I love everything that flows.
"I love everything that flows," said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I woke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
***
In water everything is 'dissolved', every form is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a 'sign', not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth. . . . Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores - even if only for a moment - the integrity of the dawn of things.
- Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion
***
Jove's own sky cannot yield sufficient water
to ease his wrath: Neptune, his sky-blue brother,
aids him with waves of fresh auxiliaries.
The tyrant calls his rivers to assemble
beneath his roof and tells them only this:
"No point in lengthy battlefield harangues.
Pour yourselves into this with all your strength,
that's what is needed! Open all your doors,
release the floodgates of your dams and dikes,
let all your rivers run without restraint!"
Those are his orders: back the rivers go
and loose the reins about their fountainheads;
unbridled streams go racing to the sea.
Now with his trident, Neptune strikes the earth,
who shudders at the blow and opens wide
new waterways. Delivered from their courses,
the rivers rush across the open fields,
and bear away not only figs and flocks,
but folks who tend them, with their dwelling places;
they also sink the shrines of household gods!
If any roof has managed to resist,
untoppled, this natural disaster,
the waves embrace above it nonetheless;
its highest turrets lie beneath the flood.
There are no longer boundaries between
earth and the sea, for everything is sea,
and the sea is everywhere without a shore.
One takes to the hills, another to his skiff,
rowing where once he plowed the earth in rows,
while yet another sails above his grainfields,
or glimpses, far below, his sunken villa;
and here in the topmost branches of an elm
is someone casting out a fishing line;
an anchor grazes in a meadow's grasses,
or a curved keel sweeps above a vineyard,
and the seal's misshapen figure lies at rest
where the slender goats were lately fond of browsing.
The Nereids marvel at the sight of groves,
cities, and dwelling places all submerged,
while dolphins take possession of the woods
and shake the lofty branches of the oak
as they brush by. The wolf swims among the sheep,
the tawny lion and the tiger both
are carried helplessly upon the waves;
the boar's great power, like a lightning bolt,
does not avail, nor do the stag's swift limbs.
After his long search for a landing place,
the bird with weary wings collapses seaward.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1 (Translated by Bernard Knox)
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
***
In water everything is 'dissolved', every form is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a 'sign', not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth. . . . Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores - even if only for a moment - the integrity of the dawn of things.
- Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion
***
Jove's own sky cannot yield sufficient water
to ease his wrath: Neptune, his sky-blue brother,
aids him with waves of fresh auxiliaries.
The tyrant calls his rivers to assemble
beneath his roof and tells them only this:
"No point in lengthy battlefield harangues.
Pour yourselves into this with all your strength,
that's what is needed! Open all your doors,
release the floodgates of your dams and dikes,
let all your rivers run without restraint!"
Those are his orders: back the rivers go
and loose the reins about their fountainheads;
unbridled streams go racing to the sea.
Now with his trident, Neptune strikes the earth,
who shudders at the blow and opens wide
new waterways. Delivered from their courses,
the rivers rush across the open fields,
and bear away not only figs and flocks,
but folks who tend them, with their dwelling places;
they also sink the shrines of household gods!
If any roof has managed to resist,
untoppled, this natural disaster,
the waves embrace above it nonetheless;
its highest turrets lie beneath the flood.
There are no longer boundaries between
earth and the sea, for everything is sea,
and the sea is everywhere without a shore.
One takes to the hills, another to his skiff,
rowing where once he plowed the earth in rows,
while yet another sails above his grainfields,
or glimpses, far below, his sunken villa;
and here in the topmost branches of an elm
is someone casting out a fishing line;
an anchor grazes in a meadow's grasses,
or a curved keel sweeps above a vineyard,
and the seal's misshapen figure lies at rest
where the slender goats were lately fond of browsing.
The Nereids marvel at the sight of groves,
cities, and dwelling places all submerged,
while dolphins take possession of the woods
and shake the lofty branches of the oak
as they brush by. The wolf swims among the sheep,
the tawny lion and the tiger both
are carried helplessly upon the waves;
the boar's great power, like a lightning bolt,
does not avail, nor do the stag's swift limbs.
After his long search for a landing place,
the bird with weary wings collapses seaward.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1 (Translated by Bernard Knox)