Water always stages changes. And whether the waters are troubled by angels for healing or ritualized by ceremony to affirm a certain association, the moment one is submerged under the swells and stirrings of the waters’ fulsome body, something different becomes of the individual. From the waters, they rise anew.
This past April made it three years since Governor Lee issued a “Stay at Home” executive order for Tennessee in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus. His order was nearly a month after the novel virus claimed its first life in Tennessee, right here in Nashville. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 2.5 million cases have been reported, resulting in over 29 thousand deaths. While life now is vastly different from that haunting year of lockdown, testing, contact tracing, quarantining, and those inconsolable masked funerals (or even more painful, “zoom funerals”), it seems we are just now beginning to feel somewhat cleansed of the contagion of Covid-19, virally, socially, and psychologically speaking.
When I learned of the title of this collection—As Water We Rise—my first thought was Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, which I returned to during the pandemic. What I specifically recalled from the novel in the context of this collection was the powerful moment of two friends finding healing in the water in the middle of fighting bubonic plague. Towards the end of the sixth scene of the fourth movement, the reader finds the main protagonist Dr. Rieux and his companion in fighting the plague, Jean Tarrou, concluding a discussion on sainthood and saving lives. Tarrou, perhaps to change the subject, suggests to the doctor, for “friendship’s sake,” that they go for a swim. Rieux agrees, and Tarrou adds: “Really it’s too damn silly living only in and for the plague. Of course a man should fight for the victims, but, if he ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of his fighting?”
The two drive to the pier and find the sea “spread out before them, [as] a gently heaving expanse of deep-piled violet, supple and sleek….” Rieux is the first to jump in and is received eagerly by the cold shocks of the water until it tempers its enthusiasm with a calmer enfold. And then Tarrou follows. The narrator describes how “Rieux turned and swam level with his friend, timing his stroke to his. But Tarrou was the stronger swimmer and Rieux had to put on speed to keep up with him….” While in the water together, the narrator describes how “they swam side by side, with the same zest, in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, at last free of the town and of the plague.”
After their swim, they return to the pier and, without saying a word, dress and head back to the car. The narrator concludes the scene by describing how “they were conscious of being perfectly at one, and that the memory of this night would be cherished by them both…but now they must set their shoulders to the wheel [of fighting the plague] again.”
This 11th issue of Waxing & Waning is titled “As Water We Rise.” Printed and captured in writing, these seemingly unmoving words upon the page betray a stillness that betrays a simplicity. Still waters run deep. And we must first interrogate the language at stake in this pronouncement before taking the fullness of its meaning at a simple face value. As Water We Rise. What is at question in this declaration is the upshot of the two-letter word as. Do we mean “as” when used as an adverb revealing comparison, proclaiming that the way we rise is compared to how water rises? As Water We Rise. Or do we mean “as” when used as a preposition, revealing that the ability of our rising comes from our identity as water? People of the water, rising. As Water We Rise. The question of meaning slips between simile and metaphor, comparison and name, modified realism and total surrealism.
However, I am thinking we do not need to choose between simile and metaphor or imagination and miracle. Literature can reveal an opportunity for the contradictions that restrain our beliefs to dissolve into the liberating paradox of sacramental language. Yes, literature can be composed of sacramental language. It is literature that showed us that make-believe could, in fact, make us believe. Sacramental language is the language that vows to live out what it believes. And this language is best made possible through the collective. It is a language of protest, of prophecy, of poetry, of healing, of love. Why do we go down to the river? Why do we baptize by water? Why do we ponder the depths and shape of the sea? Of course, scientists will tell us water makes up more than 55% of our body, so in a way, we are already people of the water. However, that does not explain the intrigue of submersion, or the cleansing, renewing, renaming power of water that pulls at us from the shore. My guess is it has something to do with the multitudes the water keeps; the multitudes we join when we enter the waters. The healing we find in the waters seems to come from the collective sense we gather in the water. When in the water, we of the water declare, in the spirit of the African philosophy of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.”
As Water We Rise. The title appears resounding. Without reading through the collection of poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction essays, one might imagine those words—As Water We Rise—spoken loudly, a victorious throng of voice, rising out of the waters, marching upon the land, seizing the moment. However, after reading the collection over a weekend, I heard something other than an insurgency of voice and will. I heard what sounded like the coincidence of a thousand intimate determinations being pulled at simultaneously. It sounded like how oceans rise when the moon pulls at its bulges. I felt that slow pull from the depths in Ery Caswell’s sunset lover ( ) when the speaker notices the “sun / lovely sank as it does / each evening into promise.” There was a similar draw, as if in solidarity, in Kirsten Meehan’s I Imagine a Scenario Where I Collide with a Deer While Going 10 Miles Per Hour on a Skateboard, when the speaker feels “Stunned after being touched / by something we never imagined / could touch us.”
Bodies of water welcome our questions, even resembling those quests of the unknown that open us to the world of plurality instead of closing and dividing it. I could feel this wading in the waters of question in the series of poems by Jonathan Yungkans, answering a handful of Pablo Neruda’s questions, like the Chilean poet’s question of, “Where is the center of the sea? Why do waves never go there?” Yungkan’s replies: “Given tide and a chance, who knows what might come howling from the moon.” And then there is Joseph Byrd’s speaker, in his poem I am going to live for a very long time, who confesses to eating “butterfly bones…[and learning] that beauty can cost a lot of / memory.” In a similar spirit of raw but healing solidarity, Nathan Shipley’s poem Dream demystifies the beauty of a so-called crater with no center by stating “You were the blood / that filled the crater.” And before Walter Weinschenk’s speaker in Abby’s Lock admits that the oar used to steady the canoe over unsatisfying waters is getting heavy, his speaker asserts, “Everything grows and dies / by the water, as a rule, / and some find it sensual / if it smells like cheap wine; / But everything ferments in time; / Everything here is always here / But only for a moment.”
How does healing sound? How does cleansing sound? Return to that moment of refuge when you were seeking something more than just comfort and safety, something more like a restoration, a new start, a re-do. How did it sound? What spoke to you in the sound of running water when drawing a bath? Or the slow sloshing sound of nearly silent waves lapping when entering the sea at night for a swim? Cleansing, unlike magic, does not sound like a sharp snap of the finger. If we could give it a sound for comparison, looking retrospectively now at the hours, days, weeks, and years that collected the sorrows, the apprehensions, the fears, it might recall the slow-moving depths of still waters rising. Reading carefully, you can hear that kind of powerful intimacy gathering volume in Joanna Acevedo’s [Poem with Apologia], where her speaker confesses that the cancer her father has, living in his ribcage and colon, she wishes she “could eat it—scoop it out of him like ice cream.” Furthermore, in another painful but intimate poem of hers, [Poem With Suicide Attempts] (CW: Suicide), her speaker cites a girl who breaks “into a thousand pieces.” But her brother, after pouring her a glass of water, glues “her back together, piece by piece.”
David Bradley’s short story “Heatstroke” portrays a different account of water’s guardianship and final custody of healing. The reader follows the senseless demise of a lost mule that has kicked its finders before being shot for its actions. The face of the dying mule is described as going “under the surface [of the water] and then up again, spray flying from the wide nostrils, teeth bared, purple tongue lapping as if to drink the inlet away. There was a moan, almost human, overwhelmed by fear and sadness, and then the mule’s head slipped beneath the saltwater.”
Water can provide ceremony for the things we want to believe, things which may only be felt in speaking, perhaps not a speaking into existence like a magic spell, but the speaking as existence, like the strivings of the poet or activist for the good, just, and the beautiful. Catherine DiMercurio, in her short story “Gone,” turns to this sacramental language as her protagonist concludes her story in search of healing through forgetting by confessing to herself how she “ached for the cricket song, the illusion of magic, the pretense that he was to soothe us, that Jody was okay, that I was.” In Roberta Clipper’s modern turn on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “The Brothers K,” Alex, the youngest of the three brothers, gave up a life of ambition to waste away in the caretaking of ungrateful parents. As he considers the unglamorous crossroads he faces, the narrator follows his lonely drive home, as he looks back on the beliefs he felt he needed to release and wonders: “But what if there’s no soul? What if this illusion is the only thing he has?…if all that was an illusion, why did it feel so empty when it was gone?” Alex, trapped between the contradictions of the literal and the figurative, the disbelief and the need for healing, can be symbolized in the words of the protagonist of Andrey Gritsman’s short story in this collection, “Stephen,” who, after returning from a family funeral and confirming his only feeling of home is in his vehicle, looks upon the Queens’ bridge at night before him and imagines it a shipwreck between two worlds: “Frozen, the souls already deported, still not departed elsewhere.” Broken, separated, frozen in disbelief, without the language to rise anew.
Water is just as welcoming as it is undeniable. It receives and envelops. It collects our contradictions, brings them together, and then bids us to come down and join, to rinse ourselves in its depths, cleanse ourselves of our separation. But we cannot remain in the water to become helplessly identical with it, for we will certainly drown if we do. The waters call us to be rinsed, baptized anew, but from the waters, we must rise.
I read this entire collection on my hammock in my backyard Sunday, March 27th. The next day, an individual fired through the glass doors of Covenant School, walked in with a legally purchased assault rifle and two other firearms, and took the lives of six people, three of whom were children. A week later, my stepchildren and classmates were joined by three Democratic members of the Tennessee House of Representatives, Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson, to demand laws to help reduce the likelihood of brutal murders like the horrifying shooting at Covenant School. Jones and Pearson were expelled for their efforts (only the third time in 157 years that such a resolution was confirmed), and the nation turned its eye to the racialized legacy of Tennessee politics. Lost in all the turmoil were the innocent lives lost forever, while the fear of mass shootings returned. Still, in all this, what could be recognized was a collective, a collective for the lives lost at Covenant, a collective for democracy threatened at the Tennessee House floor, a collective to face the fear of mass shooting together, a collective standing together, living out the language to which they had given voice.
Dr. Rieux and Tarrou, in Camus’ The Plague, tried to fight together against the plague while arguing about differing ideas of God and human destiny. But it is when they went down to the waters and performed a baptism of their friendship, a baptism of each other as friendship with the other in the water, that they became perfectly at one with the other, together for each other, for the purpose of returning to the world of plague together. We may never completely be cleansed from the Covid-19 epidemic or the Covenant shootings. Lives have been changed forever, some lost forever. And there is always the fear of the next plague, the next haunting moment. But we keep going down to the river, washing ourselves in its folds, and as water—a miracle only possible in a language we live out—we rise, we rise again, we rise anew, we rise to fight the plague together.
Plague must be faced. And it is best faced alongside friends, which is to say, individuals baptized by the unity of friendship, solidarity, people of the water. However, it is to the world that shores those waters where friends must return to “set their shoulders to the wheel again,” together to extend the healing found in the waters beyond its banks, together to be “conscious of being perfectly at one.” A collective. As water we rise.