"Above the Water": Immersion and Flotation in Become Ocean and "Skywoman Falling"

Resumo

This article deploys the concepts of “immersion” and “flotation” in order to examine the representations of human-water relationships in Become Ocean, an orchestral composition by John Luther Adams, and “Skywoman Falling,” the inaugural essay in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s collection Braiding Sweetgrass. I propose that both works imagine the sea as a space of reconciliation between the human and the natural. But while “Skywoman Falling” presents an aquatic creation story, Become Ocean takes the form of an apocalyptic warning about “polar ice” and “sea level[s],” raising questions about how the changing climate inflects artistic production. Taken together, the works gesture toward a sort of crude human-nature — or human-ocean — cycle in which humans continually approach and distance themselves from the natural world.