Talk to me about the Ninth Wave

[amahdavi@husc.harvard.edu (Andisheh Mahdavi)]

Dear Kate Fans,

     Is there one coherent plot behind the 9th wave? People usually
mention that it's about a drowning woman, but I've not seen a
discussion of the individual songs with respect to this drowning
motif.  Is there an "accepted" exegesis?

     My primary interest is what a third person, omniscent observer
would see when watching the drowning woman. My assumption, which is
quite open to objection, is that there IS an underlying set of
physical events, a "timeline," along which the highly personal events
described in the songs can be placed. This is a coarse outline:

     And Dream of Sheep  ----  In the boat, she falls asleep
     Under Ice           ----  A dream; the storm arrives
     Waking the Witch    ----  Wakes up, finding herself sinking
     Watching you w/o me ----  In the face of death, 1) Grief
     Jig of Life         ----                        2) Struggle
     Hello Earth         ----                        3) Acceptance
     Morning Fog         ----  The moment of her dying.

     What follows are some SPECULATIONS (not proofs) regarding these
matters; they are thoughts that I jotted down after having read the
"most-lyrics" file a few times. It's not my primary intention to offer
a coherent story; it is rather to start a discussion.  Anything I have
put in quotations is from the song itself.

AND DREAM OF SHEEP 
------------------
The woman is on a boat, and waiting for rescue, since a storm is
approaching. "Little light shining"---this is presumably a light on her
boat, which "will guide them [the rescuers] to"  her. Hence her "face is
all lit up." She is afraid the the potential rescuers might "take [her]
for a buoy," so she is "racing white horses,"  i.e., her boat is moving
with respect to the white foam on the tip of the waves, so that she will
not appear stationary, and be mistaken for a buoy.

She wishes to sleep out the storm, because she is afraid of it; she
wants to be "weak" and "dream of sheep" rather than to have to go
through the ordeal.  The radio says "Gale east," announcing the
storm. She is worried that she might miss her rescuers, but reassures
herself that she'll "wake up to the sound of engines." She tunes in on
people talking to each other on their two-way radios, and wishes that
she hadn't left hers back on the shore. Finally, sleep overcomes her.

UNDER ICE
---------
This song is very likely the dream she has while asleep on the boat.
She talks about herself as if she is observing a past self. "I'm
speeding past trees"---this is as detached as her first person
narrative gets, and it is in this detached style that people usually
recount their dreams.

Presumably, while she is having this dream, the storm overtakes her
boat, and capsizes it. We know from personal experience that, even
though certain dreams appear to occur over a period of hours or even
days for the dreamer, the actual physical time that passes for an
outside observer (say, for a neurologist monitoring the dreaming) can
be as short as minutes or even seconds. Thus, it is entirely plausible
that this song, as well as the beginning of the next, occur during the
few seconds in which the woman's boat is sinking.

In the following songs, the discrepancy between "real time" (of an 
observer watching the drowning woman) and "personal time" (of the
woman, seeing scenes from her life go by) increases.

WAKING THE WITCH
----------------
This song does the best job of resisting any imposition of a "plot"
onto the Ninth Wave. Even if the witch in the song is being drowned
(see below), we are very far away from the "real world" where the
protagonist is drowning. We have here deeply penetrated the woman's
psyche. A further complication arises from the line, "We are of the
going water and the gone. We are of water in the holy land of water."
The air of mysticism in this phrase helps connect the water with the
witch-motif of the song. However, it also removes us a little from the
protagonist.  We can more easily identify with a woman who is
drowning, and thinks of her loved ones; it is perhaps more difficult
to identify with a woman who communes with water-spirits.

The song nevertheless contains important direct references to the
drowning theme. The most clear instance is the last line, apparently
shouted down at the ocean from a helicopter, "Get out of the waves!
Get out of the water!" We can understand this line as reality
"breaking into" the witch-trial world of the woman. This is consistent
with the hypothesis that the witch trial is yet another (very 
hallucinatory) dream---perhaps a waking dream the woman is having as
she realizes that she is caught in the water.

A more minor examples is "There's a stone around my leg." Perhaps the
witch is being drowned instead of being burned or stabbed; the
distorted male voice says at one point "You won't burn... you won't
bleed... go down!"

WATCHING YOU WITHOUT ME
-----------------------
With this song we are again on firmer ground. After the initial
struggle, the drowning woman's first thoughts turn to her loved
ones. They are at home, waiting for her to come back from her boat
ride; "I should have been home Hours ago, But I'm not here. But I'm
not here."  Note that the "You" in this song could be either singular
or plural.  Perhaps it is her lover; really any loved one could be
substituted here.

Some of my favorite Kate lines are in this song. "Can't let you know
What's been happening. There's a ghost in our home, Just watching you
without me." She is drowning and almost dead; she is the ghost that
occupies the home of her loved ones. She haunts their home because she
is thinking of the home; her thoughts occupy it. She is there in
thought, but ultimately not in reality.

THE JIG OF LIFE
---------------
Part of her wants to give up the struggle---and dream of sheep, I
presume, i.e., let herself drown. Then she has a vision of her
future---an "old lady," the lady she could be if she survives the
accident.  This vision of a possible future takes life in her mind as
the waters begin to overwhelm her, and begins to beg for its right
to exist---"C'mon and let me live, girl!"

The second part of this song is puzzling to most of us, I'm sure.  It
can perhaps be argued that the male voice in this song is a call to
the woman to resign her life, i.e., the voice of death. This is the
evidence as far as I see it. He says "Catch us now for I AM your
future." Earlier in this song, we saw one possible future for the
drowning woman---the future where she would survive, have children,
and grow old. The most obvious other alternative, is the future where
she drowns and therefore is dead.  The female voice thus comes to
represent life, the male voice its antithesis. Also, his proposal to
wait for the time "when the lifespray cools" in an "empty world" seems
to point to this interpretation. However the solution is not a very
attractive one, and I hope someone can come up with a better one.

HELLO EARTH
-----------
Once again we seem to be in trouble. What is she doing on the Space
Shuttle?  Perhaps she is imagining things she would like to do, but no
longer can. "With just my heart and my mind I can be driving, Driving
home, And you asleep On the seat." Obviously, she is drowning, so she
can't >actually< drive home; but instead she settles for doing it with
just her heart and her mind, settles for being with her loved ones in
her imagination.

Similarly, then, she is orbiting the earth in her imagination, and
in her imagination blotting it out of sight. I am reminded of 
"In Search of Peter Pan," on _Lionheart_: "When I am a man I will
be an astronaut, and find Peter Pan."

She is resigned to her fate. She calls the tempest "Murderer!" and
asks herself "Why did I go?"---why did she leave her loved ones
behind.  The choruses signal the approaching moment of her death. The
last lines in German, "Deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depths there
is a light..." also point to the idea that she is sinking.

THE MORNING FOG
---------------
Does she drown or is she rescued? The value of this song to me 
increased dramatically when I began to consider the possibility that
she does not make it, that this song is an expression of her last
state of consciousness before she breathes out her spirit. Let's 
look at lyrics for the evidence in either direction.

          SHE LIVES                          SHE DROWNS
  -------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Begin to bleed,
      Begin to breathe,
      begin to speak.
      D'you know what?
      I love you better now.
                                          I am falling
                                          Like a stone,
                                          Like a storm,
                                          Being born again
                                           Into the sweet morning fog.

                                          I am falling,
                                          And I'd love to hold you now.

                       I___   kiss the ground
                       I___   tell my mother,
                       I___   tell my father,
                       I___   tell my brothers,
                       How much I love them.

I feel that a lot depends on what contraction is used after the "I" in
the last five lines. If she is falling, and would love to hold her
loved one, that means that she can't do it---she is drowning, and her
imminent death has sparked this enormous love for everyone she is
close to.

The "most-lyrics" file has the last few lines listed as "I'll kiss...
I'll tell I'll tell, etc..." However, when I listen to the song, it
sounds ambiguous to me. It could well be "I'd kiss the ground, I'd
tell my brothers, How much I love them." The "would"-form goes towards
supporting the theory that she does in fact drown; the "will"-form
perhaps supports the other extreme.

To me, The Ninth Wave has a lot more aesthetic value if the woman does
drown. This is not because I hate her or anything, but simply because
in this context the last song grows in emotional power. She looks
death in the face, and her last thought is that she is a richer person
for her ordeal---that she loves more, and loves better.

---------------------------------------------------------------
In any case, even if you completely disagree with everything I've
said here, please let me know your feelings towards the Ninth Wave
as a story.