Kate: "...like sensory deprivation, where you've been in the water a while, you start losing all sense of where you are, who you are, whether you're upside down or whatever… Although The Ninth Wave is about a very physical event, it's very much a mental event as well in that you are travelling in your head, even though your body is just floating in water."
"We talked together, and talked and talked all the time to keep our spirits up." - Egil Hafsas, Bourbon Dolphin Survivor.
"Watching You Without Me" - A low point of intense (physical) aloneness. The character has slipped into a semi-unconscious hallucinatory state. But her relationship with herself and her will-to-survive are ‘talking all the time’, telling stories to maintain spirits... formulating abstract theories and hypotheses to deal with the situation…
A ghost story, an out-of-body story, a wandering soul story… This love-song is a story about her ‘talking to’ her loved one to overcome her sense of aloneness… She brings the two of them together, serving her need to comfort herself and her need to comfort (reassure) the other that helps to define that self…
Her extreme situation makes her physically weak but mentally expansive…
In WYwoM, we ‘float’ between several (hypothetical) realities/stories/‘worlds’ - the anxious loved one, the desperate protagonist, the rescue search mission (sound of waves & SOS code)…
The song is a state of unknowing, between this world and the next… Between what should have been and what is, etc.
Hence: ‘But I’m not here…’ = denial (this isn’t happening); acceptance (‘reality’ of drowning/not being); fear (partner’s ‘reality’); sense of change; etc.
Odysseus also survived by telling stories. "For the Ancient Greeks, death by drowning meant no glory. Drowning was to disappear without trace, with no tale of how you died. You simply disappeared, unseen and unheard of. Friends and loved ones lacked the comfort of closure…"
Hence (if she drowns): ‘You won't hear me leaving…’
"Watching You Without Me" - She anticipates she is going to drown & is rocking between life and ‘the other side’… (We know Kate is fascinated by ghosts, spirits, etc.)
The song is ‘divided’ into several parts: her-as-a-ghost; her-in-the-water; her-frightened-of-being-as-a-ghost; her SOS messaging ("please receive me"?)…
‘There's a ghost in our home…’ - She can already see her ghost in her home… Like the ghost-form is already there, waiting for her to inhabit…To go home to…
The song reminds me of Odysseus in the Underworld - Our heroine imagines herself on the other side and unable to communicate to her loved one…
“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last…”
The Ninth Wave Suite is a relentless operatic, cinematic, nightmarish sculpture constructed out of many thematic and narrative layers:
-- And Dream Of Sheep: Like the Odyssey, The Ninth Wave begins ‘in medias res‘ - the action starts in middle with prior events told through flashback, etc. Greek myth uses the Corn Rose (poppy) to induce sleep from exhaustion/worry; and The Iliad compares a hero falling in battle to a drooping poppy.
-- Under Ice: doppelgänger - unbalanced fear - schizophrenic break-up of identity.
-- Waking The Witch: prayers - spiritual/mental crisis.
-- Watching You Without Me: loss of voice/identity - trapped under the bell jar.
-- Jig Of Life: hope against hope.
-- Hello Earth: "Space Oddity" - A bad trip - The Ninth Wave!
-- The Morning Fog: we exit the dark cinema and step into the daylight!
Maybe: 1-6 (night) we indulge in Kate’s nightmare; and track 7 (SUNday) we wake up?
EDIT:The "official" secret message in WYWM is the section where you hear Kate singing a melody with "words" that sound a bit like: "Zwoh-nikh-lawn, zwoh-nikh-law-nee. E-e-t-nee-awng, nawn-width-aw-nee-naw..." repeated several times.
The correct answer to this cryptic crossword is:
"Don't ignore, don't ignore me. Let me in and don't be long."gaffa.org/dreaming/tnw_wywm.html