The paper is the analysis of Aleksander Wat’s poem Antaeus’ Departure. The context of the analysis is the combined vision of a “drifting world” derived from the Japanese chronicle of Kojiki and a vision of a writer as a man “drifting in the self”, presented in Herman Melville’s Pierre. In this context the author tracks the intertextual game Wat started in this work and reconstructs the spatial, cultural and linguistic disorientation of the subject in the “watertown” as captured in the poem, as well as the attempts to plot a stable course of existence.
