and replace the term “progress” with “flow” due to necessity. It’s because of the changes posed by Mentz that I’m even more excited to see if and how the characters of Moby-Dick “[swap] out the old terrestrial language for saltwater terms” and outlooks.