Helen
Helen
is of course that Helen of Sparta. Helen of Troy. Helena hated of
Greece. In a dream or trance she left Troy. She finds herself in Egypt.
You must be patient, remembering. You can choose where. We are going to
see whatever we haven’t seen and maybe that means traveling down
instead of across. Some say Taiwan gets better surf than China’s
southern beaches because it is out in the Pacific Ocean and exposed to
larger swells. We camped at Bai Xia Wan. Soon Helen’s skin peeled off in
one snaking tube, leaving behind pink stinging surface. I lived in the
south and there were always rich oil kids around. One of the great
things about Taiwan, something not really true of China, is that there
are a lot of small beaches where you can surf on your own. You have to
watch the weather. Once, at Bai Xia, I tried to save a surfer who was
drowning. I tried desperately to save him for almost twenty minutes but
he didn’t make it. Paradise, that idea of being together, of fusion or
whatever it might look like. Here there is peace. For Helena. Helena hated of all Greeks. For
Helen, the ocean is a way to talk about raw force. Of course, the deep
sea is unknown. “More people have traveled into space than have gone
down to those abyssal depths,” she says. This work is work I made as we
tread. While out on the coast, I kept cutting into the work, drawing
over it. After living overseas for more than a decade, I had been
altered in the way I had to be altered in order to enter a new lexicon,
to become at once a “one” and “not one” of local culture. Whatever
happened to me, I never felt out of place, like I shouldn’t be here, in
this vertigo of inducing. A female traveler is a jewel-encrusted fan:
Helen. She’s standing on the beach but the beach has turned to scrub
brush or the tide is just out and silver is beneath the water. She sheds
a silver snakeskin, broken speech. We see life and call it beauty. It
is magnificent, wonderful. And remembering this scene, I see fever in
her face. The sheen is so plasticine it recalls salt-eaters, salmon en croute, inky saturation, smudges, staining. It retells our whole history, a record of perforations, la parlourde, la morue, coquille St. Jacque, le filet de plié,
and each notation we put in place so that we remember. Who are we? Who
directs us? And after traveling so long together? Yes, it’s this
voluminous nothing that at the time is very real but later, trying to
hold it still for a moment, it’s then that we have reached for, or that
we are straining toward, some first sight of home.
From Rayfish, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Hickman. Used with permission of the author.
