Adrienne Rich’s Final Dive

Adrienne Rich, one of our finest poets, died yesterday at the age of 82. In her honor I post her beloved “Diving into the Wreck.” Rich helped set the stage for the feminist revolution and then became one of its major figures.  “Diving into the Wreck” was written right at the cusp of the revolution, in 1971 or 1972.

Raised with traditional marriage expectations, Rich had to fight through the social stereotypes that weighed heavily upon male-female relationships, “half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course.” (For a glossy version of what she was up against, check out HBO’s Mad Men.) “Diving into the Wreck” captures the uncertainty, the awkwardness, and the drama of rethinking the age-old gender roles–the myths–that had been handed down to us.

Many women benefited from her insights, which helped them understand frustrations that they didn’t have a language for. I add that she helped men see new possibilities as well. We too found ourselves impeded by myths, trapped inside barrels “half wedged and left to rot.” We too were “ruined instruments.” If I could, as a husband in the 1970’s and a father in the 1980’s, be freer with my emotions and more open with my children than was encouraged by my 1950’s upbringing, it was because poets like Rich blazed new trails about what was possible. For the courage she mustered up to dive into deep and unknown waters, I am eternally grateful.

Here’s her poem:

Diving into the Wreck

By Adrienne Rich

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 away 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.

I particularly like what Margaret Atwood had to say about the poem in a 1973 New York Times book review:

The wreck she is diving into . . . is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women. She is journeying to something that is already in the past, in order to discover for herself the reality behind the myth, “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” What she finds is part treasure and part corpse, and she also finds that she herself is part of it, a “half-destroyed instrument.” As explorer she is detached; she carries a knife to cut her way in, cut structures apart; a camera to record; and the book of myths itself, a book which has hitherto had no place for explorers like herself.

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