„I wanted to go to the sea, always to the sea“. On the image of the sea in Ilma Rakusa‘s „Mehr Meer“

Abstract

The essay inquires into the meaning of the sea in Ilma Rakusa‘s „Memory Passages“ Mehr Meer (drawing on the collection Mein Alphabet, published ten years later). Although it seems obvious at first to take the sea in Rakusa‘s work as something inconceivably sublime in the sense of Immanuel Kant, a closer look reveals that it always remains tangible, that it is always a concrete and viewable sea. This, however, stands as a promise of an unattainable unity and wholeness, the signs of which are also evident in poetic memory.