Living by the River

The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.

Hermann Hesse 


Be water my friend!

Bruce Lee

The Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova once wrote that her only regret in life were those days that were not spent living by the sea. I know how she felt. There’s something deeply mysterious about the sea, and though I live some 20 miles from it in Govan, I nevertheless have access to the tidal movements of the river right next to me, and the sea’s seaweedy smells. To be sure, there isn’t the vast expanse of emptiness that draws the mind out, and that so inspired Akhmatova’s poetry, but there are ‘insinuations’ that, if carefully attended to, can bring the sea all the way into the city.

One cannot underestimate the power of the river to influence and 'flow in'. Though it might not flow in physically (at least not directly), there is a definite ‘poetic’ in-flow, where the river (if attended to sufficiently) breathes in to you its behaviour and its life. 'To see the behaviour of a living thing', writes Wittgenstrein in one of his more lucid moments, 'is to see its soul'. Thus, in the simple act of apprehending the river, one becomes more riverine as a result.

‘The river is the greatest teacher,’ proclaims the ferryman Vasuveda to the young, as of yet unenlightened Siddartha, in the novel by Hermann Hesse, for he knows, this ferryman, that our prior condition is ‘river’. 'Is not the body its own molded river?' asks the young German poet Novalis. In this sense, to deny (or to allow ourselves to forget) this original riverine essence is sufficient case for regret.

A rare glimpse of a Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud formation from Lancefield Quay.   [11th February, 2013]