Myth of Arrival

Dylan Thomas, "When the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing/ The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind."

Howard Moss, "The senseless drowned/ Have faces nobody would care to see,/ But water loves those gradual erasures/ Of flesh and shoreline, greenery and glass … Grown onto every inch of plate, except/ Where the hinges let it move, were living things,/ Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one/ Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:/ The origins of art."

William Shakespeare, "O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,/ What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!/ What sights of ugly death within my eyes!"

What happens to the drowned? It's amazing how primordial our beliefs that only those whose bodies we can bury receive _______________ (insert whatever your religion or belief or hang-up concerning "the afterlife" here) while those who are lost at sea never rest. It seems to be an universal belief.

Drowning fascinates me; not my own belief in it, but the belief of others, how they see themselves in conjunction with the unspeakable power of the ocean.¹ To drown in the sea is to be literally swallowed up, gone forever, vanished. John Rousmaniere echoes this when he wrote: "I think that when people are lost in a storm, there is that absence of a body. It is an elemental need to have a body, or you are literally lost."

When you consider the writers, actors, musicians and poets who've either killed themselves or been killed by asphyxiation it gives one pause. I found this list on Wikipedia then added a few of my own:

Percy Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy;

Virgina Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse;

Paul Celan killed himself by drowning in the Seine river in Paris;

Hart Crane threw himself into the Gulf of Mexico, heading home to New York City;

Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of the mathematician Pythagoras, drowned by his master for the imprudence of discovering irrational numbers;

Qu Yuan of China in 278 BC. Committed ritual suicide as a form of protest against the corruption of the era, a sacrifice still commemorated today during the Duan Wu or Dragon Boat Festival;

Antinous (born circa 111), lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile in 130;

Li Bai, Chinese poet, as legend has it he fell overboard when he drunkenly tried to embrace the image of the moon on the water;

Natalie Wood (born 1938), actress, drowned in a yacht accident in 1981; the accident raised several suspicions and murder was considered;

Alfonsina Storni, pioneering feminist, poet and journalist, committed suicide at La Perla beach near Mar del Plata, Argentina;

Carol Wayne, American actress who drowned under mysterious circumstances in Manzanillo, Mexico in 1985;

Jeff Buckley (born 1966), singer-songwriter, drowned in the Wolf River in 1997;

Spalding Gray, monologuist and actor (Swimming to Cambodia), born 1941, suspected suicide in New York City's East River;

Similarly, poet seem to have a macabre fascination concerning the drowned. The list of drowning poems alone is impressive: "Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame," "A Ritual of Drowning," "Hymns for the Drowning," "Music While Drowning," "The Art of Drowning," "The Act of Drowning," "Not Waving But Drowning" and the poet Denver Butson even has his own "Drowning Ghazals.: And now to that list I add one more:

I need to call, I need to stamp, I need
to do something; your body is missing,
submerging completely. Your mouth filling,
your lungs filling. You'll never be wormseed
now, you hungry ghost. Even dull seaweed
shuns you and seaweed is everyone's friend.
I would call you back if I could depend
on you hearing me. Not your greed, the greed
of all those bones missing, for land, for this
body of mine. Do not come back for that.
I am not Odysseus, his siren,
nor the siren's song. Still I call. What bliss
is there in death if no one prayers down at
the shore? Love, come back from oblivion.

1. Folktales, religious rites, customs and superstitions about drowning and the drowned from around the world could easily fill and entire book. Here is a sampling I found:

   Sternberg says the Chukchee of Siberia believe that their, "Clan-gods … are the spirits of clansmen who have died by drowning or fire."

   In Eastern Europe the Rusalki were water spirits, found in both Slavonic and Russian mythology. Supposedly they were the spirits of drowned girls. In other parts of Europe it was a common held belief that, "when a man is drowning it is the intention of the gods that he should be drowned; and that the rescuer, if successful in rescuing him, must be the substitute and be drowned himself later on." In a similar line of thought, one source claims "a gold earring was both a charm against drowning and the price paid to Davy Jones to enter the next world if a sailor died at sea."

   In China, a festival known as Teng Chieh, serves two functions: "As a remembrance of the dead and in order to free the spirits of the "pretas" in order that they might ascend to heaven. "Pretas" are the spirits of those who died as a result of drowning and whose bodies were consequently never buried. The presence of "pretas" among the living is thought by the Chinese to be dangerous. Under the guidance of Buddhist temples, societies are formed to carry out ceremonies for the "pretas," which includes the lighting of lanterns. Monks are invited to recite sacred verses and offerings of fruit are presented."

   There is a similar festival, I believe, in Japan. "These lanterns are to send away the spirits of those who died of drowning. It is believed that these spirits, 'drowned ghosts,' will suffer in the water until someone else comes to take their place … it is thought that many people have died by drowning simply because they were pulled into the water by ghosts who were eager to find a substitute for their suffering." [back]

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Scantily Clad Info Dump, Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.