Made, In Waves
I have found myself surrounded by water. Not so much in its physical form, but lately, the idea, image, nature and habits of water have found their way into most of the books I’ve been reading, the conversations I’ve been having, the music I’ve been listening to, and the thoughts I’ve been thinking. Made In Waves occupies most of the space in my brain right now, and I know a bit of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon when I see it. Yet it feels like water is calling for my attention, and I am willing to give it.
Made In Waves was, of course, not the first name I came up with. I knew I wanted a name that spoke of my creative process, my identity, and my human experience. Water arrived organically into this thought process, and “waves” came to mean two things. The ebb and flow of creativity, and the way in which imagination is a kind of life raft amidst the stormy seas we often find ourselves in. Landing on Made In Waves felt natural and expansive.
Despite being intimately acquainted with the life and works of Virginia Woolf, somehow in the developmental stages of my own creative space, it didn’t once occur to me that I was being drawn to that liquid imagery, as she had been. Water flows through so much of Woolf’s writing, but most naturally I find myself fanning the pages of The Waves, and pulled in, as a magnet, to my silvery underlinings, pushing out the moments that had connected to me as I read it for the first time two years ago. The Waves traces the lives of childhood friends, and addresses the permeability and porousness of identity, the threads and tangles of relationship between individuals and the group. The novel begins by introducing our characters as young children. We meet Rhoda, who is playing with a bird bath.
“I have picked all the fallen petals and made them swim. I have put raindrops in some. I will plant a lighthouse here, a head of sweet Alice. And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers…’” (Woolf 10).
The thought trails off here, into an unwritten infinity.
Throughout her life, Rhoda carries a weight with her. It is eventually too much to carry. But here we find a tender image of the strong imaginative world of a child. Through her storytelling and creativity, she remains resilient and intact. Within the imaginative practice of make-believe, her boat weathered the crashing waves with unshakeable strength.
(I’m momentarily struck by the realization that I’m back in the ideas I explored for my dissertation. My thinking centred around hallucination, societally branded as madness, but as an imaginative act of both resistance and refuge. I won’t stay with this thought for very long, but it’s funny how things tend to circle back.)
Somewhere deep, deep inside everyone is an anchor. Perhaps a kind of gravity that keeps us from falling apart. It is often buried under layers that we form throughout our lives in the hope that they might protect us from everything that feels too big to hold alone. I can’t help but think that it’s the child who trusts in their own fierce capacity to be stretched. Are we born open and exposed, vulnerable to everything but with unhindered access to the centre of ourselves, where courage and safety is found?
Sometimes, I’ve found a strange comfort in the image of deep waters. It’s something about the overwhelming experience of a burdened existence. There’s a threat but also a serenity in the immensity. As you drown, you are deeply held, wrapped up and secure. I’ve never felt that on dry land; the heavy, weighted pushing from all sides that keeps you knitted together as you sink slowly deeper into the dark.
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I think there is a reason for this. It’s something that Amanda Gorman speaks to in her poetry collection, Call Us What We Carry.
Sometimes diving
Into the deep inside us
Is the only way
We rise above it
(Gorman 196).
For anyone in long-term therapy, and for many others, this isn’t a new idea. It takes a courageous descent into the depths of our self to commune with our darkness and peel off the layers we knit so tightly. It’s underwater that we learn what we are and what we carry. I have evolved and changed with every brave inward turn.
Suddenly, Made In Waves takes on a new level of meaning; to be created by the waves. To be built up and strengthened, sharpened and honed by repetitive erosion. I don’t for one second suggest that suffering is vital, but it is certainly inevitable, and it always moulds us.
These winding thoughts have led me to these beliefs. That creativity keeps us afloat, imagination keeps us strong, that being in the waves is what creates us, and our embracing of them is what allows us to break through the elastic surface of the water.
Citations
Gorman, Amanda. Call Us What We Carry. 2021. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2021. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. 1931. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015. Print.
