Open Water is a one-of-a-kind altered book. The original book is a vintage navigation chart book for the Kanawha River of West Virginia, published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in April of 1949. The images in the book are a series of simple, cut & paste collages I did earlier this year, each using one or two images imposed on an open ocean water view. The cover is spray-painted and the text of the book, printed in pale gray on translucent paper, was written by me for this project. Some views of the book and the poem follow:
In
the beginning was the blue dream of an impossible sea.
Shards
of watery light penetrated the dryness of my soul.
The
sea has no set form; it rushes in to obliterate whatever landscape dares to
meet it.
It
cannot be measured. So it is with love.
The
sea offers pearls and glittering scales and sharp slants of cool light, but
riptides
guard her borders.
In
her depths are dead men tangled in the fibrous bones of shipwrecks and great
monsters.
So
it is with love.
When
I first whispered your name, the waves answered.
It
was a language I had never learned:
sinuous,
treacherous,
brutal.
Not
wind, but sighs.
Not
ocean, but waiting.
Not
you, not you.
But
later, when finally I fell to my knees and surrendered to the waves,
I
heard a softer whisper.
I
do not remember who I was before I met you.
And
I will never know who you were before you met me.
We
have been washed clean by these relentless waves,
this
overwhelming tide,
this
everlasting sea.
We
are sailing our own sea, you and me.
Monsters
lie below, but fathoms of blueness separate us, protect us.
And
as we sail on, I am certain of nothing except the soft memory of blueness,
and
you.
--Lynn Skordal, "Open Water" (2014)
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