Water
In Barcelona, they say the spring begins when orange trees blossom in the cloisters of the old monastery on Calle Hospital, in the old town neighbourhood of El Raval. This year, no such initiation. The gates are locked, the library closed. Only birds frequent that fragrant desolation.
At the height of lockdown, I have a different cell to circle, four stories up, on a street redolent with Indian spice, the smells of sizzling curries emanating from the pots of Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants who have made Calle Carretes their home away from home. It is also the month of Ramadan, and every sunset, the sound of praying, normally reserved for mosques, flows from balconies.
Locked up indoors, the usual pleasures of spring have been difficult to attain. I did, however, enjoy the rain. Three blooming days of it, non-stop clattering of tiny spears. The fabled April rains, a mystic, pounding rain, that drummed my senses to a trance. For a moment, there was nothing more pleasurable in the world than lying on one’s bed and listening to the elements.
In Spain it’s easy to fall in love with water, because there’s so little of it. And things are richer when they are scarce. The spring brighter for not lasting longer, youth more precious, albeit more anxious, for moving on, leaving its water marks on the skin, as wrinkles or waves of sand.
With bonds of blue,
Despair is lightly bound,
As solid flesh is tied to rain.
The tantrums and the sloping tops,
The chimneys smoking from a secret hearth,
And every delight and dread of businessmen,
Who set up shop only half-expecting storm;
All these are plunged beneath the bluest haze:
Our miracle earth, crying itself to life again.
Writers of time immemorial have found meaning in water. I can scarcely do them justice here, but a few examples spring to mind. Thales, the early Greek philosopher, suggested that water was the primary element, the thing to which everything else reduces. He was right in the sense that modern physicists also think that everything exists within a state of flux (or a quantum field). The old maxim, change is the only constant, has both material and spiritual import.
Thales’ near contemporary, Heraclitus, made his famous remark about rivers and never stepping in the same one twice. The Zen Buddhists, who disdain all forms of artifice (like the rain, I might add), consider no-mind and being present in the flow of the moment to be the highest spiritual practice. Before Einstein’s relativity, Newton imagined time as an absolute river, an eternal t, always constant, unswerving, a divinely mandated stream of change. Thus the association between water and transient realities ripples across the centuries, to be embraced (Zen Buddhists), admired (Heraclitus) or revered (Newton) but never questioned.
The idea that we can celebrate change as a source of vitality often feels paradoxical. How can we love the very thing that engenders all our sorrows? The gloomy, but highly atmospheric Anglo-Saxon laments tend to focus on the colder, darker side of water. Lonesome wanderers, bereft of their former companions, mourn the nature of a world that decays and disappears. The traditional Christian understanding of the mortal world as a vale of tears implicitly refers to rain. The Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi, on the other hand, celebrates error and deformation as a source of modesty and truthfulness. Objects on the cusp of fading back into nature, unable to retain their temporary homes, invite especial admiration. Hence all those beautiful pictures of leaves floating down colourful rivers.
Water, Samothraki, 2018, Thomas Helm
It is difficult to mention water without movement. The principle of one implies the other. When still, water smells and is rarely desirable. Recently, I’ve been trying to content myself with stillness and reduced expectations. To be both flowing and still at the same time. To enjoy the simple pleasures as though they were the only pleasures. Such as lying on one’s bed, with the window half-open, listening to the universe crying itself to life again.