Gonçal Mayos PUBLICATIONS

Gonçal Mayos PUBLICATIONS

ht tp://orcid.org/0000-0001-9017-6816 : BOOKS , BOOK CHAPTERS , JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS, PRESS, Editor, Other translations, Philosophy Dicti...

May 4, 2021

TAKING ON SIGNIFICANT ROLES, NONETHELESS

 
Obviously, this piece packs a certain expressive punch insofar as its narrative or literary genre is panegyric.  However, the analysis of the myths, metaphors and symbols of water (in contrast to what was said before about the thousand waters that make one thin) leads instead to the conclusion that water’s centrality to life is not very well reflected in our philosophical, literary or cultural traditions
[1], not even if we take culture in its widest and most popular sense.   

Instead, in its ubiquity and hushed constancy of purpose, water is overlooked, ignored by human eyes, replaced by other elements or fluids that are strange, special, unusual, out of the ordinary.  We have already seen one such set of examples presented by blood, yellow bile, phlegm and the completely fictitious ‘black bile’.  For centuries, they were together thought to hold sway over human character or ‘humour’.  Yet, at the same time, water per se or as an ingredient of these ‘humours’ was totally ignored despite being, without doubt, the most important, fundamental and ubiquitous liquid[2].  

Additionally, within the traditional mind-body dualism, the body has traditionally been seen as earth, even though we know it is basically made of water.  At the same time, tradition has it that the mind, or spirit, is basically made of air or fire, while wetness is considered alien and alienating:  it leaves one drunk, dull and dim-witted.  We need only recall Heraclitus’ views.   Water does not seem to make any positive contribution to the symbolism surrounding the mind or spirit either.  It seems genuinely surprising that the fourth element has suffered such a fate within the prevailing popular imagination of the West. Yet, without minimising this surprising marginalisation in any way, it must nevertheless be seen as merely relative.  This is because water has traditionally been granted at least two roles that are highly significant, essential, even indispensable.  These two roles relate to two systems or complexes of metaphors with enormous and wide-ranging implications.
 
Go-between, vehicle, access provider, mover, purifier
 
One of the key roles that traditional symbology has granted water is the role of go-between, mediator, access provider, transport, vehicle, mover. Water’s unquestioned ability to move things, helping to carry what is critical to life (both within the body and in the field of commerce), is outstanding.  Yet once again, that is often forgotten.  It is so easily taken granted that water is the real key here.  After all, what is carried is more visible than the carrier itself, and the end result appears to stand out more than the means or enabler.
 
Water also performs the task of carrying things away, especially those of a negative nature: filth, evil, sin.  It is widely known that water is purifying in its symbolic uses in ritual, religious contexts.  That is, it is able to wash away (bodily and spiritual) ills, readying mind and body to receive the spirit of goodness.  Carrying away evil and sin, it purifies.  So much so that the obsession with cleanliness, which was not as serious for primitive man as it is today, gave rise to the paradox of ‘washing the body while leaving the soul unclean‘[3].  Recall that, in many religions, water plays an essential role in ritual ablution, and such ablution can wash away serious crime: ‘It takes forty fountains to purify one of murder’[4], relates Bachelard. Water can also symbolically carry and deliver spiritual virtues in the case of Christian baptism or through ’blessed’ or ’holy’ water.
 


‘On the Stygian waters‘: between the world of the living and the world of the dead
 
Precisely because it has the virtue of linking the earthly, bodily world with the divine, spiritual one, water also plays a critical role in mediating between the world of the living and the world of the dead.  Rivers are dynamic because water is dynamic and this dynamism has definitely helped them serve as a metaphor for places of crossing over, at the boundaries of life.  Notice that once again we find ourselves thoughtlessly turning to talk of the virtues 'of specific, concrete waters' in place of water per se.  We think, for instance, of the river Lethe and Charon ferrying across the souls of the dead who, drinking of its waters, lose all memory of their past lives, according to legend[5]. Or we think of Hades, the Greek underworld with its Stygian waters.  On the banks of its dark, deadly currents wandered the ghosts of the dead who had not been buried (which was a terrible crime against nature, as can be seen in the Sophoclean tragedy Antigone).  Hence, pledges and oaths made 'on the Stygian waters!' were particularly solemn and even the gods themselves would make them.
 
Within the paradigm of spiritual communication between humans and gods, many springs have been seen as magically bestowing spiritual gifts, simply by partaking of or bathing in their waters.  Thus legend has it that, through the spring of Castalia at Delphi (where a chaste maiden running from Apollo had drowned herself), the muses inspire the poets.  Water—or rather, certain waters—can grant inspiration, creativity, talent, genius.
 
Place, area and medium of generation and decay
 
The second great symbolic role that water has been given by tradition is as the place, area and medium (again, the decisive role of mediator) in which generation takes place, in which the lifeless or inert comes alive.  Here, metaphorically, water is simultaneously semen and uterus.  In other words, it is both the generating seed (traditionally the masculine principle) and also the womb where generation takes place (the feminine principle).  The latter, however, is the more advanced and decisive, since it is only in the moist womb where new life can begin.  Only in the womb, only according to the feminine principle, can the lifeless or inert begin to pulse with life and the mineral become vegetable, animal or even human.  A watery medium—a moist uterus—is essential for life to come about—and not just in the case of the human fetus, which we all have in mind.   The theory of spontaneous generation, speaking generally, was accepted from Aristotle until the discoveries of Pasteur[6]. And it is again scientifically accepted today that the origin and early stages of life on Earth required such a watery environment.
 
Thus water has always been thought of as a feminine principle:  ‘the deep maternity of the waters.  Water makes seeds swell and springs issue forth.  Water is a substance we see being born and expanding on every side.  A spring is an unstoppable birth.  It is a continuous  birth.’[7] At this point in the argument, it cannot be excluded (as many feminist thinkers will already have suspected) that the feminine associations of water have been critical in downplaying or denying water’s place in the symbolism and collective imagination of our most widespread traditions.  This has, after all, been rather dominated by a certain residual patriarchy.
 
'My thought sinks ever drowning, and it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea'
 
Just as water gives life, it is also the watery or humid medium—the magma—where life turns into death[8], since water speeds up rotting, corrosion, decay, chemical decomposition and mental perversion[9], biological fermentation and spiritual subversion[10], infection and contamination.  What is more, it is often said to speed the passage of time and the process of ageing.  Socially, it is a matter of daily experience that dryness conserves or preserves, while humidity degrades and often penetrates inside, causing rot to work outwards from within.  Many of these ideas and symbologies have been drawn out and made use of by the gothic novel.  For instance, some of its favourite settings are swamps and bogs, wastes and ruins covered by mosses and lichens, cold dank chambers, cellars, tempests and rainshowers, and so on.  The psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte[11] correctly associates Edgar Allan Poe’s devotion to stagnant waters with the morbidity of his literary art and genius.  In this regard, Poe’s key confession from “Romance” is relevant:

 
I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath—
 
And water is ever present where beauty comes into the world and beauty/age takes the life lent it. 
 
Similarly, the corrosive force of water is seriously jeopardising the remnants of industrial, machine-based culture.  Although it is a matter of concern for modern industrial archeologists, water is—as we will see further on—wreaking rather poetic vengeance on our proud industrial apparatus.  Iron is much less resistant to the corrosion of water than stone or other traditional, ‘noble’ building materials[12].  Thus, many modern metal structures and machinery have a much shorter life expectancy than very ancient stone buildings.  It looks as if the romantic, damp ruins of ancient temples and cathedrals will outlast the modern, equally damp ruins of metal.
 
Water is also linked through all the symbology connected with drowning and shipwreck to death or the peril of death.  This is explored in Hans Blumenberg’s fine short work , Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence.[13]  It is also clearly evident in that infinite, disquieting ‘Cemetery by the Sea’ of Paul Valéry[14], which begins somewhere between anguish and melancholy:
 
The sea […], the sea perpetually renewed!
O how rewarding after a thought
Is a long gaze on the calm of the gods!
 
And it ends with a renewed vitalism and the startling outcry:
 
Break waves, break with rejoicing waters
This peaceful roof[15] ...
 
Or the infinite immensity where, wrote Giacomo Leopardi[16],
 
… my thought sinks ever drowning,
And it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea.
 
Surprisingly, the symbolic and metaphoric role given to water by western tradition here is not solely one of contempt.  However, this nuance is not sufficient to invalidate our thesis that it has not been done justice, philosophically speaking.  This is especially so if we take into account how such injustice—as we will show—has only grown as we move away in time from Greek philosophy and literary symbology and explore other symbologies (with their significant cultural and literary facets).  Medieval, renaissance, modern and contemporary philosophy have all certainly accentuated this injustice.  The aim here is to explain (or start to explain) how water, principle of all life, came to be treated with growing ignorance, contempt, deconsecration and even banalisation.

[1] I see this significant cultural and social phenomenon as one of the most important arguments in support of the current conference cycle organised by the Joan Maragall Foundation, of which this paper is a part.
[2] Nowadays, the supposed influence of ‘humours’ over character can be seen to have a terribly weak basis in science, which cannot account for the distinctions made.  Apparently, the success of this symbolism will have to be explained by factors that are not scientifically proven today.
[3] Bachelard, 1999.
[4] Bachelard, 1999.  On one hand, the quotation clearly emphasises the difficulty of purifying one of terrible crime (the concrete number 40 may stand for an indefinitely large number).  Yet, on the other hand, it presupposes that the water of such fountains can serve to purify in such terrible circumstances.
[5] Perhaps they essentially lost the details or the vividness of their experiences; perhaps they simply forgot the way back to their former lives.
[6]  Made in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
[7]  Bachelard, 1999.
[8] This leaves aside, for the moment, the fact that death winds up begetting new life, because from that perspective, we are back at the already mentioned generative feature.
[9] There are many examples that underscore the negative effects of a humid tropical climate on medical or bacteriological health (as well as on the mental health of the worthy and the hardworking).  Seen through the lens of colonialism, this has traditionally been considered one of the causes of the supposed cultural and economic backwardness of tropical countries.  This view can be found in sources as wide-ranging as the well-meaning Montesquieu to some of the most deplorable racist theories.
[10] Traditionally, the wet nature of sex (sweat, secretions, bodily fluids etc) has been noted.  It seems that the oriental world (basically Japan, I believe) has been creating a type of horror film that is closely linked to water, to terribly wet environments.  These questions cannot be developed here.
[11] According to Bachelard (1999) in what he develops into the theme for an entire chapter, ’it is necessary when trying to understand Edgar Allan Poe to examine all the decisive moments in the poems and short stories and make the synthesis of Beauty, Death and Water.’
[12]  Obviously wood and other organic materials do not enjoy this advantage.
[13]  The details of the English translation are:  The MIT Press (1979), 1997.
[14]  ‘La mer, la mer toujours recommencée! /  Ô récompense après une pensée {...} Rompez, vagues! Rompez d’eaux réjouies! / Ce toit tranquille’ a ‘Le cimentière marin‘, Paul Valéry, Cemetery by the Sea.  Translation from the Penguin edition of French Poetry 1820-1950, London 1990.
[15]  Where the poet takes cover from the rain.  It thus has some sense of lair, hiding place, shelter.
[16]  ‘s’annega il pensier mío: / El il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.’ ‘L’infinito’ (’The Infinite’), Giacomo Leopardi Poems and Prose, Princeton 1997.  The translation of this poem by Henry Reed appeared in The Listener, 25 May 1950.

Metaphorologism of Water (a Praise)” de Gonçal Mayos, Capítulo 2 de Disasters  and Socio-environmental Conflicts: violence, damage and resistance de André Luiz Freitas Dias; Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês; Brunello Stancioli e Lucas Furiati de Oliveira (Organizadores), Rio de Janeiro, MC & G Editorial, Fundo PROAP do Ministério Público Estadual – MG, 2020, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-65-89369-08-0




No comments: