The word 'underwater' came into a poem and then suggested itself as the title for all this stuff (and nonsense) - but why?
I discovered one certain source the other day, Robert Bly's superb Iron John, one of the books I go back to again and again. Not a perfect book; the style irritates, it's a bit too slick and American, but it recasts modernity poetically and mytholgically in a way that still resonates.
Modernity/postmodernity = lack of depth (so where do we go for depth? you've guessed!) and Bly frames the thesis around the Grimm Brothers story of the Wild Man discovered underwater. A book for men quite deliberately and explicitly, yet poetically/mythologically inclined females might like it too..
Reminded me of Hopkins too -"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."
You need to read the whole thing. Perhaps you also need to read a lot of poetry first, but here's a taste:
"...going down through water to touch the Wild Man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and seems even more so now, when the corporations do so much work to produce the sanitised, hairless, shallow man. When a man welcomes his responsiveness, or what we sometimes call his internal woman, he often feels warmer, more companionable, more alive. But when he approaches what I'll call the "deep male", he feels risk. Welcoming the Hairy Man is scary and risky, and it requires a different kind of courage. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what's dark down there, including the nourishing dark..."
And I thought too of Excalibur, a sword caught, and taken underwater. Something else I'm diving to find.
