I’ve been thinking a lot about work and identity lately. Or, to return to an earlier theme, not thinking about work and identity, but noticing the effects of not having the one on the other, much as I notice the progress of the amaryllis bulb in its stony bath on my windowsill. What I mean is I don’t watch the amaryllis growing, and often I forget about it, but when I do see it I feel immersed in its little history right away.
Being out of work makes the days dreamy and slow and unfamiliar and full of wonder and threat. It’s like snorkeling. You’ve been underwater before with a tube and a mask. You know what to expect, but you don’t know what you’ll see. You come back to the same place again and again, hoping each time it will be different, but not too different. You want to see the usual fish and then some rare and wonderful fish you’ve never seen before. You don’t want a long, gray, toothy fish not listed on the laminated guide to appear beneath you. But it might. You are in the ocean, after all. You cannot feel at home in so much water, or have any sense of mastery over its possibilities.
Having a job, by contrast, is like bobbing on the surface of the water in a boat. The boat might be sturdy or leaky or engine-powered or oar-powered, but it is still recognizably a boat. It has a particular shape and design and named parts: hull, ribs, stern, bow, mast, quarterdeck. Yardarm! Clumsy cleat! (My copy of Moby Dick has dozens of illustrations by Barry Moser. UC Berkeley Press. I highly recommend it.)
Even when I pack a lunch and drive across the city and park four blocks away and hump my computer bag and my purse and my porto-coffee cup and that other bag I always seem to be carrying with who knows what in it, always a different version of the same bag, a Trader Joe’s bag or a WWF bag with a panda on it or that shrieking bird from the Nature Conservancy or a lion or a poppy or a flowering Art Nouveau vine, even with all those bags and the three flights to my studio and the desk and the kneeling desk chair, even with all that, when I arrive I am not at work. Working hard at what I love, I am not at work. I am not in the boat. I will not be kicked overboard if I don’t show up tomorrow. I am the only Human Resource. I mean nothing to the State. I like the adventure and I want it to go on being the same but different, and definitely not worse, and I also know I cannot stay in the water forever.
Here are the first four stanzas of the 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’s a piece of maritine 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.
