Etel Adnan Talks to Andy Fitch for Los Angeles Review of Books Blog

Andy Fitch spoke with Etel Adnan for the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, focusing in particular on decades of work as encapsulated by two publications: To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader and "her more recent diptych" SEA and FOG. "Thinking before words can be a familiar experience: often we 'hear' an inner voice stirring, an inner movement, sometimes a meaning that didn’t yet take shape, a virtual thought. At these moments thinking appears like a translation of itself," says Adnan. The sea continues:

[Andy Fitch:] Still considering different types of mirroring and identification that the natural world provides, you do offer lines such as “Stripped speech patterns float in the soul’s canyons where things are perennial.” But more often, the sea seems an object of perception/reflection, or a being that deserves our emulation, but not so much a site of immersion. The sea calls forth gazing, not swimming, not diving — with you focusing less on life “under” the sea. SEA and FOG tells us that “The ocean is near, the sea, far.” So can you say more about what it means here to “See the sea” (I at least hear echoes of Emily Dickinson’s “and then / I could not see to see”)?

[Etel Adnan:] The sea is immense, to say the least. As an entity, a constituent of the physical world, it is infinite, because it is “there” (from every angle), and always there. That sea hypnotizes me. Needless to say. And the sea is an element of our inner life, a tool by which we exist, and we think. It’s sometimes an image, sometimes an energy, sometimes an inner direction back to energy, to an immaterial line that crosses the mind (the brain?). There’s also something very simple to our addiction to the sea: its beauty.

Since your books frequently refer to Nietzsche, I think of Nietzsche’s tone poems addressed to the sea (and, of course, to mountains). Nietzsche may not be able to match the chiming musicality of your lovely descriptions (“And what is this surge of the stupendous and quasi un-nameable entity, where unnumbered amounts of bubbles unbreakably bound to each other make a eulogy for smallness while creating the most maddening form of an elusive infinity?”). But when you characterize life as a scintillation, when “the universe thinks itself without being outside itself,” when you posit the world’s or the sea’s or our own “love for an illusion…what else is there,” when you progress towards a future (and a past) that is “Only waves on waves,” I definitely recall Nietzsche’s conceptions of existence as an aesthetic phenomenon, of a world suffering from its own plenitude — dependent upon human articulation both as release and further catalyst.

Addiction to the sea, addiction to Nietzsche: we come back to them for the same reasons, I am sure. They are “infinite,” not a narration to be understood once and for all, but a recurring source of amazement. The sea was for me, in Beirut, when I was maybe not yet four, the greatest “happening,” the moment I plunged in one of those tiny holes, puddles, spaces among rocks that the short tide of the Mediterranean was regularly filling, on the shore of the city, half a mile from home (by the way, all this disappeared long long ago).

To continue reading this interview, head over to BLARB.