Show 8

Contribution

I inhale clouds of gnats; whizzing insects that fit beneath my fingernail swarm about every other meter of air near the river by my home. When a few happen to strike the back of my throat, I’m enchanted by the thought that I am wandering near a fertile ecosystem. Water is the unmistakable anchor of life, as we know it. Life at the shape and scale that captures our attention and admiration has always pronounced itself around water. The precursor to human settlement can be witnessed in the crowds of all species that gather, drawn to drink, and to eat the drinkers.

There is nothing more sacred than this mysterious liquid spark which springs from special places, charges through the landscape, crashes on the sand, and washes away the pure and impure alike. The seemingly spontaneous emergence of civilization can be traced to the allure of this substance that is frighteningly everywhere and nowhere at once. The ancient merchant city of Mecca, where long before the birth of Muhammed ﷺ, travelers of all tribes would come to honor their gods, is itself located at the spring of the Zamzam well. But who would it surprise that, in the vast Arabian desert, an oasis would prove an attractive bait for commerce and worship.

Waters are indifferent, offering really nothing, yet we conspire to derive technologies and powers. At the confluence of rivers, some settlements have lingered for millennia, inspired to cultivation and capture, transportation, civil engineering, military strategy, baptism. We have formed societies in relation to the river’s invariant vector, such that for generations hence, the social formation is self-evident, as if confirmed by the natural order. In Basel where I live, the Rhein divided the city into two halves: one for the wealthy merchant class and their priests, for the markets and the high houses; the other for labor, for farms, factories, and for the lay people and their homes. And although the factories have closed and the marketsquare is largely ornamental, the tableau stands still.

Though the river is as the foot steps, we take it as the knife cuts. I was not born with a soul, but have been given words to create one. From the river we take the line, to divide the androgyne, and make holy circles and magic squares that frame our precious places of power and interest, so that out of two we conjure an ineffable third. The elusive third that has eclipsed understanding since we came to 1 and 2; the third that reveals itself at times in mystic scribbles and political metamorphoses, that now unsettles the atom and troubles the body, and that I encounter at the back of my throat where the gnats become briefly me.

Michael Ray-Von