The Deep Zoo

Water and Dreams

My first four novels are ruled by the elements: Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. These books are informed by, and much indebted to, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard — his “gentle manias” and irresistible investigations into the nature of the imagining mind.

Water’s book, The Fountains of Neptune, tells the story of a boy who, seduced by the vision of his drowned mother’s face, tumbles into the sea. Retrieved, he is suspended in a coma that lasts for fifty years. Like a fossil Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space, the boy is “asleep in (his) form,” the deep waters of his precarious mind kept murmuring by his doctor in her clinic, “where water is tamed in basins, bathtubs, and wells, and where even the ironwork of the garden fences, the kiosks and the gate, look like an abstraction of a water oily with eels.”

Guided by Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, I decided that my novel’s variable music would evoke water of all kinds: swift, still, and shallow; stagnant, transparent, and frozen over; sweet, tainted, opaque. For example, when a sailor sings:

I’ve been to Bur Sa’id,

Shbzpur and Hooghly,

Crooked Island, Easter Island;

I’ve been to Corpus Christi.

I wished to evoke the bubbly turbulence in the wake of a boat pulled along by a good wind.

And the novel is punctuated by the water’s meteoric forms (and this is a term taken from the period I evoke in the book’s early stages): sleet, snow, hail, rain, and drizzle — all powers, here consciously associated in order to suggest the many moods of the sea. What follows intends to evoke both a needling rain and the heave of heavy weather: “Saturday and pissing vinegar. The old port has vanished in the rain; port and sky and sea all smeared together like a jam of oysters, pearl-grey and viscous.”

I made lists that I no longer have, but looking into the novel’s opening pages I find: sea, firewater, whisky, rum; ocean, sea-talkers, sailors, mermen; moonshine, shellback, dancing ships; fish, mists, listing ships; foam, sea wolf, jellyfish; flood-lands, liquid amber, tears; starboard, sea worm, milky haze; hail, surf, tidewater, rain; sops, floating island, sponge, splashing, drifting. .

And I imagined a book bathed in light, light a sensuous medium that, like water, seeps into every crack. Chapters three and four take place in an underwater haze.

The idea that the music of the text would evoke waters of various kinds, was the only imposition I engaged; beyond that, as with all my books, the novel was expected to reveal itself. The characters dropped in and decided the direction the book — their book — would take. As did the unexpected collisions of words. The novel’s intention evolved from within; the entire process had a weather of its own.

Bachelard says, “And the words wander away looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.” Such bad company is scary and exhilarating, above all subversive — as it forces the writer to question her presumptions and keeps her on her toes.

I think of a novel as an unfolding landscape, an entire country waiting to be deciphered. I have always leaned into new places, tugged along by curiosity and an expanding waking dream. How I travel is how I write my books. It is enough to have a dream for a guide, an intuition, an element. “How can one not dream while writing?” Bachelard asks. “It is the pen that dreams.”

Finally, writing is a species of practical magic. Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.