The Poet's Metaphor as well as the Styrofoaming with the WatersCross-posted together with TomDispatc...

1. The (Less Than) Eternal Sea | Lewis Lapham
The Poet's Metaphor as well as the Styrofoaming with the Waters
Cross-posted together with TomDispatch.com
[This essay will appear inside "The Sea," the particular Summer 2013 issue of Lapham's Quarterly.
This particular slightly adapted model is actually posted in TomDispatch.com with all the kind
permission of that magazine.]
In hefty fog about the nights October 7, 1936, the particular SS Ohioan ran aground three miles
south as well as west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and also by noon about October 8th, I
has been among a significant group of spectators arrive at spend its respects to the simply no tiny
terror with the sea. I ended up being 2 yrs old, hoisted on the shoulders involving my father,
pertaining to whom the view to be able to windward had been neither openly nor latently sublime.
Your stranded vessel, an 8,046-ton freighter laden having a cargo priced at $450,000, had been
owned from the family steamship business involving which in turn my father one day ended up
becoming to get to become the president, and he would are already counting costs rather than
searching to the consolations regarding philosophy. no lives have been lost -- Coast Guard boats had
rescued the actual captain and furthermore the crew -- yet the initial assessments of the damaged
hull pegged the hopes regarding salvage within the vicinity regarding few as well as none.
Happily aloft inside the vicinity regarding my father's hat, and the weather having cleared since the
actual Ohioan missed its compass heading, I had been free to form my earliest impression in the sea
at a safe along with sunny distance, lulled from the audio associated with waves breaking about the
beach, delighting in the drift regarding gulls inside a bright blue sky.
The injured ship never regained consciousness. Just About All attempts from righting it had been to
become able to absolutely no avail, and in the summer regarding 1937, the actual removable
planking and machinery having been offered with regard to scrap, the Ohioan was declared a new
total loss, the actual hull abandoned towards the drumming of the surf and additionally the shifting
in the sand. Your prolonged as well as unhappy ending involving the storyline my father thought to
always be able to be a new useful lesson, and also over the particular length of the subsequent 3
years as I was shifting up inside age group via a couple of in order to five, he often walked me
through the hand over the cliff over the actual wreck for you to behold the work associated with its
destruction.
To foster my acquaintance with most the family's background changing fortunes, he spoke involving
distant ancestors sailing from your port of Boston and additionally the Gulf involving Maine within
the early-nineteenth-century China trade, of my great-grandfather's organizing your American-
Hawaiian Steamship company in 1899 certainly not since involving the cash in the business
nevertheless since with the romance. My father's flip involving thoughts has been literary, and that
he ended up being partial to strengthening his narratives with lengthy quotations coming from
William Shakespeare's plays along with extensive recitations coming from Joseph Conrad's An
Outcast of the Islands and also Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
Setting Sail

2. Floor-to-ceiling windows in my parents' house upon Fillmore Street faced the broad expanse
regarding Bay Area Bay, as instructive a new sight within sun as well as fog as virtually any that
exists throughout nature, nevertheless it absolutely was within the space with out any view, in my
father's library one of the stories informed in books, in which I learned to check upon the
enchantment in the sea. Simply By the time the particular Ohioan had been reduced to a fragment of
the bow within the summer of 1938, it had become a fading memory, along with I has been on the
lookout regarding pirates around the Spanish Main, pertaining to typhoons within the Sunda Strait.
Almost as soon as I could read I began together with Ishmael's setting foot aboard the Pequod along
with using the browsing within an atlas for your a record of the great white whale. My father
patiently untied the particular knots regarding metaphor throughout Melville's prose, discussed the
particular virtues involving Queequeg and Tashtego, appended footnotes about ill-fated ancestors
lost in their attempts in order to round Cape Horn, steered my further reading toward Richard
Henry Dana Jr.'s A Couple Regarding Years before the actual Mast and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
The Actual Rime with the Ancient Mariner, for the voyages regarding Walter Raleigh along with
Francis Drake. Meanwhile, in grammar college inside grades five, six, and also seven, I has been
relocating up in the Greek gods and heroes, one of them Odysseus and his awesome wide-wandering
about the wine-dark sea, for the a variety of discoveries involving America by Viking seafarers,
Christopher Columbus, and the Mayflower, in eighth grade to the battles involving Actium and
Trafalgar.
Conrad says the love of the sea is within fact the love of ships, your believed coming in order to him
inside 1905 as a new possible affectionate memory of the New South Dock as it was to become seen
within the 1880s, "fifty hulls, in least, molded upon lines associated with beauty and also speed,"
square-rigged and metal-plated, "moored all in the row, stem in order to quay, as if assembled there
for an exhibition not really of a great market however of your fantastic art," this kind of sight as "no
man's eye shall behold again." So, too, the particular sight of the united States Navy throughout San
Francisco Bay Area Bay between 1942 and 1945, its fleets assembled pertaining to war within the
sublime and also treacherous Pacific.
Seventy a prolonged time have arrive and gone, but I nevertheless can see ships of every then-known
tonnage, armament, and style -- aircraft carriers, destroyers, oil tankers, submarines, mild
along with heavy cruisers, trawlers, minesweepers, PT boats -- lying with anchor as well as getting
underway around the turn of the morning's tide. I couldn't know how you can step a mast, as well as
tell the major difference between a new sandbar along with a reef, but I knew that the Battle
regarding Midway had been fought somewhere within the same amount of longitude that had seen
the end regarding Captain Ahab, and also I contrived to always be able to picture myself as
somehow engaged throughout mankind's age-old struggle using the mystery and energy of the sea.
The conceit was not that will far-fetched. From the beginning with the war throughout 1939, the
U.S. government requisitioned the particular American-Hawaiian's fleet involving 38 cargo vessels,
many of which ultimately pressed into service using the North Atlantic convoys bringing meals and
munitions for you to Britain and in addition to Russia; 11 of these were torpedoed by German U-boats,
another 3 scuttled to create your Mulberry harbors supplying the invasion regarding France;
my father (an executive of a transport line will no longer possessed involving ships) have been place
in cost with the military port associated with embarkation forwarding the particular freight of men
and also weapons to be able to every theater associated with operations south and west with the
Golden Gate Bridge. Throughout 1944, my grandfather has been elected mayor associated with San
Francisco, and when he ended up being referred in order to as upon to convey the city's
compliments to a victorious admiral returning from the Coral or perhaps the Philippine sea, he
sometimes took me together with him within the captain's barge being piped aboard the particular

3. deck of the flagship dressed along with men inside uniform.
My teenage hopes of joining the actual Navy fell afoul in the physical examination administered from
the Naval Reserve Officers training Corps program to applicants inside the freshman class in Yale
Higher Education inside the autumn associated with 1952. I proved being blind to the distinction
between your colors red along with green, prepared to steer for that Guerrière and glory however
not in any position to read the actual signal flags. To End Up Being Able To appropriate the actual
course of my disappointment my father referred to end of tenancy cleaning Gloucestershire always
be able to as inside a favor from the National Maritime Union inside The Large Apple which
permitted my temporary ranking as an ordinary seaman aboard one of the family's last surviving
freighters through the summer between my sophomore and also junior a lengthy time at college.
The SS Mount Whitney sailed via Mobile, Alabama, in order to load iron
ore from a mine on the Orinoco River throughout Venezuela, so when it slipped loose involving
tugboats and dropped the actual harbor pilot at the entrance to the bay, I ended up being astonished
by a sense of total and boundless freedom, the casting from all the troubles lurking inside the hearts
and also onshore schemes associated with men. The Particular poet Langston Hughes evidently felt
similarly. With the age of 21, he quit the particular island of Manhattan to "find the vessel which
was moving" also to escape "the sensation regarding usually getting controlled by simply other
people -- by parents, by employers, through a amount of outer necessity not really the own."
Among the particular miseries being left behind, Hughes mentions "the stupidities involving color
prejudice"; my own miseries were self-inflicted along with of your lesser magnitude. I joined the
actual ship about the night just before it sailed, and also several members of the crew, amused from
the arrival inside their midst involving an Ivy League university youngster via somewhere in an
uptight, fancy neighborhood, undertook to acquaint me using the carry out turning out to be in the
sailor. on understanding that I'd by simply no means but kept carnal business having a woman, these
people insisted upon arranging the actual rite regarding passage inside a waterfront brothel exactly
where these people bet shots associated with bourbon and rounds of beer against the odds of my
creating your alter coming from boy for you to man along with everyone of the actual five girls about
offer. For You To everybody's surprise, not least my own, I did so.
Having been imprisoned with regard to 4 a lengthy time inside your walls of a puritanical boarding
school, yet another a couple associated with years in a New England university not really yet
molested through the 1960s sexual revolution, I rejoiced in the discovery of your new as well as far,

4. way much better world. The Actual next morning I has been burdened with a heaviness involving
spirit as well as the anxiety about divine retribution inside the form of your venereal disease,
nevertheless as soon since the ship was moving, I knew that will I will be making good my escape in
the stain regarding sin, outward-bound to the state involving grace which is the actual freedom of
outdoors sea.
The Restless Sea
Which is the age-old guarantee that the sea is merely by simply no means sure to keep. life cruising
is actually regarding necessity your being managed by simply others, from the captain with the ship
or even the regulation in the watch, by the motion of the waves and additionally the direction of the
wind. The point we had not been lost on Conrad, who throughout his youth had served two decades
fore as well as aft the mast before likely ashore to London within 1894 for you to turn out to become
able to be an author. He knew your sea to become "impenetrable as well as heartless," giving
"nothing involving itself for the suitors with regard to its precarious favors... its fickleness can be to
be held correct in order to men's purposes simply through an undaunted resolution, as well as by
method of a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, throughout which, perhaps, there provides often
been a lot more hate when compared with love." the philosopher Immanuel Kant had reached much
the same conclusion inside 1790 with out visited sea: "To call the ocean sublime we should regard it
as poets do, merely in what strikes your eye; whether it is at rest, as a clear mirror associated with
drinking water merely bounded through the heaven; when it will be restless, as an abyss threatening
to be able to overwhelm everything."
As seen from your deck with the Mount Whitney within the summer regarding 1954, your sea has
been poetically in rest, as it absolutely was pertaining to Lafcadio Hearn within 1856, "sometimes
smooth as well as gray but flickering using the morning gold," the particular horizon tinted along
with "opaline colors involving milk and also fire," flying fish glimmering throughout "the liquid
eternity" of infinite blue; the particular romance of that initial voyage in for you to the Caribbean
didn't stow aboard the actual second, nine a extended time later on below contract towards the
Saturday Evening Post, as becoming a wide-wandering journalist.
The sea had been in a restless mood, the particular control by other people incompetent and also
violent. The Particular editorial direction of the Publish in 1963 had fallen into the hands of the
publisher partial to staging publicity stunts, as well as in the summer of the year, the publication has
been intent upon salvaging the particular wreck of the Spanish treasure fleet thought to are already
lost somewhere off your coast associated with Honduras throughout 1605. Seven galleons in transit
coming from Cartagena, Colombia, in order to Havana, almost all of them burdened with shipments
of silver coin as well as gold plate.
Three hours out of key West, on a heading for that Yucatán Channel, your Sea Hunter, a chartered
shrimp boat 65-feet lengthy with a round bottom along using a shallow draft, rolled uncomfortably in
the reasonable sea while I listened to Robert F. Marx explain which upon our arrival at the
Serranilla Bank we will be bringing up "the hefty stuff" inside potato sacks. Outlined around the
Post's masthead as its "Adventure Editor," Marx was obviously a handsome man in his late twenties,
tall as well as deeply tanned, his gestures brave along with bold, his eyes shaded with a wary, far-off
squint. He cleaned his fingernails having a fish knife whilst discussing your opportunity which he
had conceived, organized, along with funded as a photo striking towards the eye of your poetic
newspaper publisher. "I've been on a lot of treasure hunts," he said, "and this is the most scientific
treasure hunt actually seen... your best equipment, as well as guys that truly understand what
they're doing."

5. The on-board accumulation regarding diving gear with each other along with state-of-the-art
electronic devices as well as aerial photographs in the Serranilla Bank prompted the temporary
willing suspension associated with disbelief; so does your credits involving another gentlemen on the
manifest, included inside this a new soon-to-be-retired commander in the U.S. Navy; from Bermuda,
the "foremost treasure diver within the world"; from Annapolis, a champion waterskier and also
proud owner of the pet shark named Horace.
West associated with Grand Cayman, the Sea Hunter encountered heavy seas along with winds
gusting as significantly as 50 miles an hour in the storm certainly not unlike the one by which
Columbus located himself "dreadfully buffeted" in 1502. With Regard To three days the boat was
close to foundering, monstrous seas breaking more than the actual stern, your hull rolling through
angles involving between 30 and also 40 degrees. all the particular navigational techniques failed;
the particular Navy commander, not knowing what different for you to do, looked to drink, and for 3
days I held fast to the cabin table, unable to think or speak. Columbus within his letter to Ferdinand
and also Isabella describes his crew as "weak along with humbled in spirit" from the tempest, "many
of which promising for you to lead a spiritual life." I gladly would have completed the particular
same, had I identified the particular prayers.
The storm passed on the afternoon of the fourth day, and according to our program environment
through Grand Cayman we must have been in the southwest finish in the Serranilla Bank by simply
dawn. We arrived in noon, well off for the northeast. There was absolutely no evidence or sign of any
kind of wreck, Jamaican turtle schooner, as well as Spanish galleon -- only several seabirds inside a
forlorn and also empty sky. We remained in the anchorage for the much better component of a week;
sporadic plunges in for you to the perils as well as the tricks of the deep resulted inside the recovery
associated with 3 iron spikes, 6 nails, eighteen ballast stones, 235 seashells involving assorted sizes
along with colors, 2 empty gin bottles each of British manufacture, one shapeless metal object
identified by Marx as pewter, by the Bermudan as pig iron.
The Ocean as Desert
The voyage regarding discovery aboard the particular Sea Hunter brought with it recognition with
the sea like a murderous abyss, also a new reminder involving the past days of the actual Ohioan,
however it didn't lead me for you to abandon the idea of the sea as apostrophized by simply Lord
Byron since the "deep and also darkish blue ocean" unmarked from the ruin that will mortal men
visit upon the actual green yet shallow earth. Through the particular mid-1970s, married and with
children, I was an editor in new York Area which vacationed in the summer with Newport, Rhode

6. Island, exactly where metaphors for your sublime are not hard to come by. Because your times of
sail gave means for the ages of steam, Newport had become one of the initial points around the
American map in which usually oceanfront property has been seen being desirable, the worthiness
added by the nineteenth century's fishing out from the mighty ocean your existence involving
seaside resorts like the one described by Charles Dickens in 1851 as a quiet beach that "becomes
indeed the blessed spot" using fancy shops, bric-a-brac, picturesque fishermen. "We use a fine sea,
wholesome regarding just about all people; lucrative for that body, lucrative for your mind."
Certainly so it seemed during the years when I ended up being content to watch kids build
sandcastles around the shore regarding Narragansett Bay, to make the actual difficult options
between your smoked salmon and the broiled lobster, for you to surprise whether the pretty
sailboats in the offing had been environment course for Martha's Vineyard or perhaps
Kennebunkport. In The Actual Program Of those same years, within my capacity as being a magazine
editor inside search associated with intrepid investigations, I sent writers on voyages that will I has
been will simply no longer in liberty to attempt -- towards the Galapagos Islands and also Australia's
Fantastic Barrier Reef, to the Gulf involving Alaska, your northwest Mediterranean. Within location
regarding storybook romance, they will returned together with reports involving missing whales and
seabirds soaked throughout oil, regarding corals dead as stone, along with shorelines blanketed in
algal slime, however I was reluctant to draw in apocalyptic conclusions.
Surely the particular sea had been eternal, going upon forever, its vast prodigious bulk 71%
regarding the earth's surface, not to be contained inside the particular frame of history as well as
chained towards the oars of death and time. so it have been inside the creation myths constructed
inside the languages involving each art along with science -- the particular Sumerian goddess
Nammu providing birth for you to heaven and earth, Homer's "Ocean, whom is the source of all,"
Christendom emerging together with Noah from the Flood, evolutionary theory evolving from the
primordial, undifferentiated flux. Therefore I believed it nonetheless was, T. S. Eliot's "groundswell,
which is as well as has been from your beginning," correct there where it absolutely was supposed to
become each and every summer, throughout sun as well as fog, 20 yards more than the particular
horizon with the beach club's beach umbrellas.
Except it wasn't, plus it isn't. The Actual poetics stand corrected from the science. Contrary towards
the belief in which man can't mark your sea using ruin, it turns out that he may be doing
consequently for that final two thousand years. Basically ended up slow to become able to
acknowledge the particular unwelcome fact, I was in distinguished company. Henry David Thoreau
inside the 1850s failed to "associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor surprise how it looked
the thousand a lengthy time ago, as we do in the land, pertaining to it was equally wild as well as
unfathomable always."
Rachel Carson, the perceptive along with far-seeing naturalist, in 1951 assured the readers
associated with The Particular Sea About Us that mankind "cannot control as well as affect the
ocean as, in his brief tenancy in earth, he offers subdued and plundered the particular continents."
The Lady subsequently revised the opinion, remarking in certainly one of the woman's later on
notebooks, "Even inside the vast along with mysterious reaches in the sea we possess been brought
again towards the fundamental truth in which absolutely nothing lives to be able to itself."
By the actual flip in the millennium, I understood that the melting with the Arctic ice had been
warming the actual temperatures inside the sea, that fish stocks had been declining, that will
significant sectors of the ocean had been awash in nonbiodegradable refuse -- cathode-ray tubes,
visitors cones, and also polypropylene fishing nets -- yet I didn't fully grasp the particular link
between marine ecosystem and human settlement until January 2013, when I came across W. Jeffrey

7. Bolster's book Your Mortal Sea.
Bolster derives your title and also its assertion through a prolonged reputation the actual fisheries
within the North American Atlantic in between Cape Cod along with Newfoundland. To be Able To
the by-now-familiar story involving the many depletions regarding species more than the past 500
many years (the haddock by simply 1930, the actual cod by 1992), Bolster, the professor regarding
history in the university regarding New Hampshire, adds the particular dimension associated with
events using location in territory -- political and also economic, cultural and also demographic.
Drawing with every single other in the same net the 2 sets of datapoints (from a person's maritime
neighborhood as well as the marine-biological community), Bolster shows your ocean to become
subject not just to the changes occurring more than the particular span of evolutionary as well as
geological time, however also, along with ever more rapidly, to people imposed about it by the hand
as well as mind involving man.
We needn't call upon an angry god to make the sea an item regarding no little terror. Each As Well
As Every year we withdraw from it 160 million tons regarding fish, deposit inside it 7 million tons
regarding garbage. Poisonous chemicals inside the Gulf of Mexico possess formed the pool
regarding dead h2o equivalent in size towards the state of New Jersey; one associated with the a
amount of hundred dead zones elsewhere within the world, one encircles the actual Chinese
coastline.
If the particular sea ranges continue to rise in their present rate, the day is a small way off when
Miami and also Atlantic Metropolis grow to always be able to be beds with regard to oysters. The
Actual fishing inside the sea which was when close for you to the surface now could be carried out
simply by trawls the actual length of locomotives dropped towards the depth of your mile as well as
dragged across the bottom, lowering many thousands of square miles of the ocean flooring for you to
barren deserts will absolutely no longer providing birth for the tiny organisms through which usually
emerge the fantastic chains involving becoming which sustain the life in the planet.
Nothing in the sea lives by simply itself, absolutely nothing either on the earth or even in the air or
even within the minds involving men. In Order To know the sea is mortal is usually to understand
that we're not really apart coming from it. Man is naturel creatively refashioning itself. The
Particular abyss can be human, not really divine, a are employed in progress, whether produced with
a poet's metaphor or even having a huge prodigious bulk of Styrofoam.
Lewis H. Lapham can be editor of Lapham's Quarterly plus a TomDispatch regular. Formerly editor
associated with Harper's Magazine, he's the author of several books, such as money and Class in
America, Theater regarding War, Gag Rule, and, the majority of recently, Pretensions to always be
able to Empire. The brand New York Occasions features likened him in order to H.L. Mencken;
Vanity Fair offers suggested a strong resemblance for you to Mark Twain; as well as Tom Wolfe
provides in contrast him to Montaigne. This particular essay, slightly adapted for TomDispatch,

8. introduces "The Sea," the Summer 2013 issue of Lapham's Quarterly, quickly to become released at
that website.
Follow TomDispatch upon Twitter as well as be portion of us about Facebook or perhaps Tumblr.
check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse's The Actual Changing Confront regarding Empire:
Particular Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-lapham/the-less-than-eternal-sea_b_3375896.html