Minds Tossing on the Ocean: Venice, the Sea, and the Crisis of Imagination

This essay argues that reconfiguring the relationship between Venice and the sea in culture and the arts may provide a specific contribution to a revision of our global cultural and social imaginary of the ocean in times of environmental crisis. It compares the last two important literary texts that have foregrounded the relationship between Venice and the sea, Joseph Brodsky's long essay Watermark (1989) and Amitav Ghosh's novel Gun Island (2019). Brodsky's sea is a both a physical and metaphysical presence in a city where he found a refuge from the political storms he endured in his lifetime and where he was laid to rest. Brodsky envisions a peculiar temporality where Venice, because of its aqueous element, projects humanity to the future. Ghosh places the city at the center of a turbulent whirlwind of global phenomena, connecting it, as it were, to two marine ambits: the troubled sea of migration and the rising sea of climate change. If we agree with Amitav Ghosh that "The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination", Venice becomes an important vantage point to address this unprecedented challenge and reimagining its past and future oceanic entanglements is a necessary gesture. In their different ways, Brodsky and Ghosh envision a city that could instead become an international laboratory for scientists, scholars, artists, an ideal place to tackle the environmental crisis and formulate solutions that apply to all coastal cities in the world.