Conscious Choice: Mostly Water

July 1995

Mostly Water

by Edmund J. McDevitt

Let’s settle this right now. Water is magical. And I’m not even talking about water as symbol, water as political issue, water as anything except what it is. Water is everywhere. It is most of us and of all living things, at least here on this planet. It is most of the surface of this planet. And that’s just a small part of the story. Water’s signature has been found in the far reaches of the universe. It gives comets their heads. It is ubiquitous and surprising.

Unlike most substances we encounter, we know it in three forms, not just one. We deal most often with its liquid form, but we also know water’s solid form, ice, and we have a whole separate relationship with it. For example, we expend huge amounts of energy making solid water so that we can refrigerate things, including liquid water. We expend smaller sums making solid water in order to slide around on it. We also expend huge amounts of energy trying to turn the solid form into the liquid form so that we don’t slide around quite so much.

We curse its semi-solid flakes when we have to move it around to make way for ourselves — and we build machines to make snow on certain slopes so that we can slide down those slopes. We fear its solid pellets because they fall out of the sky and can cause substantial harm to our own water-filled forms.

And ice in its most massive form can be a major environmental hazard (or cleaning agent, depending upon how you look at it). Not very long ago, much of the land mass we call North America was covered with ice that was several miles thick. As this mass of ice receded to the north, it left a scoured land and several gigantic holes in the ground — and it filled those holes with its liquid form — creating the Great Lakes.

Still Waters Run Deep
Water’s liquid form dissolves nearly everything, and this is both a blessing and a curse. That it dissolves sodium chloride is more important than just about anything, since we and our fellow creatures would not exist at all — certainly not in our current forms — were salt and water not friendly to each other. Unfortunately, we also have found large numbers of other substances to dissolve or suspend in water, which water indifferently accepts, though we and our fellow creatures do not.

Before creatures came along, there were probably some materials in the earth’s water which were as ugly as the pollution we put in today’s water. It was only when the messy concoction we call a "primordial soup" got lit up by some powerful force that something like a creature came about. Today we would probably condemn that primordial soup as a toxic waste site — and we’d be right.

In our own culture we spend major resources on slightly flavored water. And despite the fact that we get water from taps in our buildings, we buy huge quantities of water from someone else’s tap, often thinking that their tap spews better water than ours. We fight massively over the water we drink; we fight about what we do (or let others do) to our supplies. We fight over what any given supply is for: industrial use, farm use, domestic use, any number of possible and often conflicting uses. We fight over where the supply gets sent to, and who gets it.

One of our great films, "Chinatown," has at its center the ownership of water, water supplies, and water distribution. The plot has historical credibility. There were water battles in California, and they persist to this day. But the important historical fact is that a massive amount of water was and is diverted to a desert, making it fertile. This is one of the largest and at the same time one of the most sordid engineering feats of modern times.

The Vapors
Water’s gaseous form is invisible. We think we can see it, and we call it steam. "Steam" means, at its root, "exhalation," and probably originally named what we breathe out in cold weather. But invisible or not, steam — water vapor — is powerful. When we learned to enclose it in a vessel, and to harness its expansive force, we gained the most powerful method ever devised to change our environment.

Of course, the sheer power of liquid water had generated energy (through water wheels, among other things) for a millennium, but when we confined water in much smaller spaces, we multiplied its power and ours, and created a new engine both of "progress" and of destruction.

In some parts of the world, like Iceland, which sits upon the mid-Atlantic ridge of volcanoes, naturally occurring steam heats whole cities. Free, or nearly so.

Water Music
There is Handel’s, of course. Why it is "Water Music" is a matter of conjecture. It was written possibly for a party around 1715. The most likely event was an aquatic festival on the Thames River on July 17, 1717, held by order of King George I. The King’s boat headed the procession, and had behind it a barge with fifty or more musicians playing Handel’s score (whereas today, one could float a small raft with a portable CD boom box).

John Cage also wrote a "Water Music;" his, however, requires a pianist to display a radio, whistles, water containers, a pack of cards, and a poster of the score.

Then there is the glass harmonica (glass harp), usually made by filling wine glasses with water to various levels, making the glasses vibrate at different frequencies as they are either struck or stroked at the lip.

In none of these is water the musical medium. Water is, in fact, amusical. But as a vehicle for musical expression, it has its importance, whether as flood (Debussy’s "Engulfed Cathedral") or as rainstorm (Beethoven’s 6th Symphony), or as the medium upon which you float on your barge, playing.

An Elemental Force
At one time, water was understood to ba an element. At the time, pre-pre-pre-Periodic table, the Western world postulated only four elements: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Water was and is symbolic of an original universal state — Chaos: "the disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed by some religious cosmological views to have existed prior to the ordered universe" (according to the American Heritage Dictionary).

The "element" of water symbolizes the primal source of all fertility, the source of all life, the source from which all flows. Water’s most significant symbolic manifestation is the ocean, which sent out life onto the earth, which marks inexorable time, which swallows all back again.

Water’s flow symbolizes the flow of life. Heraclitus posited that time is a river, flowing endlessly. In some traditions, at the end of life, one was put upon the water to float away into the next life and into immortality. In others, water mediates between life and death, and is the means for another sort of last voyage, that to the abyss of death. When Jehovah wished to punish a wayward world, he unleashed a flood upon it. So did many other gods. Enough or too much, water is a blessing and a curse. This idea is a persistent one across cultures.

Water’s flow also denotes the transmission of wisdom from a higher plane to ours. Water is also a domain of the deepest emotions, passions, overwhelming feelings. In fact, to "whelm" is to cover with water, to submerge. In Celtic legend, the Well of Wisdom is the spiritual source of everything, particularly the streams of the five senses. Celtic wells also were viewed as the entrances to the womb of the earth mother, from which all life flows.

Water is a purifier, both of body and of soul. The ritual of baptism carries within it the sense of returning to the medium of birth, of being purified, and of being reborn. This is not a new idea. For the Greeks (Heraclitus, again) Death was, for the soul, to become as water. One idea was that the souls of the dead incline towards water because they wish to be reincarnated.

Perhaps that’s why various types of water (or places where water is contained) have great religious significance. The British Isles contain thousands of wells and springs at which people throughout history have prayed for miracles, cures, and fertility. At some sites, people hoped that dreaming by the well or spring would bring a miraculous result. Such dreaming was also used for divining the future. Bathing in sulfurous spring water (whether at Lourdes or Glenwood Springs, Colorado) is thought not only to cure physical ills, but also to have miraculous religious powers.

And when the twentieth century rolled around, water did not suddenly cease being both wet and symbolic. While we have concerned ourselves greatly with what we are doing to water supplies throughout the world, we have not lost our inner sense of the magical and the spiritual in water. Many writers of the twentieth century have been fascinated by water’s mythic resonance. The symbols that lie behind water reflect what is probably a most basic understanding — an understanding possessed by all the animals: that water is our origin. And that contamination of our water is destruction of our source. The symbols are not arcane, ancient curiosities. They are resonances which we share with our furthest ancestors. Their deep meanings need to be heeded: we ignore them at our peril.

Edmund J. McDevitt is the Senior Vice President of WSSI, a consulting firm in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, USA. He drinks a lot of water.

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