WATER FOR EVERYBODY BUT NOT FOR SIMPLY ANYTHING

 

Recovery

 

Of course, the tendency to overlook water’s vital force and its mysterious creative power has not been entirely replaced by our fascination with the human capacity to take advantage of its kinetic energy.  For many, it is apparent that water yet retains its great power, as the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea have recently reminded us.  Human effort is again seeking to plumb its mysteries, grasp it in all its richness and pay tribute to its necessary ubiquity.  In short, this is exemplified by three important trends in contemporary philosophy.

 

Environmentalism:  water for everybody but not for simply anything

 

The first of these notions comes out of current environmental thinking:  the unending cycle of life is inseparable from the no less unending water cycle.  However bountiful, widespread and ubiquitous they may be, elements critical to life such as water can grow scarce and must not be wasted.  ‘Water for everybody’, definitely!  But not for simply anything.  It should not be squandered nor should its life-giving capacity  be left in ruins.  The infinite claims of life should not be underestimated.  There is always some form of life that needs, benefits from and awaits its portion of water to survive.  Even water is scarce and runs out.  It is precious to life and must be taken care of; it must be saved.

 

Only vanity has led humanity to forget verities such as these, so universally acknowledged in the ancient world.  In antiquity, humanity put water to work but always showed it respect.  For water is shared by right of usufruct.  It is shared by all, both human and non-human tenants, throughout our environment.  It can never be owned outright.  It mustn’t be stolen from those who cannot survive without it, nor must it ever be returned to the immense cycle of life in a degraded state or poisoned.  Water is magical and generative when its cycle and it purity are respected.  If underestimated, it turns fearsome and treacherous .  It vanishes, it grows scarce and fickle, if it is wasted, if it is reduced to an economic factor of no stature or value, enslaved to certain business interests which are indeed seen to have “value”.

 

Bachelard: '’The destiny of man is as the water that flows’

 

Secondly, briefly touching on psychoanalysis and ‘digging deeply’, it is apparent that both singular water and plural waters retain the old mystery yet and still yield surprising meanings.  From the perspective of psychoanalysis, water has provoked so much thought that it may constitute one of the most complex and persistent symbols in human history.  Of especial note are the classic Freudian studies, the Jungian research of the Eranos group, and the work of Gaston Bachelard, the odd rationalist who had no fear or prejudice and became a student of the irrational.  In 1942, he carried out an encyclopedic analysis translated as Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, which he later confessed he had not been able to conduct as profoundly or systematically as he had done in the companion book, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

 

If Bachelard believed his analysis of fire managed to achieve what his  analysis of water did not, it is yet further proof of the tragedy of water and water’s symbols, metaphors and conceptualisations since ancient Greece.  Justice has not been done to it.  On the contrary, it has lost out to other symbols and metaphors, to other idols and dreams.  This is despite the fact that the cycle of life unfailingly leads us to the cyclic flowing of water, despite the fact that human beings, too, are essentially a flowing.  ‘The destiny of man is as the water that flows.  Water is the truly transitory element.  […]  The being consecrated to water is a rushing, giddy one.  Minute by minute, it dies; something of it is lost again and again.’  Unfortunately, Bachelard let the perfect opportunity slip away here to express more graphically how his substance spills, trickles or drains away.  There is no doubt that, moment by moment, our time slips away from us and our lives as well, dripping and dripping away as the clockwork waters of the clepsydra do. Instead, Bachelard offers up yet another marvellous metaphor: ‘Water’s death is an everyday death.  Water is always flowing, always falling, always ending in its own horizontal death.’^[1]

 

Heidegger: back to the thing

 

Lastly, let’s turn briefly to the existentialism of Heidegger’s ontological difference, which has the ability to rescue the everyday ‘thing’ from its anonymity, triviality and apparent lack of essence.  In the same way he interpreted Van Gogh’s ‘Boots with Laces’ and raised those boots to the level of a category, he put across the notion of ‘proximity to the thing’ and posed the significant example of the pitcher.  The pitcher creates and holds a void that can be filled, emptied, carried, etc. The popular imagination has been quite wrong and unfair here, since the pitcher is assumed to contain a void, when in reality it is full of air.  ’Filling’ the pitcher is therefore only changing its contents.  Nevertheless, from another perspective, the popular mind has addressed the question well, because the pitcher certainly does create a void or quasi-void that, even though filled with air, makes way for a liquid that would otherwise lose its natural flowing in ’horizontal death’, as Bachelard would say.  Precisely by trying to get close to the thing through ontological thinking, Heidegger speaks to us of the gift of a fillable void which the pitcher constitutes.  In some sense, the pitcher’s gift is the halting of water as it flows.  Yet, it also makes reference to, and conveys, the potentiality of the spring and the rocks from which it bursts, the land where the dew and the rain collect, and finally nothing less than the mythical ’marriage of heaven and earth’ itself^[2]. It conveys all of this for us, giving us a pitcher filled with water.

 

Marriage of heaven and earth

 

What magnificent praise!  All made from close ‘proximity’ to the most humble and most real ‘thing itself’:  water.  In the midst of the twentieth century, water appeared to have lost its mystery, although of course it was us who had lost our sense of wonder.  Yet in spite of everything, we can still grasp the mystery in a simple pitcher able, so it seems, to hold still the Heraclitean dialectic and stave off the ‘horizontal death’ of water.  Thus, the pitcher receives, keeps and presents back the same water as a gift, a present which, in the final analysis, is nothing short of that flux borne out of the ‘marriage of heaven and earth’ itself.

 

---

^[1]  Bachelard 1999.

^[2] Martin Heidegger Conferencias y artículos, Barcelona, Ed. Del Serbal, 1994:143ff. (especially 149f.).  (Lectures and Papers)

“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