Yesterday, I did a combination of things that worked. Firstly, I downloaded Freedom to disable my network for 5-6 hours. One would think I could muster the discipline to shut off my wireless my own damn self, but, yes, I do require technology to act as a grown up in my stead. Then, after staring at the computer failed to magically produce I ideas, I started writing them out in longhand. Eureka! Productivity achieved.
Most importantly I think I've managed to break open the swamp in a way that more effectively ties it to the sea in terms of looking at Dred. I returned to the Allewaert essay and looked again at that passage on the first page.
"Whether this chain of sea-coast-islands is a step, or advance, which this part of our continent is now making on the Atlantic ocean,” Bartram muses, “we must leave to future ages to determine.” The advancing continent seems to confirm a present-day scholarly tendency to read the writings of eighteenth-century Anglo-European elites as contributing to the imperialistic project of continental expansion. But as Bartram moves deeper into his meditation, the continent begins to dissolve. He reminds the reader that the tide-lands “were formerly high swamps of and any southern planter could confirm that draining these coastal marshes would yield “strata of Cypress stumps and other trees” (78). Land becomes sea, and only fossils and fragments remain to testify to these marshes’ terrestrial past as the southern terrain that Bartram exhaustively details in more than four hundred pages moves toward annihilation. (Allewaert 340)
This anxiety over physical dissolution embodied in the swamp seems to echo a similar fear manifest in Dred that the insurrectionist threat represented in the swamp will envelope the entire country. The swamp both contains a whole history slave insurrection in the United States and indicates the maroons of the transatlantic world.
This is where I left off yesterday and where I begin today. Radio silence begins in about 30 minutes
