Ideas - Why the world feels like a shipwreck

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

For thousands of years, Shipwrecks have been a mainstay trope of literature and storytelling. IDEAS dives into the history of shipwreck tales to discover the allure of maritime disaster, why they resonate today, and why life so often feels like it’s heading for the rocks.

Hugh is a rock climber, a white supremacist, a Jewish neo-Nazi, a spam king, a crypto-billionaire, and then someone killed him. It is truly a mystery. It is truly a case of who done it. Dirtbag Climber, the story of the murder and the many lives of Jesse James. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Every ship is a potential shipwreck.

Every voyage carries with it the possibility of shipwreck, whether you get there safely or not. Ever since humans took to the sea, we've been faced with the possibility of shipwreck. And we've been telling us. stories of shipwrecks for just as long. We want the most intense story, right? The most intense story is the story in which the ship hits the iceberg. The most intense story is when the danger that shadows the voyage becomes realized. From plays like The Tempest to movies like Titanic, to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,

we are drawn to a good story, movie, or song about nautical disaster. Disaster songs, particularly the ocean disaster songs, or the shipping disaster songs, maybe particularly apt because the ocean is also pretty unknowable. There's a kind of ambiguity about it, an ambiguity about when exactly death happened, maybe even whether death happened.

And shipwrecks live on in our language, philosophy, and metaphors. We're not fully in control of our destiny. We have to, you know, appease the gods, We have to pray to the gods. We have to hope these things go well. But we're not fully in control. In this episode, Ideas producer Matthew Laysen Rider explores the history of shipwrecks, literal and metaphorical, and what they might tell us about the world today. Hi, Matthew. Hi, Noah. And you're right. Shipwreck stories have been around forever. But I feel like there's something in the the air right now about shipwrecks.

Okay, tell us about that. Okay. So this summer, for a little summer reading, I was reading a book called The Wager, which is a really popular book. It first came out in 2023. It was a huge hit. It topped the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list immediately

and stayed on the list for 66 weeks. And it came out in paperback earlier this year, so I picked it up. I like the paperback. I don't like carrying around that big. Hardcover, you know. So it's the story of a shipwreck in the mid-18th century, and it's an amazing tale of, it's a true story, amazing tale of pride and wreckage and desperation and survival. And this book was such a success. Martin Scorsese bought the rights to make a movie out of it,

and Leonardo DiCaprio is going to star in it. It's a whole thing. Leonardo DiCaprio of Titanic fame. Yeah, another great. Another great shipwreck movie. And the thing about movies, so the very day I finished reading The Wager, I went to see the new Superman movie. And the start of the movie, the trailer that played was for Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. And the first shot in the trailer is Odysseus floating on the wreckage of one of the many shipwrecks in that story. And I had this moment where I was like, okay, I was just utterly captivated by a shipwreck story.

And roughly 3,000 years ago, people were utterly captivated by a shipwreck story. That is one long-lived, powerful, eternal storytelling trope that connects us across time. So you're saying it's been in the air for that long. What about now? What is it now that's in the air about shipwrecks? Okay. So a couple days later, this was an eventful couple of days, as you can understand. So a couple days later, I thought that was a fun book to read. I'll go back to the bookstore, see if I can find another book about a shipwreck. So I go to the store and the history wall, and something like the third book I lay my eyes on is a book about a shipwreck. And then I realize there are a ton of new shipwreck books on the wall, like an outside. proportion of the books on the history section were about shipwrecks. And it's weird because a lot of things happen in history besides shipwrecks, right?

But a couple of quick titles, Graveyard of the Pacific, beneath dark waters, save our souls, left for dead, and a history of the world in 12 shipwrecks. And all of those books released in the last two years. I eventually came back to buy a book called Wrecked, unsettling histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific, which came out this year from an author here in Vancouver, who is a history professor at UBC. And then check this out. I sent you a picture.

I took a picture. As I was leaving the store, I passed, you know, the display tables at the front where they put all of the, like, here's what's popular. Here's what's going on. And I missed it when I was coming in. But as I walked out, I saw their popular, what's popular table. And they had a whole table set up just for nautical design. disaster books. Extraordinary. Yeah, and it's clearly not your imagination, because I'm seeing here,

there's the wager, which you mentioned, Moby Dick, Save Our Souls. Yeah, and I'd say roughly half the books on that table are about shipwrecks or our shipwreck adjacent. So, like, for whatever reason, books about shipwrecks are popular. Shipwrecks are showing up in movies. And what do you do? What do you work on a show like ideas and you see some kind of pattern? Well, you embark on a journey to try and figure out what's going on and why shipwrecks might be on people's minds these days. And I started here.

I live in Connecticut on the shores of Long Island Sound. I was just out this morning for about 40 minutes swimming in my local bay, which is called Short Beach, Connecticut. In the summer, when the water's warm, I go every day, and I really feel like my physical engagement with the ocean, with salt water on a regular daily basis is really important to how I think about the long relationship between human bodies and watery bodies. That's Stephen Mence. He teaches literary theory and what he calls the Blue Humanities at St. John's University in New York.

And he's the author of the book Shipwreck Modernity. He's also an ocean swimmer. The thing about the ocean is that one, you know, one of the basic things we know about water on our planet is that most of it is saltwater. And so when I went swimming this morning, you know, in my little bay in Long Island Sound, I am in, you know, physically inside the largest body, moving body on the planet, you know, connected to all the other oceans and saltwater. bays. And so that element of salt water, the global element, what scientists sometimes call the world ocean, is really interesting and important to me. It really is the biggest thing, isn't it? You're in Connecticut, in the same body of water that touches Antarctica and Japan and Bermuda. Antarctica, China, Chile. Yep, it's the biggest thing and the biggest connected thing.

It both separates landmasses from each other, but also connects them. Steve Mence loves the sea and also literature I wrote my first academic book about habits of narrative in the age of Shakespeare more or less and the inheritance of Greek and late Byzantine kind of classical romance from the early centuries of the common era which were very influential

in the late 16th century in London one of the things I noticed is that there are shipwrecks in all of them and people who go to see Shakespeare plays will notice that he picks up on the shipwreck. Shipwreck is a common trope. It's in Othello, in The Tempest, and Comedy of Errors in 12th Night, and lots and lots of plays, Pericles. It became clear to me that there was something deeply fascinating about it to audiences and writers and thinkers of different kinds, artists of all kinds. It's a long tradition of shipwreck representations and painting, for example.

From the earliest stories, shipwrecks have a lot to do with people going places they're not supposed to go or doing things they're not supposed to do. Shipwreck is a moment in which a kind of force from outside the world touches human bodies directly, whether that force is God's plan or providence or the author or magic or an angry god like Poseidon being angry with Odysseus and the Odyssey. A moment in which the veil gets pierced and human bodies are subject to more than human forces. Night swept down from the sky. Winds clashed and sprung from the heavens. Royaled heaving breakers up. The Odyssey is full of shipwrecks. Odysseus,

King of Ithaca tries to get home after the end of the Trojan War, and the whole story begins with Odysseus shipwrecked on an island. All his days, he'd sit on the rocks and beaches, wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish, gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears. He just wanted to get home to his wife, Penelope. But Zeus destroyed his ship with a storm, punishment for his crew eating some sacred capital,

The wind lifting his spirits high, royal Odysseus spread sail, gripping the tiller, seated astern. Zeus eventually relents and arranges a new ship for Odysseus, and the king sets out on the water. And now the master mariner steered his craft, sleep never closing his eyes, forever scanning the stars. And just when Odysseus thinks things are looking good and he might just make it home, he passes by another god, Poseidon.

Awkward because earlier in his adventure, Odysseus attacked, blinded, and mocked Poseidon's son, a giant cyclops. Poseidon, god of the earthquake, saw him, Odysseus, sailing down the sea, and it made his fury boil. He rammed the clouds together, both hands clutching his trident, churned the waves into chaos, whipping all the gales from every quarter, shrouding over in thunderheads the earth and sea,

and Odysseus' knees quaked. His spirit, too. Numb with fear, he spoke to his own great heart. Wretched man, what becomes of me now, at last. The Sudden is, you know, understandably angry at Odysseus for blinding and mocking his son. Odysseus then represents both the skilled,

careful, artificer, human, but also a human who is particularly vulnerable to the forces of nature, in particular the forces of the ocean. Huberous, Fatal Pride, is a big part of The Odyssey and many other shipwreck stories. Tales of Shipwreck are also metaphors, the ship representing some sort of political or psychological system. There is this ancient tradition, which you can find in Plato and in Sophocles and in lots of ancient texts, in which the ship represents the state. The ship is a political and technological order that brings people together in order to traverse a difficult or hostile environment. And so the moment of shipwreck is the moment in which the state fails to do the thing that it is trying to do.

It can no longer keep you safe. It can no longer keep you going where you thought you were going. Instead, it's going to take you where God or the gods or the storm wants you to go or the author. So there is this sense that it is a moment of political crisis as well as individual crisis. But I think these stories are especially kind of alluring and enticing. for audiences even today, you know, audiences from Homer to today, because they are this moment in which you can see, you know, not just any humans, but particularly skilled and adept humans, you know, sailors like Odysseus or whomever, who are victim of this more than

human power, that they are suddenly pushed off course and into a position of, a position in which they have to recognize their own vulnerability. The hubris side, it's a trope that runs from 700 BC right to 1997. I don't see what all the fuss is about. It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauritania. You could be blasé about something's rows, but not about Titanic. It's over 100 feet longer than Mauritania, and far more exerts. So this is the ship they say is unsinkable.

unsinkable. God himself could not sink this ship. God himself could not sink this ship. Iceberg! Right ahead! So is the message, you know, don't get too big for your britches? Or that even great feats of engineering and great sailors aren't immune to the whims of nature and the anger of God. I think it's probably connected, right? The theory that, I mean, Odysseus, when he's bragging about having defeated the Cyclops, or, you know, the way in which the story of the Titanic gets told that it's the unsinkable ship, right? It represents the triumph of early 20th century technology. That is an expression of hubris, but it's also like a legitimate expression of

extraordinary skill. Like, the truth is that Titanic was an incredible ship. The truth is that Odysseus has, you know, human capacity to its extreme. And yet even that is insufficient to avoid being victim to, you know, the more than human power of the gods, the storm, the wind, the waves. I think that shipwreck is a representation of the kind of catastrophe that it might partly be our fault. because we do bad things, right? We brag too much or we get too satisfied or hubristic, but it's also the kind of catastrophe that can't really be avoided because it is fundamental to being a mortal human in a world

that isn't all that hospitable to us, right? That we are terrestrial mammals, and when we travel by ship, we are trying to inhabit an aquatic environment that isn't really natural to terrestrial mammals like humans. The maritime experience shipwreck, these are basically to transgress boundaries. In other words, to go out to sea is to literally step beyond the bounds of land of a nation, but also beyond human boundaries. It's constantly a negotiation with the gods as to whether the seafaring is successful or not, precisely because it is a transgression.

That's Paul Fleming. He's a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Cornell University. He notes that Shipwreck, as a metaphor, is deeply embedded in our language. When it comes to record it, written down human history, seafaring was the primary way of getting around. That was both internal to countries when it came to rivers and stuff and external when it came to the whole kind of colonial enterprise. I mean, the 19th century, seafaring was incredibly dangerous. I mean, the number of people, who died in seafaring and people who knew people who died in seafaring was enormously high. So I think there's just a bigger reserve of literature that we draw upon from the Greeks to the beginning of the 20th century that we draw upon for that metaphorics that has then just kind of, you know, it's trickled into our language. So our marriage is on the rocks means, yeah, we're washed ashore and we're trying to see if we can survive or not.

There's a philosophical element to shipwrecks. For thousands of years, from Lucretius to Kant before and after, philosophers have used shipwreck metaphors to explore deep human concepts. One 20th century German philosopher named Hans Blumenberg was obsessed with shipwreck metaphors and used them throughout his work. Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence, above all, through a metaphorics. of the perilous sea voyage. Hans Bloomberg is a fascinating person. He's been called a detective of ideas.

And as a detective of ideas, he's after kind of big questions and tracing them across large epochs of thought. And so he asks himself, why are all these myths, these stories, his metaphors drawn from maritime experience and shipwrecks? The catalog of nautical metaphors of existence is very rich. It includes coasts and islands, harbors in the high seas.

Reefs and storms, shallows and calms, sail and rudder. Paul Fleming is also a translator. One of the books he translated is Care Crosses the River, one of two books from Blumenberg with a focus on ocean metaphors. The other called Shipwreck with Spectator. Often the representation of danger on the high seas serves only to underline the comfort and peace, the safety and serenity of the harbor in which a sea voyage reaches its and

The sea for him is a metaphor for risk, for danger, for pushing boundaries, for testing limits. And what's to go to sea is to basically express some discontent with what's given, with the known, and it's a desire for adventure for something else, to experience something else. The sea for him encapsulates both kind of sublime beauty and sublime danger. The sea is fickle, it is capricious, it is unpredictable. It is one moment, it's utterly gorgeous, and the next moment it is absolutely. absolutely deadly. Shipwreck is a pretty malleable metaphor.

In his work, Blumenberg tracks how the meaning of shipwreck changes over time from the ancients into the modern period, and how shipwreck becomes the price, willingly paid, of global interconnected trade. It was one of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment that shipwreck is the price that must be paid in order to avoid a complete calming of the sea winds, making all-worldly commerce impossible.

Well, I mean, you know, the other thing to go back to is Caruso, Robinson Caruso, as, you know, basically the founding novel of explaining capitalism and homo-economics to the Western world. That is a shipwreck story. It is, you know, it's the entire history of capital in the 17th century from sugar plantations and slavery and slave trade. I mean, he goes down as a slave trader. I wouldn't forgets that part. And then he gets reduced to what he needs to rescue in order to set up life on the island.

And it's basically how you build up an economy from nothing on the basis of a shipwreck. And you get back to one of the kind of fundamental insights of shipwreck is that it teaches you what's really important in life. And what's really important in life are the things that you would need if you're a shipwrecked on a desert island. And that's why you still have, like, if you are shipwrecked in a desert island, what would be the 10 albums you would bring? I mean, it's still a way of kind of reducing things down to what's essential in life. And in the case of Robinson Crusoe, it's like, how do you build up economy? What is necessary for an economy for survival? An odd thing about the prevalence of shipwreck metaphors is that most of us don't have much of a connection to seafaring anymore.

We don't rely on it for travel. We aren't waiting for our husbands to return. we aren't pressed into service in the Navy. So why do these metaphors, on the rocks, run aground, dead in the water? Why do they stick around? It's an excellent question. And I think it's really fascinating to think about, because for me, the Titanic is perhaps the last great example of a shipwreck. I don't think we have had one since, and I don't know if we'll have one again.

I think that age of the grand metaphor of the shipwreck, as far as producing new metaphors, is over. And I think the attraction there is on the one hand. I think it's all the things that Bloomberg says. It's the risk-taking. It's the sense of hubris. It's the sense of, you know, that everybody knows that the iceberg's there and they think they can avoid it, but they don't. It is the various classes that are involved in that thing. It's a microgram of society that we, you know, we rely on the shipwreck metaphor because it's the one we still have and it still works,

but it still allows us to have the pleasure of being the spectator from outside, the shipwreck with spectator, that gives us a metaphoric insight into the risks of human existence, into the precarity of human existence, that it could all go down at one point. I mean, it uses the sea to help us explain our life here on the land. It's the sea metaphors that help us explain or understand or grasps our position in the world. And the sea metaphors ask basically how much order is out there, how predictable, how reliable, how stable is life here on Earth. if it's a metaphor from the past

the reason it sticks around might be we just don't have any better language to describe the world we're in a world where things are broken and shifting and it's tough to find solid ground Steve Mence author of Shipwreck modernity

Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, shipwreck is a perennial story, right? It's an ancient story as well as a contemporary story, as well as one on the kind of cusp of modernity in the period that I was writing that book about. The modernity part for me is also tied into the way I think about shipwreck as an environmental story. And this is the sense in which I think that these are deeply contemporary stories. Shipwreck is a story about a human or a group of humans. who are suddenly thrown into an aqueous environment, an environment that is hostile to them because they are not, they are terrestrial mammals thrown into an aquatic environment. And my understanding of the, you know, the long arc of climate change in the present is that our environment is growing a little bit more hostile

than the environment we thought we were born into. after a summer of wildfires and record high temperatures has come this more rain in a day than people here are used to in a month we see this in particular that our environment is just getting wetter we see it both in coastal flooding and storms and also in you know river flooding and really intense rain events throughout the world over night in north carolina flash floods submerged entire neighborhoods we did not expect especially the gravity of what occurred to hit us and then in such a short period of time. This incredible video capturing a man in neck high water rescuing a woman from a submerged vehicle.

I started filling up with water all the way up to the sea inside. I had to climb to the window. Hundreds of people, many of them children, were loaded onto buses after being airlifted to safety. It's not just limited to North America. This is happening throughout the world. The increasing intensity of rain and flooding events, the rise of sea levels, the increasing wetness of our world is making our world a less hospitable place. And so the story of shipwreck, the story of how we respond and, if we're lucky, survive an encounter with an increasingly inhospitable, wet place strikes me as really urgent in the present.

Shipwreck, an ancient tale, a contemporary environmental story and a deeply compelling idea. This episode is called The Power of Shipwreck from producer Matthew Lazyz-Rider. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. You know what's funny? Tony Kaleigh, hates watching horror movies, but she loves acting in them. As one of the most dynamic and versatile actors of her generation, Tony has starred in everything. I mean, from her Oscar-nominated role in The Sixth Sense to her iconic haunting performance in Hereditary. In our career-spanning conversation on Q, you'll hear why she keeps returning to the genre she's afraid of.

That's on Q with me, Tom Power. Follow wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube. We were drinking down to Reedie's house When first we heard the blow It seemed to come from the Baroque so coldly forth we go And sure enough, a rusty tub could just be barely seen As her stern was high up in the air We made out Athens Queen

Oh, the lovely Athens Queen Nala, this is Rec of the Athens Queen By Stan Rogers And honestly, Matthew, this is one of my favorite Stan Rogers songs. But it sounds really happy and a bit quick for a shipwreck song. Yeah, it's one of the cheeriest shipwreck songs going. So as you know, it's about a bunch of dudes onshore who see a cargo ship crash on the rocks. And they say, hey, let's wait until everyone on board is safe and on shore. And then we can head out there and see what kind of cargo we can grab. So they

spend a little time getting drunk and then paddle out to the wreck. the galley then, because I was rather dry. And glad I was to get there quick for what should I spy? Oh, what a shame it would have been for to lose it all at sea. Forty cases of the best Napoleon brandy ever seen on the lovely Athens queen. And they get all kinds of goodies out on the water. And most importantly, booze. Yeah, they take some chicken and a nice green couch and a whole bunch of brandy and skedaddle.

and then the song ends with them saying, you know what, that was so much fun. Maybe one day another ship might crash and we can have a party all over again. Well, here's to all good salvagers, likewise to Ripper Rock, and to Napoleon Brandy of which now we have much stock. We eat a lot of chicken and sit on a couch of green, and we wait for Ripper Rock to claim another Athens Queen. Oh, the lovely Athens Queen. Yeah. So that's a particularly cheeky shipwreck song. But it does have a really nice message that, you know, the world is chaos. Maybe the best way to treat it is to have a good time when you can. What's important is, is having friends and family and making the most of what comes your way and enjoying the simple things in life, like chicken and, um, and, um, and the, um, and, um, and,

some alcohol. Now, I'm a big fan of Stan Rogers, like most CBC employees, and he does have more serious shipwreck songs. He's got songs about death and pain and strife on the water, songs like White Squall and Northwest Passage and Flowers of Bermuda and Mary Ellen Carter. And with Stan, it kind of adds up to this idea that shipwreck is part of the Canadian experience in a way. You know, we're a people of the water from the Atlantic provinces to the Great Lakes to the Pacific. And unlike the epic poetry of Homer or the drama of The Tempest, our language of shipwreck is music. We love our stories of tragedy and disaster, and it's not just disaster songs. That's just one type, of course.

We love disaster films and disaster novels. And these are all ways that we have to explore. what death might be or what it means. Because, of course, we just simply can't know. It is the ultimate unknowable. That's Heather Sparling. She's an ethnomusicologist at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia. She collects and studies disaster songs,

this musical tradition that's existed in various styles and forms and functions for hundreds of years. Sometimes we don't really know exactly when or where disaster happened. There's maybe an assumption that a ship is lost and that all are lost, but who knows, maybe somebody survived. And that kind of ambiguity and uncertainty of the ocean and of death on the ocean, I think, is a very apt metaphor for the unknowability of death in general and makes the shipwreck song a particularly evocative cultural piece that we can use to explore sort of what does death mean and what happens. The songs in Sparling's collection are based on real disasters. In the days before radio and television, songs were often a way to spread the news. They were broadside ballads. Songs would be written and the news story would be hawked by these newspaper boys who would stand on street corners and sing these songs and people would be attracted to the songs. They'd buy the broadsheet

for a penny and then they themselves might start to sing the songs. You'd hear the songs being sung in pubs and the broadsheets themselves would often get plastered on walls. So broadside ballads about disasters were very common. You feeling-hearted Christian, with me now sympathize. When you hear my lamentation, twill draw tears from your eyes. Concerning those poor emigrants that lately sailed away on board the Anglo-Saxon, to them a woeful. day. Those are the opening lines to a sorrowful lamentation for the Anglo-Saxon, a broadside ballad announcing the loss of the ship and her crew off the coast of Newfoundland in 1863.

And as you can hear, God still plays a role. Here's the end of another ballad, the wreck of the Atlantic from 1873. So it is with us, my loving friends. There's breakers all around. And in an Unexpected hour, the last great Trump will sound. The shrieks and groans and cries of those who fear the chastening rod, all unprepared must them come forth to meet Almighty God. Oftentimes they were very formulaic. So they were very typical verses. There might be five verses, and each of the verses is.

going to deal with something like what was the event, who was on it, some kind of empathy for the family members, and often a religious message, a Christian religious message of being right with God, because we never know when we might lose our lives. So those formulaic elements were always there, which made it easier for songs to be created very quickly. I would also say that at the beginning of the music industry, we weren't always very clear on what role radio was going to play, for example. And so broadside ballads continued to be written in the early days of radio and in the early days of recordings. Many disasters affected the lower classes and the rural classes and the working poor. And so those disaster songs were very appealing to

them. The music industry created records, discovered that there was a market there and created records specifically for those demographics and disaster songs were part of that. This is The Titanic, or It was sad when that great Titanic, or it was sad when that great ship went down from 1925 by Ernest Stoneman. Recorded 13 years after the sinking of the Titanic, it retains that breaking news. broadside ballad structure, including references to the will of God, lines like, they were going to build a ship that the water could not go through, but God with his mighty hand showed the world it could not stand. As Heather mentions, there is also a message about

class. Another line, the rich they declared they wouldn't ride with the poor, so they sent the poor below. They was the first that had to go. There was sad when the great ship went down. It was sad when the great ship went down. For wounds and my little children lost their lives, It was that when the great ship went down. There are still, of course, popular songs about recent shipwrecks. November of 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking

of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which inspired the song from Gordon Lightfoot. What Heather is really interested in is something more unique, a spontaneous community reaction to shipwreck. Something more like the ballads of the 19th century updated for a digital world. Of course, people, professional artists, continued to write some songs, but my thinking was that the amateur writing of ballads would have slowed down. What I've found is that it seems to have increased, over the past few decades.

I have events, songs about events that stretch back hundreds of years, but most of those events might have one, maybe two songs about them, whereas today I might have a dozen songs about an event. I'm thinking about, for example, the Miss Alley fishing boat that sank off the coast of Nova Scotia in 2013, and almost immediately about eight songs emerged. I think I have about 12 altogether about that. that one event. Is this the Miss Alley?

The Miss Alley was caught in a February storm off Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Can you give me your position right now? The ship was lost, hit by waves, and capsized. Five young fishermen died. The search is finally over for a fishing boat missing for six days in wild seas off the coast of southern Nova Scotia. The vessel was found capsized with no sign of the five-man crew. The loss of those five young men was, of course, an awful tragedy for the families and community,

the town of Woods Harbor, Nova Scotia. As the news spread, so did songs, written by people who saw the news and felt like singing about it, on sites like Facebook and YouTube. I wrote this in their memory and it's called The Wreck of the Miss Alley. Maybe on your peacecoach, you just got to figure out how to pay that bankerman and keep that boat a flood. Amateur songwriters and communities often see themselves as community historians as documenting significant events that have impacted their communities.

Those who go down to the sea in ships. In other cases, there are people who are grieving. They've seen the coverage of the event. They may have no particular association with that event themselves. They may not have a connection to it directly. But they see the repeated coverage on the news and they're feeling a sense of grief. But also disenfranchised grief because we don't really expect or accept somebody's grief

over somebody that they didn't know. God bless you, boys. Shipwrecks are harder to physically memorialize than other disasters. There's no sight. There's no side of the road where you can lay a wreath. Songs are the replacement. Sparling calls it vernacular memorialization. So we can think of disaster songs and vernacular memorialization as part of death culture. And death culture has changed a lot over time. One of the things that has changed is the significance of organized religion. formal religion, which has been historically a very, very important institution or institutions that help us to make sense of death. They help us to understand the purpose of life, that there is some entity that has a bigger plan and that we can't always understand it

and that we have to accept that there is maybe an intention when somebody passes away young and unexpectedly. Religion also provides us with the rituals and the ceremonies that help us to deal with loss. And in the decline of formal religion, there is a bit of a vacuum or a gap that needs to be filled. And so vernacular memorialization has grown in conjunction with that decline in formal religion. And I would say disaster songs have two.

There's some special connection between music and grief. Whether you're grieving at a distance, like from some, something you've seen in the news, or mourning someone you knew and loved. Music has a special ability to bring people together, to help you through it, and make you feel not so alone. We're not very good at supporting people through grief. We give people a certain amount of time to get over it, and then we're not necessarily very accommodating as grief unrolls over a longer period of time. And what we do know is that grief is often not very predictable and that it's not often a short-lived process, especially the closer somebody is to somebody who's deceased, then it can take years for somebody to process that grief. And it comes in cycles and waves.

And so a song becomes an opportunity. A song is acceptable. First of all, it's acceptable to cry during a song. I think that's important. So we're not always very good at dealing with people crying. but a song evoking tears seems logical and acceptable. The other thing that is important is that for many people who are grieving, retelling a story over and over and over again is part of the grief process.

And again, we're not always very receptive to hearing the same story over and over again. But we tend to be a little bit more accepting of hearing a song over and over again. And so that disaster song or a song about grief or a song about death, or a song that simply evokes somebody who's passed can become a very powerful means of remembering that person, giving the grieving person, the bereaved person's space to express their grief, and to do so in a way that is socially and culturally acceptable.

The feeling of grief and loss is very disorienting. For the people left behind, their worlds are changed. Music creates the space for us to sit with the feelings as well as the thoughts that come in waves and can be very overwhelming. A music helps us to put some guardrails around that or it gives us some boundaries where some of that can be felt and explored in a way that becomes perhaps helps us to feel like we're not going to be drowning in it, so to speak. That was all really beautifully put by Heather Sparling. I did wonder whether Heather planned on using all of those nautical metaphors at the end there, or that that just happened naturally.

I think that was just natural, and that's the power of metaphor, right? Shipwreck, waves, drowning. These are all so big. into our language of crisis and chaos and loss. And I want to try and relate what Heather Sparling explains there, that the process of coming up with a shipwreck song to understand one's own grief, with the role of shipwreck metaphors more broadly. So Steve Ments, who we heard from earlier, argues that shipwreck is the central metaphor of modernity.

Shipwreck is the cost of a global, interconnected world of trade and commerce. It represents political crisis and environmental crisis and personal crisis. But there's kind of a deeper sense of shipwreck that Steve gets at that the shipwreck isn't just all the stuff that happens to us. Shipwreck is a metaphor for how we deal with all of that crisis. And the heart of it is a collision between the wet and the dry. I'm trying to think about the shipwreck narrative as, as many. up of the contrast between these two moments, right? There's the moment in which you as a sailor or a ship have become unexpectedly wetter than, you know, your ship has broken, you've been thrown

into the water, you are surrounded by the physical experience of the ocean. And I think about this a lot as a swimmer, even when I'm swimming recreationally and there's no, no wreck involved. But being wet is disturbing, is disorienting, reminds us of human vulnerability. and environmental limitations. If we are so fortunate as to get out of the water, as I did this morning after my swim in the ocean, and as some survivors of the Titanic did, as Odysseus did, as the people in the shipwreck

at the opening scene of the Tempest do, if you're lucky enough to survive that moment of immersion and disorientation and disruption, then you experience what I call the kind of drying-out process, which is retrospectively trying to make sense of the experience of shocking and dangerous immersion. So wet experience is a shock and a disruption, and then drying as a kind of intellectual retrospection in which you integrate the experience of wetness and disruption into your larger conceptual understanding of your place in the world.

So there, Steve is talking about crisis and what it means for us. that shipwreck stories resonate because they kind of reflect an internal process that applies in our lives, where the crisis is just the beginning or the catalyst for making sense of ourselves in the universe. And so many stories contain a metaphorical version of this and lots of movies, the trope of, you know, there's a really chaotic scene on the water, waves are breaking and things are smashing and there's shipwreck and disaster. And then, blam, there's just a hard cut, too. a character waking up in serene calm on a beach, and that's where the real reckoning begins.

And so as you're describing that, the image that comes to my mind is like Tom Hanks and Castaway. Yeah, exactly. So Castaway, technically a plane crash, I guess, but it's a shipwreck story, right? And that's exactly what happens. So it's like chaos, water, explosions, yeah. And then blammo, sunny day, nice weather. Tom Hanks wakes up on the beach, coughing and spluttering. And there begins the real moment of figuring out who he is and what he's all about. Where am I? What am I going to do? What am I made of? And then to me, what's really interesting about what Steve says is when you think of it like

that, there are other shipwrecks in that movie. And to me, one of the most memorable scenes is just after Tom Hanks finally gets rescued. and Helen Hunt gets a call at home that he's still alive. So you mean the part where Helen Hunt actually faints at hearing this news? Yeah, she picks up the phone and she's like, oh, and then immediately faints. And then the camera pans over to her new husband and her new child. So she had built this life that was supposed to be safe and secure and carry her forward, this new family, this new secure ship that was, you know, going happily along. And then something totally beyond her

control comes along and bam, she's thrown into chaos and self-doubt and personal torture. And the rest of the movie is her and Tom Hanks trying to navigate like, who are we now? And so the pain of shipwreck isn't that moment of catastrophe. It wasn't that specific thing that hit Helen Hunt. It's the coming to terms with the world that is unpredictable. and unstable. So the wet is the moment of shock and danger, and then the dry, or the drying, is an attempt to make sense of that, to understand that in a larger sense of yourself and the continuity of your life and your history. So, Matthew, going back to our earlier conversation, how does that help explain why shipwreck stories might be more alluring today than ever?

Well, based on everyone I spoke to, every conversation I had, I think they are particularly attractive right now because they tell the story of our lives right now. We are tiny, vulnerable human beings caught in a world of unpredictable chaos. And that chaos is getting closer and closer all the time. And we can do our best to build a ship to carry us through. But ultimately, the universe is beyond our control. And especially at this moment, you know, who knows where this whole project of the modern world is heading? You know, thinking about the ship of state, we built political structures and legal institutions and trade agreements to help us. But those things often seem like they're falling apart.

And when there is uncertainty and fear over politics and nature, the idea of a world, caught in a storm is a pretty good metaphor. You know, what if we lose control of this big thing we've built here? What kind of reckoning will we have when it all comes to an end? And, you know, to put it in the sense that Steve was talking about, how do you make sense of all this chaos and uncertainty besides trying to come to terms with it, to incorporating it into how you live, to dry it out through telling stories about it and making songs about it and metaphors about it.

So in that way of thinking about it, in that framing, does shipwreck stories overall generally tell us something about how to get through, how to survive, or do we just have to be content with uncertainty? Well, I'll end with one more piece from Stan, our friend Stan Rogers. This is a familiar song to you if you listen to enough CBC radio or go to enough folk festivals. It's also a song that I truly, truly love. And, you know, everyone in life has good times and bad times.

And when I've had bad times, I have often given this one a spin. She went down last October in a poor and drive-and-raim. The skipper he'd been drinking and the maid he felt no pain. Too close to three-mile rock and she was dealt her mortal blow. So that's the Mary Ellen Carter subtle low. So that's the Mary Ellen Carter, a story about sailors who survive a shipwreck. Yeah, a bunch of sailors on a boat make it through a shipwreck. But they loved that ship.

It was their livelihood and protection. So despite the best efforts of their former employers and its insurance agents, they work to bring it back up from under the waves. But we patched her ends, stopped her men's dog, hatching portal down, put cables to her for a nap and girded her around. Tomorrow noon we hit the air and then take up the strain and make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again. Rise again, rise again. And the climax of the song, here's the big message and metaphor.

When you feel like a person whose ship has been lost, The only way through is perseverance, resilience, and determination. And I'll read these lyrics now on. And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow, with smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go, turn to and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain, and like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again. Words to live by.

Thank you so much, Matt. Thank you, not. Or we couldn't leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale. She'd saved our lives so many times living through the gale. And the laughing drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave, they won't be laughing in another day. And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow with smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go turn to and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain and like the

Mary Ellen Carter rise again rise again rise again though your heart it be broken on life about to end no matter what you've lost to be at a home a love of a friend like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again on ideas that was Matthew Laysen Rider with his episode The Power of Shipwreck. Special thanks to Don Monroe and our colleagues at CBC Sydney in Cape Breton.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. You can check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production by Will Yarr. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer

Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.