The Empty Boat
“I was foolish, and did not know the power of the ocean.”
A Woman Awash is a collection of drawings that hangs poetically upon a story about an unassuming character, E. M. Last, transformed by a plan gone wrong:
E. M. Last has a naïve idea that she might spend a pleasant day at sea on a small boat with her book and a lunch packed. She rows out exuberantly and settles into a contented space of contemplation. Before she is aware of it, the sky has grown dark and there is no sight of land. She becomes lost at sea, a woman awash. After a number of grim and despairing hours that seem to stretch into days, she is swept up, delirious and dehydrated, in the manner of an ancient mystic, and is returned, after a brief transcendent encounter, to safety. She returns to her books, her drawings and her quiet life, but her orientation has shifted. Her mind bends in circles, not aimlessly, but with a spacious allowance that opens rectangles and squares to accommodate the curves and spheres so much more present in the world outside of human invention. She thinks back to her unaccountable experience and tries to make sense of it. In her journal she writes:
“Then I was above the water, my body held as if in the peak of a trampoline jump, steadily climbing until I was far above the sea, soaring toward roiling clouds, dizzy with height and lift.” She draws, reads, ponders, and writes again:
“The neck and the back and the eyes and the brain. The hands and the feet and the teeth and the hair // they all show signs of wear // But I have a secret body, edged away by the heat of old stars // With silence, acquainted, of time, unaware.”
I Feel like a Texture (Losing Time)
Apex
Three Floating Saints
Morning Reading
Everything is Important
Flight and Weight
Frame for Silence