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WORKSHOPS » POETRY » ADRIENNE RICH, "DIVING INTO THE WRECK" » RE-READING
Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"
BIOGRAPHY
Reading » Re-Reading » Explorations
Re-Reading Questions
Text on p. 965 of the full Ninth Edition
Pay particular attention to italicized words:
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First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
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Re-Reading Questions
Note: Some of these questions require extensive answers to explore them fully. Therefore, you may either use some as brief prompts for your own thinking about the piece after reading the study materials or explore them in a paper.
1. Consider carefully the nature of the wreck, the diver, and the ladder as you re-read the poem, paying special attention to the italicized words:
This dive requires preparation; note what the speaker needs to take. The mask seems particularly important to allow the speaker to breathe, yet a mask often has other meanings. Compare it with the "drowned face." Why isn't the lamp mentioned at the beginning and the end? How might the speaker use each of these tools?
What does the wreck, the object of this quest, represent? Re-read lines 53–71. How is the wreck related to words and myths? Here is a scene of "treasures that prevail" encased in rot and destruction, something gone terribly wrong (lines 81–87). As with our fascination with the Titanic and buried treasures, such a search and desire to reconstruct tells us much about ourselves, personally as well as culturally. Is this a search of the poet's past/unconscious/identity? The history of human civilization and patriarchal culture?
The diver, the voice of the poem, is presumably the poet; at first she is very much alone and unsupported (lines 8–12, 32–34, 42), but she is not alone when she reaches the wreck (lines 72–77). There she becomes she and he, mermaid and merman, "the tentative haunters" (line 72), the "drowned face" (lines 65–6, 78–80), moving to "we are the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course" and finally "We are, I am, you are" (lines 84, 88) and the unifying paradox of two-in-one, "the one who find our way." Consider what this transformation suggests. Whose quest is this? Why is it undertaken "by cowardice or courage"? Whose wreck is this?
Look at the description of the ladder (lines 13–21). Why is it "hanging innocently" and who might be the "we who have used it"? How is the air described in contrast to the sea (lines 25–28, 35–44, 52)? Consider what each could represent.
Look again at the ending: She (he/we/you) carry "a knife, a camera / a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear." These are tools of discovery; could they also be tools of reconstruction?
2. Read the Adrienne Rich interviews in your text (pp. 1096–1103 LIT and pp. 836–43 LIT Shorter), paying special attention to the following quotations. How do they help you understand this poem?
"I think of myself as using poetry as a chief means of self-exploration" (p. 1096 LIT and p. 836 LIT Shorter).
Male writers "seem to write out of a sense of doom, as if we were fated to carry on these terribly flawed relationships. . . . [Women] are feeling that there has to be some other way, that human life is messed-up but that it doesn't have to be this desolate" (p. 1097 LIT and pp. 837–38 LIT Shorter).
"I can conceive of a women's movement that will show the way to humanizing technology and fusing dreams and skills and visions and reason to begin the healing of the human race" (p. 1099 LIT and p. 839 LIT Shorter).
And from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Norton Critical Edition, pp. 167–68:
Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name—and therefore live—afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.
For writers, and at the moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us.
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