“I’m living under water”

Clare’s image of “living under water” names a state of grief in which time, feeling, air, and sound seem thickened, and ordinary contact with the world becomes difficult. On September 23, 2000, she imagines herself and the baby sealed together in a diving bell, alone beneath a distant, sunlit world; the metaphor makes emotional isolation feel like an enclosing physical environment.

The submerged perspective

Clare contrasts the world above, where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, with the dense atmosphere below. The comparison is not simply between sadness and happiness: it divides experience into two incompatible tempos. The upper world remains imaginable, but beyond reach; underwater, even air, sound, time, and feeling lose their usual ease and movement.

The diving bell holds Clare and the baby together, yet does not relieve her loneliness. Its enclosure offers no passage back to the quick, sunlit world. The metaphor therefore captures a painful contradiction: she is not physically alone, but experiences herself as isolated, with the baby as her only companion in an alien atmosphere.

Silence and failed reassurance

The underwater image is followed by Clare’s unanswered call. The brief question, “Hello? Are you there?”, meets no answer, turning the metaphor’s remoteness into a scene of attempted contact and silence. Its placement sharpens the sense that the world she longs to reach cannot respond.

Clare tells Amit that Henry is dead. Amit smiles anxiously and points to his heartbeat, but Clare says she cannot explain. Henry tries to feed her, massage her, and cheer her; she eventually snaps at him. The account sets observable care against Clare’s inability to feel reassured by it: the heartbeat is evidence of life, yet it does not dissolve the state she has described as living underwater.

The studio as an extension of loss

Clare walks across the yard into her studio, where the condition she has named becomes visible in her work and surroundings. The studio seems like a museum or mausoleum: still, without anything living or breathing, and populated by things that appear to accuse her. Her blank drawing table, dry vats and molds, and half-made sculptures register a break in creative activity rather than a return to the world above.

The blue-iris-paper-wrapped armature had seemed hopeful in June; now Clare thinks of it as stillborn. This reversal gives the image of underwater life a material counterpart: what once suggested a future appears unable to develop. Clare focuses on her clean, soft, pink hands and hates them, the emptiness, and the baby. The expression thus belongs to a passage where grief reaches beyond mood into strained contact with care, artistic work, and her own body.