Going Down: Water, War & Identity in Literature & Life
They always began the same—I would be swimming underwater, delighting in the dreamy sensation of moving through liquid without need of air, until I'd realize that my path to the surface was blocked by a large object—a whale, a dolphin, a boat. Total panic would take over, as I'd thrash about trying to get to the surface and heave life's breath once more. But a peculiar change would take place in the midst of my struggle every time. As I'd face this threat looming directly above me, the sun's rays would fan out around the beast and play upon the patterns in the water. It was then that I would become enraptured in this gorgeous display above, and the strongest sense of peace that I have ever felt would flow through me. And I would know that it was okay to stop struggling, to let go, to die.
I would often wake up after these dreams to the sound of my dad brushing his teeth, getting ready for work hours before anyone else. I would never go to tell him about my dream, as most four-year-olds might after such an intense vision. But I was more afraid of him than any dream I could have had. In many ways, that dream, which came to me repeatedly throughout the next ten years of my life, reflected a need to process my existence under the control of an abusive father. It was my attempt to break free and claim my own identity—a four-year old internalization of a war being waged in the only world I knew. Little did I know that out in the other worlds, past and present, humans were seeing the same underwater images as me.
Painters, musicians, poets and psychologists have all gazed into the deep to explore death, rebirth, transcendence, and transformation—to grapple with the most unbearable certainties of our existence. Shakespeare ushered the tradition into modern literature with the famous quote from his play The Tempest. In it, the spirit Ariel tricks a shipwrecked prince into believing that his father has died in the storm by chanting, "Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange." As the play unfolds, we find that his father's transformation was not that of a man to a corpse, but from a villain to a simple man begging forgiveness. Shakespeare's metaphor of a sea-change—the ocean's depths symbolizing a kind of psychological transformation—has resonated throughout art ever since, from T.S. Eliot's famous poem The Wasteland to Beck's new like-titled album.
Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf obsessed over the connection between water and the psyche. Woolf was particularly fond of subaqueous imagery representing her unchecked imagination. In a speech given to professional women, she spoke of the novelist as being a fisherwoman on the bank of a lake, who lets her rod of reason down into the pool of consciousness. "Sometimes she felt a jerk, and the line raced through her fingers as her imagination took to the depths. Then reason had to haul the imagination, panting with rage and disappointment, to the surface because it had gone too far." It's not hard to leap from the theme of the subconscious and land beneath the water's surface. Being underwater is a reverse sensory experience—you see before you hear, you smell only through taste, and gravity has turned upside down. It's a completely unearthly world here on Earth, just as our dreams seem so unreasonable but are right there in our reason-loving brains. Through her symbolism, Woolf acknowledges these siamese worlds as a paradox of human existence.
But clearly the one world is favored over the other. It's a retreat, a place of safety and calm. In one of my favorite passages of Between the Acts, Woolf elicits the sensation of some primal subsumption when the narrator reflects: "What she wanted was darkness in the mud; a whiskey and soda at the pub; and coarse words descending like maggots through the waters." Words, frequently appointed symbols of logic, transform into creatures with no reasoning capabilities, as they plunge deeper underwater. A strong urge to escape becomes clear—a desire found in much more than Ringo Starr's old octopus jingle.
But escape from what? After all, we don't live in a vacuum or underwater. In T.S. Eliot's self-conscious poem The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator expresses great anxiety over growing old and getting scrutinized tea party society women. Turning to the ocean, he bemoans his need to avoid such torment: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." The women have been made to symbolize the superficial society that Eliot criticizes (as he and his cohort Ezra Pound were wont to do). And these social pressures aren't just cold pricklies for him, they pose a real threat: "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea…Till human voices wake us, and we drown." You can sense this man's fear as he grapples with his identity in relation to the world around him. This water stuff is not just literary slight of hand—it's a real attempt at dealing with the Big Questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Why does everything suck so bad?
We can hardly ask ourselves such questions without discovering that who we are is largely informed by the outside world. Sure, we inherit uniqueness from the cosmos upon arrival on earth, and our minds are master protectors—they work up their own convoluted systems that comprise much of how we act and what we learn. But they do this in order to process everything we experience outside of our bodies, from getting weaned to getting dumped to getting jumped. To say that we are products of our society isn't a cop out—it's a fact, whether that society is our planet, country, or family.
Eliot said that the great writer, in writing himself, writes his time. Identity and society at large seem to be inextricably linked. So what happens to the writer when his or her time is war? How does she internalize the treachery of murder and uncertainty of life itself? As with everyone who lives during such times, war deeply affected the Modernists, some falling into deep depression. "There was no question that the Second World War precipitated [Woolf's] suicide," says Professor Elizabeth Abel, an expert in Modernist Literature at UC Berkeley. "In her writings it's unambiguous that when she was listening to the bombs dropping around her, one of the things she found most intolerable about going on living was the outbreak of the second world war." Because we are in large part a reflection of our environment, war is evil = I am evil. The figuring may go something like this, in two parts—if war is evil and humans make war, humans must be evil. But that's the easy part. It's much tougher to say, "if humans are evil and I am human, I must be evil." I think the despair we feel when faced with war comes partly from our inability to reconcile a personal identity with a referent devoid of any good.
No doubt this conflict is what Woolf is dealing with in "Time Passes," the second of three sections in To The Lighthouse, and widely read as the space between the First and Second World Wars. As the bombs stir once more, a significant shift of perspective occurs that manifests in the very landscape: "There was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath." The blood clearly speaks to the people dying in the war, as the ocean did become a mass grave for thousands. But the war has also killed the collective imagination of society, the thing that formed Woolf's identity as a writer and a human being. With poetic grace, she describes how these changes render even the most sublime walks on the beach unendurable. For when all of the truths from which we define our existence shatter, we are left to gaze at the purple stain, asking answerless questions: "Did nature supplement what man began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and his torture. That dream of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath?…to pace the beach was impossible…the mirror was broken." A dim faith remains in that sanctuary below the sea, but those powers nobler than warring super powers slumber on, leaving her disconnected and incomplete.
It seems Woolf was unable to answer those questions that she posed in To The Lighthouse, and in a way, that failure lead to her suicide. We can see this unfolding in Mrs. Dalloway, where Septimus Warren Smith, a shell shocked veteran of WWI, kills himself after going through heightened stages of delusion and despair: "He was drowned, he used to say…He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea." When Clarissa Dalloway learns of Septimus' suicide, she understands his death as an attempt to communicate, an embrace. That Woolf wrote Septimus as struggling with the realities of "human cruelty" while having visions of drowning, and whose death Clarissa viewed as some kind of embrace can hardly be coincidental. This narrative was playing out her own position on self, life, and death. For even though "she had tried suicide by other means earlier," says Abel of Woolf's drowning, "I don't think it was accidental that that's the one that worked." It's as though drowning was her way of reconnecting with her deeper self—something that the war severed from her and that could only be recovered underwater.
Somehow this all makes sense. If my mind is constantly affirming who I am in relation to my surroundings—I am a daughter, I am an American, I am a goddess—than I can't possibly feel confidence or pride in myself when my external points of reference embody violence and brutality. When Bush decides that America must shock and obliterate all who live outside of "American values," I cannot feel good about being an American. After all, those aren't my values. So now I'm completely ostracized from the society that I supposedly belong to. The same goes for any social group of which you are a member, like a family. How can a child understand or feel good about who she is when the person who defines her is violent and unpredictable? She must find a way to escape the violence and carve out a space where she can reconnect with her genuine self. Just as the Modernists coped with war and brutality through their written images, I sought shelter in my dreams.
It's incredible how anyone of us can tap into the underwater symbolism of death and transcendence. At age four, I had never seen such vivid images in my waking state. But they came from somewhere. Discovering this massive tradition of submarine imagery in art and literature makes me feel we are all part of a collective consciousness. Whether we humans evolved from the sea or are just a part of the same primordial stew, we hold the same knowledge, and that is a major part of where we come from and who we are.
It's tragic that humans are unwilling to see that we are all connected, and that connection is the love we require in order to evolve as spiritual beings. This is our true identity crisis. Yes, it's all about peace and love. Everything is. Otherwise, it's about pain and suffering, and we know where that has gotten us. I've had enough of towns leveled and humans murdered and children beaten. It's time for the nobler powers to wake within each and every one of us. It's time for a sea change.