Alinor told me about a 67-year old man who was found dead yesterday in Long Island Sound about a mile along the shoreline from where we swim. He lived on Clam Island, one of the low, bare bits of rock on which people have been perching houses since the late 19c.
He was fully dressed, so it doesn’t seem to have been a case of swimming gone wrong, though it’s not clear how or why he got into the water. What is clear is that however he got in — falling, tripping, a stroke — he wasn’t able to support himself in what Conrad calls “the destructive element.”
I went on my afternoon swim anyway — it won’t be gorgeous September swimming weather much longer — but not as far as I usually go. The wind blew hard out of the southwest, and the waves were choppy.
Uncanny…
“Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns- nicht wahr?… No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up…”
As terrible a tragedy as there is to be found in any untimely human death, there seems to be something fascinating about the idea of death by drowning.
For instance, I’ve been reading George Eliot novels for Amy King’s class and can’t help but notice– and especially thanks to this class– the number of deaths or possible deaths by drowning. In Adam Bede, Thias Bede, a chronic drunk, fell into a stream (not quite the sea) and drowned. Later, in the novel, Hetty Sorrel wants to drown herself in any number of pools when she finds herself undesirably and disgracefully pregnant by a man other than the one to whom she is engaged. In Silas Marner, Dunsey Cass, the gambling-addicted, miserable son of Squire Cass and thief who robbed Silas Marner, traipses through a foggy night right into his death in a stream. In Daniel Derronda, Mirah Cohen wants to throw herself into the Thames (if I remember the water source correctly).
In Eliot, drowning appears to be a disgraceful death, a coward’s death, but really, there is something near-mystic about drowning, about returning to the watery existence from where we all began. I think of how it is often portrayed in films. There is silence and maybe a seeming-panic, but usually the person slips away peacefully in the end or there’s some kind of sad slow music. There is rarely more than a second of panic. Yet, from people who have narrowly survived drowning, and even from my own experiences being tumbled by the waves of the Jersey shore, drowning is not a peaceful experience. It burns, and it panics you. I wonder if Shakespeare was ever knocked down by a wave or left to flounder at the bottom of some river.
I hope this poor man passed safely into whatever comes next and that his death came quietly before his fall into the sound, not by drowning.
Are you reading *The Mill on the Floss* in Dr King’s class? There’s a good paper on “the destructive element” in George Eliot for you if you want to pursue it…
Death by drowning, as I think Shelly said, is a “very poetical subject.” Shelley, we might remember esp if we are interested in the Romantics, drowned while sailing in a storm off Italy, in a boat he owned named either the “Don Juan” (after his friend Byron’s great poem) or the “Ariel.”
Mill on the Floss is up next, and I certainly wouldn’t mind giving the paper a read if you have the title or author handy!
Sorry to have been cryptic — I meant that your earlier post tells me that you are partway to writing a good paper on drowning and the aquatic environment in Eliot’s novels. If you’re interested you might talk with Dr King about it.
Just to riff off of Nicole a little bit, there is a scene in the book No No Boy by John Okada where the main character’s mother drowns herself in a half-filled bathtub. I read this book 2 years ago and the scene still disturbs me. The story is set after the Japanese-American internment during WWII. The mother refuses to believe that Japan has been destroyed and insistes that all of the pictures and news reports on television are false. Although she had been living in the United States for over thirty years, she was obsessed with going back to Japan. When she is forced to accept the truth, that there is nothing for her to go back to, she drowns herself. After reading this part I kept asking myself, what does it take for someone to do something like this on purpose? To lay there and accept the burning and pain that Nicole was talking about. To be so distraught, to have given up so completely that she could endure the pain. And at the same time, I think of the amount of….determination?
Okada’s description of her body in the water instantly made me think of a Delarouche print I have titled “La juene matrye.” It is a picture of a floating woman with her wrists bound and her eyes closed with what appears to be a halo hovering over her face. She has often been referred to as Ophelia. I bought the print because there was something ethereal and peaceful about this woman that moved me. For the mother in No No Boy, although she was distraught and a little crazy, I imagine a peaceful look on her face because she would be thinking that she was going back to the Japan she knew thirty years earlier.
The old man was fully dressed? It makes you wonder…
One distinguishing feature of death by drowning is that, at least in the deep sea, there’s no body to recover. Gonzalo’s plea for “brown furze” at the end of 1.1 responds to that absolute loss of connection to the earth (which was particularly important in an early modern culture that took the resurrection of teh body very literally). The suicide of the great American modernist poet Hart Crane, who supposedly took a swan dive into the Atlantic on his way back to New York from Cuba, fits into this mode — though I suppose No No Boy’s mother in the bathtub is a bit different.
Modern Japanese (and Japanese American) literature has a complicated relationship to suicide as a form of heroic self-control. The person to read here (besides Okada) is Yukio Mishima, esp *The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea* and the four novels in the *Sea of Fertility* Trilogy.
There are numerous tragedies in this world every single day. Babies are killed, car accidents, bombs, freak accidents, but drowning to me has to be the worst.
Drowning is the only incident…and REALLY think about this….Drowning is the only incident that the victim is entirely alone when they die. There are lots of tragedies in which a group of people die, but when someone drowns, it is truely personal. If there wa someone else around him, he would have been saved, or at least potentially rescued, and not washed up on the shore, as is the case in most drownings. No one ever sees it happen. So the Art of drowning is truly the most personal death that exists.
Within itself, it is also the most painful and feared of all the deaths. Imagine the suffocation that occurs. When you stay underwater for too long and that burning pain gets in your chest, and all the CO2 wants to just burst out of every oraface in your body as you try as hard as you can to get to the surface. Once you finally do, there is nothing better, and you can’t gather air quick enough.
No one wants to drown. That’s why suicides in bathtubs are rarely from drowning. It’s some other stupid, selfish act.