Water of the Sky

A magnificent sight: rolling slopes of oxide red and ochre, here and there interspersed with islands of green earth, then scattered patches of pale Naples yellow and dazzling titanium white, sparse at first, then gathering into ever larger areas, clinging to one another. The field of vision shifts, and below, on the right, a continuous yellowish-white band appears on the diagonal. Its outer edge is playfully jagged, its contours broken, and beyond that edge stretches an unbroken depth of Paris blue tending towards black, extending as far as the eye can see. The Peloponnese from tens of thousands of metres above, seen from a satellite. A serrated, fractal-like pattern where land and water meet.

To see Water means incomparably more than seeing a stream, a river or the sea. To see Water is more than drilling a well, being soaked by a downpour, watering a flower, building a ship or fearing a flood. And it is equally more than knowing its chemical formula, being able to recite its chemical reactions by heart, or knowing that the human body consists predominantly of water. The way of seeing that deeply permeated ancient cultures—a way perhaps more accurately described simply as contemplation—made it possible to experience the surrounding world in its wholeness. This is true in both spatial and temporal terms: it is equally fundamental to the moment, to the span of an individual human life and to the existence of an entire community. Every spiritual achievement, every memory preserved in writing or oral tradition, every building, work of art and archaeological find conveys to us the vision of an eternal, timeless world: a world in which the forms of things may assume an infinite variety of appearances to the outward senses, while the deeper, essential experience is permeated by the fascination of perceiving and knowing the immutable, eternally existing forces behind them. For the people of these ancient cultures, phenomena appeared as symbols of the collision, interpenetration and separation of these forces, uniting the entirety of the experienced world within a final, monumental vision.

The mythic-symbolic way of seeing, then, is in truth far more than a legacy of cultural history. It is a state of being that mobilises the whole of consciousness, irrespective of age or place, and in which cosmos and consciousness become, reciprocally, symbols of one another. In this way, genuine metaphysical contemplation of existence becomes possible.

Over the past few centuries, analytical, discursive Western science has taken this worldview as an object of analysis and dissected it into its constituent parts, employing philosophy—even as the “science of wisdom”—as one of its instruments, thereby considerably weakening the consciousness-shaping power of myth in our own time. Yet it has not been able to sever myth from its roots, because the roots of metaphysics lie in the deepest-highest layer of the human mode of existence and, beyond it, in the Consciousness that encompasses all existence.

The emergence of certain fields that may be called modern—psychoanalysis, systems theory, chaos theory, holistic approaches to science, and so forth—and newer questions arising within theoretical physics do indicate an effort to integrate analogical and symbolic forms of understanding. Yet today it is above all the artistic way of seeing that still offers the possibility of doing so in its fullness. Naturally, this does not mean merely some capacity to depict or represent, still less the exhibitionism of what is nowadays so highly esteemed as “artistic self-expression”. It means, quite precisely, a consciousness capable of seeing, sensing and experiencing the essence of phenomena and the forces beyond time that set them in motion. This has always formed the basis of the artistic mode of being, and continues to do so today.

Seen in this way, the works of art brought into existence through artistic activity are rather documents of that state of consciousness—necessary and important concomitants of it—than primary goals of a sequence of actions that might simply be placed alongside any other form of human activity. The symbolic way of seeing permeates art in its entirety, across space and time. It is not, and cannot be, confined to depiction, imitation or simple demonstrations of skill. Nor does the formal reproduction of the great, timeless symbols of human culture possess artistic value in itself when those symbols are reduced to decorative motifs or mere compositional elements without a complete experience of the phenomena that lie behind them. On the contrary, the task of art is to build worlds once again behind the meanings of things, thereby restoring them to their full spiritual stature.

Indeed, we must say that true art does this a priori, regardless of material, style or form, by virtue of the mode of being the artist must necessarily possess and which automatically permeates every conscious act. (Let us set aside here, for example, those tendencies that, with the advent of modernism, sought—and continue to seek—to proclaim indiscriminately as works of art every object created or altered, even by chance, by the “artistic individual”; a tendency which, horribile dictu!, has in certain instances extended even to human excrement.)

Essential knowledge of the four elements—air, fire, water and earth—and their symbolic elaboration are part of an ancient cultural inheritance. Nothing is taken away from the significance of this spiritual treasure by the simplified interpretations of the pseudo-spiritual tendencies of recent times, which touch only the surface of the phenomenon and seek to present it as something accessible to anyone, without qualification, through the astrology columns of weekly magazines.

It is self-evident that a genuine work of our own time—by virtue of the symbolic way of seeing that permeates the artist’s entire being—must be capable of reaching these forces at such a depth that, as far as possible, it catches them in the act and makes them visible: either in their operation itself or through the powerful and ordered representation of the forms in which their effects become objectified in the world. To use a simple, everyday example: an image depicting the direct or indirect effects of a tsunami makes the destructive energy of water more immediately experienceable than the mere pictorial representation of the mass of water itself. In the same way, the lush vegetation of an oasis rising from a barren desert landscape evokes for us, with the greatest immediacy, the life-giving and nourishing force of water. Recent images taken by space probes, showing traces of water erosion on the surface of Mars, have had an astonishing impact throughout the world.

Water, whatever form it may assume, comes from the sky.

It is a living force, a bridge between spirit and dead matter.

Its essence is all-possibility.

It can assume any form.

Water is the tear of the Almighty.

Matter, which is Earth, is the salt precipitated from that tear. Again and again the tear falls upon the earth and gives it form, and the Body comes to life. Earth is dead water, and vapour is the resurrected body of water.

This is the alchemy of waters, and the language of alchemy is the language of eternal symbols: the language of creation.

And of art.

For the artist is the one who repeats this creation day after day.

Let us not, then, seek Water in a form stripped of its spirit and reduced to mere matter. We shall not find it in true art. The biblical Flood and Noah, the Sumerian legend of Utnapishtim, Poseidon and Njord, gods of the sea, Neptune and the frost giants of the North still show us the way today; and if we look closely, in the furious green of a landscape drenched by a summer downpour we shall see the face of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, taking shape before us.

The field of vision shifts once more. Near the serrated coastline, dark, incision-like bands appear across the surface of the land: roads crossing one another.

Man has passed this way, arriving with the rain and travelling with the vapour between Earth and Sky.