Tag Archives: Steve Mentz

Steve Mentz’s article is truly noteworthy. 

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After reading Mentz’s article, it feels like my eyes have opened up a little bit more because of the details that I completely agree with. In the article, he quoted: “For literary writers and scholars, the ocean seems especially attractive because of its metaphorical vastness. The great waters represent a principle of narrative fecundity that Salman Rushdie has described as the “sea of stories.” (140). This quote is so interesting to me because, for a long time, I have been curious about the idea of: is there more to the ocean than just water? We all know that the ocean is vast. We all know it has tons of stories of people who are worth mentioning. This is when curiosity strikes me. I want to know more about the deep-sea creatures. Most people would think that such creatures would never exist, but the deep dark sea contains everything, and when I say everything, I mean creatures that our eyes could not even believe in. Mentz made such great points in this quote because, as scholars, we allow our curiosity to win over us. We study by gaining knowledge. We study by thinking about the possibilities of everything that could possibly happen at any moment. We create thoughts that are beyond the human imagination. We are attracted to the ocean not only because it has water, but because it creates images that allow us to visualize those stories in our heads. This is why Moby Dick plays a huge part in all of the articles we have read so far. The novel allows us to explore the mysteriousness that the sea offers to us. As scholars, we are not meant to know everything about the sea. We are meant to study it, to visualize it, and know the dangers behind it. When Mentz refers to ‘sea of stories’, I believe he is referring to the stories of the people who sail to the sea in the novel. There has to be people who challenge their lives in order to go out into the deep sea. Even though there are some points that I believe are spectacular and worth mentioning, this article still confuses me because it talks about the sea with poetics alongside other poets. Does this mean the ocean is the body of a poem? And people just sort of utilize it as a way to create more poems? I would love to learn more about how the ocean is associated with poetry because it definitely plays a huge role in explaining the vastness of the ocean.

Steve Mentz Questions

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  1. The fifth word listed in the “Preface to Ocean” reading calls for a change to our language, as you ponder if “our language [is] too visual.” What other linguistic alternatives are you thinking would align with the communication of underwater creatures?
  2. One of the first things that I noted in my reading of “Preface to Ocean” was your use of “moving and moved” to describe the waters surrounding us. What do those past and present tenses touch on with your ongoing studies of deterritorialization and “the blue humanities?”
  3. You’ve mentioned the effect that the eco-crisis and climate emergency have on your field of study. How might the growing concern on this topic influence the future of “the blue humanities,” and how might we, as students and advocates of the oceans, better help?
  4. Visibility and perspective seem to be huge points of interest in the process of destabilizing and adjusting our “old terrestrial language.” What role does visibility play in the advocacy for the oceans and surrounding waters? In other words, do you find that those in more direct proximity to the ocean and waters have a greater interest in “the blue humanities?”
  5. In what ways has your interest in poetry influenced your outlook on your field of study? We often discuss fluidity in our literary discussion and analysis of poetry, which makes the subject of water/oceans and poetry seem like complimentary partners.

“Deterritorializing Preface” Perspective – A Whirlwind

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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.

Earth. Ocean.

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Long ago, the two territories lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Steve Mentz nation attacked. With seven words, he launched an assault on the old ways of thinking… ideas that relied on ground-based words to help everyone towards true progress, or rather, flow.

His first statement already captures the message, but the rest further supported his claim. It’s understandable: changing “progress” to “flow” would rewire our mindset to keep going. Don’t stop. Just keep going. You can’t stop here. Keep up the momentum, and finish the race.

His idea to change “state” to “ship” is also fathomable. “Ships, as historians, philosophers, and Hollywood movies have long shown, are symbolic unities, heterotopias, and polyglot fantasy-spaces. Perhaps it is time to imagine politics through ship-to-ship encounters—trading, fighting, hailing, sighting—rather than through the grounded metaphors of the state?” I agree, and in fact, I’ve always seen politics as such. Though, I’m not familiar with those grounded metaphors.

However, one splashing statement was when Mentz said, “Our metaphors must float on water rather than resting on ground.” This quote baffles me… why can’t they stick? Are they not the reason we could understand most complicated matters? Just as much as we should use water as a metaphor for innovation, the earth is where we can find a sense of stability. What if we drown in responsibilities? Flooded by relentless ideas?

Water as a metaphor to improve thinking can also rattle our ships of thought. We could swim in a mundane pond, unable to grasp the stone of stability. That very pond could also blind us. Mentz mentioned distortion instead of clarity, but without clarity, would our way of communication be self-contained in our own rivers? Rivers all lead to the same destination, but their origins are never the same.

The soil separates us, and the rivers then converge into the same thinking, yet rivers only flow because of what holds them apart. Mentz wants us to continue thinking, shaping the form of Earth into something different. Even with rivers guiding us, land will always be somewhere. Without land, there is no where we can simply bask in the sunlight. Without land, we would not prevail against the creatures of the sea.

Underwater animals don’t need sight, as Mentz said, but he also said “water bends light.” We are dependent on what we can see. The blind can only “see” because they were able to enhance their other senses. But not everyone can do that.

Out of the seven (or rather six) words he replaced, I would keep Clarity, Landscape, and Ground. What lies below the ocean is ground as well, but we are not for the world below the surface. We are built for above it.

Questions For Steve Mentz (Extra Credit)

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  1. You talk about climate change and rising sea levels, how can blue humanities help us think different about our current ecological challenges?
  2. What drew you to study blue humanities?
  3. Which other works do you think captures the poetics of water?
  4. How do you balance the reality of water, like rising sea levels and pollution, with the symbolic meaning of water? Does material reality and symbolism overlap?
  5. What connections are there between blue humanities and environmental justice?

Somethings have to change

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The ocean can teach us so much about our lives on land and its fragility, highlighting our refusal to acknowledge the delicate nature of the society we have created. Steve Mentz and the Blue Humanities movement uses the presence of our oceans as a signifier of the chaos that belongs to nature, something so obviously vicious and beautiful you cannot turn away from its message. This untamable spirit has connected humans across worlds, creating empires on land that tumble but are quickly replaced by a bigger one. The human empire is at odds with nature as the climate crisis worsens every day, Mentz calls this the “central challenge of the current generation”. Water is our survival but it has the potential to destroy the human empire on Earth. We cannot possess water and we certainly cannot survive in it. 

Before this course, I never attributed any sort of characteristic to water, it was just a thing that we needed, essential but invisible. Thinking about it in vast amounts and the various climate crises that have happened through bodies of water, it’s both creator & destroyer of life. As we continue to live on Earth at the pace we are going, these water crises will be more prevalent until we have completely lost the privilege of seeing water as invisible, its presence will demand our attention through its violence. Mentz sees water, the ocean, as a way to slow down and embrace the vulnerability of the human empire. Rather than a stagnant society shaped by people who lived hundreds of years ago, the fluidity of water can teach us about how we can move towards a freer world. Mentz renames progress, not as something that has a is already defined in a single direction, but flows outwards unable to take a single shape, confusing us enough to think outside of “historical narratives”. Thinking about the nature of water can reshape the things we take for granted as truth. Greed and hatred have been byproducts of what we deem as truth, as ‘the way the world is’. Reframing the world through the lens of water can offer us “possibilities for new ways of thinking and living”, a world where we are no longer captive to ancient establishments but we become both destroyers & creators, like water.

Blog Response – “A Poetics of Planetary Water” by Steve Mentz

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Steve Mentz constantly discusses the means of changing our relationship with the water in our environment. For centuries, the ocean and large bodies of water have been viewed as something to conquer, to possess, and something that can be transformed into a border or a place of recreation. This type of mindset revolves around issues of colonization, laying claim to or being placed in a position above something that cannot be “owned”. Melville refers to this as the “masterless ocean”, as Mentz references in his writing, something that humans “depend upon [it] and love [it], but it cannot be our home” (p. 4). It seems pointless to lay claim to something that is ever-changing and thus cannot be tamed. The ocean is something almost alien, especially considering that we know so little about it. To lay claim to the very thing that we cannot defeat or confine shows our complete lack of understanding of what the ocean truly stands for. Mentz urges us through the study of blue humanities to learn more about the ocean because “we are going to be seeing more of it, closer up, in the future” (p. 8) Not only in the rising sea levels of the unexplored ocean, but in the heavier rainstorms that risk flooding our neighborhoods with the ever-growing draught of our planet, we risk succumbing to the extremes of the water that we consider having rights over. The very thing we own, without proper knowledge or understanding of, will ultimately kill us all.

 My Reponse to Steve Mentz’s “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis”

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When I first started to read this article by Mentz, I was a bit intimidated by it. But when I came across this line I believe I finally understood what he is trying to tell us about in this article: “We have come to know the sea,” he concludes,“as much through the humanities as through science.” Artistic, poetic, and humanistic knowledge, he insists, define the sea’s centrality to modern Western culture.” (pg. 144). There are so many ways that a vast number of people can learn about our oceans and what is within them and how they can help us as a society. As our oceans are so vast and cover most of the planet it has become a cental part of how we live our lives today.

Basic human knowledge as he says is part of how we know the sea, yes we can see it, touch it, smell it, and swim in it. But many don’t have acess to the ocean because of where they might live and they have heard of what the ocean looks like and might see pictures, a basic idea of the ocean. Those who might even do dives in the ocean and more, a lot of people can enjoy the ocean and what it can provide for us emotionally and even physically. People can also make art depicting the ocean and how others feel reguarding it which I enjoy seeing the most. The art works we looked at in class really spoke to me and I could see the story behind them and manty artists through their art styles can show how calm or even how violent the ocean might be. Reading about the ocean through poems is another way that Metz speaks of later and he does give examples of poems he enjoys which evokes the idea of blue humanities. So many poems have been written about the beach, the ocean and how one might feel regaurding it and this can help people gain a better knowledge of the ocean and what the ocean can mean for us.

As the ocean is so vast and everyone knows of it, it has become a source of where many countries recieve their food sources from and how much we use it, is very important for our modern world today.

Extra Credit Mentz Questions

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  1. What other oceanic studies were there before the rise of blue humanities?
  2. How much does the study of the ocean in blue humanities include life in the ocean and how they interact with it?
  3. How are places such as aquariums and Sea World viewed from a blue humanities perspective?
  4. What are some consequences that may arise if we were to ignore blue humanities?
  5. Can a similar approach to the ocean in blue humanities be applied to other frontiers, such as the desert?

Extra Credit Questions For Mentz!

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I can’t wait to ask these questions in class! Maybe these will spark more questions people might have in the room!

  1. What other words/phrases would you say or use to describe blue humanities?
  2. As we see our world changing due to climate change, how can we relate this back to blue humanities and what can we do oursleves to educate people on what is happening in our world?
  3. Is there an art peice or anything that you would show to others to inspire them to learn more on blue humanities?
  4. Are there other poems that you would point to that you also enjoyed that are about the ocean besides Dickinson or Whitman’s?
  5. Where did your love of the ocean stem from to then bring you to study and write on this subject matter?