rivers of the mind

"The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze green water in the opposite direction. This apparently impossible contradiction made apparent and possible, still fascinated Morag, even after years of river watching."(Diviners,3)

That’s the famous first paragraph from Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners. It sets up the central theme of the novel. Rivers are inexorably linked to time, and this river, running both ways, is an entry to time’s relentless movement forward and the mind’s eternal yearning backwards. Though we must move into the future to produce a life, we are compelled by something in the human spirit to reproduce that life in memory and in art.

"You can never walk into the same river twice," the Greek philosopher Heraclites said. "It will not be the same river the second time." Heraclites saw a world in flux, every second changed from the one before. He raised the question of being, the question that Heidegger later raised as the question of being in time, the central question of the post modern world.

We are gathered here now, at this moment at the bottom of an historic lake, Lake Aggasiz, left over after the glaciers pulled back. Its traces are everywhere, in the residual waters of Lake Winnipeg and lake Manitoba, and in the ridges of gravel that surround those lakes, the ancient beaches that were once Aggasiz’s shore. Lake Aggasiz exists now only in our imaginations, but you can imagine its surface if you like, hundreds of feet above our heads.

The fish and animals of that lake died and sunk to the bottom. Over the eons, their bones piled up and formed a huge layer of limestone. Water from the surface sunk into the limestone to form an aquifer. Underground caves, lakes and rivers formed, and they course below us now.

These waters, the imaginary lake above us and the mysterious rivers below nourish the artist’s imagination. Let me tell you a story.

When I was a child of two, my parents constructed a house in the country just south of Gimli on the shores of lake Winnipeg. They called in the well driller who dug an artesian well, one hundred and twenty feet deep. The well ran for a few minutes, and then stopped. The well digger moved his equipment a hundred yards away, and dug again. This time he was successful. The water gushed high into the air. He capped the well so that it ran into a wooden box and thence into a ditch and away.

The missing well, the failed well, was about thirty feet from our house, just beside a spray of three slender ash trees. I thought about it often, wondering why it was dry when the other, not so far away and exactly the same depth, was a perfect well. Then one day, when I was six years old and just starting school, I walked out of the house early in the morning, out to the ashes. Up bubbled a small fountain, about a foot high, of the clearest, coldest and sweetest water I have ever known. It must have started just as I left the house, because a puddle of water was just beginning to form. I lay on the grass, and drank the cold, clear water. I remember feeling that I had been given a miraculous gift.

When I came home that day, the well had vanished. The well digger had come in my absence and capped the well and covered it over so that there was no trace of it except for the puddle, a mini lake Aggasiz drying up in our back yard. And of course my dreams. Since that day I have had a recurring dream of the discovered well, its water clear and crystal and cold.

When we were children, we learned in school about the underground rivers and lakes that fed our artesian wells. We heard stories about how somebody had been getting drinking water from a well and a tiny fish had appeared in his pail. The fishes were always blind, because they had no need of sight in the dark underground rivers and they exploded as soon as they popped out of the well, because the pressure below was so great. I suppose those stories were apocryphal, but they might have been true. They might still be true. I haven’t tried to find out because there are some things better taken on faith.

I grew up in the Icelandic community on the west shore of lake Winnipeg, a community that made its living on water. My grandfather was a farmer who sometimes fished, my father a fisherman who sometimes farmed. Our lives were intimately connected with water. The Icelandic word for river is "a,"(ow) the letter "a," the first letter of the alphabet.It takes an "r" when it makes a compound word. Thus the point of land on the lake where a river enters is named Arnes, "a" for river and Nes for point, and there is a town of that name just north of where I grew up.

When the Icelandic immigrants settled on the Drunken River and renamed it the Icelandic river, they named two towns. One was Riverton, the other Arborg, the Icelandic translation of "river town," two towns with the same name on the same river.

The word "artesian" derives from the Norman district in France named Artois, in Old Norse, the river Tois. The artesian wells the Icelandic settlers found when they arrived were already sunk deep in their language. I offer you here a false etymolgy. My name is Arnason. I have a river in my name.

I began by talking about rivers of the imagination as having two aspects. They represent the unchangeable and irresistible movement of time but they also represent flux and change: the static and the dynamic. They can combine these opposing aspects because they flow.

There is a traditional argument that art must make order out of chaos, that it should capture and make static the timeless moment selected out of the flow of experience. Keats’ Grecian Urn is just such a work of art, though the poem that describes it is not. The art of the ecstatic moment made static, the statue, the photograph, the painting is the art of transcendence. This Art with a capital A is a transcendental signifier, an art that guarantees the system from outside. The artist captures the moment. Note the violence of the metaphor. The living moment captured and made still. The art of the taxidermist.

A social and material art, an art of the organic needs a different model, and what better model than the river. Why must art be static? Why should it stop the flow instead of entering the flow?

Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia argue for a philosophical system which understands the world as a system of flows rather than as a system of static objects in relationship with each other. They take Artaud’s image of the schizophrenic as a "body without organs" and use that metaphor to describe any organizational site from the human subject to a social club, from a city to the universe. The "body without organs" is the idealized structure. It takes shape and meaning when a number of what they call "desiring" and "paranoid" machines organize flows across the amorphous body.

Let me take myself as an example, this human subject before you. In Deleuze and Guattari’s universe, I am not a stable ego, conscious of my selfhood, complete with a psychology and a case history. I am a nomadic subject, coming into existence only where different flows cross on a body without organs. At this moment I am a lecturer on a stage, a speaking subject. Elsewhere, I may be a father, a lover, a consumer of haircuts, a gardener, a card player, a gambler, a singer of madrigals, all unimaginable now because at this moment I am none of these things. But the moment a new set of flows cross my nomadic subject will migrate, and I will be someone else.

Or take the university where I teach. We have an old joke on the prairies about a town so small that when you get there, there’s no there there. Well thats true of the university. There is no university there, only a site where things flow in and out. Water flows in through the pipes and leaves through the sewers. Traffic drives in through the streets and drives out again. Books come into the library and the bookstore and they go out again. Ideas flow through this site, but so do diseases, colds and flu’s and measles. Food flows through here and so does paper and ink and gasoline. From the point of view of a hairdresser on Pembina highway, the university is a place where hair grows. From the point of view of the Transit company, it is an important stop on a bus route. Gardeners see it as a place that plants grass and flowers and trees. Painters see it as a collection of walls and ceilings, sidewalk builders as a collection of paths. Where these flows cross, we have a university.

Today, Winnipeg is the site of a discourse on iconography and its relationship to narrative, The icons that interest me here are the images of rivers and gardens both real rivers and rivers of the mind and real gardens and gardens of the mind.

Literature is full of rivers, from the river Styx that separates the living from the dead to the river that ambiguously "runs through it" in the American novel and movie of that name. Cleopatra in her barge floats endlessly down a Nile of our imagination, while the Seine’s left bank remains the symbol of romantic youth. The Danube separates Buda from Pest and the Mississippi divides the US into east and west. Rivers divide and join at the same time.

Every city worthy of its name has its river, every country in the world sanctifies at least one river, and makes it a symbol for some transcendental notion of its own national or spiritual being. What does it mean to bathe in the Ganges? To travel down the Amazon? To cross the Rubicon or sail down the Rhine past die Lorelei? To sail down the Dneiper from Kiev to Odessa? To ride a Mississippi river boat or to swim in the Yangtse? Surely it means to come face to face with the central symbols of a culture, the thing that the people of that culture have invested with their most important meanings.

Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness begins with a leisurely journey down the Thames to watch a battle. From the vantage of that highly civilized river, Conrad details a moral battle fought on another river, the Congo, which leads from the sea into the dark heart of the African continent. Of course, the view from the Thames is only one perspective. The Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe said that when he read The Heart of Darkness, he realized that he was dancing on the shore of the river. The signified slips out from under the signifier.

I quoted the passage about the river that runs both ways in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. In an interview with Canadian writer, Robert Kroetsch, before she wrote that novel, Laurence said, "You can’t just put a river into a novel and make it into a symbol. It has to be a real river first." Her answer points to a touching faith in the real, but in The Diviners, her river is a symbolic river long before it ever becomes a real one.

And Robert Kroetsch himself is a lover of rivers. His first novel, But We are Exiles is set on a voyage down the Mackenzie river. The trip is a surreal journey from innocence to experience, from life to death, as the crew of a riverboat follows the corpse of Michael Hornyanski on its journey to the sea. The hero of the novel may or may not be responsible for Hornyanski’s death, though he certainly believes himself to be. The conflict comes over their struggle for the love of the main female character, Kettle Frazer, a woman named for two rivers.

In another novel, Badlands, Kroetsch follows an archeological team led by the appropriately named Jack Dawes down the Red Deer River into the badlands of Alberta. The journey describes a search for the fossils of dinosaurs, but it is also a journey back into the prehistoric roots of consciousness. Each of the male figures is a partial human. Among the seven men on the trip, there is just enough psychic dimension to make one human subject.

Every river is an Aristotelean narrative. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It starts with a basic assumption of balance. It seeks its own level, an intrinsic and self balancing end that is absolutely inevitable. Along the way, there are tributary sub-plots, sudden turns and unexpected directions. The ending is always the same, an opening to the maternal sea.

And so the river informs the traditional narrative as a metaphor for the search for equilibrium. It is the perfect location for the quest whose end will be either freedom or death. Think of Humphrey Bogart hauling the African Queen with Katherine Hepburn aboard down to the sea. Think of the ending of the movie of Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast, the boat moving into the endless blue of sea and sky after the claustrophobic river in Central America.

But the Heraclitean river can also be a model for narrative. The river that is only flow, that is never the same river twice, can be a model for a narrative that refuses closures, that shuns originary moments, in short, the post-modern narrative. That narrative explores being in time. Its shape is synchronic rather than diachronic. Its chief figure is not analepsis. Analepsis assumes that chronology, the linear movement of time towards some teleological end is the only model for a narrative. No matter how wrenched out of order a narrative is, it can still be reconstructed by the determined reader. The chief figure for a post modern narrative is syllepsis, organization by principles other than time, by iconography, for example or gesture or syllogism.

Think of any narrative as a river. At a syntactic level, it moves inexorably along a horizontal axis , subject and then verb and then object (at least in English. In other languages the snytax may differ but it will still be linear). At this metonymic level it has its beginning, middle and end. It moves to closure as a river moves towards the sea. But at a metaphoric level, it is like Heraclites’ river. You can never enter the same conversation twice.

And rivers enter the narrative of art as metaphors. They stand in for other signifiers, other ways of speaking. The Canadian poet F.R. Scott writing in the late twenties and early thirties, when modernism was just making its way into Canadian art wrote a poem about a river that might have been a manifesto for the new movement. It’s called "Old Song"

far voices
and fretting leaves
this music the
hillside gives

but in the deep
Laurentian river
an elemental
song forever
a quiet calling
with no mind
out of long aeons
when dust was
blind and ice hid sound

only a moving
with no note
granite lips
a stone throat.

The St. Laurence river which is "only a moving" with "no mind" stands in for a poetics of reduction that came to characterize modern poetry. The river of the imagination, traditionally weighted with meaning, here is stripped down to its elemental being: its flow.

Scott’s friend and co-editor carried the reduction even further. His poem "Swift Current" reduces the river to a set of vectors and directions:

This is a visible
and crystal wind:
no ragged edge,
no splash of foam,
no whirlpool’s scar;
only
- in the narrows,
sharpness cutting sharpness,
arrows of direction.
spears of speed.

The poem, of course, is not simply a poem about nature. It is a small manifesto for a poetry that will strip down imagery and suggestion to a bare minuimum.

For Eli Mandel, another Canadian writer, the river as source of metaphor and meaning fuses with identity itself. His poem, "Birthmark" tracks both his birthplace on the Souris river and the source of his inspiration as a poet. To understand the poem, you should know that the word Souris is French for mouse, and Eli Mandel had a small furry birthmark on his forehead.

seeing a mouse
my mother struck her forehead

he’ll be marked at birth
she said
the women cried

I carry the souris
on my brow
the river
in my head
the valley
of my dreams
still echoes
with her cry.

The river as metaphor for time and movement is one of the informing images for art. The other great informing image is the garden, and the two have odd connections. The garden, like the river, is an ambiguous metaphor. It stands for beginnings, as in the garden of Eden, but it also stands for the eternal and timeless, the mother, the source, the place of fertility but also the place of death. And yet, the garden is also a place of flows. You can never walk into the same garden twice, because it is organic and growing and always in flux. It may be defined by paths and nodes and objects, but there is another set of flows beyond all design: Rain enters, and snow, insects and animals, and wind. The garden’s rich fecundity is like the river’s crystal flow.

In Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, the garden is also the graveyard. The neat order of the landscape of death is always threatened by the chaotic energy of the wild garden outside. Hagar, the heroine of the novel says:

"I used to walk there when I was a girl. There could not have been many places to walk primly in those days, on paths where white kid boots would not be torn by thistles or put into unseemly disarray...But sometimes through the hot rush of disrespectful wind that shook the scrub oak and the coarse couchgrass encroaching on the dutifully cared for habitations of the dead, the scent of cowslips would rise momentarily. They were tough rooted, these wild and gaudy flowers, and although they were held back at the cemetery’s edge, torn out by loving relatives determined to keep the plots clear and clearly civilized, for a second or two a person walking there could catch the faint, musky dust-tinged smell of things that grow untended and had grown always."

When the garden represents order, it is always under attack. In Margaret Atwood’s "The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer" The settler, determined to impose human order on the wilderness by planting a civilized garden is defeated.

In the darkness the fields
defended themselves with fences
in vain:

everything
is getting in.

But everything is not just getting in. It is getting in through a metaphor of water:

On his beaches, his clearings
by the surf of under-
growth breaking
at his feet. he foresaw
disintegration.

And if a garden is to be worthy of its name, a river runs through it. Even the Garden of Eden had a river that ran through its heart and formed the headwaters of the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Every human being who constructs a garden is in direct competition or in collusion with the archetypal first garden and its first gardener.

I imagine the garden of Eden must have been watered by artesian wells. Given the technology available to its builder, he would surely have recognized the value of underground rivers not only to gardeners but to writers who want to imagine currents that run deeper the surface. And though there is some uncertainty whether that creator was actually Icelandic, he would have wanted to name his rivers with the single first letter of the alphabet: a.

As a writer, I am personally obsessed with images of water. I live in a city traversed by rivers. I grew up on the shores of an ancient lake. The ghost waters of Lake Aggasiz hover above and the deep rivers of the aquifer murmur below. The first book I wrote was called Marsh Burning, a long poem about trying to locate an identity and put together a thinking subject out of the fragments of a life. It’s full of rivers and wells and lakes and streams and marshes and a narrator who dreams of drowning. A narrator with a river in his name.



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