I’m underwater. A Miami school field trip. A trip to the beach. I may be in second grade. Maybe first grade. I cannot remember which. “Be careful of the tide,” someone says early on during the trip. The kids scurry out into the waves. I do too. I am not careful of the tide. I’m underwater. I can’t swim back to the beach. I’m going to drown. The tide furiously and lazily pulls me out. I’m going to drown. I’m underwater. I can’t talk. I’m trying to talk. To scream for help. To say something. To speak I can’t. I’m underwater. Someone pulls me from the water and throws me onto the beach.
I’m underwater. My father’s image above me in the shimmering ripples of the pool. He’s probably laughing as his arms fall to his side. I’ve been thrown. Into the water. Standing at the pool’s edge, I’m suddenly, without warning, in the pool. I feel the impact of the water on my head and chest as I enter horizontally. The throw is a shock to my system. I can see his figure through the pool’s surface. I am not going to drown. He does not help me out of the pool.
I’m underwater. The Red Sea. Clarity. Everything is so clear. The beaches of Dahab sit off in the short distance where Bedouin sell weed to tourists. On the bus ride to Sinai, another Israeli looks at my bag, a long green one I used in the army with Hebrew written all over it, and says: “Are you crazy? Why did you bring that?” So little is clear to me at this point in my life. Why do I bring anything anywhere, I think. What am I doing? I’m underwater. Fish. Life. Blue. People snorkeling around me. I remember it. I remember it sort of. Just not nearly as clear as the water obviously was. It’s a moment of clarity around me where I can see all that I normally cannot see while standing on ground. It’s a moment of clarity when there isn’t clarity around me.
They are out of the water. Jellyfish spread across the Tel Aviv beach. Their bodies, clean and clear in the glare of the sun, possibly still able to hurt, to cause pain, to sting. Even out of the water, and likely dead, they propose danger. “Be careful of them,” I say to my curious kids who walk around the lifeless blobs. “Be careful.” It’s difficult to be careful. The jellyfish are out of the water. They are on the beach’s sands. They have drowned backwards. I have too. I am slowly drowning backwards in this marriage. In a few months after this moment, I will drown completely.
We are largely soaked in a rhetoric of water. “I’m drowning right now.” “My house is underwater.” “Drowning for information.” There is a parable about “the drowning man.” He is the man who does not ask for help. There are songs about water that sit tightly in my memory as if they are songs about me: “Down By The River.” “Take Me to the River.” “The River.” “River.” “Sitting On the Dock of the Bay.” “The Ocean.” “Sea of Love.” We sat out on the rocks of the Tel Aviv shoreline, stuck there against the Tayelet where people rode by on roller-skates and bikes, and we were staring off into the distance. We strolled along the Lisbon Mediterranean walkway, scarcely populated with cafes and boats, my kids taking pictures of each other against the sea’s backdrop as if they are fashion photographers. I sat on a bench in Split across from the water, tourists wandering alongside the stalls, staring out into the sea and ferry boats running people to the islands. So much strolling by water. So much staring at water. Why are we always staring into the water? Sometimes, when first meeting, people ask a series of questions to get to know each other such as “mountains or the beach?” If I prefer “beach,” does that mean I am fun and want to stroll along or stare into the water, or that I believe I will drown one day? Why do we want to stare out into water? And what do we see? Water is vast. The ocean is vast. We are vast. There is nothing to see; it’s too vast. Do we think we see someone, somewhere, out in the waves, struggling to not drown? Are people underwater out among the waves and the blue? Are people slowly drowning somewhere?
I would guess most of our drownings go unnoticed.
The Lieutenant in our platoon will eventually drown in a kayaking accident in New Zealand. Natalie Wood drowned on an outing with two men who likely loved her. Bodies of immigrants float up on the beaches of the impoverished and desperate countries that border the Mediterranean. They have drowned on their way to Europe. Susan Smith drowned her two sons. Rodney King survived a beating that could have taken his life only to drown years later in a swimming pool.
My son does not know how to swim. I worry that he may drown.
Dive right in. Take the plunge. A fish out of water. Water under the bridge. In hot water. So many sayings about water. As if we cannot speak or say what we mean with clarity, so we turn to water. Water is the saddest of all the elements. In “Drown in My Own Tears,” Ray Charles sang:
If you don’t think
You’ll be home soon
I guess I’ll drown, oh yes, in my own tears
Cry me a river. If you come down to the river, I bet you gonna find some people who live. Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul. Why is love often equated with drowning or with rivers?
In “River of Tears,” Eric Clapton sings:
It’s three miles to the river,
That would carry me away,
And two miles to the dusty street,
That I saw you on today,
Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed. We see water as escape and as sadness. People buy sailboats in order to leave this world for the promise of whatever world awaits. Noah built an ark to escape the world about to drown. The ocean was once crossed. People fled their old world for the new world. We see water’s potential and its loneliness. Water should be strong and yielding, a Taoist proverb claims. In basic training, we had to drink a canteen of water straight, without a break, chugging the water down our throats, a suffocating feeling, a feeling like we were drowning under a drink. People cry rivers of tears that eventually turn into streams, rivers, floods. Bodies wash up ashore. In “Down in the Flood,” Bob Dylan turned water into failed romance or relationships:
Now, it’s king for king,
Queen for queen,
It’s gonna be the meanest flood
That anybody’s seen.But oh mama, ain’t you gonna miss your best friend now?
You’re gonna have to find yourself
Another best friend, somehow.
The world is made up of water. Our bodies are made up of water. Our tears are water. Still, we are drowning. In headlines. In other’s hatred of us. Their hatred has been hidden in the waves, sort of, bobbing up and down, until it rises again to the surface in a massive pogrom followed by that pogrom’s praise. We are drowning in the massive anti-Semitism where people openly call for genocide against the Jews in protests, against silence, against apathy, against us. They are proud to celebrate and call for our murder. They portray us as an octopus, a creature from the ocean, with its tentacles within the world. The world drowns in indifference. By the rivers of Babylon, we say, we wept, we remembered Zion. Our loss, we point out, is remembered as it appears by water. From the river to the sea, they chant, and their genocidal ambitions go unnoticed and seldom remembered. Or they go noticed. Or they are remembered. And I’m not sure which is worse.
We drown in your hatred, a hatred you won’t even recognize that you possess, a hatred that you have used for over a thousand years to persecute us, convert us, destroy us, murder us. You are the waves of hatred continuing to pull from the beach every last one of us into your racist undertow. We are slowly feeling underwater among colleagues and friends, people we don’t know, movements we supported, strangers, people we have long known want us dead. We drown. For a moment, we drown.
“Would you like a glass of water?” I reach for a carafe and pour out two glasses of water. They are quiet glasses. Silent glasses of water on a table. Water satisfies. Water hydrates. “Please bring me some water.” I take a glass of water to bed. I put water out on the table for our dinner. I carry a thermos of water to work, on road trips, to the gym. “Are you thirsty? Have a drink of water.” Water means everything. We cannot live without it.
If you drink too much water, though, you drown. You drown inside.
We are drowning.
