and that language is ‘poes’

21-3-’76

For the second time i’m witnessing from up close that a child learns how to talk. And despite all my efforts and focused attention I haven’t been able to catch the phenomenon on a decisive phase that I would like to call ‘origin’. Daniel’s language too seems to have been brought from a secretive, prenatal existence. Only the slowness of its development forces me to assume that he is learning it from us, gradually and in a way that’s not dictated by us.

He started later than his sister, Neeltje. That’s apparently normal for boys: hard wood grows slowly. How he started, I don’t know. I suspect in the same way as all babies and I think that is: by listening to the rhythm and sound of our sentences. Even before he could say one word, he would talk in a tone that he knew from us, but without filling in the rhythm with words.

He now says three or four words: poes (cat), papa, da, sometimes mama. But he knows a lot more of them. What he says is only a fraction of his passive vocabulary. I know that, because I experiment with it. This morning I said: ‘Daantje, give the doll a kiss.’ He crawled through his stall, took the doll and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Other assignments too he appears to understand well.

I’m not sure he uses his limited vocabulary in a truly targeted fashion. He says ‘papa’ too when the word doesn’t refer to me. Neeltje did the same thing for a long time. At this moment ‘poes’ is his favorite word, and has been for two weeks. He has practiced it for months. First it was pf… followed by lots of blowing, then ‘poe’ and only recently ‘poes’. He uses the word very targeted, that is when he sees a cat, also on television. I really should say that in those moments, he doesn’t use another word or squeak, but immediately says ‘poes’. But he calls a lot of other animals that too. When a dog was here two weeks ago, he kept saying ‘poes’ and would not be corrected. He seemed to make it into a game to keep saying ‘poes’ and did so with a malicious and triumphant laugh. ‘This is a dog, dog.’ ‘Poes.’ ‘No, dog.’ ‘Poes, poes, haha.’

I think something is going on here that I noticed too late with Neeltje. I thought of it when I went to get him from his bed yesterday afternoon and this morning. He was already standing upright, looked around his room and pointed imperatively -his little index finger not straight ahead, but in an angle of 145 degrees to his hand- to all sorts of objects, and with it said ‘poes’ every time. I can’t assume that he saw all that stuff and those plants as cats. Apparently he wants to greet me into his world and to do so, he wielded the only word he has the hang of. He greeted me in his language and that language is ‘poes’. The word doesn’t only refer to the cat, but more than that it means that he wants to start communicating. With ‘poes’ he informs us: ‘I can talk’. Corrections such as ‘no, dog’ he resolutely rejects because they literally threaten to dumbfound him.

With Neeltje I used to initially think, as the faithful reader of treatises in which the beginning is always represented as very simple, that such words for concrete things could only relate to those things themselves. Now I notice that ‘poes’ includes all sorts of meanings, amongst which also something like a reflection on language. The latter happens mostly when a word is repeated over and over: there occurs something like a greenhouse process in which that one word becomes a whole language and metalanguage. ‘Poes’ coming from Daniel’s mouth means:

1. that cat there,

2. that animal there,

3. look over there,

4. I want to talk

5. I have already learned to talk

6. I want to keep talking,

7. I talk like I want to.

‘Da’ is sometimes ‘daag’ (bye), sometimes also ‘dank je’ (thank you). Often he says ‘da da’ when he wants to have something. Thanking then becomes an order.

 

If

In my opinion ‘if’ is the most philosophical and at the same time also -and perhaps precisely because of this- the most honed conjunction. It is often regarded as a little word for dreamers who want to put up a border around reality in its coincidental appearance against everything that could just as well be possible, or would be. With ‘if’ we preface assumptions that have to do with that. That way it contributes to a dislocation of obviousness, which is a pre-eminently philosophical activity. Sometimes all that’s needed for it is a trifle. If for example Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, Pascal thought, the whole face of the earth would have changed. People with a sense of reality, or at least with a sense of the way they have to come across as though they have a realistic view of things, don’t want to hear of such talk. They refuse to entertain questions that begin with ‘if’ and they’ve learned from their grandparents that if the skies fall, we all wear blue hats. Especially vigorous administrators have a dislike of questions that start with ‘if’. Even though the word belongs to the verbal package of the foresight that government is supposed to be, they prefer to just see to it when we get there and therefore to dispense of foresight and prefer to decisively react in the moment itself, so to improvise rather than to foresee.

There is an ‘if’ as in ‘in case of’ in which the future and its foresight are the subject; and there is an ‘if’ that relates to the past, so two types of ‘if this happens’ and ‘if this happened or had happened’. The first one is called realis, not because it really happens, but because the speaker leaves open the possibility that it will happen sooner or later, and the second is called irrealis, because the speaker is convinced that it hasn’t happened and can not happen anymore. He complies with its inevitable consequences, but is aware that it might as well could have happened. In the case of Cleopatra’s nose, Pascal was speaking in the irrealis. And when I say ‘if I lived in the middle ages’, I thereby express that I can only dream of that, but it also gives me a certain perspective on the life I lead now, not on the way I should arrange it, but on the fascinating coincidences that make it like it is now. Sentences with ‘if’ are always about the present. They give relief to a reality against a background of possibilities of which we’re trying to form an image.

Because decisive and practical realists appear not to dream and because they mix up dreaming and contemplating and realis and irrealis, to them everything that seems to be reality also seems to be obvious, and thoughts of all that is not reality, are then also nonsense. In their eyes nothing could have been different from what it became. That it, coincidentally or not, is what it is, means that it must be that way too. That it was a hair’s width and everything would have been completely different or hadn’t existed at all, does not seem to matter to them; that it does exist and is what it is, they undergo without any trace of surprise. Or maybe, I think in an attempt to save a piece of their soul, they just pretend, to restrain others from plunging into the abyss of wonder?

Resurrection

We say that someone ‘rises’ when he gets up from a seating or laying position by himself. When that happens from a bed or a chair, we simple call it ‘to rise’, when it happens from a situation of subjection, we call it ‘rise against’, and when it happens from death, we speak of ‘resurrection’. And for this last and most mysterious word we have to follow the most complicated trains of thoughts to comprehend it a little. All metaphors of rising have to be called in, those of sleep from which we rise, those of rising against and those of resurrection from death. In waking up we deny sleep, in rising against we deny subjection, and in the thought of resurrection death is denied. And because death seems to be the most definitive of all those horizontal situations, denying it is our toughest job and the rising from the dead is for us the most incomprehensible miracle. We can think for a long time about the old analogy of death with sleep, and we can, like Pascal did, consider that rising from the dead is no greater miracle than birth, but we can’t get so far as to think of it as self-evident.

Why do we for the length of history deny death or compare it to the sleep from which we rise again every morning? We apparently have a compelling motif for it that doesn’t exactly coincide with the attachment to our own existence. Shall we call it love? When we love someone, do we do anything else than to confirm the existence of that person so absolutely that we can’t think of our own existence without them? ‘To love someone’, said Gabriel Marcel, ‘is to say: you shall not die.’ And when the impossible happens still and we see that person laying there, cold and powerless, we can’t just revoke that absolute statement. When we love someone, they have to stay. When it has all appearances that they have left, they will have to return sooner or later and death can at most be a provisional state. The thought of the resurrection and the return seems to have been prompted by hopelessness or hope against all odds. But what do we know of death and what reasons do we have not to rise against it?

We rise from sleep by ourselves, when we wake or are awoken by someone else. From what we think we know of death in any case is that it is a total powerlessness and that the deceased, crushed by an ascendancy, won’t wake up and rise by their own powers. We can try to keep them alive in our memories, but in doing so we give them a vague and shadowy existence which depends on us and after at most a generation of loving remembering is doomed to sink into oblivion. We would like to perform the miracle of resurrection and rising from the dead, but we are as powerless against death as the dead themselves. And whether we are deeply religious, skeptic or agnostic, as the biggest miracle we can think of the resurrection is never a self-evident matter. The thought of it or the believe in it is more a resistance against against every form of self-evidence. If it concerns a dogma here, it is about time that this dogma too rises from the dead as an object of thought. Any belief that becomes an automatism, is a disbelief.

*Translators note: ‘to rise’, as in to get up, is ‘opstaan’ in dutch; to rise against, as in to revolt, is ‘opstand’; and the resurrection, rising from the dead, is ‘opstanding’. The three words are in Dutch more connected than they are in English, but I think the thread and theme are strong enough to warrant translation.

from the diary Cornelis Verhoeven kept on the language of his children.

“You are sweet, papa, you have to stay alive”

dubious certainties

Absurd

Although the word ‘absurd’ was introduced to Dutch already in the 16^th century, probably from French, it was only included into the first supplement of the Dutch Dictionary in 1956. Perhaps it was too obviously a borrowed word to be allowed in without a fight. And the word still sounds a bit scholarly now, no matter how contemptible it is usually meant. And that is also what is nice and refined about the word: It seems to locate the nonsense that it relates to on a higher level, or give it a second change by indicating it in a scholarly way with a Latin term. And of that Latin word ‘absurdus’ the meaning is very mysteriously and perhaps also adequately described by the gorgeous dictionary of Van Wageningen and and Muller as: ‘who or what deviates from the usual hum’. It could therefore also relate to who or what makes a remarkably clear and sensible sound amidst the hum, but in Latin it was long since used to go below the already dubious borderline of everyday buzz and to expose that as just noise. It then no longer concerns a normal and natural process, but something with pretensions that distance it from the norm.

The borrowed word will therefore be introduced to distinguish an excess of non-sensical and meaningless buzz from the usual portions of it, to which the ear has gotten used in the mean time. And because in the Dutch language ‘absurd’ is a scholarly word, its usage must come from circles where such diagnoses could be made or where the excess probably occurred the most. So we’re not talking about regular and incidental nonsense, but about a higher and better organized form of it, cultivated in circles where everything that has been said and regulated, is regulated again, so that this surplus of of rules totally disrupts everything again. The population is thank god healthy and malicious enough to take over such a term and apply it to the very circles where the disease arose and the diagnosis was made. And in that way the meaning of the word ‘absurd’ must have been related to bureaucratic actions, a hum that indeed deviates quite a bit from the sounds caused by the usual and what is considered efficient activity. It is more the sound of little preambles and buzzing preparations than of progress.

The strict rule that seems to be underlying this development, could in the spirit of the word be described as following: everything that has already been regulated must on a higher level be regulated again in such a way that the regulations become not only more complicated, but also less efficient. And within that development there is increasing absurdity. The perfect organizations seems to strive for a maximum of absurdity; and that can only be reached when there is nothing at all outside of the agency, or nothing else is recognized and the machine hums in a completely empty space. The machine then works at full speed, but it doesn’t produce anything anymore. For the law of maximum absurdity will not allow that it produces anything else than this sort of spinning rumble. And as long as that ideal has not yet been reached and the organization, as a sort of industrial accident, makes a product, the machine will have to be perfected further until such an accident is ruled out and the buzz will sound to the enthusiasts as absolute music.

Wisdom and books

Pausing by water

There are in the world a number of things that, to the extend in which they can spontaneously grab our attention, can compete with the most sensational occurrences. A burning fire, a sleeping child, a spinning wheel, rolling waves, streaming water, falling snowflakes and raindrops on a window irresistibly draw our gaze towards them and keep hold of it so long that we forget time. They are movements that invite a passer-by to pause and place him outside of the stream of history for a moment. They completely take hold of us without being in any way sensational.

They only have this in common with sensational occurrences, that at every moment there are changes in the spectacle; but those changes are minimal, random, never ending and in no way contribute to a predictable or a tensely awaited end, The happenings that occur don’t add anything to the spectacle and do not change the totality. A maximum of movement coincides with a minimum of change. They occur within a fairly limited frame. The sensation does not lay outside of the spectacle and the tension isn’t caused by the expectation of a shocking occurrence, which will break out of the frame, or a decisive turn in the history of what is happening. Nothing happens, or: the very little that does happen more affirms the status quo than that it creates spectacular changes within it. There is an intense dynamic, but it has its terrain within a frame that seems more static; what happens bends back into a horizon, in which it is no longer a happening, but regular order.

Still these movements interest us no less than an exciting match. This fact in and of itself is wondrous. Apparently the repetition of almost identical movements can be fascinating and in a certain sense spectacular, regardless of any thought of a decision or an end. Spectacular in a literal sense is what is a spectacle en invites us to watch. A classic tragedy was interesting for spectators and compelled them to watch, even though in most cases they knew exactly how the play would end. The tension was created more by a balanced building up than by the question what would happen next.

That causes a thought to rise, that also the tension of a decisive match is determined more by the structure of the happening itself than by perspectives on what will happen next, therefore more by the present and the presence than by the future. The more equal the teams are, the more stringent the rules to which the players must adhere, the more then the forces keep each other in equilibrium and make a surprising result unlikely, the more interesting can the match be and the more the spectacle will tie the spectators to the present.

To the same extend the back and forth movements tend to resemble more the rolling of the waves or the flickering of a flame within a balanced frame. The tension of a match consists of the repose of the decision and repose means: absence at this moment. The moment itself is being occupied by other thoughts, it fills itself with the lyrical presence with an endless movement. To watch is just to be witness, gazing at what happens over there, in the water, in the fire, or on the field. New flames flicker, new waves roll in, new resistance delays the victory.

These things seem to differ so much, that it appears to be nonsense to join them. That this happens anyway has a meaning. For with all too much fervor staring into the fire or water is labeled as a somewhat introverted musing, while watching a game is seen as stout, extraverted engagement with brave deeds and perhaps also as a preschool of the willingness of actually participating in those activities. This way of seeing things can be questioned , which will immediately relate to other discrepancies that are taken for granted, such as between activity and passivity, the outside world and the inside world, doing and thinking, labor and leisure.

Whoever stares into the fire or gets enthralled by the endless roughing of the waves more easily gives off the impression to be lost within his own thoughts than the spectator at a match. It is likely that this is caused less by a deep difference in the symbolical meaning of the movement towards which the attention is geared, than by the circumstance that at a competition, a spectator is not alone, but amidst a large mass, that with loud yells encourages the competing parties in the hope to influence the outcome with it. That can provide the illusion of activity. But when the supporters are as equally divided as the players, in the incoming waves of encouragements too a balance will arise. In this case, nonetheless, it is clear that the centre of attention is outside of us, there on the field.

But also when we are musingly staring into the fire or being enthralled by streaming water, we don’t think of ourselves. We think of nothing, or of something that is too large to think about it in detail. Thought seems to stand still in wonder of something that it can’t comprehend. Maybe the movement of fire, water and breath is so fascinating, because for us it is a symbol for the restlessness of our own inner being, but it exudes calm, because it exists clearly and undoubtedly outside of us. Attention for that movement frees us from ourselves and directs itself to an outside world, which engrosses us by its own qualities.

There are not too many things which can, in this way, without the promise of a decisive outcome, fascinate us and rip us away from our own centre. We could say, that it concerns elemental things. In the elements a number of characteristics are present in a focused way, that keep being of interest to us: omnipresence, eternal returning, recovery of balance, irreplaceability, concreteness, in short everything that makes them suitable to be the carriers of endless symbolism. Elements make us spectators. We pause by them and wonder about their pure presence. For a moment the matter-of-factness of an outside world made manageable falls away and we focus out attention on a secret. Musings by the fire, water and other elements don’t let us sink into the own inner self, rather than that it places us with a soft shock in the outside world, of which we –until now perhaps thoughtless users- suddenly become surprised witnesses.

By speaking of ‘elements’ we don’t exactly bring the secret of the world within our own reach, but we acknowledge that for the time being it is outside of this reach and cannot be reduced to a function of our own power. The word is an attempt to indicate within the multifaceted reality a structure or a skeleton, or rather: to verbalize a suspicion of a structure. ‘Elementa’ –a word with an obscure origin- was used by the Romans to denote the letters of the alphabet made out of ivory, and later also the raw materials, of which the world in the antique’s point of view was composed. Elements, letters are not the literature, materials are not the world. The word ‘element’ is no more that a coat rack for our willingness to penetrate deeper into the world, a temporal but un-omitable repose for our wonder. The inexplicable word explains nothing; it just says that man, faced with an interminable multitude, wants to bring order to it so not to be perplexed forever.

 

Earth, water, air and fire, ranked according to density and mass, were in the minds of the Presocratics thought of as raw materials, of which the vis­ible world consisted and to which all matter could be reduced. Elements are at the beginning and end of everything; they survive the fortunes of what is build up out of them. Between arising and perishing a whole history occurs, in which the elements get mixed in the most diverse ways and form complex structures. The way up goes in reverse order through the same stages as the way down.

This whole symbolism seems to deduce to a great wonder about the elements, but it represents at the same time a certain phase in the history of attempts to articulate this wonder and make it into an instrument. The thinking of the Presocratics has defied the myth, in which elements and forces of nature were represented as gods. It is a decisive step in the history of the human emancipation to from now on give a god or nymph the name ‘water’ or ‘earth’. This secularization brings the manageability of the world closer. Earth, water, air and fire are no longer only being worshiped, like Demeter, Poseidon, Zeus and Hephaestus, but principally also engaged in human activity. Gods are outside of that. They diverge to an invisible world, where they cannot be reached. The classic school of elements has maintained its validity for so many centuries, because it functioned as an attempt to replace the focal point of an explanation of the material world from outside that world to within it, and to make its substance accessible for human efforts.

Wonder brings things closer. It does invite us to pause and to postpone immediate action, but we pause ‘by’: the strangeness is discovered in our own surroundings, like an element beneath our feet, before our eyes and in our hands. The process of demystification and rationalizing, which started with the Presocratics, does not get stuck in introverted musings, but becomes the technical manageability of things. Rationalizing appears to be for a large part operationalizing; we have learned to connect the extend in which we understand and can explain something, to the extend in which we master it technically.

One of the Presocratics, Thales of Miletus (640 – 550) thought of water as the most important element. ‘All is water’, he said, but also accredited to him is the maxim ‘all is full of gods’. There are anecdotes about his life that illustrate his absent-mindedness, and others that must prove, how sober and practical this ancient engineer was in several fields: astronomy, economics and hydraulics. He predicted a solar eclipse and a bad wine harvest and was able to make profit from this knowledge. He cut off a bend in a river to let an army go through. His dream of the all-explaining water apparently went alongside a practical mastery of this element. When everything is water, everything has to be predictable and manageable according to the laws of water; but when everything at the same time is also full of gods, the wonder about this primal element will never find a definitive way out to a complete technical submission or a total self-evidence.

Elements remain things that we pause by. That means in the first place, that they grab our interest and incite our wonder. A meeting with the elements perplexes us and makes us contemplative. Pausing means furthermore, that we for some time halt our activities and our urge to intervene. ‘Elementary’ we call those things, that by their own quality ask for our respect. It is not without reason that they were once represented as untouchable gods. An element is that which resists further treatment, what must be left to its own wisdom and structure and cannot with impunity be subjected to our capriciousness.

Also in that sense water is an element by which we have to pause; it makes us hesitate. Historically that hesitation can be interpreted as a certain conservatism in dealing with the elements. From Thales till the eighteenth century not much has changed therein. The classic symbolism of water does not end with in antiquity, but also outside of the classical culture has a historical validity and exemplary worth. The attention water as element asks and the respect it demands, are defined by the convincing way in which it manifests itself as an independent world and an impressive force.

In musing about water the mind experiences the human powerlessness against elemental occurrences. Elementary is what refutes the illusion of human omnipotence with its own manifestation. The wonder about water is a realization of the limits that come with the manageability of the elements, and of the multiple uses it has within those limits.

Translated in terms of technology this wonder means a focused attention for the particularities of the element and is respect: the willingness to obey the elements own laws when using it. ‘Nature can only be conquered by obeying it’, Francis Bacon wrote in a time in which the immerging sciences could not yet dream of replacing nature. The discovery of systematic laws is an invitation to obey them and to consult with the matter. The ‘soft technology’ is determined in this consultation and is besides some human cleverness also a tribute to the elements. In ancient times this respect had taken the shape of a cult.

The ancient technology of sailing, to name one example, does not only let be the divine power of water, but seems to be imbedded in expressions of pious reverie for the powers that control water. Sailing has never been taken for granted. It always coincided with the feeling, that something daring was undertaken, not only in relation to one’s own life and personal safety, but also in the sense that it remained an expression of over-confidence against an element, that invites us to pause and limits the human expansion.

In the first century before Christ, Horace says after quite an innocent sea trip to Greece, that the human species, cheeky enough to endeavor anything, is plummeting itself into a prohibited venture by going to sea. Mortals have mastered air and fire and also for water they won’t stop. ‘In vain God has in his wisdom separated the lands by the ocean as a border, when the godforsaken ships still dare to jump over waters that should have been inaccessible.’ If we weigh this maxim without poetical exaggeration and a conservative pathos, then still remains a starting point, with which contemporaries could agree: the wariness for the sacredness of the elements.

Water is a force that needs to be reconciled with this way of exploitation. ‘Sailing is necessary’, but it needs to continually be paired with excuses to the forces, like the primitive hunt too and the rituals of hunters are not without a salute to the wild animals. Libations were poured out and prayers directed to the winds. Without their benevolent cooperation the bold technological undertaking of seafaring would be doomed to failure. With all his haughtiness and power man still is dependent on the elements. According to an ancient legend the Persian king Xerxes, driven by a very high esteem of his own power, but also conceding to the coercion of an archaic representation, had the Hellespont tortured, when a storm there had destroyed his ship bridge and his plans had fallen into water. The god acted against another, a windy ego against the elemental force of the storm.

The symbolism of the holy water is as complicated as the element is all around. In it, the violence of the waves has a place together with the depth of the sea, the clarity of the lake, the squishiness of the puddle, the velocity of a mountain creek and the innocence of the source. Water is a living element. When Thales said that everything is water, he must have had living creatures in mind in the first place. In the ancient symbolism water is the element that brings forth and renews life. Life is a gift from water. Living water means new life and a renewal of the old life.

The ritual use of water is steeped in the same respect for the element as its technical exploitation. The ritual washing in living water is more an invitation to symbolical thinking about the element than an effective cleansing. The ritual cleansing activates the symbolism of the stream that passes and carries away. The cleansing water, according to this symbolical way of thinking, takes with it all that is alien to the one being submerged into it; it gives him back his proper and undivided identity, the one he had before he got smudged by history. As an element water makes a fertile connection with the primal time and the beginning. ‘All is water’ can mean not only that everything arose from water, but also that everything can be renewed by the element that represents the primal time and with it the model with which everything should be measured. Washing is, like many old rituals, an attempt to wipe away the accretions and the alienation of history and to connect with the pure beginning. In the depth of water history is broken down and the innocence of the prehistoric times restored.

It probably is a too romantic illusion to think that in a technological age this archaic symbolism of water still has any serious and practical meaning. The question is, how seriously it was taken in old times, so before the time that a romantic interpretation had laid itself like a second skin over the symbols. When we can speak about something like a ‘lost identity’, it cannot be restored in a symbolic way. It is doubtable, if this was literally the meaning of the ancient rituals, and even if such terms were even conceivable in an archaic context. Maybe there is more of a homage to the elements than a searching for the own identity. Unmaking history in a symbolical way isn’t necessarily an expression of an irrational desire to start anew and to give up the achievements of reason. The gesture can also be seen as a re-evaluating of human actions by the laws of the elements.

The ancient rituals can be interpreted as a constant precaution to, as the Stoic philosophers would say, live in accordance with nature, in harmony with and parallel to the seasons, the movements of celestial bodies and the elements. The rhythm of life in this symbolism isn’t determined by a self-powered decision of man, who regards himself as the centre of the universe, but in dialogue with a rhythm outside of him. The world does not revolve around man, but man is a late-comer in an already revolving world and needs to adjust to its rhythm and laws to maintain himself. He is more the witness and careful inhabitant of the world than a master of it.

The ritual cleansing with living water fits in the same frame as the careful consulting of the phase of the moon and the stars in agricultural and nautical enterprises of decisive importance, as the studying of the flight of birds or listening to the predicting rustle in the tops of trees. This whole technology of cautiousness, embedded in a contemplative stance in the world, represents a respect for the elements, that in later times was perhaps neglected too much for the benefit of a maximum of exploitation, which more and more took on a character of overtaxing. The way in which in our youngest past streaming water is used as a self-transporting sewer, in hindsight bares all the characteristics of what was considered hubris in ancient times.

An example of that is told by Ovid in his playful frame tales surrounding the mythical metamorphoses, in which water plays a strikingly large part as a medium of transformation. When the goddess Latona, floating over the earth with her two children in search of a cool drink had arrived at a clear lake, she wanted to scoop the water with her hand. But the Lycian country-folk, who were working in the vicinity, prevented the goddess from quenching her thirst. ‘One sip of water would be as nectar to me, and I will feel, that with it I’ve been given life again’, she assured them. But without hearing the warning nestled within the word ‘nectar’ –an indication, that the woman knew this drink of the gods by experience- and from the consideration that the elements could be no one’s personal property (usus communis aquarum est –water is for common use) the herders kept the goddess away from the water. They even jumped into the lake to muddy the water with their stamping feet and make it undrinkable. As a punishment for that, the goddess turned them into frogs, sentenced to forever flounder in brackish water and quack without being understood.

The temptation is great to use this story as an instructive fable on modern relationships, and point out spiteful Lycians in our own environment, that muddy the elements. The question has been talked about often and there’s no shortage of accusatory pointed fingers. But whoever should be transformed into a frog, it is clear, that the symbolism of water, which until recently had a distinctly poetic character, has in the last few years undergone a thorough change. No natural disaster has caused that, nor a sudden change in symbolical thinking, but human neglect in regards to the side-effects of a somewhat too hasty and messy technological development. Running water no longer seem to be the source and image of life, but of death, not of cleansing, but of decay. The clear beginning phase has become a brackish end stage. Instead of an element, water is in danger of becoming a waste-product with the fortunate characteristic, that it takes care of its own transportation. A communal property degenerates into a public sewer. The friendly babbling brook of yesteryear flees the scene ashamed and bubbling with poison. The nymphs that gracefully danced on the shores have changed into wrinkly furies with snake-hair; drooling slime and venom they preach death and destruction.

 

Still, the attention for elements has not disappeared in a technological age. That is only in a very little part the merit of man. What is elemental will maintain itself through the entire history. If it is forgotten, it will return and present itself again. The historical, history-making man can only separate himself from the elements a couple of steps. When he goes too far, he lapses into an uninhabitable artificiality and he will be haunted by furies. The history of technology is a continuous, haughty experiment with the length of that distance. Water too is involved in it and it’s been made mostly subordinate to technology and the will to reduce the world and the elements to means. But the archaic, cautious dealing with the element has as it were spliced off the technological existence and taken a place in a ‘second life’, that hasn’t been caricaturized by our will, namely recreation. What water was in ancient cleansing rituals, it has become again in the modern way of spending time off: a recreating, recreative element. In the time in which we relax, we can afford a pace of life, in which elemental things get a place they’re more entitled to. The tension of a match is part of it, but also the disinterested interest in movements that do not lead to anything spectacular, but only invite us to contemplate.

The place that water takes in recreation, is a sign of its elemental indispensability. Elements cannot be passed by in history. If they are passed over, history has evaporated into poisonous clouds. When they are driven out of technology and economy, they’ll return in luxury, like for example the fire place or in the alternative life of time off, and give those more content. The further we are separated in our ‘first life’ from the elements, the greater is our need for recreation. In recreation the technological alienation from the elements is being undone and on a small scale the history of the human position to water repeats: the surprised contemplation of the element, the battle against the waves and the wind, waged with the most primitive of means, the relaxed succumbing to their overpower and the endless, goalless drifting on the back of the water. In this recreational match the means are reduced to the elemental.

Psychologists might be a bit too quick in talking about a ‘regressus in uterum’ and a drifting on the amniotic fluid. But when we emphasize the elemental character of water, by this interpretation man again seems to become the centre of the contemplation too much. That water is an element means that man could attribute an endless amount of meanings to it, but only based on the fact, that the water itself is the centre, and not subjected to an ‘egotrip’. It’s not man that makes water, it’s water that makes man and invites him to contemplation. Drifting on water, listening to the waves or with his eyes following the stream he is confronted with something that in force and duration surpasses his own existence and on which he depends.