What is maritime history? What is terrestrial history?

All History is Maritime History | Paine

The Sea and Civilization

After having elucidated a little on the ambit of argument literacy as the domain of the academic intellectual on our previous post, as a follow up to Ayn Rand’s New Intellectual, Sowell’s Modern Intellectual, Edward Said’s Liminal Intellectual, in sync with the Intellectual Dark Web, let us now foray into the world of Gramsci’s Organic Intellectual!

Antonio Gramsci has pondered much on the profound role of the intellectual to society. 

To him, all humans are intellectuals, because they have their own intellectual and rational faculties. The problem crops up because all humans do not have the social function of intellectuals.

Hence, he draws a customized line between the ‘traditional’ intelligentsia who see themselves, albeit wrongly, as a class apart from society, and the thinking types, produced by every class, from its own rank, in an organic way! 

He calls them Organic Intellectuals!

There’s no gainsaying the fact that the liminal intellectuals advocated by Edward Said sync a tad better with the organic intellectuals, put forward by Antonio Gramsci. 

To Gramsci, if at all there’s a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, it musta real be effected only through the concepts of ideology, hegemony, power, and organic intellectuals.

And these ‘organic’ intellectuals help in expounding, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves.

This said, I would personally regard Lincoln Paine as one such organic intellectual of sorts, who explains, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences of the sea, which the masses could not express for themselves!

All history is maritime history, roars the byline to his official webpage, that puts forth his profound ponder that, human beings FIRST had the opportunity to come into contact with one another only by means of the seas, the oceans and the rivers, the lakes, and the streams! 

Hence, goods, languages, religions, and even entire cultures were specifically spread across and along the world’s waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

He real has a knack for giving his reader an engaging and gripping narrative right from the introduction on, where you find the flipping of the pages seem so easy on the indexy, and makes you ask for more from Paine! And the read, titled, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, is real huge, running to a whopping 1048 pages in toto!

Just a little bit of snippety nuggets from his Intro –

I want to change the way you see the world. Specifically, I want to change the way you see the world map by focusing your attention on the blues that shade 70 percent of the image before you, and letting the earth tones fade. 

This shift in emphasis from land to water makes many trends and patterns of world history stand out in ways they simply cannot otherwise. 

Before the development of the locomotive in the nineteenth century, culture, commerce, contagion, and conflict generally moved faster by sea than by land.  

Two questions merit consideration before taking on a maritime history of the world as either writer or reader: What is maritime history? and What is world history? 

The answers to both have as much to do with perspective as with subject matter An alternative and perhaps simpler way to approach the question, 

What is maritime history? is to tackle its unasked twin: What is terrestrial history? - the view from the land being our default perspective. 

Imagine a world of people bound to the land.

The ancient Greek diaspora would have taken a different character and been forced in different directions without ships to carry Euboeans, Milesians, and Athenians to new markets and to sustain contacts between colonies and homelands. 

Without maritime commerce, neither Indians nor Chinese would have exerted the substantial influence they did in Southeast Asia, and that region would have been spared the cultural sobriquets of IndoChina and Indonesia (literally, “Indian islands”)—in fact, the latter would have remained unpeopled altogether.

This book is an attempt to examine how people came into contact with one another by sea and river, and so spread their crops, their manufactures, and their social systems—from language to economics to religion—from one place to another.

I have sketched this history as a narrative to show region by region the deliberate process by which maritime regions of the world were knit together. But this is not a story of saltwater alone. Maritime activity includes not only high seas and coastal voyaging, but also inland navigation.

These “signs” indicate that mankind’s technological and social adaptation to life on the water—whether for commerce, warfare, exploration, or migration—has been a driving force in human history. 

Yet many mainstream histories are reluctant to embrace this. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies gives barely a page to “maritime technology,” by which he means watercraft and not the ability to navigate or any associated abilities.

Although airplanes have replaced ships in most long-distance passenger trades —transatlantic, between Europe and ports “east of Suez,” or transpacific—more than fourteen million people annually embark on a sea cruise. 

This is far more than ocean liners carried before the passenger jet rendered them obsolete in the 1950s, when the names of shipping companies were as familiar as (and far more respected than) the names of airlines today. 

The idea that people would go to sea for pleasure was almost unthinkable even 150 years ago, 

says Paine!

Now, moving on to Pinney...

Pretor-Pinney, is yet another intellectual who’s forayed deep into the world of clouds, and finds could-gazing an art and a therapy as well!

His delightful read of sorts, The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History and Culture of Clouds, is a real awe-inspiring treat to the culture of clouds, that’s completely unknown to the lay hitherto!

I’m just excerpting a chat from the pages of The Guardian, where, he opines that, he’s embarked on this gentle quest to overturn the malign understanding of clouds that has long informed western thinking. “People do have a slightly derogatory view of them,” he says.

“When people say someone’s got their head in the clouds, it’s about being disengaged from the world. Whereas I say, ‘Sod it - what's wrong with having your head in the clouds?’ It’s a really important thing to do, a reaction to the pressures of modern life. But there are all kinds of negative associations: the idea of someone having a cloud hanging over them, or clouds on the horizon - these very doomy things.

“But there’s an Arabic phrase for someone who is lucky or blessed - they say, ‘His sky is always filled with clouds.’ It’s the complete opposite. Clouds provide shade and rain. And rain is life; it’s about abundance. Clouds bring beauty to the sunset. And they clear the atmosphere. They’re purifiers: cloud droplets form around bits of pollution and bring it back to earth. But one of the main things for me is appreciating their beauty. Every day is like a new page.”

Indeed, there’s a silver lining to all his clouds! He’s got one named as Morning Glory!

Also, since he’s the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, he’s got their manifesto outlined in simple nuggets right at the start of the book, with Shelley’s mighty lines on Clouds for the poetic charm to it!

The Manifesto

of The Cloud Appreciation Society

We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be

immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that clouds are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her

displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if

we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s

moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.

We believe that clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation

benefits the soul.

Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see within them

will save on psychoanalysis bills.

And so, we say to all who’ll listen:

Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty,

and live life with your head in the

clouds.

Then Pretor-Pinney moves on to categorise clouds into ten basic groups, much akin to the Latin ‘Linnean’ system, based on their heights and appearance.

This apart, he broadly divides clouds into three types –

The Low Clouds, which he impishly calls the ‘cotton wool tufts that form on a sunny day’

The Middle Clouds, which to him are, ‘the layers of bread rolls in the sky’

And finally, the High Clouds, which he calls, ‘the delicate streaks of falling ice crystals’!

Some of his descriptions are so charming, that they really tug at your heartstrings with such impact and such warmth!

Just giving y’all a snippety nugget from his first chappy on the Low Clouds!

The rest, I bet, is as engaging as your favvy lead actor’s blockbuster movie!

Do grab a copy for yourselves at the earliest, dear litterateurs! It’s a collector’s treat of sorts!

Yesss! He’s got a real amazing way of enthralling the avid nature buff in us all, with his impish, engaging and humorous descriptors of sorts!

Here goes Gavin Pretor-Pinney –

Leonardo da Vinci once described clouds as ‘bodies without surface’, and you can see what he meant. They are ghostlike, ephemeral, nebulous: you can see their shapes, yet it’s hard to say where their forms begin and end.

But the Cumulus cloud is one that challenges da Vinci’s description. Rising in brilliant-white cauliflower mounds, it looks more solid and crisply defined than other cloud types. 

As a child, I was convinced that men with long ladders harvested cotton wool from these clouds. They look as if you could just reach up and touch them–and, if you did, they would feel like the softest things imaginable. The most familiar and ‘tangible’ of the cloud family, this is a good type for budding cloudspotters to cut their teeth on.

Cumulus is the Latin word for ‘heap’, which is simply to say that these clouds have a clumpy, stacked shape. 

The people who concern themselves with such things divide them into humilis, mediocris and congestus formations–these are known as ‘species’ of Cumulus. Humilis, meaning humble in Latin, are the smallest, being wider than they are tall; mediocris are as tall as they are wide, and congestus are taller still.

It is the smaller ones that generally start forming over land on sunny mornings. And because neither they nor their mediocris brothers produce any precipitation, they are widely recognised as ‘fair-weather clouds’–a pair of puffy fingers up at those who can only think of clouds as the opposite of fine weather.

A lazy sunny afternoon beneath the drifting candyfloss curls of the Cumulus is far finer than the flat monotony of a cloudless sky. Don’t be brainwashed by the sun fascists–fair-weather Cumulus have a starring role in the perfect summer’s.

  

There is one other species of this cloud: Cumulus fractus. This has a much less puffy shape, its edges being fainter and more ragged. It is the way a Cumulus looks when it is decaying at the ripe old age of ten minutes or so.

The distinctive shapes of Cumulus clouds may go some way to explaining why they are the cloud of choice in the drawings of young children.

No six-year-old’s picture of a family in front of their house feels complete without a few puffy Cumulus floating in the sky above. Children just have a fascination with clouds.

Can it be that, wheeled around in prams staring up at the sky as infants, they develop a deep connection with the clouds–like young chicks forming a familial bond with the first thing they see out of the egg? Who knows?

Well, yesss! Who knows?

Yet another delightful read from the pen of Gavin Pretor-Pinney is his equally lovely book on the waves! It’s titled, The Wavewatcher's Companion, where he discusses all sorts of waves, proving his premise that waves are such an indispensable part of our lives!

Wordsworth and Shelley have given us impactful powerlines on the clouds and the waves!

Yet, Wordsworth for once, seems so near, and he seems to resonate far beyond his lines, kindling a few soulful chords that tug at straight at our hearts and souls, and now we could feel with such awe and import the aura of his famous lines from his poem, “The World is Toooo Much with Us”!

Here goes - 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.

How Tooo (trueee) much!

To be continued…