Deep sea diving

I’m fascinated by the way women artists turn so readily to oceanic imagery. Of course, there are a myriad explanations for this great trope of Romanticism – the moon’s influence on the tides, menses, and so forth. For Hélène Cixous, the pioneering French feminist, the ocean is a metaphor for female subjectivity; unlike the masculine trait of fortifying the self against invasion, female consciousness oozes out beyond the self to embrace the world: ‘her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide’, in Cixous’s words. This is what I hear in Sandy Denny’s song ‘The Sea’, where

Sea flows under your doors in London town
And all your defences are all broken down.

I'm reminded too of ‘Undine Goes’, a prose narrative by Ingeborg Bachmann, the greatest Austrian writer of the post-War era, which addresses the world of humans from the perspective of a sea nymph. An upper terrestrial world of masculine certainties and social order is subverted by a submarine world of fluidity and impermanence, a water world that Bachmann consistently identifies with music, ‘the note of the shell, the fanfare of the wind… the cry from afar’. Leaving her realm of water to encounter the Everyman figure, ‘Hans’, in a clearing, Undine challenges him to speak truthfully. When he complies, the effect is devastating:

Then all the waters overflowed their banks, the rivers rose, the water-lilies blossomed and drowned by hundreds, and the sea was a mighty sigh, it beat, beat and ran and rolled towards the earth, its lips dripping with white foam.

Last year I got into correspondence with the American musician Robin Frederick. Apart from being a gifted singer and writer, whose songs were covered by Nick Drake and John Martyn among others, Robin is a teacher who reflects deeply on her craft. Oceans are her realm also. On her website she writes:

Too often, when we look at a life - even our own - we see only the peaks, as if life were a string of isolated events, like islands in an immense ocean. It’s only when you dive down into the depths that you find the great oceanic floor that connects them and from which they all arise… Songwriting is the great ocean floor of my life… I write songs and sing them and I will keep doing that as long as I live. And I’ll keep working on my diving bell so I can go deeper and deeper, down into the oceanic abyss where everything is connected.

In an e-mail to me Robin developed the idea that Sandy Denny’s music-making was a kind of plunging downwards, a descent to the abyssal plain:

I was interested to hear about the split between Denny’s onstage patter and the persona she presented in her songs. I am very interested in artistic persona, how it is created and its relation to the artist’s whole personality. When I look at Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen or Stevie Nicks, I see a stage persona that is seamless, flowing through both the songs and the onstage presence between songs. It seems to be an exaggerated aspect of their personality. It is honest in that it is a genuine part of who they are but it is not a complete picture; some aspects are submerged while another becomes dominant. It seems that Denny either did not recognize or did not trust that aspect of herself. It was acceptable when the song gave the persona a reason for being but was not a true representation of her ‘normal’ social self and therefore had to be dropped when she wasn’t singing. Of course, the social self is also an artificial construct, albeit created over a number of years so it feels like the ‘real’ self. Allowing the social self to ‘take over’ between songs may have been a way of fending off the power of the artistic persona which may have threatened to overwhelm a weak, conflicted social self.

Just a thought about the sea/ocean archetype. I can’t help seeing this symbol, in general, as a representation of the unconscious. In your article, you have avoided doing any pop psychology for which I commend you! Just between us, I wonder if an image of the sea breaking its banks and flowing under doors - an unstoppable, threatening flood - does not convey a real fear of being overwhelmed by that which is unknown and uncontrollable, like the artistic persona which she may have instinctively realized was a powerful force within her, capable of overwhelming her fragile social self. In this light, her remark [à propos ‘The Sea’] ‘I suppose it's a bit frightening really in aspect, but it's a nice enough tune, so if you just want to relax and listen, that's all right’ could be seen as her own reassurance to herself: ‘It’s okay... I’m going to go down deep but I’ll it will be all right. I’ll come back.’ This would explain her ‘chirpy’ personality onstage - a genuine fear of being overwhelmed by the deep persona embodied in the songs. She is coming up for air in her onstage patter, resurfacing from the depths. [Quoted with permission]

References

Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman (English tr. 1996)
Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year (English tr. 1964)http://www.robinfrederick.com/origins.html
http://rfrederick.diaryland.com/denny.html

Illustration: Arthur Rackham, from Undine (1904)