Syllabus: Ocean
But I would have liked to see you doing an analysis of spontaneous religious sentiment or, more exactly, of religious feeling which is... the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the eternal (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and like oceanic).
—Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud, Dec. 5, 1927
The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in a poem, caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible — and I am afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of characterization — nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content which is most readily associated with the feeling. If I have understood my friend rightly, he means the same thing by it as the consolation offered by an original and somewhat eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted death. ‘We cannot fall out of this world.’ That is to say, it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole. I may remark that to me this seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual perception, which is not, it is true, without an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any other act of thought of equal range. From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives me no right to deny that it does in fact occur in other people. The only question is whether it is being correctly interpreted and whether it ought to be regarded as the fons et origo of the whole need for religion.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
I began to think about how the land in Whereas functions like the Atlantic Ocean in much of the work of African-Americans. That the ocean holds the passage into both physical and, for centuries, psychic killing. So that once we arrive in this country we are never fully alive.
—Claudia Rankine on stage to Layli Long Soldier, New York City, March 2019
Each semester I ask poetry or nonfiction students to devise a topic we can jointly research. This past week, the class generated around sixteen final candidates for our creative inquiries, including: heights, lucid dreaming, sleep, class hierarchy, influence, surface, celebrity, sexualization, intrusive thoughts, narcissism, cowboys and perception. The four I suggested were—masks, color, celebrity culture and Sappho. The three finalists they came up with were texture, ocean, and animalization. In the last vote, ocean won the day. I promised them a preliminary ocean syllabus. So here it is. Mapped across four zones: the literal; liquid flows; the Black Atlantic; mythology and creatures.
Zone 1: The Literal
Hart Crane, “At Melville’s Tomb,” “Voyages,” “O Carib Isle”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Imaginary Iceberg,” “Crusoe in England,” “The Unbeliever”