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

AN UNFULFILLED HOPE

 
Athena defeats Poseidon
 
As human beings became city dwellers, urbanisation turned water into just another resource.  Offering potable water to the citizenry became a political task and a public service.  And who, after all, would still be able to worship something supplied as a public resource? The myth of Athens’ choice of city patron gives us an example of the complex process by which worship of one god is replaced by another.  While undoubtedly not the most central feature of this change, one outcome was the progressive waning of water’s importance and its symbolic presence, among other things.  

The election of the patron of Athens is known to have been disputed by Poseidon (god of the sea, to whom the city owed practically all of its splendour since Athens was a seafaring city-state) and Athena (astute, industrious warrior goddess).  Legend has it that the two gods agreed that each would offer a gift to the polis then let the citizens choose between them[1].  When it came time to present their gifts to the polis, Poseidon struck the earth with his trident and a spring burst forth.  Unfortunately it was salt water.  Athena then gave the first domesticated, fruit-bearing olive tree.  Naturally, Athena was chosen.
 
Our reading of the legend points to the fact that, symbolically but significantly, it is the city’s citizens who use their political power to marginalise the old god of the sea.  Moreover, there is something childishly cruel about Poseidon’s alleged mistake in presenting them a saltwater spring as gift, since such water is of no value.  It is not even of use for drinking.  We can see through the legend to the conceited pride of the polis feeling completely safe behind its two ’walls’.   There were, on the one hand, walls ‘of stone’ that had been built to separate the city from nature so as to command it better.  On the other hand, there were the ‘walls of wood’ which the oracle had foretold would always protect the city as long as they stood; these walls were none other than the ships that guaranteed Athen’s mastery of the seas.  These two walls had weakened the city’s self-interested devotion to Poseidon, the more chthonian god of the sea, whereas they had strengthened the equally self-interested worship of the military and political goddess, who was cunning and capable of domesticating bios (life) and fisis (nature) to the greater glory of both nomos (political law) and anthropos (man) at the same time.  Fear of storms, shipwrecks and being cast adrift on the sea (recall how Homer recounted the punishment inflicted on wily, conceited Ulysses) has given way to the spread of agriculture.
 
An unfulfilled hope
 
The above process continued apace as agriculture and livestock ceased to be the primary sources of wealth.  Long-distance trading managed to preserve the myth of the ocean and the seven seas (at least until sailing became technically sound), but it could not even minimally preserve the myth of their lowly ingredient: water.  Moreover, its deconsecration became banalisation as societies became industrial.  Nevertheless, centuries passed, and industry and the Baconian notion of dominating nature continued to go hand in hand with water.  After all, the first great human machine was the watermill.  Conveniently harnessed, water drove a wheel that could move enormous stones.  Anything could be ground or pressed as required:  wheat or olive oil, rice or wine, and so forth.  Later on, hydraulic presses served as the first great sources of electricity, and the famous steam engine was driven by water, or rather by water’s expansive force as it is turned into vapour. However, in terms of society’s symbols and metaphors, such virtues were no longer attributed to water and its creative power or mystery.  Instead, they were seen as proud products of the power of reason, the reason which had engineered such machines and made the water flow, evaporate, drive turbines and so on.  Apparently, technology and applied reason were no fans of the fourth element either.

 
Nevertheless, history appeared to repeat itself as the industrial revolution caused another civilising leap forward along the riverbanks and in the rivers themselves.  This time it was not the carrying of fertile sediment such as the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan, Indus and Yellow Rivers did.  Nor was it their capacity to be harnessed and irrigate the land.  Instead, new rivers took center stage, connecting people and promoting trade.  The Rhone, Thames, Rhine, Chicago, Hudson, Mississippi-Missouri, Danube (soon less blue than stereotype had pictured it) and others promised new industrial and hydroelectric potential.  This trend was to prevail in rivers far and wide.  The enormous Aswan Dam has thus put the revitalising floods and flood-carried muds in jeopardy.  Likewise, in China, they are now finishing a colossal and highly controversial dam at Three Gorges.
 
Examples are widespread and well-known of rivers being dammed and harnessed, with harmful side-effects, for example, on the migration of fishes.  They have been made dirty.  They have often been used as a principal way to get rid of waste of all kinds.  That is, they have become sewers!  It is truly astounding to see how, over centuries and all around, the same river has served both ‘as a source of drinking water and as an outlet for sewage’ (and without any hygienic treatment of the water![2]). Regrettably, Catalonia has the widely recognised and lamentable cases of the rivers Llobregat and Besós.
 
Today such situations are everywhere apparent to us.  Without dwelling on them, there is nevertheless no question that, behind them, another very different relationship exists between humanity and rivers, along with the water such rivers carry.  It is both qualitatively and quantitatively different, yet it has merely accentuated an old trend tending to drive water out of the popular mind and its symbols, or at least to slight or belittle its significance.  Despite its vast debt to water and waterways, industrialisation seems to have betrayed its early hopes and expectations of them, as so beautifully formulated by Antipater of Thessalonica in the previously cited text.  Waterfalls and watermills were to have freed humanity of the heaviest manual labour, and this has undoubtedly happened for part of the world‘s population.  However, not all the hopes put in this process have been fulfilled, despite far outstripping anything anyone could have ever imagined.  Once harnessed and deconsecrated, dirtied and made trivial, water has been reduced to a mere bit player in the modern storms of iron, fire and blood[3].

[1]  There are various versions regarding whether the election was made by the people or decided by the powerful Athenian ruler of the day: Creorop.  There is even a version that states that the woman’s vote decided the election in favour of Athena, who later withdrew the right to vote from those very same women.
[2]  Carefully separating sewage from the water supply played a key role in improving public health and leading to population growth.  Unfortunately, it only began in large Western cities in the second half of the eighteenth century, using vitrified clay pipes.  This step was crucial so that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, cities in the advanced world would stop experiencing chronic population loss, from higher mortality rates.  Until that point, the countryside had had to compensate with constant flows of people to the cities.   See J.R. and W.H. McNeill’s The Human Web:  A Bird’s Eye View of the World.  New York: Norton, 2003.
[3]  Without being able to go into detail here, we can see the contrary myths conveyed by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and, on the other hand, Ernst Jünger’s The Storm of Steel and The Worker: Dominion and Gestalt.  While these last two books do relate multiple, epic struggles between opposing forces, there is no doubt that any complex symbolism essentially related to water and the ocean has been totally replaced by one based on fire and steel.

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: