excerpted from Water Writing - an essay

Arriving below at the Japanese poem one third of which I quote above as the title of this excerpt, the reader may appreciate anew the problems of containment raised by all our excerpts. You have here roughly the first third of an essay on water. I will add that the essay's three, though in length unequal, sections - "Properties," "Rights," "Imagining" - mean to bring ethical and aesthetic reflections together into a provisional reciprocity or fragile congruence or case that might help persuade us in the private and public confusions of the global water crisis to see and share water as we must share our creative powers. What you have here breaks off largely before I reach most of the examples drawn from literature and other arts to support my argument. But the scope is visible, like kinships among some of my characters who appear later as well, such as Lincoln, Leonardo da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, George Perkins Marsh, Primo Levi, and Stanley Crawford.

1. PROPERTIES

Water can hardly belong to us, though it is almost everywhere in us. Which reminds you and me at least that it is almost everywhere else. Or was before we were. It is one of our properties, passing through, as if we were one of its. And if we are one of its properties - for it helps us live - where can that take us? Isn't it pretty simple, water? We better drink it and better not breathe it. Soon done with it, we forget our need, yet come back, revisit, and may wonder at this continuous substance in the offing held by sameness, concealed by distance, contained by surface or habit, qualified by quantity, and necessarily shapeable. In pipes and underground. In cloudburst, surf, high sea, gutter, sink, mouth. And in its insubstantial yet strikingly reflective surface, its standing depth, beneath us, in us, beyond us. I sound like the sage; is this what water does, beckon, get personal, think for us, ask for trouble, insinuate or flatter, while persisting ruthlessly inanimate?

And so we build its need with ours. Or I do today - every one of these days (February, March, April, May, 2004) in New York, trusting my own self-love and the city, and water's still widespread, selfless, and apparent simplicity, to help me think sometimes with my senses. But as bather, gazer, diver, thinker, water-proof clock-watcher, often half-conscious consumer of bottled water, wader-in, or in even a canoe or ship of my eye-watering memory and perspiring future water- borne (as we say of some diseases), I'm not done with its quite indivisible surfaces and its lights and awful lid and waiting dimness through which gravity draws a stone, a ring, the pages of a magazine, a history of waste and communal amnesia; nor even as the deluge clearing and cleaning the Earth has water quite seemed to me day to day first and fundamental, though for all its unbreatheable compounding of oxygen it is a naked medium for me, a naked, night-swimmably different, a freeing "element" on the skin, its look, what it is surroundingly like an outside that is inside.

Used and gone, as if I were the one, not water, it is at hand taken or not; noted, or unseen, back again in one of its passing shapes, heard. Taken mostly for granted where I live in the northeast corridor of the United States, though not by me in catchments of words. Like memories worth letting go of watching out my window in winter great gray-white ice-slabs rafting the harbor, planing the East River chop; in buoyant fantasy me standing on one, having learned and forgot and learned again why ice floats, from my father, once a chemist, who told me this in the late 1930s - and before I discovered like a discoverer that this wasn't a river technically though I must have divined early water's need weirdly like ours to associate itself with just about any low thing, our powers, our stories (our writing, which is also not stories but "telling everything at once," I reread in a slender book I come upon again by chance on my own shelves called Practicalities, by Marguerite Duras, who has much to say about water and women and men that I must reassemble for myself),

Marguerite Duras, Practicalities. Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jerome Beaujour, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1987), p. 27. 1 so one of water's properties built into its unsimple peculiar life-partnering is that it reminds us - blindly, seemingly proffering its blankness essentially to us who understand, that we are given to imagining. Diving or hesitating to dive, looking far down at an interior at once accessible (though, if we dive in without serious weights, a rubbery medium that seals me in myself).

Water has value beyond our survival, I will try to find it in me to show at this time of crisis, as Thoreau said of life and the dull jobs he chose to see around him. Water lately a global value, yet unweighed "some of the time" among us who stock our minds with fresh schools of fish it almost seems or spring water labeled attractively and who are like air-conditioned, spring-fed drivers enjoying saguaro in bloom or hours later in the distance coming up fourteen hundred feet off the after all porous desert floor a volcanic plug Navajos name Ship Rock (the myth of which I once appropriated).

Women and Men (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1993), pp.198-215; and Ship Rock: A Place - From "Women and Men," A Novel in Progress (Concord, NH: William Ewert, 1980). 2

[ link to Gleason on the Ship Rock chapter in History as Accretion and Excavation -eds. ]

Weighing water's shadow and silk, its rawly inherent outside and (if not partable, dippable) inside, its apparent stretch, its formless appearances (and how it runs over and through and is continuously seeking containment yet not perhaps in its form-assuming models specially for us to learn to form it), I hear water called a commonwealth. A virtual property of water or right given it which translates into a debate and chaotic non-debate of keeping one's self-reliant (but with a support system) own profitable counsel, in which I try to locate myself:

:as I learn water could belong to some of us more than others some of the time or all of the time (as our most interesting, elusive, and high-profile President perhaps apocryphally put it in a related context but off the record, whose mind it comes back to me his lawyer friend Herndon said was not subject to refraction). This growing strangeness of what is happening to water as ownable property - a Hold, a Sell - lately springs not so much from water's odd properties as from us who are (depending on whose personal experience you trust) vessels 60 to 70 percent water more or less (and whose arguments don't always hold water, I add, since "Properties" (above) shares boundaries at once with "Attributes" and with "Assets owned" by persons) whom water reflects like other surfaces with its own.

I pour into water like a leaky vessel what values come to me (a habit obviously one of our properties surfacing in us) admired, reproduced, curative, echoing, a depth not superficial but in practice depth upon depth to build on. Isn't water fluidity itself? - fluidity itself, a perfect motion, seamless texture; dangerous (because you don't want to interrupt fluidity yet you don't want to be taken over by yourself or style), changeable, half invisible, unless we stop and look, which you have the right to think water "teaches" us to do - recalling the early-6th-century B.C. thinker (and statesman!) Thales who we think imagined that everything is water: which also meant, Forget mythology (with, as Anaxagoras suggested, its monarchical vocabulary), while encouraging solider Aristotle to think Earth alive.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, trans. from the French (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 119-29. 3

Fact and subject, glittering, light, dark, steely, already too encompassing: but while the truism attributed to Heraclitus is technically so, the reverse is, too - you always step into the same river, like the Teacher who can't help repeating himself, or writer, or physician. In rivulets and drains, in a drop in the bucket or from a faucet a drop stretched in its stronger-than-rubber skin till it lets go to cohere in "of all possible shapes the one having the least surface for a given volume." Workable surface and depth a nearly unique union that may be dark or hiding something important makes water drop or swing through the mind.

Kenneth S. Davis and John Arthur Day, Water, Water The Mirror of Science (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), pp.34-5. 4 I am at sea (something like what is in us); in bay, lake, or like the Hudson and East (so-called) "rivers" that I grew up with and neither of which I ever recall stepping into: estuaries salt and fresh sometimes flowing both ways bringing ten-pound striped bass to city fishermen casting their bait with a good heavy rod into the Hudson from the parking lot at 125th Street, several rods propped against the railing as my bike coasts past.

But no turning back - I've just begun. Yet have not at my age the right - who gave me this slippery non-right? - to be unclear. At least when I get to where I want to go. By hearing what I say and building on it. For example, that water can hardly belong to us because it is everywhere in us.

If we say a person has depth, it's not six feet under we're thinking, is it distantly of water? Which, granted, is where we go to sooner or later as bone or ash. Maybe wells fascinate because their deepness is both water and earth. Yet say that to someone who's been "taught by pain /... what good water's worth; / If... /...with a famish'd boat's crew [you'd] had your berth, /... You'd wish yourself where Truth is - in a well."

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, Stanza lxxxiv, Complete Poetical Works of Byron, ed. Paul Elmer Moore, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), p. 784. 5

We dip into water, it is beautiful and too much, reserve it behind huge dams; displace it mysteriously with our bodies, our forms, store it in New York on top of our apartment buildings in quite fine wood-shingled, up-close not very hygienic-looking, cylindrical "water towers" that I used to photograph in the 70's, an older craft touch or art here and there across the outline of my city. Conscious barely of gravity and not at all of how strange it is that water expands when it freezes, we listen to it negotiate our pipes, and in city and country course along our ditches. The waiter writes H2O on his pad and returns with two glasses of water, so easy to poison. HO it was assumed to be for much of the nineteenth century, and what it could carry was as misunderstood as that it carried malaria - from Sardinian swamps, for example, that developed when hundreds of trees were clear-cut on the mountains, and rainfall and melt-off ran down in torrents, "creating" marshes that needed to be drained (and after "the War" resort developers did); and cholera today in Capetown neighborhoods where the poor are charged for the water that delivers it. As for this buzz-magic infra-structure that delivers the water.

I keep an eye on container ships, barges afloat upon this universal solvent inert in that it is not changed chemically by most of the substances it dissolves: the very property that let living cells evolve until, after unthinkable millions of years in the sea, that salt solution our home was replaced by tissue fluids, blood plasma, liquids living in cell interiors; and life could emerge into the air. I make a mental note to reread a story that's based on this by Italo Calvino.

Water we need to drink. To water fields and livestock. Wash. (Which often alters the form of my body I feel within me.) Yet I recall a fellow swimmer in a penthouse pool who continued his harangue that water was bad for the scalp from the diving board on into a backstroke lap and a half we did together. It passes through my hand even my fingers tight together, it has its own gravity. It's pretty much available so far in my experience, my northeast United States - my society; but it doesn't seem to belong to us. It passes through, through harbors and even lakes, pipes, pores, bladder, and eyes, though for years it scarcely moved in the lower Hudson and you wouldn't want to swim across, though I know two men who did (though nobody 30 years ago or recently living in a houseboat at the 79th Street boat basin). My words not germane perhaps to "disaster areas" or "desert places" or dry country farming in Hopi country where you plant beans 16 inches down where the sandy soil gets cool, no more than that - that is the water - but an old man there told me it was the absence of water that persuaded the Hopi originally to settle there on the mesas because then they would have to keep the ceremonies going. I have due respect for that historical account because it respects water's very absence.

If it had a need, water would need us to be part of life. Though some have called water life itself, at least the actually "living water" or spirit-bond Jesus recommends to the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well in John 4:10. In water, we often learn that imagination need not bear us away violently into transcendence but grounds our facts and is worth heeding even in our inexact impressions.

Almost alive, what does water teach? Not a thing. Not a thing except what we want, or would grant or yield, or would use its breadth for or seeming soft wateriness to float our transcendence needs. "Our simple wish for there being more to life," the poet Paul Muldoon puts it, ambiguously imaging that inspiration in "The fixity of running water" and the unplumbable in what we may call shallow.

Paul Muldoon, "Our Lady of Ardboe," lines 14-16, in Poems 1968-1998 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 50-51. 6 Water hides the deeps, lights the shallows, horizons vastness, gives back surfaces like us, and can seem plural as layers our worshipped or excoriated sciences patiently name. Water we hope self-cleansing like a self releases questions some of the time as if it had contained them:

Water mirror:
Making you suspect
Your own face a bit.

Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, trans. Bownas and Thwaite, with introduction by Bownas, (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974), p.177. 7

Like my life (which water can't clean up but must needs support), it can drown an idea or inspire one (out of perhaps reciprocal waters in me): cover the land between France and England from the time of the Ice Age with a channel, one day inspiring a tunnel, engineered at great cost, now tolerated because though not a money-maker it's there beneath unthinkable weight like an idea or doom; while water does not exactly urge me not to write about water - or, as a "true American who" "[knows] something of the facts," not to walk on it without skis and a motorboat however full of Feelings these days and fields (that once were streams) of Consciousness and ideas that may (as Henry Adams put it) "[survive] only as art,"

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918), pp. 384-5. 8 i.e. against the metric needs of survival.

Life is a value most of the time, like the thought of rights, "The Rights of Man" even, from which into that all men's story Billy Budd is impressed. Like life, water seems a curious "accident." We know strangely little about this unlikely pairing of hydrogen and oxygen, one highly flammable, the other not at all though it supports combustion. A coming together apparently through an explosion of radiation when the sun initially ignited.

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos. Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 42. 9 A history of the mobile earth is in water's lens, chemistry unforeseen and in the lab proceeding like underground art to report from time to time on supercooling which gives water among fluids a surprising, hardly to be predicted increased capacity to absorb heat. Yet in the face of observation we devise catchments of symbolism for water to suit our tastes (fertile, unconscious, flood furiously cleaning house, sexually male, fluidly female, transient).

Water opens its idea indiscriminately. Is "water" "a thing like...stone whose conduct can be predicted"?

W.H. Auden, "In Praise of Limestone," Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage, 1964), lines 80-81. 10 One thing I know, but more from sorrows I've heard about: "Water, is taught by thirst," observes Emily Dickinson (as "Land - by the Oceans passed. /... Birds, by the Snow").

Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems, ed. Thomas H, Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), # 135, lines 1-2,6, p. 63. 11 Thirst, land, pressure, flood level, distance and absence (for "The water is wide," the song lovingly tells us, "neither have I wings to fly," which applies in fact but not spirit to Henry Adams returning like a Tyrean trader to a land that "knew no more than [he]" how it was changing.

Adams, p. 237.12 Water brings everything up: breath, birth, blood, wave, dry, wet, sweat, the tributary and canal net circulating cyclic inside us that we could no more drink than the matrix sea unless unsalted by evaporation or filtered by reverse osmosis (prohibitively expensive and fossil-fueled of course).

And water perhaps a more ruthless friend of gravity than we brings everything down: the leeching rain, featherlike drainage patterns in Sumatra, meandering channels, a waterfall in Zaire, current, river to the sea: while, in the midst or too inside of a subject building my way out with water materials, to me water comes also as an ocean of deposits recording how sea snails and corals and microscopic algae make almost heartbreaking use of the sea's wide and deep resources. ("Oh ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired...whose ears are...fed too much with cloying melody," recalls the sea's, water's, restorative properties shaped, of course, by rock and wind, all of which I suppose Keats markets, but free).

"On the Sea," lines 9-12.13 Extremes of monsoon and Marvell's "deserts of vast eternity," but "eddies of meaning"

A.R. Ammons, "Corson's Inlet," Corson's Inlet. A Book of Poems (Ithaca: Cornell, 1965), p. 5. 14 still more evoke a supposed language place where water, knowing and gifted, bespeaks a bridge, even actual metaphor. Motion, absence's too, need, haunt, flow (which our hardly New Age Socrates somewhere finds a ubiquitous source observed more than legendary) we can't stop implicating water in as mind, if only ours - or Consequences in Stephen Wolfram's analysis of eddy systems "intrinsically generated inside the system itself."

Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champagne, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002), p.381. 15 Like us, absorbing and suspect, its flow to be strategically diverted to trouble our neighbor or feed ourselves. Darkly, patently, profitably dammed, for dams interrupt water in order to isolate its power: as water interrupts land, dissolves, renews, shaping a gorge as profoundly as Darwin's earthworms turn the earth of English hills.

Water goes deep as if it were depth, reflects (gives back) or conceals surface (several-leveled in Melville's "clean-swept deck...above the waterline; whereas the vast mass of our fabric, with all its store-rooms of secrets forever slides along far under the surface");

Melville referring to White-Jacket, speaking of the ship as a microcosm of society, "Notes and Commentary," Billy Budd, Sailor. An Inside Narrative, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) p.134. 16 or on it, "A swan and its reflection / on the water's black surface, / a perfect emblem of peace" in full irony belied by the price of it in W. G. Sebald's poem "Dark Night Sallies Forth," a tension between the forgottenness of war horror and the curious adequacy of second-hand memory threatening us with its persistence and with the space-time imagination the non-witness has found like thinking; an uncollected unconscious below "the surface" including dreams the interpretation of which ranges random like a lottery and, if "rivers overflowing speak plenty," as Sir Thomas Browne (seeing in dreams proof of the soul) ponders pharaoh's sleep,

"On Dreams," The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Charles Sayle, vol. iii (Edinburgh: The English Library, John Grant, 1912), p. 551. Helene Renard, The Dream and the Naifs [with Vilem Stransky, Naive Art: Language and Mirror of the Soul ] trans. Barbara Allemand, Kathleen Chevalier, Thomas Kessler (Paris: Editions Max Fourny, 1983). Vast majority of paintings include water: unmistakably part of the landscape of dream and of the subconscious. 17 plenty of trouble I would guess as well if you fear losing your home. Or (day or night) water is indifferent, not even that - Past itself, as I recollect Sebald's image in The Rings of Saturn of the River Blyth near the coast silted up, and the bridge and emptiness, all opening a low, long, half missed vista of disuse associated with a long, slow passage of time marking a mood which is of history not recovered from.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions: New York, 1998), pp. 137-8. 17a Its miscellany embracing my own memory of the dangerous "sprinting tide" in Morecambe Bay, the Irish Sea at the turn coming in so rapidly that shellfish gatherers can't get back in time. "Sink or swim," for interruption (which a dam does to water) seems threateningly in return implied by water in drowning and flood (sudden not only in AZ but anywhere nowadays) as well as interruption erased by what is ahead of me or out there. Yet day or night ideas of fluidity itself (swift, slow) and of waste and mixture, we spin off or from or out of water, and indirectly in the field of it and the beauty of chance, like hope across an expanse of glittering surface at sunrise. Contained, continuous occurs to me: meaning, "I have more," or "There is more," or "There is time," but...

Unthinkably wide and seeing, running away from me / with me, even if quite still; tranquil and dread, I mix parts of speech; channellable, meandering not by magic or just by chance but for geo-riverine causes you can plot,

E.C. Pielou, Fresh Water (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 119ff. 18 an innocent field if you want to label water with some immaturity or carelessness you find in others incessantly. "Ocean stream," or The Sea Around Us I so recall but more the word "tragic" which, when I was a difficult college senior once upon a time Henrietta Ripperger, a kind writer (friend of my mother's - mine, too, I hardly grasped - and published in The New Yorker at $140 for a story), a woman four times my age, applied to Rachel Carson's book but to the sea itself, "tragic," a word I dismissed as sentimental, her human and not even literary word (said to me and me alone in the kitchen) - tragic! - the ocean? - impersonal depths, time, and remoteness...breath-taking, resourceful variety of the ocean described by this other writer Carson whom I liked for her knowledge and subject (perhaps sense of different times - as she points out, we had tides before we had water - my own miscellaneous memory of the dangerous "sprinting tide" in Morecambe Bay, the Irish Sea at the turn coming in so rapidly that shellfish gatherers can't get back in time) missing (myself) then in Carson a "tragic" I grew to understand in time, and a sea for weeks aboard ship of a mind-calming sameness because endlessly articulated, for we ask water to mean something and it does.

Detoured before I'm almost started - by "a long-legged fly" whom Yeats of course does not include "upon [this] stream" among his select great figures spied along the Emersonian "Representative" bias making history and in their creative silence isolated in order that "civilization may not sink"; no, it's our own Lincoln who detains me. He would have served just as well as Yeats' Michelangelo ("on that scaffolding," "his hand [moving] to and fro" even imagining a sonnet he would write later with that learned hand, though dismayed that "The Flood" [laid on with too-wet plaster] had begun "to mildew so the figures could barely be distinguished").

Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl, 2nd edition, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1999, p. 57. 19 Or Yeats' Caesar (contemplating spread-out maps, "His eyes fixed upon nothing, / A hand under his head").

"Long-Legged Fly," Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 327-8; compare "A civilization...like some great tragic person..." in A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 268. 20 Our big-foot Lincoln still longer legged, who wrote at least as well as Yeats' artist and general, stepping onto these moving waters inseparable from thoughts that took Lincoln where he wanted to go. (How can we tell the river from the water that remakes its banks, shrinks from them, sweeps over them, shapes landscape that in turn (but what turn?) contains it - and how from water tell the whirlpools Leonardo that great engineer and would-be river-reviser studied as he studied us and in us Earth's hydrological cycle virtually? We are of Nature. We remake it.)

That is its property in us. As a young candidate for the Legislature Lincoln had plans as we will see for his own river, the Sangamon (which he is said to have said he knew better than anyone). Which is not to sentimentalize his ten-dollar-a-month stint as an "uneducated" twenty-two-year-old flatboatman a few months shy of the outset of his career; nor his attested handiwork as evidence he was a more than adequate boatwright. Nor his turn as an assistant pilot if one wants proof that the shoals and bends and meanders of his river (which, to get it out to the Illinois more quickly, he proposed straightening!) were (whatever he said) known to him anything like as well as a Mississippi River pro knew those hundreds and hundreds of miles the memory of which far exceeds knowing Old and New Testaments forward and backward (reckons Mark Twain) or "every house and window and lamppost and big and little sign" of "the longest street in New York" so "you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night..."

Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper, 1917), pp. 107-8. 21

Plying my theme upstream, downstream, I know less, then more. Fixing its fluidity testing its surface, I zoom on the water-strider insect to this day running with long high steps along the firm surface of the Sangamon or a pond in Florida knowing where it's going - or weigh both the odd property of water itself that can support a razor blade, a needle, things much heavier than water which has "a tensile strength close to that of some steels,"

Davis and Day, p. 35.22 and its property of expanding when it freezes (beginning foresightedly at 4 degrees C.) no matter where you step in or on - anywhere, even where I'm not; to say nothing of becoming lighter "than itself" when frozen, which I suppose saved the dark depths of the sea from a diminished life. I learned just the other day that the molecular structure of water supercooled opens out the spaces between its parts - a tetrahedral packing less dense than that of the warmer liquid - which explains why colder is lighter and (first shown me by my long late father) why ice doesn't sink.

Peter Weiss, "Wet 'N' Wild. Explaining Water's Weirdness," Science News, Jan. 24, 2004, 58-60. 23

Can novelists use this insight, must it turn into quaint metaphor? (I learn from my 14-year-old son that in 1901 lower East Side tenement dwellers if they didn't have a quarter for the gas meter could counterfeit one out of ice to slip in the slot. Robert Frost, Garcia Marquez, a fragment of Greek pass in and out of my wet brain whose very wetness may help to remember or postpone these passages.) I know more, then less, it and I are outside and inside, and yes I am over my head in this simple substance. "If you wish to drown, don't torture yourself with shallow water," my one Bulgarian proverb has it. (Who wishes to drown? Many have wished, but not me: I see that horror, that awful, gasping sinal surrender and the vast sinking downward, but almost conversely also the water rising and nowhere to go, a ship, a water-filling compartment with an inch of air between me and the ceiling.) Yet my bark canoe slips uncannily over shallows.

To the young Primo Levi (who much later plunged to his death down a stairwell), the "enchanted glass of beakers and test tubes... intimidat[ing]," breakable, and almost untouchable reveals itself as "a substance different from all others...full of mystery and caprice. It is similar in this," this chemist observes, "to water, which also has no kindred forms: but water is bound to [us], indeed to life (or I should say our earthly life which life elsewhere in the universe would probably have to share several characteristics of in order to be defined as life)

Wolfram, p. 825.24, by a long-lasting familiarity, by a relationship of multifarious necessity, due to which its uniqueness is hidden beneath the crust of habit."

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken, 1984), pp. 24-5. 25 Or beneath that "lid of glass" that Emily Dickinson spies far down a well (I must revisit).

Dickinson, #1400, line 6, p. 599.26 Deep even to get to, it occurs to me, while granting a poignant authority to Levi yet contrasting his "uniqueness" to Dickinson's absolute surface - for it occurs to me that like fluidity itself, so surface with all its attraction and changes with the light and our misunderstandings of it, may come from water, whose surface is rarely still. Good surface lessons for writers who...

On one of the "frozen rivers" Pablo Neruda mistakes for "broad white highways" as he leaves the outskirts of Moscow, a fisherman "like a fly on a glossy tablecloth" looks through the hole drilled in the ice to find "the buried current." And drops his hook, waits for hours, and for what? He is like a writer, Neruda explains, who must find the river, patiently look for the deep water, pull out some poor fish...

Memoirs, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp.197-8. 27 Am I still speaking of water or of that which is out of sight? On a winter morning Thoreau will "go in search of water, if that be not a dream...[what was] the liquid and trembling surface of the pond...so sensitive to every breath...[now] solid."

Walden; or Life in the Woods [et al] (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 547. 28 It is a window for him; he expected to see what was there. Other water images conceal what is Under, or open it as what is to be dreaded, as we shall see, thirsty for what moves us.

In 1948 under a glaring sun, I trod the searing, majestic crest above Hoover Dam's spillway twelve years after its completion. A Something near me. A vastness, elegant as someone else's death. What, at almost 18, would my part in all this be? Where was everybody? A pinpoint of a man in overalls along a walkway down there. An impregnable monument, taking the measure of the Colorado's canyons and deep-intrenched meanders at considerable risk of flash floods, as I learned, to say nothing of the half-seen topography itself. The damage difficult to see, though, was to the fish, the water chemistry, the downstream bed scoured to bedrock because of the changed flow rhythm of the river, our joint stock.

I imagine - not unlike imagining my rights periodically - the construction of the great early dams

Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold. The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water (New York: The New Press, 2002), pp. 243-4. 29 and other mammoth works like the Gunnison River diversion tunnel (undertaken to divert the Colorado River after the 1902 Reclamation Act). The idea was to bring farmers to the American desert and make it bloom, which it did. Bowed upstream against the Salt River current, Roosevelt Dam above Phoenix a 280-foot high giant soon to be dwarfed; Elephant Butte on the Rio Grande; Grand Coulee and Bonneville on the Columbia, with gigantic gorge reservoirs and locks to one side for ships to pass - come back to locks - and "ladders" that in theory enable salmon to swim onward (through what became unceremoniously a series of slackwater lakes, but...) power, drinking water, irrigation, the scale of construction "grand," even the idea - the list seems incredible. I study diagrams in my much thumbed copy of Condit's American Building Art, Vol. 2, and get that sinking feeling where from the downstream side looking back over the dam face at the surface of the reservoir, water depth becomes height, dreadful as a vast disguising surface - I recall the walls of quarries, fjords - the seclusion and sudden awful light through the trees when you get there - dreadful, mostly lifeless Crater Lake in Oregon, its chill purity, frightful and beautiful, its ancient depth.

Locks show people and process close up. (Locks pace canals, and our own 363-mile-long Erie, descending 660 feet through eighty-three "massive" stone locks and passing over eighteen "stately aqueducts"

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham. A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 430 - a book I read and reread with the greatest admiration. 30 floated New York Governor Clinton's political career if we speak of flow as if it were not struggle. Indeed, water business led to our original Constitutional Convention which arguably developed from Washington's call for an Annapolis convention to obtain support for his Potomac Company's plan to dig a canal that would open routes to Virginia, Maryland, and westward.) Big spectacular dams could make you nervous, as if it mattered, the insupportable assertion of control over such water force.

You have a right to such feelings. The 1920 federal water power act (Boulder Dam one result) opened to the feds the allotting of water for irrigation, homes, and electrical energy, thus narrowing control.

Charles and Mary Beard, A Basic History of the United States (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), pp. 446-7. 31 Yet the Tennessee Valley Authority - FDR's TVA - identified in its project an entire river system for the first time ("...the power...of running streams..." [ Lincoln's italics]

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. ii, ed. R.P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 440. 32). By the mid-1990s our 50,000 photogenic dams represent an engineering success embracing irrigation, electric power generation, water supply, and flood control. This was the New Deal, generous, political, impersonally hopeful.

But Alice Outwater has shown how an engineered river system may wreck "the cleansing and nutrient-filled annual flood pulse" by arbitrarily evening out the "[n]atural extremes of flow, temperature, and sediment transport." It's devastating, but she has much to say. She is a hydrologist, wide-ranging, distinguished (among a later, younger group of excellent, communal writers on water and the ecological web). Not given to facile trope, she speaks still of water as "the blood of land - always in motion, from the rain to the mountaintops, through the forests and plains to the sea, and so to the clouds again" - yet so "simplified" "by dredging, by damming, by channeling" that we may be surprised to see her actual conclusions from this analysis of the effect of upper or lower level water release from a dam, and of what happens to deposits that sink and remain in the reservoir, and so on. The interruptive clamp of the big dam upon the accumulating weight, the deep reality, of the river and its natural course and cycle, becomes an intervention with effects often not foreseen.

Alice Outwater, Water. A Natural History. (New York: Basic Books. 1996).