Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Writing on Water: Resources, Discourses, Reflections / Justin Scott-Coe and W. Scott Howard
If one reckons that the planet on which we live and even the bodies in which we live consist mostly of water, then it is a short step to seeing the enormous role that water plays in human experience. Scholars, whether in the Humanities or the Sciences, who neglect the "floods of life stream[ing] around and through us," who overlook an essential element of their experience, bury their scholarship in arid soil. To overlook the relations between the hydrologic world and human experience, between our experience and the theories we formulate about the world, is to deny both the existence of the greater text that scholars must consider and the greater contexts in which scholarly consideration occurs.
T.S. McMillin, par. 8
The idea of voyage is implicit in the form of the boat.
Basia Irland, par. 23
<1> We started this project in the shadow of the Great Tsunami of 2004, witnessed Katrina destroy New Orleans as submissions were coming in, and now publish during a record-breaking, nationwide—some say worldwide—heat wave. Is it any wonder the release of our journal issue on water appears as suspiciously timed as Al Gore's droning tome on global warming?
<2> Still, our own lives continually touch upon more immediate, everyday water worries. Justin commutes to work, as a Southern California water consultant, across the Santa Ana River—once ephemeral stream and now flowing continuously (and increasingly) with highly treated municipal wastewater effluent. Scott teaches early modern literature amid the shrinking glaciers and tinder-dry timber of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, vital for being the headwaters for major rivers in the Western United States.
<3> Water is truly inescapable (both in the near and far term) as a fundamental substance, as a contested resource, and as a dynamic subject of study and object of desire among many discourse communities. Is there a field of knowledge, a sector of the economy, a practice of everyday life that is not quickened by water and its multifarious uses and significations? How to write on water? How not to? William Blake's approach, in "Songs of Innocence," was to pluck "a hollow reed", make "a rural pen", and stain "the water clear."[1] Our path, our reflections, though perhaps not quite so bucolic, also led us to matters paradoxical and political, secular and sacred, local and global. Water transforms all that it touches; writing on water involves displacement, refraction, dissolution, pollution, distillation, clarification, transport.
<4> According to hermetic tradition, Water (embodied as the god, Nu) was the primal substance from which the gods of the first ennead emerged. Because all life begins in water, there is an ancient Chinese belief that water is the dwelling place of the dragon. Many cultures draw distinctions between "upper" and "lower" waters: the former corresponding with a realm of what is potential and the latter with what is already given in creation. Modern psychology grasps the unconscious as a fluid body: the non-formal, catalytic, female component of the personality. Water is often associated with intuitive wisdom. Immersion in water may signify a return to innocence or holiness—concomitant with an experience of loss, death or annihilation followed by rebirth, regeneration, and a strengthening of the life force.[2] Approximately 72% of the fat free mass of the human body is composed of water.
| Systematic name: | Water |
| Aliases: | Aqua, Dihydrogen Monoxide, Hydroxic Acid, Hydrogen Hydroxide |
| Molecular formula: | H2O |
| Molar mass: | 18.02 g/mol |
| Density and phase: | 1000 kg/m 3, liquid; 917 kg/m 3, solid |
| Melting point: | 0°C (273.15 K) (32°F) |
| Boiling point: | 100°C (373.15 K) (212°F) |
| Specific heat capacity (liquid): | 4186 J/(kg·K) |
<5> The Oxford English Dictionary provides forty-nine definitions for "water" and several connotative and denotative secondary permutations for each of those primary meanings.[3] Volume three, the Supplement, adds fifteen more, plus numerous respective variations.[4]Wikipedia offers a concise, hypertextual paragraph:
Water (in its pure form) is a tasteless, odorless substance that is essential to all known forms of life and is known also as the universal solvent. It appears colorless to the naked eye in small quantities, though it can be seen to be blue in large quantities or with scientific instruments. An abundant substance on Earth, water exists in many forms. It appears mostly in the oceans and polar ice caps, but also as clouds, rain water, rivers, freshwater aquifers, and sea ice. Water in these bodies continuously moves through a cycle of evaporation, precipitation, and runoff to the sea. Clean water is essential to human health, and, in many parts of the world, it is in short supply.[5]
<6> In this special issue of Reconstruction, our arrangement of articles according to the sub-categories of Liquid, Ice, and Vapor traces (if partially) water's endless cycle of changes, attaching them to meta-social significations suggested by each. Thus, in Liquid we test our limited perspective (colorless? blue?) on this all-too-familiar substance; in Ice, our frozen short supply of water awareness and witness; and in Vapor, the radically unconventional potential housed in water's transformative properties.
<7> In the first section, Jamie Linton, a geographer, and Meg Ferris, a theologian, start us off seeing water and our relations to it from literally The Beginning of Genesis. Linton, hearkening back to the founding chaos, argues against the most common characterization of water as resource and for a relational, cultural politics of water. Ferris, underscoring instead the Abrahamic tradition of water appreciation in an arid climate, draws on spiritual resources and local activism to develop a "blue" eco-theology emphasizing water necessity and value for the 21st century. Fiona Allon, as a practicing water sociologist, focuses the problem of resource relations on the vast canvas of the Australian water crisis, successfully supplanting the "demand management" paradigm of water conservation with an investigation into existing "everyday" cultural resources of domestic water usage. Finally, enviro-technologist Tiffany Holmes gives an all-out eco-nerd-fest report on the ecovisualization movement that is attempting, through a combination of ecology, art, science and technology, to render "public education through shared experience" of the environment in all its aspects—water included.
<8> Julie Trottier opens the second section's colder explorations of water users and abusers with a study, incorporating scholarship and first-person experience, exposing the parasitic water broker acting as a succubus on the world development scene. Daniel Fusch follows with an equally disturbing exposé on water bottlers' use of the intrinsic, semiotic association of water with inspiration to sell their clear-housed product. Finally, Ray Chandrasekara and John Polimeni shoot straight for the global jugular with an essay, belonging on the top shelf of any wonky think tank, outlining a more-than-probable future Southeast Asian dystopia where water crises act as catalysts for social upheaval.
<9> The final section, offering new and radical ways to think of and through water, begins with two personal and theoretical accounts of aquatic meaning. T.S. McMillin, noting that "the significance of water is often overlooked, even in the search for Truth," follows a parabolic journey on various literary and literal rivers to ascertain the meaning of water's reciprocity. Kathryn Miles returns herself to her childhood idyllic experiences of the monstrously beautiful Lake Powell to explore her generation's break with the past through its re-vision of the reservoir from conservationist disaster to environmentalist icon. Demonstrating a similar intermixture of scholarship and riparian journey, W. Scott Howard introduces an experimental work, part relation, part collation, that joins the long tradition—think William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain or, more recently, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon—of understanding American history through artistic intimacy with past materials and material experience. Stefan Helmreich, preeminent MIT anthropologist, finishes the section with a fitting return to the awful 2004 Tsunami (which in so many ways frames this journal issue and the renewed global focus on the power of water) offering his discovery of a new temporality he calls "oscillating ocean time," something distinct from geological time yet splashing up against its profundities.
<10> In keeping with the transformative properties of water, this issue inaugurates a new category and medium of critical work into Reconstruction—visual images. In our Gallery section, we showcase three artists' sets of work. Basia Irland is well established in the visual and digital art world for her work with a number of media and displays of work that suggests an investment in the aboriginal, personal and environmental; we are honored to host some of her most recent work and writing on water. Next, Michelle Eischen demonstrates that oil and water do mix with two landscape paintings which suggest a defiantly non-figurative context for water in the world. Lastly, Debra Livingston displays ten images from her current photojournalistic work indicating the various "moods" of water movement.
<11> Before launching into the issue, the reader is asked to consider the following aspects that make this collection unique:
- Cross-Contamination
<12> Water—forgive us—is a slippery subject, and you'll notice many different streams of argument converging and contaminating each other. Most materially, we experience the great reservoirs of the world, from Lakes Mead and Powell in the Southwestern U.S. through the childhood guilt of Miles and the newcomer fascination of Irland to the still-forming impoundment behind the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam in China through the apocalyptic vision of Chandrasekara and Polimeni. More ephemerally and subtly, Fusch takes one half of Ferris' argument for water's spirituality and shows its path to the dark side of bottled water marketing, while Allon surveys the historical mystique of massive "Big Water" infrastructure projects in dry areas of the world, and how it can be overcome by a less evangelical, more "everyday" conservation movement. We find McMillin's theory of the palindrome acted out not only in his own and Thoreau's journeys as recounted in his piece, but also by Howard's research and evocation of Howe's literal and Atherton's littoral crossings of the Connecticut River in 1676. Similarly, the temporal implications of these palindromic riverflows are immediately comparable to Helmreich's chaotically contingent and potentially catastrophic "ocean time," as well as the more artistic "motion captured" and "eco-visualization" practices explained and demonstrated by photographer Livingston and techno-artist Holmes, respectively. Another theory sourced by a water body is Miles' attempt to understand the genesis of her environmentalism on the decidedly anti-environmental Lake Powell through an expansive application of "Ecopsychology." Miles' struggle is likewise reflected in Allon and Linton's calls for a cultural rather than environmental or managerial (respectively) understanding of water, and connects with other warnings about leaving water discourse to geo-political "experts" (Chandrasekara and Polimeni) or funding "brokers" (Trottier). More broadly, a line of "river literacy" can be traced through McMillin, Irland and Howard's works, while the contributions of Helmreich, Miles, Ferris, Livingston and Fusch chart a practice of reading meaning—what Allon calls "suites of values"—through bodies and modalities of water.
- Interdisciplinarity
<13> All of the works in this collection flow—not only crossing "disciplinary" boundaries, but also operating on several discursive levels, from the professional to the personal. Our call for papers sought "interdisciplinary studies, especially works that combine physical science with social and/or conceptual analysis; multi-media projects; hybrid formulations of creative/theoretical/scholarly writing; and essays that strike a middle ground between academic, private, and public sectors." We have been most fortunate to receive a remarkable gathering of contributions that flow through each and all of those channels. If interdisciplinarity involves nuanced integrations of different fields of study, and if cross-disciplinarity engenders interactions among various disciplines; if multi-disciplinarity juxtaposes disciplinary perspectives; and if trans-disciplinarity poses questions that reciprocally cross disciplines, then this collection achieves all of that—and something more as well: a poetics of water, or, at least, studies at the confluence of aesthetics and praxis, content and context, resources and discourses.
- First-Person Scholarship
<14> As can be gleaned from the above descriptions, most essays in this collection take advantage of the personal, first-person point of view. This was, as well, by invitation in our CFP, and the results are outstanding. From Linton's ruminations and tributary digressions on water as resource to Helmreich's description of the discourse at a scientific conference failing to grasp dire intersections of human and geological time on an ocean wave—from McMillin's rides up, by and over rivers and back again, to Holmes' placement of water quality measurement devices in Switzerland, to Trottier's tortuous time with the water brokers, to Allon's funny yet poignant family epic of water withdrawal, dying gardens and shared baths—the essays in this collection demonstrate a shared determination to incorporate experience, description and reflection into an active scholarly praxis. In other words: by writing on water, our contributors got wet.
<15> Water is a limited resource with unlimited meaning. We hope this journal issue inaugurates a new phase in the exploration and research of that meaning, and inspires further launchings of boats and pens. Enjoy!
Notes
[1] William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 7. [^]
[2] J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, Trans. Jack Sage (New York: Dorset Press, 1971), 364-5. [^]
[3] The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). [^]
[4] The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 3, A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). [^]
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water [^]