"Diving Into the Wreck" - Commentary by Don Raymond, Jr.

... and I tried to explain to her last night that we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.

                        -- Hunter S. Thompson

There is a poem which has haunted me since I first read it, twenty years ago. In “Diving Into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich describes an explorer preparing for her mission. The first stanza begins with a check-list of scuba equipment, then ends with a sudden, almost bitter turn:

I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

This contrast runs through the remainder of the poem: loneliness versus teamwork, darkness and light. This contrast has also run through my own life: there is no one else. I have to do this alone ... no help is coming, and none can be expected.  But for all that we might wish to be a part of Cousteau’s “assiduous team,” there is also a certain rebellious streak of pride in the solitary challenge of the lone diver.  After all, that’s what poets, explorers, scientists, do – go off alone into the wordless places and bring back something that might be the truth.  And there is a price to be paid for that.

            I don’t know what Rich’s life was like, beyond the obituaries; I know mine. Pushing myself to the limit of reason, health, and sanity – but always with one eye on the lookout, because there was no one else to do it for me. 

            There is a ladder.

            The ladder is always there …

            …

            We know what it is for,

            we who have used it.

            Somewhere, somehow, I learned that the team on the deck could not be counted on. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  Nobody, except myself. And Adrienne Rich.  I haven’t studied feminism, its politics or its art.  But loneliness, now … this is my story, or at least a part of it.  The bitterness, the anger – but also the pride. For once, words that were mine and not, again,

            a book of myths

            in which

            our names do not appear.