WATER
Friday, April 23, 2003, 1-4 pm.
Participants:
Simon Kress
Elizabeth Milewicz
Brian Croxall
Carla Gober
Melissa Sexton
Ajaya Bhadra Khanal
Christopher Hays
Walter Reed
Mikhail Epstein
Topics
Suggested:
toes
ribs
improcvisation
laughter
spring (all meanings)
media as extensions of nerves
the underworld
water
room
Selected by
Majority:
water
Duration of
writing: 1 hour
Duration of
entire session: 3 hours (1-4 pm.)
Texts (in the order of readings):
Found
on the floor, near the refrigerated section
by
Brian Croxall
I’m not sure how
to say this: “I’ve made some
modifications to a resource”? No,
that doesn’t quite do it. Too
nebulous. Too academic. “You might notice something different
in your lunch today”? Well…that’s
true. But they’d probably think it
was the lettuce. I noticed it was
wilted on my way through last night.
What makes them think anyone wants iceberg anyway? Aren’t we beyond that now? It’s kind of 1980s—you know, what you
get on one half of the McDLT (“The hot stays hot and the cool stays
cool”). C’mon, we’re more
conscious of our bodies today—we eat red and green leaf, Boston. Spinach is a nice substitute. Then there’s assorted greens, dandelion
greens, argula. A-ru-gu-la. Hmm. Is that something for a salad? I don’t know. Anyway, there’s sprouts and water cress. Parsley. Witlof. Okay,
I’m getting Whitmanesque: “I sing the salad electric!” No more lists. They’re distracting. And probably not even funny. So what was that for anyway? Oh…right, iceberg lettuce. No, I wouldn’t touch the stuff with a
10-foot Pole. Not that I’ve ever
seen a Wachowski that long before.
Not, it’s not your lettuce.
I don’t know, maybe this confessional thing is a bit too hard. You’ll all figure it out
eventually. How? Will there be something in the paper
tomorrow? Doubtful. Will there be a spot on the news? No. I’ve taken care of that. You’re getting tired of this, aren’t you? Well, so it goes, as Vonnegut
says. No, no one will publish
these tidings on the rooftops.
Where it’s really going to stick out like a sore thumb is at the
gym. The World of Coke, too. At the neighborhood lemonade
stand. People will pause whatever
it is they’re doing, shrug, … and?
Well, I’m not sure. I mean
what can you do? Do you know it
when you taste it? Can you smell
it? Am I talking about iocaine
powder? (“It’s tasteless, has no
odor, and dissolves instantly in liquid.”
Prince Humperdinck picks up the vial, sniffs: “Iocaine. I’d bet my life on it.”) No, that’d be too convenient. This is the real world. Here we have things that leave all too
strong a trace. Too much too
young. Anyway. Sure, it will make people pause, but
can you recognize that which you’ve never had before? Like, say I blindfold you and feed you a dachshund? Would you know it? What if it was your
dachshund? Definitely not
then. So…yeah. People might notice, but they probably
won’t be able to say what’s in there.
What will this
do to global stability? Not much,
I’m afraid. I don’t know. Maybe it will. Maybe someone will notice they’re the
same now. Someone will set down
their fix, try out the old source.
Maybe, but not likely. How
does one guy compete with multinational conglomerates? Sure, Pynchon did it, but when’s the
last time you saw him? How can you
stop crass, conspicuous consumption?
Literally consumption. Why
slap a label on “a celebration of what’s most natural about Florida”? Doesn’t the labeling process
de-naturalize it? Maybe that’s why
she always used to peel the labels off everything. But does that help?
I mean, you’ve still got all that reverse osmosis in there. And that bottle. Can you believe they care about the
shape enough to copyright it?
Well, not anymore. Sure,
the interaction with the plastic gives it that special something extra. The bang for your buck. Bang. Buck.
Bang. Buck. No. Nonsense, won’t help, you won’t believe me if I start saying
stuff like “Ob-li-di, Ob-lah-dah.”
Well…I don’t care. Life
goes on…at least until now.
Anyway, back to
the subject at hand. How do
I say it? Do I call the grocery
stores and say, “You might want to advise your customers…”? No. Who’d believe me?
No one, despite my credentials.
I’m utterly capable of doing what I’ve done. The proof’s in the pudding, so to speak.
If only you’d
listened when I told you how ridiculous you look paying for it. If only you’d…I don’t know. No one cares if they’re a walking
billboard, if what’s inside your skin continue to mark you as a consumer of
deception. All I’ve done is pushed
the deception a little further.
It’s not just you being fooled.
It’s them too.
Huh. This is something like the Unabomber’s
rant. There’s another Pole I
wouldn’t mess with. But I don’t
care what you think. Coke, Pepsi,
Evian, Spa, Fiji. None of them
ever did either. Well, we’re all
together now.
No, it’s crazy
but true. Euphemism won’t change
things. Look, here’s the score: I
unscrewed the lid. I filled it up. I put it back and did the next. It’s the same stuff, isn’t it? It’s got the same H and the same
O. In the same proportion. But it’s not the same. Finally.
It
happened. Right under their
noses. But can you come right out
and say it? Do you brag? Why didn’t I think of this first?
Anyway, here
goes: “I poisoned the water supply.”
by Christopher Hays
“Let justice
roll down like waters/ and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
–Amos
5:24
Quoted
by Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech, this verse from the
prophet Amos has become so well known that it may have lost its ability to
function as a literary image and become pure meaning—pure social justice. I
would like to point out that it is interesting as an image.
It
is part of Amos’ warning, written in the 8th century bce. It follows imagery of God’s
judgment on the unrighteousness of Israel, those for whom religious propriety
was more important than justice for the poor and oppressed. Previously, Amos
has warned that those who have gotten wealth and houses unjustly will never
enjoy them, because Yahweh’s wrath is coming in a day that is “darkness, not
light, and gloom with no brightness in it.” (5:20) It will be “as if someone
fled from a lion, and was met by a bear” (5:19), and “in all the squares there
shall be wailing” (5:18).
But
the image of justice “like waters” is rather different, is it not? This is not lex
talionis, “an eye for an eye”—Israel’s
violence and injustice will not be answered with the same in this case.
The
image of waters may have its roots in the primordial watery chaos that predates
Israelite literature and is found in ancient Mesopotamian myth, where the
sea-god Tiamat is slain by Marduk and split to create the earth and the
heavens. That image is reflected in the “formless void” of Genesis 1, in which
God separates the waters to make room for the land, and for life. God’s threat
through Amos is that he will cease to hold back the watery chaos so that it
will again overwhelm the earth and its people.
For
an ancient Israelite, the image of a thorough dousing might have evoked the miqveh, or ceremonial bath that one took to pass from a
state of impurity to a state of purity, often so that one could enter the
temple, “in the presence of the Lord,” and participate in worship practices.
Leviticus 19:2 reads: “You shall (or “should”) be holy, for I, the Lord your
God, am holy.” So one way to think of this justice “like waters” is that it
images the necessary cleansing for a sinful nation to be restored to God’s
presence.
When
Judah[1]
actually experienced God’s judgment (for so it was interpreted by the prophets)
in the destruction of Jerusalem and the entry into exile in Babylon, they
experienced the costly nature of this cleansing. The laments of the exiles are
captured or reflected in various parts of the Hebrew Bible, including vividly
in Psalm 137: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept.” It seems,
based on this and other passages that the exiled community actually lived by
the river Chebar, in or near the ancient city. The waters of God’s judgment became the waters of exile: the
foreign river in a foreign country, where they asked, “How can we sing the
Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:4) Their tears, too, are waters of
judgment.
After
fifty years of exile, the Judahites returned from exile to rebuild their city
and their culture. The Psalms, many of which would have been written before the
exile, continued to be used in the temple. The Psalter begins with a psalm that
describes those who live within God’s blessings “like trees/ planted by streams
of water.” Surely a statement like that never sounded quite the same to Israel
once they had been washed in God’s waters of justice and lived by the waters of
exile. Psalm 23 seems to reflect this experience of loss and return:
“The
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He
makes me lie down in green pastures;
He
leads me besides still waters (“waters of rest”),
He
restores my soul (or “life”).
The life that
was nearly washed away in judgment was restored in waters of restoration. Amos’
promise of water is therefore an evocative one; in the midst of judgment God
holds out the promise of life. If we expect human kind of judgment, we may be
astonished and ask, like John’s woman at the well, “Sir, where do you get that
living water?”
by Walter Reed
“Like a bridge
over troubled water,/ I will lay me down.” Thus the Simon and Garfunkel song you can still hear from
time to time on the ‘oldies’ stations.
In the healing story in one of the gospels, we are told that a certain
pool only had healing powers when an angel came down and troubled the
waters. I was listening recently
to a spiritual based on that story, “The Lord Troubled the Waters.” So besides the opposition between
troubled waters and still waters (“He leadeth me beside the still waters,” the
23rd Psalmist says) there seems to be a distinction between troubled
waters that bring trouble—division, separation, breaking and keeping apart—and
troubled waters that bring healing.
(Although in the gospel story the man who needs healing gets it directly
from Jesus; he doesn’t need to get carried down to the angelically
turbo-charged pool by his friends.)
Are these simply
random metaphors—figures of speech that may not even translate of out
English--or is there some deeper (a dead water-metaphor!) meaning? As Melville’s Ishmael, who identifies
himself as an inveterate “water-gazer” says in that Great American Water Novel Moby-Dick, “Surely all these things are not without
meaning.” Maybe not as much
ontological profundity as Gaston Bachelard, the French phenomenologist claims
in his book Water and Dreams
(companion volume to The Psychoanalysis of Fire). But
the idea that water is one of four foundational elements, instead of a
molecular combination of two of them from the Period Table that I last saw
swimming before my eyes in the high-school chemistry class that inspired me to
become a professional student of the humanities, is persistent.
“Like a bridge
over troubled water(s)” might be taken as a description of metaphor itself—a
metaphor for metaphor. But is
metaphor figured in the solid, reassuring bridge or the fluid and disturbed
waters underneath? The
reversibility of figure and ground.
“Put your hand in the hand of the man who walked the water,/ Put your
hand in the hand of the man who stilled the sea.” (I may be improving on James Taylor’s lyrics here,
back-filling, as biblical scholars call it.) What is the trouble with water? That we are so dependent on it (though lack of air will do
us in much quicker than lack of water)?
That it constitutes so much of us (ninety-something percent of our
bodies, if I’m remembering those Amazing Science Facts correctly)? Or that it keeps breaking into history
and myth, the real world and the imagined world, in the form of floods, tidal
waves, monsoons and perfect storms, sweeping everyone and everything before it
into a vast watery grave? (Ask
whether water or fire is more prevalent in the underworlds of world mythology.)
But in “O
Brother, Where Art Thou?” by the Cohen brothers, that impertinent cinematic
parody of the Odyssey, the Great Greek
Water Epic, the flood comes bursting in just in time to save Ulysses
whatever-his-name-is and his two fellow escaped convicts from a cruel and
certain death by hanging. The flood
as deus ex machina, wiping the slate clean for salvation history and
homecoming. Which may be the way
we are supposed to understand the flood in the Book of Genesis—at least from
the point of view of Noah and his ecologically and historically extended family. Or from the point of view of Christian
baptism.
“The sky is
crying,” wails Elmore James in a classic case of the pathetic fallacy. “Full fathom five thy father lies,”
croons Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest in
a classic case of fallacious pathos.
(Ferdinand’s father, the King of Naples, has actually been delivered
from the storm conjured up by the bookish magician Prospero and his spirit
servant.)
The notes of
this paradoxicalist continue, but we may end this fluid and troublesome
mediation here.
[1] It should be noted that Amos’ words were addressed to the northern kingdom, Israel, which fell at the end of the 8th century. The southern kingdom, Judah, survived until 587 bce; later prophets, however, cast its faults in similar terms to those of Amos.