“I came to explore the wreck.
[. . . ]
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth”
from “Diving into the Wreck”
by Adrienne Rich
I wouldn’t begin to unpack it for decades to come, but my delivery into a hungry world was transactional from the start.
