Women and Parrots

The book has survived five different cities, has travelled between those and visited many more. A quarter century, maybe longer. The first copy found in a cluttered used bookstore, early in the expansionary years of the Internet. Somewhere along the way, moving between cities, I misplaced it. For several years I made do without it, but the longer it could only be leafed through in memory the more I regretted I'd been slow to buy another copy. Why regret? It’s not as if I owed the book the great privilege of my ownership. Odd moments now and then I would think of the overall impression it left on me, when I had first skimmed through it then read it—admirably antiquated, out-of-step with basic norms of scientific inquiry and research; far-fetched; reaching so far past the practical dimensions of its grasp, it left behind all decorum and posited theories patently Romantic and outrageous. I believed none of the assertions the book made about its subject—the so-called “spiritual properties of the natural elements”. Relieved from having to take it seriously, I could appreciate it for the elegance, the generosity and beauty of its vision, no matter how questionable the premises that informed it.
As a birthday gift a few years ago my wife (from a second marriage) bought me a fresh copy—tired of hearing me ramble on and on about it. Instead of describing the impression it left on me, attempting to reassemble it from scattered recollections as a bedtime story for my own benefit, I could finally shut my mouth and read it quietly to myself. I have that copy here now before me, a revised translation published in 1996, almost thirty years ago. Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air by Theodor Schwenk. “Sensitive chaos”—a phrase taken from Novalis’ Fragmente; his characterization of elements in motion, air and water.

The same book and not the same—this new version reads me at a different stage of life, middle age. The original was published in German, by Verlag Frieres Gesiteleber, the front pages tell me, in Stuttgart, in 1962. It has rained through the morning and afternoon but not with much strength, the windowpane speckled with the refuse of atmospheric drizzle, and read by natural light filtered through a continuum of scummy grey clouds, the book unfurls like a hope with not much proof to either destroy or support it. That’s not the purpose for which it’s taken. Its author, poor earnest ecstatic Theodor S, is in the ground. He was buried, I’ve read, in a cemetery near or within The Black Forest, not far from the small building housing The Institute of Flow Sciences, which he founded. There’s not much available to know of him—his habits, his quirks, preferences, favorite dishes or feelings about his colleagues. He’s just so much information now, and not much of it, at that.
Flip open his book’s front cover, there waits a black-and-white photo the exact size of a postage stamp. An old man, it appears, gazing across a lake or pond. Resembles Thomas Merton in his more rustic moments, in woodsman attire. A capsule biography adds touches of prestige to the photo—born 1910; died ’86; between those dates became (immodest claim if ever there was one) a “pioneer in water research”. No description of his alternate life as a German citizen during the war years. Conscripted? Volunteer? Somewhere along the way of merely living he had become acquainted with the occult scientific theories of Rudolph Steiner. This made a strong impression. Steiner's writings taught him to "read" nature; the telluric alphabet. With the enthusiasm of a newly minted religious convert, he became committed to gaining literacy beyond books and pamphlets. He learned to study an acorn tree with searching care until he witnessed its Geist, so as to later share his own Geist with it. Anthroposophy, the life force playing through matter; evangelical holism. Somewhere along the way he gathered his impressions from the study of the fluid element and put page to typewriter—notable his revelations weren’t durable enough to be written with a Keatsean finger, on the still surface of a puddle or pond. Trees fell and burst into books and here, on the desk before me, is one of them.
The table of contents lay bare the man. Chapter titles alone enough to appall even the most amiable skeptic:

Archetypal Movements of Water
Water, Nature’s Sense Organ
Water as Mediator Between Earth and Cosmos
On The Spiritual Nature of the Liquid Element

As I write this, rain has stopped flirting with window-glass. Indoors at an observational distance, I can study the water beads collected there, glass like a slide under microscope. Dozens or hundreds or thousands of life-forms trafficking through globs of isolate water. They fell half a mile or more to land here; how far had they travelled suspended on air, carried along by the currents? Planetary, hyper-local—I suppose the variety of scales involved warrant some appreciation, low-key admiration edging amazement. Theodor S is buried in Filderstadt and elsewhere I’m mixing thoughts of him with water.

Works of wisdom literature tend to outlast the cultures that nurtured them. This is mostly obvious to non-believers not in the habit of reading them. Death and predation everywhere, from all sides. From nature and its products, great and small; but foremost from one’s fellow humans. Some are believers and some aren’t—bacterially inspired dysentery treats them as they often can’t bear to treat each other: as equals. They shit their way towards a watery death, dehydrated. Supposedly holy texts are quoted from, to decorate their passage into the ground or crematorium. Islamic and Hebraic poetry, moldy fragments of Christendom.
Works of scientific inquiry tend to mature in the opposite direction. Hypotheses proven or disproven--quantitatively fragile to the labors of each successive generation, their discoveries, their purposeful integration of gains across any number of proliferating domains unforseeable by their forebears. Meta-analyses, longitudinal studies, randomized control trials...these rot quickly but enrich the compost pile; a mass energy fund powering the up-shoot of a few innovative blooms. If they last, they’re integrated into a live, growing momentum, a body of knowledge—a body that won’t grow sick and die, supposedly, though we will.
Should Theodor S. be judged harshly for his ambition—to direct scientific inquiry towards wisdom? That was the aim. What was the outcome? His book is an obscurity and his belief in its principles and revelations was not strong enough to make it last. It was a perfect read for its time—the ‘60s. Hippie culture, communes, ideological urgencies about “getting back to the land”. Back then my grandfather and father were cutting tobacco, topping corn, tossing bales of hay off of flatbeds—religious people in the classic harsh mode, fire-and-brimstone, they wouldn’t fathom the gallons of sweat they shed each day would constitute the flower of anyone’s idealism. I did the work myself off and on, it was awful. Nine hours walking a soybean field at hundred-plus-degrees, hacking weeds with a hoe, cautious of snakes coiled in the leaf-shade, there was little left of a person for science or wisdom. Both were indulgences. Both described materiality by standing apart from it, escaping the chokehold often at the end of its reach. Maybe this was the reason I was worked a nickel-an-hour at such a young age: to cure me of any temptation to romanticize. Fate shook people from the sky and they landed here. They had children and those children had grandchildren, and religion was useful because it promised reward for arbitrary suffering and their lot in general—their punishments would eventually end and they’d be rewarded. Meanwhile they survived the land and made a living from it.

*

Surviving the land—the preface to the first French edition of the book, published in 1963, speaks to this explicitly. It’s a conundrum, a going concern. Somewhere far back in the annals of evolution we abandoned water for land, and this was a gain that came at considerable cost to our blending with the vitalizing element. The original fall. Estrangement. It marked a significant transition for humankind, long before humankind was conceivable as a species. “Gravity—I saw it in a flash—was the original sin, committed by the first living beings who left the sea,” the prefacer writes, his metaphors fashioned from a childhood infested by Christian thought-lice. Upon first reading it, I was saddened slightly and surprised the guide chosen to lead me into the worlds of air and water was the Carl Sagan of nature programming, Commandant J.Y. Cousteau—Jacques Cousteau. But brushing the lice from the text, I felt more sympathy for the conceit at play, its phrasing: water was the man’s religion and he could not bear to have been born a heathen. Eden waited for anyone who could hold a breath and dive. Hell was down there also.
With precision and enthusiasm he enumerates his many encounters with the seas and oceans, the delicate and intricate habits of their many angels. Submerged in the dark he ventures to reclaim his innocence, never mind Portuguese man o' war were often bobbing nearby—from these expeditions he has returned with sights that would chasten the human eye; chasten to conjure salt water from its patron duct, an ocean drop-by-drop in sympathy.
He writes of a time when he had the privilege to observe “the nuptial round of the great silver caranx” near the islands of Cape Verde. Between surface and depth a school flowed, swarmed in a unison of movement above him. Each, he noted, registered with exquisite sensitivity “the slightest stir in the surrounding water”, conforming to the direction of their communal rolling, which articulated in slow motion the broader pattern of a “whirlpool spiral”.
He writes of sharks near the coral reefs of the Red Sea, admiring their ergonomic sluicing through currents. He describes how a seahound once glided past his view from a diving saucer, near the Corsican shelf. He recalls his first exploration of an enormous forest of brown kelp off the island of Alboran. His description of what he witnessed there is delicate, full of wonderment:

The vast culture medium was swarming with clusters of eggs,
transparent larvae, tiny, faintly coloured crustaceans, long
   Venus girdles which a single gesture could wind at a distance,
   crystal bells indolently pulsating, turned by our lights into
   glittering gems.

There he found colonies of sea salps joined in trains sixty to ninety feet long—transparent jellies of organized water. Each prized at its core a tiny orange grain, a signature feature of its morphology. In a dark rendered spectral by the divers’ lights, they drifted like chains of pearl, necklaces to be modeled by a water goddess.

There were other books, of course, other examples. There was Intuition, Buckminster Fuller’s epic poem cut from the mold of Lucretius’ On The Nature of the Universe. There was Hemingway’s counterweight to all this excessive ambition, which did double duty protecting his own insecurities on the matter, probably: “All bad writers are in love with the epic.” Not some, all. Totalizing opinions are the order of the day, though it’s early afternoon still, and I’m fresh from arguing with my wife about our inability to effectively share kitchen space, when cooking and both hungry.
Domesticity versus liberation in the raw—the author of Sensitive Chaos has things to say; in the foreward takes a stance of low-grade luddite militancy, warns against widespread excessive mastery of nature by technology. Domestic Man could agree; could channel his irritations to a higher purpose and blame the extravagances of the kitchen territory for his marital problems. That line of argument would also be tailored for utmost convenience; luckily there’s a wife nearby skilled in the olfactory arts, poised to catch the slightest whiff of fecality in his high-mindedness.
Turn a tap, there is hot water. Not instantly, but given time, gradually more so. Wait sink-side, watch for steam. Test with a finger, but quickly. Otherwise the finger comes back red and scalded.
Turn another tap, there is cold. This almost always instantly, though during summer months extra grades of chilliness can arrive, if water is allowed to run a few minutes.
Among the many privileges of First World membership, these are two—Domestic Man can count them among the long list of conveniences he takes for granted. They weren’t installed by principles, but by plumbers. If broken, won’t be fixed by Romantic philosophers. Hegel, Goethe, Novalis: Theodor Schwenk, idealistic as a boat upon a river, advocates in his treatise for a return to an explicit valuation of natural phenomena for their spiritual properties; that said, since he wrote a book and it was published, he was most likely a Domestic Man. He writes the way a leaky faucet holds water—contradictions, no matter how glaring and personal, can’t stop him.
Once upon a time water had not been readily accessible. This has underwritten many a story of hardship. Not good, not at all. But from its scarcity came respect and reverence—those who could not walk and find where it hid soon suffered the lacerations of an excruciating thirst. For this reason divinities were conjured to embody and protect it. Appeals could be made to the imaginary. Rarely did this solve the recurrent problem of actual dehydration, so people looked elsewhere. They invented water purification systems, desalination technologies. They discovered through extensive trial-and-error experiments with all available chemicals that iodine could kill microbial demons in possession of a cupful of water. Hand-in-hand with these advancements, the more divine properties of water lost their prestige. They weren’t necessary; in fact, retold an old lie through metaphor: human helplessness required a helpmate.
Domestic Man takes a look around and sees in the wake of the long mass funeral for our long-lost water gods much discord and destruction. He spies a holocaust in the innocent swan-necked forms of water faucets. "Whereas it then seemed profitable and advantageous to dry swamps and make them arable," he writes, "to deforest the land, to straighten rivers, to remove hedges and transform landscapes, today it is being realized that essential, vital questions of the whole organism of nature have very often suffered and been badly damaged by these methods." If pressed to play his own devil’s advocate, he’d be forced to cite nature as equally cruel and damaging. Ask the child whose cerebral chambers fill to excess with cerebrospinal fluid, so the skull-plates expand and the head swells. Nature remains innocent of its many weapons, Hydrocephalus included.
Admittedly, his stated aims aren’t quite utopian. A little grace, a measure of care is what he asks for. The tone his prose assumes suggests he doesn’t expect it, but holds out hope for it still. "Through watching water and air with unprejudiced eyes, our thinking becomes changed and more suited to the understanding of what is alive." In all cases? Of course not. But there's little fault to be found in his claim. How many afternoons and mornings have I sat crosslegged on the shores of a pebble beach or river, admiring their repetitious eddies and wave-forms? There and nowhere else a water trance catches hold of me subtly, and brings me into accord with their slowness.

Maybe this was how it began for him. A boy in Bavaria is outside playing. A dry crackling in the sky above him, then a boom, like dynamite detonated in a distant mine. Deep and avalanchine, it rolls laterally in every direction through clouds for miles. All at once rain falls, crashes about the leaves and branches, and soon the whole forest is dancing like his uncle, poor soul, cursed with convulsive twitches and shivers of St. Vitus’ Disease.
He’s been warned by his mother that where there is thunder, there is lightning, and wherever there is lightning, fate is filing down its fangs to take a bite from one’s neck. This is why instead of taking off his jacket to hold above his head while he runs, he chooses the lesser of two discomforts and wraps both hands around his throat, protecting windpipe, carotid, and jugular. He had been hunting for mushrooms, he was far from home. There were natural lightning rods of every kind above and around him. Would he die? Would he survive the afternoon to see another morning?
He ran a short while but here and there the ground was muddy. After slipping and striking a kneecap against a stone, he was forced to free a hand and sit there, rubbing the knee. The other hand splayed fingers as best it could, to protect the underbelly of his neck. Soon though he brought even that hand down to the ground beside him, to support his balance. There he sat half in grass and half in mud, watching the undersides of the canopies above pullulate greenly rainstorm visions in shadow. He had fallen, he hadn’t died. His throat, unbitten yet, swallowed.
Hissing and a teeming shushing everywhere about him, and though no one, not even his mother, knew precisely where he was, he did not feel under threat for having yet found his way under roof and home. The birds were chattering to each other and he considered maybe they were marking changes in their territory, now that their own homes, the trees, had become suddenly populated by a downpour. His body did not tell him to worry. There were no nerves in his looking and watching. Looking: sight tuned to selective searching. Watching: sight receptive to whatsoever welcomed observation.
A boy fallen and choosing to remain there, drenched and muddy. Hardly the makings of an idyll, but from that lowly position, he surveyed water as it performed the good work of marrying heaven and earth. He sat apart, watching it; but caught outside, and gladly now, he was part of it.
The rain lasted the better part of an hour but clocks were indoor creatures: out among that congress of trees animated by the tugs and tweaks of marionettists on high, time was free-flowing and disorganized. He conducted his observations inside a daydream. Then, when the rain petered to a drizzle, then pulled up its strings and returned to the sky, he pulled himself to stand and, sopping wet, trudged a lean path back to civilization, where a dry cottage waited for him, with its fireplace and blankets.
That afternoon fortune bent his life’s wending in a quiet new direction. Thereafter he walked alone or in the company of other rain-chasers, indifferent to minor discomforts. It was a significant event, when the sky cracked and through those cracks rain fell. He counted it among the few truly notable visitations on earth by the holy spirit. It was a religion that required much knocking at some imperious thoroughly locked door. He was the one inside; he was the one tasked with working the locks, not some priest or angel. Stepping outdoors, he would be welcomed as part of some prodigal whole. Looking and watching.

Is this quietism? A retreat from involvement in what resists ready idealization—the fallible, petty details of a shared civic life? I remember the couple from Beijing, the wife a teacher of French, not Chinese, who bristled at the mention of Taoism. We shared stories of our home countries over lunches once, twice a week, during which the husband described what it had been like for him to discover history, the overview of his place in it gained after years of painstaking study; with his degree he had quickly found there were very few jobs interested in such specialized expertise, so he opted to re-generalize himself and become a sampler of water tables. He tested communities around the area for subtle degrees of contamination. Thereafter during our lunches I’d note he always sipped bottled water.
He told me: Mao made convenient use of Taoist attitudes and metaphors. He had no problem encouraging that kind of passivity in the population. Sit back, allow the products and actions of nature to determine one’s course. True, he granted, this was a common misapprehension of the concept Wu Wei, and how it was understood often depended heavily on how it was translated. “Inaction” or “effortless action”? Big difference between the two—an imprecision of outcome that was probably the predictable result of casting a whole subtle worldview and philosophy in verse, rather than in legalistic prose. As Mao knew, crowds are swayed most easily by metaphor. It wasn’t by chance the Cultural Revolution was predated a full decade by the Four Pests Campaign: before intellectuals were denounced as pests, mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows had been marked for extermination. These would not do, Mao decided, and it was the duty of every good citizen to advance the cause of purifying the country of their presence. Infestation. Carriers of disease. So for the better part of a year millions set about murdering each where they could be found. The sparrows were most difficult to eliminate, seeing as they could take flight to greater heights, to flee. Their nests were raided, eggs crushed. Many were shooed until they dropped from exhaustion, stomped where they lay panting on the ground. This was hardly effortless action. But the husband, the non-historian, analyst of water, felt Taoism fit Mao’s hand like a glove. He pulled it on, wriggled his fingers fully into it; enjoyed the snugness of the fit before reaching to strangle the country, several hundred thousand people at a time. Why does a strangler take such pains in the first place? The hand is ready: throats are within reach. A gloved hand leaves no fingerprints. The glove could’ve been worn by anybody or everybody.
No to Taoism then. To some, comforting as a mitten. To others, stitched leather stripped off the flanks of some poor mammal, cured and chemically treated. No to Taoism then but yes to Bavarian rainfall.

A pioneer in water research—I wouldn’t know. The claim is made but it’s uncertain he considered himself a pioneer of anything. At the Institute, supposedly studies were conducted but what specifically were the findings and what was particularly innovative about his methods? For purposes of observing and analyzing the effects of pollution on water, its plasticity and general flow properties, Theodor S devised the “Drop-picture Method.” The results of the method are simple but were difficult at first to coordinate. A camera was affixed over a plot of water; strobing lights were activated; a water drop was then released to crash into the still plot, and in that very instant was photographed. Black and white images of patterns water-in-motion made when striking water-at-rest.
These could serve as case studies of water in health or crisis. Evidence of behavior expressed through movement—from which quality and chemical composition could be inferred.
Delicate in their symmetries and details, they resemble photos of the lunar surface, closeups of craters. Each in their way look uninhabitable. Some pucker and cave into stippling dissolution. Others decorate their ringed boundaries with flash-ripples.
Here are three samples of differing composition. The first is of water of the utmost health. Note the multiplicity of forms, plastic and interchangeably fractal. The second is of water moderately under the weather. Note the contraction of forms, the diminishment of their variety. This sample has been tainted by sewage and industrial waste: infirm. The third sample displays what to the discerning eye appear as death throes. These are not positive features but negative ones: what doesn't appear, what diverges from water-norms as a lack. To this sample detergent has been added. Note the impoverishment of vortex forms, how the boundary ripple has separated from the core. It has very few days of life left. It requires intensive care, end of life comfort. To drink even a thimbleful of such water would trigger grave illness in a person or animal. Rush it to a purification plant, put it under, perform necessary and extensive surgery. If it survives the night, consider it lucky.
I’m unsure this qualifies as innovative, but the Drop-pictures are beautiful. Even the portraits of diseased and dying water are aesthetically indifferent to the root concern at hand; water is amoral, the human eye is also.

A kid caught out in the rain in the summertime. Drop-pictures by the thousand in their natural habitat, vanishing rapidly in puddles around him. He didn’t think to notice; hadn’t yet gained awareness thinking begins with noticing, and vice versa. The two were unconnected as of yet, but a certain future could be salvaged, maybe, from the morphemes of drop-concussions that eviscerated his reflection playing across each puddle-surface. Feeling came first: he was inside the belly of a rainstorm and he was wet and in contradiction to previous experiences of being caught under a downpour, he didn’t care. There were years yet until this elation, after repeated forest wanderings, lost its initial force and settled into a contented alertness. Somewhere along a path of tempered evolution feeling would acquire maturity and increasing sophistication—guided, prompted, defined by noticing. Soon after, the first seedlings of genuine thought would split and drive forth a greenness-in-miniature. All of this would be hermetically personal and no guarantee the feeling was appropriate to the noticing, or the thinking was proportional to either.
Four decades pass. Though the cities have been bombed and leveled, the same forest remains. The same rains can be found toppling through the branches of trees hundreds of years old. The boy is gone; he’s an adult, a kind of scientist; a nature enthusiast in middle age. Having devoted his life to the painstaking examination of watery phenomena, he feels compelled to theorize from feeling: the qualitative is best suited for observation of their behaviors, not the quantitative. The latter is poorly suited for depicting their liveliness.
Wheresoever there is a straight line, he would tell you, there are insults to nature, manipulative interventions by a controlling hand. Engineers damage the non-Euclidian intricacies of waterways, manhandling them into locks and channels. The circle. Circularity is what’s lost and what matters. Free a river from straight lines, it will wend and wander, shed from its curves during flood season oxbow lakes. Halflings broken from circles. A straight line, though convenient, disrupts such creativity. And even then, it can’t last. Circles will avenge such abuses eventually. Circles will rebel and free the lines.
His passion is dogmatic, a kind of straight line running through all thinking. The circle at the end of the line, a non-believer might ask, hectored a full hour by this man more preacher than scientist—what of it? Having rounded its circuit, would a traveller then be lead back the opposite direction down a straight and unnatural channel? If so, there was an engineer for that also, it would seem.

Sphere, spiral, wave, vortex—these, Theodor S argued, are most worthy of study. These are everywhere to be found where there is water. Archetypes that play freely throughout nature and summon a plethora of flora and fauna from fluid-to-solid. When I first sat for the lecture over a quarter century ago, though circumspect I was willing to accept him at his word. Photographs of the planet transmitted from orbital satellites had proven the earth was spherical, and the moon at peak fullness also. Wet towels could be twisted into tight spirals. On the Florida coast the Atlantic Ocean had demonstrated how waves could travel far distances to rise from their troughs, topple, then rush and waste into thin washes of foam. Vortices were legendary, infamous; tornado season chased herds of them through trailer parks and farmland. On the evening news digital models illustrated the twist and creep of advancing hurricanes: there was an eye for each, unfurling sickeningly outwards, shedding clouds with each revolution. I was familiar with the forms. I’d noticed them now and then, in both dramatic and mundane contexts. Theodor S referred to them as archetypes, so for the sake of following him for a short while, I accepted the term—if there was another more appropriate, one day I might be motivated enough to find it, apply it to categorizing vortex, wave, sphere, spiral as end products of some master design. One day I would cross-reference his research and propositions against those of established scientific consensus—fluid mechanics, et cetera. Did he describe the characteristics and habits of each accurately? Some day I'd know.
That day never came; now I’m no less uninformed on these than I used to be. When I open his book, there’s Theodor S patiently guiding his reader through an origin story for each, describing their behaviors with neat precision, lovingly.
Consider water as it falls from a height unknown, he writes. In every instance it takes the shape of a sphere, in droplets. As it is with rain, so it is with dew. Infinitely pliable in its liquid state, it conforms to the push and pull of gravity, humbly seeks the lowest level. Much like beads of mercury, everywhere it seems compelled to seek and meld with its kin, reclaiming a lost wholeness, “joining what is divided and uniting it in circulation.”
Analytical description or lyricism? Knife carving a pear to its core, or the pear itself? Reading him now, I notice how closely he hews towards personification: he talks of water as if it had been socialized; as if it had preferences and made choices. He describes it as if it consciously sought to meet the metabolic needs of human discernment and wisdom. There’s a glass of water at hand as I think on this. Some percentage of what I drink will in half an hour sputter then stream from a urethra as urine. A smaller percentage will wander elsewhere, blended with blood, circulating.

The toilet flushes and I watch it guzzle, spiral, choke. The death throes of a flush are usually punctuated by choppy, guttural coughs. Afterwards the toilet tank serenely hisses and water at the base of the porcelain wobbles and trembles. Through pipes straight and bent soiled water travels to the septic tank, and from there is swept along the switchbacks of an underground labyrinth to a treatment plant several blocks away. It’s close enough I can walk there, and often do. Built a century and a half ago, the reservoir is open to the public—a mile-long rectangular path on raised ground, with an antiquated tower station in the middle. Along the tarp-lined banks grows a kind of algae. Fish ballooned from long exposure to the easy life lounge there nibbling the edges and through this I suppose a harmonic balance is achieved: life feeds life and the edges are cleaned. Theodor S would approve, noting yet another instance of his favorite theme—metamorphosis, boundary zones as breeding grounds for transformation.
Solid, liquid, gas. The myriad subtle pathways between.
He pulls back from what’s intimately at hand. He gestures towards broader, more planetary processes. Watch how it travels, water, how it changes. Lifting in veils from oceans, lakes, and rivers, how it circulates through atmospheric currents around the earth. Entering a cooler zone, when passing over mountains, for example, it contracts and eases or drops to ground again as sleet, snow, rain, hail, or dew. From there, the rounds of transformation begin again—solid to liquid, or liquid to gas. There’s no end to it. There is, he claims, a definite and reliable number to all this—liquid to vapor to liquid, water changes state some thirty-four times per year.
Likewise he describes the circulation of waters through ocean currents. How water, achieving peak density at four degrees Celsius, sinks, plumes and pushes downward into depths, while warmer water rolls and rises to the surface. Sunken water thus follows a mass migration from the polar regions towards the equator, where it emerges again undetected. To the mortal observer’s eye it appears as water among water, all of a piece. To the eye educated in the ways of currents, it is always quite possibly foreign, long-travelled water surfacing.
In the winter months the reservoir doesn’t freeze over. Children carry their sleds to glide down its slopes; no ice, though, for skating. The fish retreat to the depths, I’m assuming, where it’s warmer. Once, walking around it on a particular cold afternoon, I was stopped by an older woman without gloves, who asked: Which way was it to the exit? She’d entered somewhere, she remembered, but she was lost. The walkway along the levee was simple and didn’t branch off into side-paths; it was almost impossible for someone who had entered at the main gate, at the top of several flights of steps, to get lost. In the gentlest terms I was about to say this when I noticed her head turned here and there, side to side slightly, like a bird considering the acoustics of traffic before hopping toward a dead squirrel meal at the center of a road. She was blind and somehow I hadn’t noticed. I told her I was actually walking that way myself, if she’d like to walk with me. For a quarter of a mile we talked about the cold and the trickiness of the walk despite the bushels of salt city workers had sewn over the ice. Where a grain of salt landed, I noticed, it would eat a modest hole through the ice. There it would sit on damp concrete, paired with a few of its brethren or alone. There too evidence of constant, subtle conjugations, state to state. Water undone unto water. At the gates the woman offered a shy smile as she thanked me. Awkwardly I offered to help her down the steps, though I didn't want to assume this was something she needed--but would regret not offering just in case. She forgave me for the contradiction, said no thank you, but thank you. As quietly as I could I watched her gingerly select each descending step, ungloved hand edging down the stone handrail. She was hearing my quiet, I was sure, and in going about her way was effortlessly illustrating a point she'd proven to others standing by quietly at other times, other places, her whole life. It was a minor moment and I record it here now to remind myself: at the top of those steps a shy smile will usually be there waiting for me, or always.

Theodor S is marveling at the collective contribution of plant life to the intricate migratory circulations of water around the planet. He notes that plants consist mostly of water. They serve as intermediaries between earth and atmosphere, he tells us, and responding to heat and direct exposure to sunlight on a summer day transpire water in a vapor to support the formation of cloud-blossoms in the sky. It is a wise and worthy contribution, for brethren elsewhere downwind will benefit from these labors, when the blossoms rupture and shed densified seedlings of rain. The future of woodlands depends on it. A constancy of meadows sings of it.
“On a summer’s day a 40,000 litre stream of water is drawn through a hectacre of woodland into the atmosphere,” he writes, and I believe him, because I want to believe. Forty thousand. The specificity of the number mimics facticity. Is it proven? Is it provable? The fern in the room, the plant nearest to me, sheds dry brown wrinkle-leaves to the floor. If I cared, when sweeping up these remains I could count each and determine their sum. I could do this once at the end of each day, a whole summer. Then average the sums. Would those factor into a reliable number? The same, I imagine, for the amount of water evaporating per summer day in a hectacre of woodland.
Two summers ago, summiting a mountain path to an alpine valley, one littered with pristine lakes under a cloudless sky, my old friend Matt unpacked his fishing kit and found a boulder near lakeside and attempted to teach me how to fly-fish. It took him minutes to tie the lure; I stood and watched the sky and water. Another fisherman nearby explained: the fish were feisty today. Almost as if they knew their days were numbered. In a month this place would be covered under a foot of snow. The lakes would freeze over. In two, three months, would freeze solid. All the fish would freeze, starve, suffocate. In the spring, after the thaw, the lakes would be restocked by helicopter or plane. Fish dropped from the air, into virgin water. How many? This was also a matter of numbers. The count more reliable, of course, because each winter the sum would be factored back down to zero.
When the line was lured, Matt taught me how to cast it. Looping, flowing gestures, back and forth—then send the line long, to drop on the water. There’s shadow-play involved. Mimicking the movements of insects. With left hand hold the rod, with fingers of the right hold the line, tease it ever-so-gently when it seems appropriate, to carry the lure across the surface and woo any fish that might be tempted. Most of my casts were abortive, sputtered a few feet from shore. A couple achieved full reach and glided with accidental elegance to land where the water was darkest and most settled. Ripples were registered by the surface membrane, and here and there fish received their message. The fisherman standing by told us the kind of fish that were listening to us, but their exact names I can’t remember. Not far away a woman pitching a tent with her boyfriend was gushing loudly about the beauty of the valley around her in what sounded like garbled English—charming and annoying both, because doubtless the fish heard her also. She was doing them a service, they’d prefer to survive to see another morning, hungry and quiet. We kept losing our lures to the water, anyways, or to the underbrush when lines were miscast behind us.
There were dwarfish aspens in the valley, and moss and scrappy diminutive bushes, and half-buried boulders scabbed with whitish lichen. None seemed capable of holding much water, nor contributing much through evaporation to the communal recyclings of the sky. They depended on the generosity of lusher plant life elsewhere, I imagined. Clouds formed far from this place but came here to perish, their soft bellies gutted by the twelve, thirteen-thousand-foot peaks around us. Snow tumbled like confetti guts and feathered the land during winter months. But in the warmer months rain fell in a constant drizzle, reanimating dormant flora, charging their push to release pollen and travel downwind, where their colonies might stand a better chance at longer survival. In a mockery of their efforts, I left the valley by foot. When thirsty I unscrewed the cap of a Nalgene bottle and drank without counting sips. There was more water elsewhere and I was happily descending a mountain to find it.

The smell of rain. The smell of earthiness released by the ground during and after rain. There is a word for it, I was told. Petrichor. A term invented by an Australian scientist two years after Theodor S first published his little book in Germany. Greek and Latin—following well-worn taxonomic conventions, the name was soldered together from two Greek words, as many scientific terms are, when a new natural phenomena is discovered and separated from everything around it, a sudden small island of noun-hood: Petra=stone; Ichor=golden fluid that flows through the veins of immortals. Stones are often too slow-going for their aging processes to be observed with any appreciable clarity; yet they’re hardly immortal. They can be held in hand; they can be thrown. They can be ground down to powder then churned with water and chemicals to form cement. They can be stacked and bound by mortar. Formed as a wall, they can withstand the ichorous urinations of others who are more apparently mortal: the five tavern-goers I saw once, for instance, in Dingle, west Ireland, standing outside their establishment. They were nearly shoulder-to-shoulder and could almost rest chins atop the rock wall on which they were urinating. They jabbered on to one another as they relieved themselves. Imagine the fragrance of that wall on a hot summer day, or after a rain.
There are three factors active in earth-smells after rain. Ozone, geosmin, and plant oils. Each combine along a chain of interactions between sky and earth, and the outcome of their combination is largely incidental to their origins.
First there is ozone. When lightning strikes, molecules of nitrogen and oxygen are shattered. These recombine as nitric oxide and ozone. Ozone molecules are then absorbed by water droplets in clouds and fall as rain.
Next there is geosmin. There is a bacteria, Actinomycetes, often found in soil. This bacteria secretes a chemical compound which is released from soil to air during rainfall. So attuned is the human olfactory system to its scent, it can be detected at less than five parts per trillion. This is geosmin. This also plays a part.
Lastly there are actions of plant oils. Stearic acid, palmitic acid—during dry stretches plants will secrete these, which are in turn transferred to rock and soil. When rain falls, rock and soil release these into the air, where they circulate.
It is unclear to me yet how these three interact to perfume the air with earth-smell, but I can attest to its presence on a rainy day. For decades I’d appreciated it without having a name for it, nor any understanding of the mechanisms of action that produced it. As a boy playing in a cow pasture with friends, outside Limerick, the scent was a continual feature of the landscape; for the longest time it was simply how I thought rain was supposed to smell. I had no concept of soil-born bacteria and their role in the development of immunosuppressive medicines. I lived innocently among a romance of rain and earth, believing the feelings they conjured in me where indivisible and inexplicable. They weren’t, I’d later find out. They were merely waiting to be complicated by a subtle chain of disenchantments. The language of chemistry could be learned, though with some difficulty, the way I’d been tasked with learning Irish Gaelic. It was also impossible for me absorb at the time, though I tried. Sitting in class next to Irish-born kids, struggling to pronounce the impossible words, it was my first experience with feeling unequal to a task. There’s been many others since.

Forty years since I’d left the classroom at Monaleen, never to return, there’s only one word I remember: féach. “Look”. Surely the reason it left a lasting impression was its close aural resemblance to a certain dirty word in English. Pronounce the -ch throatfully, as if clearing your throat, hocking mucus from the rearmost reaches of the tongue, to spit out a window. Aside from scents of earth-rain, my memories of the place are mostly visual. The Tinkers and their mule-drawn flatbed wagons. The gnarled ancient trees lining the walls dividing neighborhoods and fields. My friend Niall’s setter Rusty running in zigzags to avoid the snares of nettles.
In the room where I'm writing this hangs a painting by my mother, painted from a photograph she’d taken during a return visit. Of the Black Lake in the Gap of Dunloe. In a tin container beneath where it hangs, there rests folded, among other castaways of foreign currency, a single Irish pound note. Having summoned it from its hiding place, I’m currently holding it to lamplight, feaching the watermark of Lady Lavery imprinted in the paper: there she sits for a perpetual portrait, ghosting and glowing. When I was younger she was a figure of curiosity and mystery. Who was she? She was a spirit who lived in people’s pockets and travelled hand to hand. A patron saint of commerce, whom tavern-goers prayed to when they were thirsty for a pint. I’d later find she was an immigrant like me, born in Chicago. The stink of the River Shannon I also remembered. Nowadays, living one neighborhood over from a twenty-four-hour slaughterhouse, now and then I’m hit with aromas of shit and carnage and the River Shannon flows once again before me. That much-abused, moderately famous river. I don’t miss it.
The river runs north to south, threads through Limerick to an estuary which opens to the Atlantic. A crooked arrow pointing the direction to North America. It begins as a spring near Cuilcagh Mountain then wanders where the land takes it. Left to their own devices, streams or rivers never take a straight course—they meander. This is something Theodor S explores in some detail, the question of why water is compelled to follow such a winding course. As it descends a hill or mountain, notice how it ventures alternately from one side to another, bending and weaving. The exploratory instincts of water in forward motion, he says, are acutely sensitive to the character of the landscape it encounters. A wide valley provides room to wander, so it swings back and forth in “far-flung curves”. A narrow valley causes the curves to tighten, their hither-tither oscillations to become more rapid. He compares this improvisatory liveliness to the qualities and movements of artificially straightened rivers, finding the latter inert and dreary.
The River Shannon as I knew it was straightened in its course, locked into concrete and patterned after the demands of the city. It stank like manure or rotten chicken on the summer day when I last visited, the pub’s windows thrown open to afford a view of its slow-going ugliness. A shot of whiskey held beneath the nose wasn’t enough to sweeten the reek of it. There were other expressions of the river, I’m reminded by Theodor S’s sermon, further north or elsewhere, near its widening and emptying. Elsewhere it doodled from county to county and freely expressed itself, teasing the land with cursive circle-games.
The word meander, a footnote in the book explains, originates as the name of an actual river. In Asia Minor, in modern day Turkey—The Büyük Menderes. The river “flows in very pronounced rhythmical loops”, striking enough to offer its name for common description of any such shape assumed by any such river. Over the centuries it has become archetypal and peppers written and spoken English with its evocative verbishness. I use it here in my own way, following details where they fall, connecting them in a wandering fashion, unhurried by the final requirements of a coherent pattern. It may not resolve into a perfect circle; might be enough to slip past capture in a straight line. It’s pleasant—learning a word I’ve used my whole life has been active a long while as a large living thing, autonomous of description. Boats travel up and down it even now, as I write this. Traffic moves both directions across bridges, shadows of bridges supported by the illusion they lay still upon still water, when really both—shadow, water—achieve their shared deceit through movement.

*

The anatomy of a river. Theodor S devotes pages to this. Cross-section illustrations, arrows and dotted lines to denote the patterned movement of currents within them, the perpetual revolutions that define their interiors. What causes this? What purpose does it serve? “Water on the surface flows from the inside of a bend to the outside”; from there it turns downward, “returns along the bed of the stream to the inner bank, where it rises to the surface again.” This results in a spiraling motion. Usually two such spiraling currents play against each other along the bed of a stream or river, like monoamniotic twins in a womb.
Here is one such river laid out in diagram, dissected. Note the interweaving of currents activating and defining its forward movements. He compares these to “the single strands which, twisted together, make a rope; only here we must imagine that everything is in constant change and also that new water keeps flowing through each single ‘strand’ of water.” No, he changes his mind; that metaphor isn’t altogether useful. Strands in a string—too solid, concrete. Instead it would be best to call to mind steam threading from a cup of hot tea or smoke from the end of a cigarette. Veils that twist and turn—their substance submitted to perpetual change so their forms might come alive and take shape through movement.
This is better. This is more what he means. Currents summon their form through interplay, forever in movement.
Meanders express this indirectly, through erosion. Currents wrestle and tumble and gradually the outer banks erode. Silt from the outer banks are deposited downstream on inner banks, circulated by the currents. Over time, unchecked, a river will “grow closer and closer to the form of a circle”; a heavy downpour will eventually flood the land and join the meanders. A chain of lakes in the vicinity of a river tells an old story: through riverine mitosis independent bodies of water were established, later to be individually named by locals. In effect they were byproducts of current, ancestors of river set free to play without need for prodigal atonement. They were unwieldy but joyful, like children on a playground, and like children frequently selfish—crushing and drowning the houses of un-landed gentry for sport. Rent was cheap along the river banks, so they gambled; and lost when the rains came and the river flooded.

There is another book, a better one, a classic of its genre. On Growth and Form. The book reached me as a curiosity; the author shared the exact name as my brother, minus the apostrophe—D’Arcy Thompson. My brother has a mind for mathematics but also the training, so read the book for fun, to appreciate the significant contributions to biology made by his doppelgänger. Additive processes evidenced in the growth of natural forms—shells, horns. Not long after, Theodor S’s book found me and it seemed he was also familiar with the logarithmic habits of organic forms. He speaks of water as integral to the developmental processes of organisms. Nothing is mentioned in regards to genetics or selection pressures. He seems more moved by sample illustrations from biology. The “screw-like spiraling shapes” of Infusoria; the fins of fish. A tube worm native to the Mediterranean—Spirographia. The structure of the heart of a particular African lungfish—Protopterus—which has evolved a dividing membrane in the shape of a “twisting spiral” and which channels “two neighboring blood streams”. He admires the spiraling designs to be found in the structure of human bones and sinews. He cites the work of a certain Benninghoff, who tapped with an awl tiny indentations into the surfaces of calcified bone. These he filled with India ink. The ink, slightly absorbed by the bone as it dried, lengthened out, “revealing the direction of tensions in the bone.” The patterns revealed by these fissures suggested a system of currents, moving in concert, swirling. The accompanying illustration of a human shoulder bone is marked with dots flowing in mutually enfolding directions. Another illustration of a femur describes within the spongy matter of bone a similar play of currents. The book is filled with illustrations, borrowed from an array of other books, many I imagine more obscure than this one. Primary sources are acknowledged but it’s uncertain whether these are artists, researchers, or both. Homann, Walter, Hesse-Dolflein. Parlenko, Hinkderks, Ludwig. Surnames like fossils uncovered by the progressive erosion of a riverbank.

A life takes shape that way—cause-and-effect in a meander until certain abilities are developed and realized or half-so. Easy to point that out because saying so provides the pleasures of a short-cut. A Bavarian boy caught in a rainstorm reads a particular book or meets a particular person and becomes curious about quote unquote spiritual science. What was he missing in his life that he’d need research to lead somewhere besides the confirmation of certain hypotheses about the operations of matter? Quanta and neutrinos—he couldn’t feel them. Wholly unappealing, the judgments passed down by physicists, that at a certain point intuition was an impediment towards investigating and accurately representing the micro-movements of natural phenomena. It has been proven true. The equations of advanced mathematics like super-sensory antennae have received messages from abstract, unknown wild-lands of cosmic design. It could be he didn’t have the requisite training, or the ability. It could be the satisfactions of a delicately structured equation didn’t speak to his needs—to feel connected to a thoroughly integrated liveliness, part of a whole. The Germany of his youth had a problem with this in general: the part’s loneliness for inclusion in a whole. He much preferred hydrodynamics, comparative anatomy. He’d rather walk in a rainstorm than suffer to solve progressively more difficult calculations. To see, smell, taste, touch, hear. To track subtle resonances among differing categories of natural form. This was better, at least for him. This came more naturally.
Cause-and-effect. There’s the argument that it favors best those who are ready for it; for those who can watch and wait, like surfers who’ve paddled a fair distance from shore; select carefully which swell to follow, when to leap to board, ride the wave. I think of Nathaniel Bowditch, the sheer luck of the man, and how he learned to mold it to his advantage. When a boy he took work as an accountant in a shipyard. One day unusual cargo arrived, stolen by pirates from a ship traveling from Scotland to England. A famous chemist’s entire library had been traveling among its freight; the whole load of books nicked and carried across the Atlantic. The thieves may have not seen too much use in them, or lacked the connections necessary to sell them. Was there a black market for scholarly texts at the time? One would imagine. The boy, spying an opportunity, persuaded his way into ownership of the full library. From there he set about reading. Every single volume he read; many he re-read. At the time this constituted a first-rate education. What was peculiar was the growth of the boy’s understanding: the accountant within him rapidly matured into a mathematician. As always, context mattered. He worked in a shipyard, kept company with seafaring people, so became interested in nautical topography. Later he would design intricately precise maps of the New England shoreline, which are accurate in their measurements to this day. It was a far-reaching wave that he chose to ride across a life, and when it crumbled it carried him long into the current century. As I write this, ships sample and track his original designs through sonar. It’s not necessary he be a household name—the shorelines of Southern Georgia were definitively transformed by his education.
The books had been traveling from Scotland, headed for a university in England. England at the time was well beyond realizing its colonialist aspirations; Scotland lagged far behind, and far behind itself, really. It had already been conquered, was one of England’s earliest—how delusional would a colony have to be to nurture colonialist ambitions? Roughly two miles from where I sit there is a golf course, a hilly stretch of green very near the middle of the city. Through the dry months of summer thousands of gallons of water are squandered keeping the grass fresh and springy. It’s like this everywhere, the world over. There are golf courses in Dubai and on Iceland. Soon there will be a course on Antarctica, on the Ross Island Sheet. Each in their way reference a specific stretch of Scottish wasteland where the game was first invented and played. This was centuries ago. Strike a pebble with a stick, towards a hole. It passed the time between suffering and dying. Three hundred years later the landscape has been replicated everywhere and demands constant upkeep—far more than was ever required in Scotland. Call it a topological virus, spreading wherever there’s money and the will to swing a driver. There’s another course, I realize, equally distant from here in another direction, near the reservoir. I walk and drive past these so often their existence hardly registers. After several months of drought, I’m sure I’d learn to see them again. Their grasses springing into action as clouds--sprouting miniature rains from sprinklers.

Two boys climb to stand on the second-most top rung of a white wooden fence. Here’s how they experiment with tallness—hold their arms out full-stretch either side of them, for balance. A field of corn rolls before them for a mile or so at full height. In a week the combines will come to mow them low, shucking the cobs and threshing those for their kernels. The boys hang like scarecrows, admiring the concert of swirling patterns the wind makes across the leaves. Dips and swells, massive rolling flows plow towards them. When they run between stalks down the rows, there’s no such motion. The leaves whisper and flick, shuffle and blink, chaotic. Very little rhythmic unity to be found there. But when they take height and stand wobbly atop the fence, a shine rolls forward across the leaves and they’re reminded of ocean waves. This could be the Atlantic, the Pacific. This could be the big middle of either, agitated by an oncoming storm. One of the boys imagines them as foothills come alive and running. Fleeing the mountains east of them.
Here’s an early education also. Preliminary experiments of comparison between wave-forms. There will be others—sand in dunes, or flocks of birds lifting, settling back to ground. Later a book will describe these as common manifestations of an archetype. It will analyze the varying structures of waves and categorize them accordingly.
Consider their form and substance. How they appear to advance, animating the mediums they inhabit. But look closer. Take a more careful examination of their ways and habits: do they really? Context matters, it seems, the local habitat and customs of each wave. Samples to be found in a flowing stream are wholly different, are they not, from those that cruise as fluctuating movements over still water? Take note: “The wave behind a stone in a stream remains always at the same place, a lasting form, with new water constantly flowing through it, whereas in the stationary water of a lake or sea the form of the wave is transformed in movement across the surface.” This discrepancy is crucial, the book insists, and is worth our consideration, for its implications are as subtle as they are comprehensive. Why does the difference matter? It may take many diagrams and more than a few equations to explain.
What is a wave? As with water in its spiraling form, driving forth a river, it is an interplay of opposing forces made manifest. Currents and their emergent patterns. One works against the another and among the interaction of their polarities a third thing takes shape, fully formed, at their surface of contact: a wave. The water doesn’t make the wave; contrasting currents achieve a balance and from this a wave is continually created. Rhythmicity and speed, intersection of boundaries, interference patterns. The book considers many essential factors that must be present before a wave can emerge. The book offers itself as a fence to stand on. From the meager height it affords a person, they might use it as seamen in the distant past made use of crows nests—a vantage from which to scan and assess the swells of waves around them.

The sleeper is awake and sipping coffee. The coffee is Columbian black. Still a residue of otherness clinging to his thought-movements. Placenta sloughing off a mind-born-from-dream. He’s no longer tired, there’s a freshness to his efforts. He’s sat himself down on an overcast early afternoon to recall what he once gleaned from a capstone work written by a well-regarded sleep researcher. There are stages to sleep; waking not included, four in number; there are patterns of excitation and lull. The slowest carry across various regions of the brain in synchronized and gentle lappings, and after an hour, an hour and a half, cease, making way for another round of the full cycle. These aren’t Schwenkian waves, though water is involved, so much as neurons are sustained, as heart, liver, and kidneys are, by the fluid element. In the third stage, across the flowing of the brain’s slowest waves, memories are shed of their inessentials and consolidated. Rejuvenated upon waking, the sleeper lifts a structurally altered brain from the pillow: new neural connections have washed ashore.
He’s awake now. He’s less coordinated. He yawns and digs a crust from a tear duct. This is also a product of his reading, what is normal to his waking moments but explicable now as information. Electrical activity in a daylight brain is almost always desynchronized. Various regions perform their functions more or less independently: an interplay of contrasting currents. Together their force lines summon a shape. In this case, a wakened brain. It’s thinking about itself. It’s cross-referencing descriptions of its functions against the feeling of sitting in a chair, bitter coffee in the mouth, gray sky absorbing him into a mood that compliments the lightning strike of caffeine. These are the dour months, rainy and chilly. The days shorter, sundown before end of the afternoon.
What are the exceptions? Migraines, seizures. Widespread synchronization of electrical activity, latter more catastrophic than the former. The sleeper has known other sleepers who periodically suffer from seizures: it’s an experience he can only imagine. Migraines, though, he’s well-acquainted with—a searing hot razor blade cutting along the length of the trigeminal nerve. Aural scotoma, brilliant needle-sparkles. Nausea, brain-bruise, loss of balance. He calls it “brain-bruise" because it feels that way. For days after, there’s a mega-hangover. Each cough thumbs deep a sore-spot in the brain. Equally annoying is the difficulty with which thoughts are linked one to the other. Efficiency of neural teamwork out of sync. He feels like a dunce for days. And for days can feel another painful hatching waiting in the wings, prodromal. To avoid triggering another, he avoids bright lights and airborne allergens. He wears face masks and sunglasses. The most reliable hiding place is sleep.
He’s awake at the moment, unfortunately. He’s biding his time with a line of thought—“line” being a figure of speech, not in the least descriptive of his movements through hearsay and memory. Novalis. Long ago, on his lunch breaks as a laborer on a horse farm in the heat of summer, he had sat in the angling shadow of a barn reading the poems of Novalis. He was wholly innocent of the vagaries of translation—that there could be a skillful translator or otherwise. What mattered was how the English worked through him: if a line surprised or delighted him, good enough. Having a genetic predisposition for cystic fibrosis, as a medical test had once proven, he paid special attention to descriptions of the author’s illness—its progression unto death. The poet was an inspector of mines by trade, assigned to a salt mine near Weissenfal. His lungs went bad; coughing turned up blood. In his introduction the translator noted tell-tale symptoms of the disease were ironic in this case: a salty taste and scent on the skin. Given where he worked, how would he have noticed? Sitting in the hot shade, the sleeper soon became attuned to the saltiness his own sweat left upon his lips. In the grass beside him was a bottle filled with middling water. Not cold, because by more seasoned hands he’d been warned—cold water will drive a spike through your brain. Migraine-prone, he knew the feeling, so kept his water neither cold nor warm.

*

Consider a hen’s egg, the formative processes in the embryo, how these are carried along by rhythmical wave movements. Like sleep waves in the human brain, “gentle waves of contractions” pass over the egg’s amnion “from one end to the other and back.” It is, as Theodor S describes, “a kind of rhythmical to and fro movement that continuously massages and moulds the content of the egg.” He cites experiments with unfertilized eggs. How, if subjected to persistent rhythmic shakings, the development of an embryo can be awakened. This sounds as likely as spontaneous generation, but there’s the sense it might be true. From there he examines the peristaltic movements of intestines, wave-like also. And from there forwards examples of creatures so attuned to the fluid element they have incorporated wave-movements into their anatomy: manta rays, snakes, electric eels. Wave-shapes are so prevalent among living creatures, they might be considered expressive of their original evolutionary condition: in water they first developed and from water they sprang; in the waters of egg and womb they continue to take shape. In successive waves of birth they track the prospects of a species, shoring and dissipating as generations.
Restless leg syndrome. My left leg, per usual, under the desk. Heel lifts off floor, weight presses into ball of the big toe, jackhammering starts without conscious awareness. During meals people have held the stems of wineglasses to still them, laid a hand politely atop their utensils—my leg had been going and had conjured a pet earthquake from the floor. Up the table legs the trembling had carried, spread in rapid waves through plates and glasses. At times my wife, amazed and annoyed, will point to the table’s centerpiece or a nearby lamp—a trembling possessed by leg-spirit. I think to the leg: stop. It stops. The initial minutes of stillness feel off: the urge to start again is strong. Turn back too soon to conversation circulating above the table, it might resume without my noticing. Slip an egg in my pocket as I sit for dinner, by the end of the evening maybe I’ll have granted it a future childhood, leg-shakes activating the embryo.
Another sip of coffee, another morning. The leg’s going and I remember: the foals, their deaths. The plague of stillbirths that swept across horse country fifteen, twenty years ago. It had worried the owner of the farm where I’d worked; they weren’t a diversified operation. Each year the farm pooled the bulk of its earnings to make one big purchase at auction in Saratoga Springs, usually a Derby winner or Preakness winner or winner of the Belmont Stakes. A thoroughbred for breeding. Mare after mare, a forced mount, one quick impregnation after another. Dozens of mares about the place carried potentially high-dollar foals to term, and after the foals were born they were babied, raised with the utmost skill and care. If a fraction of these realized the talents of their stock, money would come flowing back to the farm and most of this the owners would bring back to Saratoga Springs. It was a cycle of purchase, birth, sale, and since they lived by auctions were often reminded how much they were compelled to gamble. Never were they reminded so sharply than they were that summer when foals started dying, for no reason they could tell.
Womb-dead, they were pulled from their mothers half-formed. It was the case with every mare, so each was examined. They were healthy, nothing wrong with them. The farm’s accountant projected an approximate dollar amount that had been lost—upwards of several million. If no foal came to term, the farm might have enough money for auction later in the year; no purchase meant no future stock, no sales. They would go belly-up eventually without quality stock. They’d be left breeding losers instead of winners.
The stillborns were sent to a lab—the amniotic fluid, umbilical cords, everything was tested. The results that came back were alarming, confusing: in each, trace amounts of a chemical similar to cyanide had been found, strong enough to abort an embryo or fetus but not in concentrations that would harm the mother. They were poisoned, then. But by whom? How?
Environmental field technicians were hired to survey the farm, the stables, the surrounding fields. They took samples, observed where horses grazed and wandered. The farm’s owner told them: some of the land had been purchased a few summers prior, and these had been marked by fences slathered in creosote. The fences had been torn down after the purchase, but over the years chemicals in the creosote may have wept off the planks and somehow leeched into the ground? It could be, they told him. They collected grass blades from that field and others, sent them to a lab. Not long after they had their answer.
The grass. Depending on where it was found, to varying degrees the grass was tainted. Near certain tree lines, especially. The trees were investigated more closely and there in large numbers the poison-source was found, a species of caterpillar particularly abundant around the area over the previous few summers—the Green Eastern tent caterpillar. These ate the leaves of a certain cherry tree, many of which were nearby, in view from any direction. The leaves produced a chemical that, digested, was secreted by the caterpillars as slime trails. Caterpillars could be found wherever the investigators walked, crawling in the grass.
The solution, if I remember correctly (knee shaking): the trees were cut down and burned. The most contaminated fields were cleared and sprayed with pesticide. By the end of the summer three healthy foals were born and I suppose that constitutes a happy ending. I’m reminded again of what I’d realized at the time, bitter to the taste as any leaf from the aforementioned cherry tree: after a lifetime of labor, never could I hope to earn as much as what a stillborn thoroughbred was worth. Dissimilar to human embryos, theirs were insurable, protectable through the full course of pregnancy until birth and shortly after--though it's expensive to do so, I would imagine.
End of story; the knee is still again. The desk is calm and I'm sitting at it. But here begins the real discomfort. Though the leg's ceased its jammering there's the sensation it hasn't--stillness is a ruse and it's still moving. The only relief would be to jig it. Before I can ask it for relief, it starts up again.

Incarnations of sphere, of spiral and wave, of water teased by the lay of land and gravity into a meander. These are preliminary, they lay the groundwork for construction of the final form, the most striking and protean—the vortex. Theodor S holds vortices in special regard, for they combine the aspirations and principles of the others, direct them towards novel purposes. From an abstract vantage point he watches a wave rise, crest, curl, fold. At that critical moment he pauses the wave to call our attention to the hollow that’s been formed by its curling. There, he says, air and water interbreed, “unite in turbulence and foam.” What interaction of forces specifically animate the shaping of such hollows-in-water? He reverses the wave, replays it in slow-motion. Look—look how its upper layer overshoots the lower and water is drawn into the hollow. It does so in a circular motion—a sphere summoning towards its completion but unsupportable, so it crashes and shatters. Before that happens, briefly, there is this hollow powered by in-turning circularity. Here marks the instant when eddies and vortices are born.
Look for them anywhere there’s water and usually the looking’s rewarded. There’s the classic shape of bathwater curling down a drain. To find them in a stream, he advises, examine its boundary surfaces and little obstructions—a branch or twig half-submerged and cleaving its flow. Vortex hatchlings sputter along in alternating trains either side of the twig, losing strength and shape as they smooth back into the even glide of the current. Wherever there are contrasts, jagged differences attempting resolution in a flowing medium, these singular constructions take shape. Solid and liquid; liquid, gas. Slow and fast, cool and warm. Viscous, fluid. Alkaline, acid. Whirling and charged incarnations of vortex channel conflicts among these, and express them. These can be scaled large, as vast shifting air currents over Newfoundland. They can also be viewed preserved in stone, evidence of the earth’s larval past—magma churning and cooling into layered curls. He offers as proof crosscut illustrations of mountain ranges of Central Europe and North Africa, flowing patterns enfolded in stone.
He makes use of visual aids, presents his case as a slide show. Here’s an image of the Milky Way, a vortex-sample of the largest scale. He mentions Kepler’s Second Law, speculates about the influence of cosmic patterns on smaller, more local phenomena. Next comes a diagram of the pituitary gland of a sand lizard. Note it’s vortical character, the curling, the invagination. He postulates this as possibly an influence on growth processes that coordinate development of the organism as a whole, for synchronization of growth processes is the pituitary’s primary role. He presents a slide of a river lamprey. He pulls up a diagram of the human cochlea. Snail shells, the horns of the African kudu antelope. He presents a wealth of evidence to support his argument, which is a simple one: vortices great and small can be found nearly anywhere, form influencing a variety of functions. “All bad thinkers are in love with eclecticism,” Hemingway didn’t once write. It’s as true for me as it is for Theodor S: mixing unlikely and even opposing elements into a shared environment, to inspire novel forms from tension and conflict. The final slide of his presentation is an aerial illustration of the many Circles of Hell. No, it’s the image of a gold mine in rural Brazil. Tiny people descending a circular path down to its center. I blink and see a lamprey’s mouth, rows of teeth arranged gullet-wise in rings. To see it is to be recognized and swallowed.

On New Year’s Eve three people gather in a small bathroom. The host of the party has invited them to join him for a lecture on toilet water. A trained naturalist, he had been describing the influence of the earth’s rotation on the paths of objects or fluids traveling north or south—the Coriolis Effect. Since the planet was wider at its circumference near the equator than at other points further north or south each hemisphere, lines of progression and travel veer and curve in the direction of its rotation. This shapes the drift of weather patterns and the migratory habits of currents. In the northern hemisphere this turning runs counterclockwise; south of the equator, the opposite. This can be viewed playing out in real-time meteorological trackings of cyclones, but also in humbler, less obvious settings such as here, a bathroom. To illustrate his point, the host flushed his toilet then stood back so others could lean in and watch. See how the water spins through its flush counterclockwise? If we stood in a bathroom in Adelaide or Buenos Aires, the flush would reverse itself, follow the circular paths of minute and second hands. Since the host is more learned and older than them by several decades, his students believe him. For weeks into the new year every time they flush a toilet or stand in hot showers with bowed heads, observing water turn in a drain, they’re reminded of the earth’s rotation and its subtle regulation of water-movements. None thought to doubt him—he spoke so confidently. Uncertain about the subtler operations of nature, they took his degree’s word for gospel. Doctor Coriolis: if he spoke in a particular direction on some topic or other, unthinkingly they usually were compelled to follow. As it happened, they would remain unaware how far they’d veered from the consensus of informed opinion, until months or years later when someone as equally informed as he corrected them. They’d feel foolish, doubly ignorant. The Coriolis Effect was a scientifically proven phenomenon, but it’s reach was more limited than they’d been led to believe: toilet water didn’t follow the turn of earth’s rotation, nor change its habits once it crossed the equator. Challenged about this, Doctor Coriolis denied placing any claim on misinformation. He couldn’t remember ever being wrong while standing in a bathroom. Maybe while he was talking in one direction, the earth’s turning had influenced how they heard him; and since no follow-up questions were asked, they kept traveling on an erroneous path until they’d been corrected. He was sorry they hadn’t heard what he’d said or had meant to say, and had believed it. But having been wrong a while and having discovered their wrongness under embarrassing circumstances, he was sure they’d never forget the experience of being emboldened by a falsehood. No doubt, Doctor Coriolis was smug, incapable of admitting fault. They didn’t think to thank him. A small offense, they couldn’t muster much resentment for him either. He stood to lose more by losing face than they’d stand to gain from gaining one. Though the need for a face, they figured, was largely the problem. Like umbrellas among the unfortunate, often they were content to share one. Though rain didn’t fall equally for all concerned.

Watch this turning in the water, observe what occurs as a drop of dye is added to it. How the drop, upon hitting water, spins along. How it accelerates as it travels from the outer to innermost circuits of the vortex, until it vanishes into the narrow of its core. The whole wobbles and throbs rhythmically up and down, unharmed. Negative pressure, suctional tension. Increasing gradations of speed. Summoned experimentally in a lab, these pet vortices seem uninterested in tearing a world asunder or drowning an unlucky leaf. They live a short while, as long as one current is driven against another, or a dividing surface, a steel rod for instance, is submerged in driving water. A train of vortices sputters along downstream in an alternating rhythm, left, right, left, losing strength and smoothing back into the general flow.
Play with the variables—the narrowness or wideness of the channel; shape and weight of the obstructions. Notice how the vortex train changes accordingly.
Intervals between vortices shedding from either side of the rod downstream—these lengthen as the channel widens. A thinner rod sheds smaller trains. Adjust thickness of rod, speed of water, width of channel. Notice the resulting variety.
On paper, these can be calculated, numerically diagrammed. Before water is pushed through water into a channel, before a rod is plunged gently through its surface, cleaving it, the outcome is predictable by equation. Thickness of obstruction divided by speed, times frequency. The fluid mechanics of oscillating flow-properties laid bare thanks to Strouhal’s Law.
These are sad examples, bred for dissection. Born in captivity, they’re only fit for sterile conditions. Rod instead of twig, plastic tub instead of creek-bed. The water they’re conjured from comes pre-tamed by pipes and hoses: there’s no separating them from it, for relocation in a wilder habitat. They won’t contribute to their surroundings in any appreciable way, enriching boundary zones with their busy-work. They’ll dissolve softly when a faucet’s turned and water stops, lights switched off in the lab. Some may turn a while in the memory of their observer, meta-vortices more neuron than stream. But like people born into history but rendered unimportant by it, they’ll vanish unambered by the public record, never to return. They’ll vanish like individuals in a species, unnamed and unbothered by their lack of acclaim. Consummation with their anonymity rejoins them with their own.
Here, for example. A jellyfish pushing through water. Contracting, expanding, it draws water into its body, ejects it—and thus is propelled forward by a backwards thrust. Theodor S calls attention to the anatomical symmetry between jellyfish and water-plume: “…each jet of water takes on a bell-like shape, like the jellyfish itself but in reverse.” A train of bell-shapes curling into twin vortices, lasting a short while before resolving back into formlessness. Past selves, mirror selves, they mark their moment by driving the future forward, then they’re conjugated cleanly nowhere, water blending with water.

*

Nature and beauty—the eye of the beholder gouged out. Severed from its optic nerve, the eye, newly null to beauty and horror equally, is returned to blind matter, and rots, or is preserved frozen in a hospital for later examination in a lab. There was violence, but committed by who against whom? There was a socket, and a face surrounding it. There were eyelids and lashes, a warm wet den inches deep in the cranial cavity. Nature’s stranded there somewhere in the nano-labyrinthine workings of a neocortex, corpse or survivor. Beauty has stolen the eye of the beholder for itself, and left the beholder to bleed out, clutching the wound with both hands. Miles from the Pacific coast of Columbia the island of Gorgona can be found—seventeen to be exact. A high-security prison was built there and for four decades thieves of human eyes could be found there.
It is a small, thin island, overrun by venomous snakes. The surrounding waters are filled with sharks. The country sent its worst criminals there to live out the rest of their days in squalor. Rapes and murders were frequent, and attempts at escape rare. If they had eyes for the place, prisoners were forced to share them: such was the common fate they’d created, harvesting the fates of others and squandering them. Those who weren’t murdered by their fellow eye-collectors died from tropical diseases, and those who attempted escape died from desperation and foolishness.
There was one exception, and here it will be noted. A serial rapist and killer of children, a man greedy for eyes—The Beholder. He has a name but he doesn’t deserve one here, since the children no longer have names either. He harmed children in Columbia. He harmed children in Brazil. Later he would harm children for two years without check, in Ecuador. If he didn’t have eyes, the children of Ecuador would have been spared. If he hadn’t escaped from Gorgona, some seventy-two to a hundred-and-eighty girls would have names.
If ever there were need for proof that skill in the art of careful observation is amoral, consider this. From his window he studied the ocean currents. He analyzed their rhythms and fluctuations. From these observations he plotted an escape by sea. On the Feast of the Virgin of Mercy, patron of inmates, he fled and hid. Preservation of virginity was the obsession that inspired his psychopathy, so there was no small irony in this. He built a raft of logs; lashed together with vines. On that he sailed to shore and vanished and was given extra lead time by the assumption he’d perished on the waters. Within months he was disappearing children in Ecuador.
Not long after, the prison was closed and the island remained. The prison became green and part of the island. The Beholder was stabbed to death elsewhere, by a fellow prisoner also without a name. His eye for the currents briefly gave him freedom but brought him there. Holistic fairytales would have him decompose, undone forever, to recombine as parts of other, less terrible forms. The molecules that composed him were not complicit, the sixty percent water freed from capture in his self. Certain forces played through a childhood to form the child murderer: they had shaped him and carried others into that shape, and now it was gone.

*

I have my own eyes and since they’re not stolen yet, I can give them freely to whomever and whatever I choose. Faces are words and printed words fossilized micro-expressions of Schwenk-thought. If “reading” nature is the aim, I’m illiterate. Luckily what it would care to impart is carried along by an oral tradition, articulated in the negative: thoughtless silence. As Theodor S tells us, “The resting state originates in movement.” I check to see whether he means this metaphorically or literally; the truth is halfling, closer to somewhere between.
He is describing a critical turn in the creative actions of water. Opposing currents meet, forces achieve a balance, surfaces take shape, and soon novel forms emerge. Without plan or even intention, an inner region separates from an outer one—-water from water. Differentiation of structure without differentiation of substance, with only a flow of currents-held-in-balance to animate it. Look everywhere and you’ll gain more eyes from witnessing it: the spontaneous emergence of an inwardness and outwardness from something once capable of neither.
Examine the stages of human embryonic development—there it is, free to be found. One force working another, “welling outflow and suctional inflow”, sinks and currents collaborating, traveling nine months downstream on the genetic river.
The optic vesicle, for instance. You’re reading this, so let’s appraise where seeing and reading began. Twenty-six to thirty days after fertilization of an egg, in the wall of the diencephalon, a small bulge forms. This bulge invaginates and shapes a lens disc. From the budding brain the earliest buds of the eyes emerge and subtly cordon themselves off from brain. Their inner chambers will fill with vitreous humor. The outer surfaces will branch with delicate capillaries. When flecks of dust irritate their surface, eyelids will blink. Should the lids close, their lashes will mesh and establish a change of relationship between eye and world: eyes will be hidden beneath skin. Retinal photoreceptors will continue to fire, sparking soft red spots in the darkness, and vision will turn inward, unfolding imaginary scenarios in the mind. I suppose we could add to the long train of examples of outer and inner one last divide: brain and mind.
So ends Theodor S’s improvisations on the topic, as I imagine it. Already his book has moved on to other things—the filtration processes of aquatic sponges. How all across a sponge’s outer surface narrow channels passively grant water entry to the interior. How those gatherings are then expunged from a wider channel at its top, in a concentrated stream. Suction inwards, streaming outwards—a tension that buttresses the growth of a sponge. As it is with brains and sponges, so it is with water and minds? No—“so it isn’t.” So it isn’t with water and minds—though when I take a sip of water, half an hour later the two meet intimately, and I think of it.

An interesting difference between the North American beaver and the European—one makes dams, the other doesn’t. North America was rendered fertile by some two hundred million engineers constructing dams and lodges upstream. Then hunters arrived from Europe and blighted the beaver population: two hundred million have since been shaved down to an estimated two million, as of this writing.
They are small of brain and monogamous. They eat their food twice—consume wood or leaf which they then defecate as a gelatinous porridge; this they eat and digest for optimal extraction of nutrients. Their origins date back millions of years. Their ancestors were seven feet long and dug enormous spiral burrows underground which filled with debris after their extinction and thus were calcified and preserved. Many such burrows to this day can be found in North America, western Europe, or central Asia. One who devoted his career to studying these has dubbed them “devil’s corkscrews.” It’s uncertain what the devil would make of this, since these are real and he’s largely imaginary.
Ruminating—chewing and coughing up and chewing. I could mention that through the miracles of engineering the flow of the Chicago River has been reversed. I could describe the whistle-language of the shepherds of the island of La Gomera, which has been employed for centuries to communicate across far distances. I could quote Peter Medawar on allometric growth or Huntington’s chorea or monotremes. I might track the refashioning of marshlands to create the defensive waterworks around the Citadel of Lille. A close description of the surfing techniques of Gabriel Medina as he rides a tube or pulls up through a cresting wave for a three-sixty flip. Or maybe these would be threaded through the weave of a memory more immediate and personal—my grandmother, later in her long dying from congestive heart failure, her swollen deoxygenated ankles and bluish engorged feet. Her toes were rendered tiny as candy mints in a dish and the sight of them turned my stomach with pity. She lived in a world different from one I’d come to know: there was a god who was an architect of her pain, and the pain proceeded according to plan, which would be realized in her ascension unto eternal relief. She died buried in bed with her many children kneeling around her, each reaching a hand to touch her. She was a farmer’s wife and left behind a hard past but also over a hundred human lives continuing beyond her—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She’s outside all of this now. We loved her and I loved her, often in drastically conflicting ways. As tribute, I build a small obstruction in the flow beyond her, and walk along it a while, watching the character of the land change downstream.

PURIFIED BY REVERSE OSMOSIS! SUPEROXYGENATED (UP TO 500% MORE OXYGEN)!—stickers on the water disperser enthuse to the point of bragging. Identical three gallon plastic jugs fill with ichorous virgin water. I drink the stuff and remain commonplace. For now I’m made to wait while twin streams plummet and sketch turbulent shapes in the jugs; they resemble inverted fountains—down-driving through ever-rising surfaces until the brims are topped and faucets are turned off. White plastic caps to be screwed on each.
No more vortex, no more spirals or spheres or meanders. Here begins the latter half of the book, when Theodor S opens the subject of his lecture to the cosmos. He speaks at such a height above the details of everyday concerns, there’s precious little air to breathe, if we were to join him. He invites us to meditate on water’s role as the earth’s “sense organ”.
Here is the moon. A fine place to start. It’s effect on the tides is well-known. Before humankind’s technological emancipation from nature, our forebears, he asserts, tended an even subtler, keener awareness of lunar rhythms. Well-diggers consulted the phases of folklore before breaking ground, knowing water presented itself more willingly to a new moon, or no, a full one. Lumbermen tracked the phases also, for rivers, he claims, tend to splay wider during a fuller, making it difficult to float logs down a current without their washing ashore. Where there is a new moon, however, he swears, logs journey more naturally down the middle.
The creatures of the earth feel it too, particularly those that make their home in water. He refers to a species of smelt which returns from the open sea each May to the coast of California. They don’t rush the beach—they wait. They hover near shore receiving instructions from the moon. On the third day after a full moon, when the tide reaches its highest point, they ride the tide to the beach on the final-most strongest wave. Females lay their eggs and males fertilize them and then both are dragged back to the ocean on the next wave. Their timing is calibrated with such precision, unconsciously. Waves that follow their retraction recede at diminishing lengths, sparing the eggs from being washed away. Fourteen days must pass before the tide is that high again. Minutes before the strongest wave reaches them, the eggs hatch and the living spawn is drawn back into the ocean.
He could easily have cited menstrual cycles. He could have described disturbances of mood among patients in psychiatric facilities, during a full moon. Taken alone, each were familiar; but taken together they humbled the delusional: earthly autonomy was wishful thinking, the exceptions not much thought about. Water, being mediator between earth and cosmos, registered gradations of push and pull between the two. Even its molecular structure reflects this. Two smaller hydrogen atoms orbiting a larger third, oxygen. Tension between the three holds them in balance. Multiply these by a number nearing infinity and soon you will reproduce from scratch the Pacific Ocean.

When the incendiaries fell on Hamburg, where was he? In Bavarian natureland? Rain of a different sort—of fire and screams and flesh in puddles. His life as I know it is limited to the covers of a book, and these too were proven mortal, for as many burned as people did, if not more. Forty-five thousand. This is what happens when one element is made to behave as another: thunder and lightning and down rolls the very antithesis of rain to recreate from human imagination the carceral furnace where damned souls are sent for solitary immolation, each perpetually charred yet with flesh perpetually regenerating. Peaceful Theodor Schwenk contemplates the moon and the sea; elsewhere a city’s population writhes in fire.
This is assuming a lot, and maybe it’s unfair. It could be his book was intended as antidote to a poison, and proper reverence for nature, by his lights, had been the very thing lacking in his generation. That would also be assuming a lot. It could simply be he was a man entranced by his own quiet. If so, I can’t very well fault him for it. There were times, are times, when I’m very much with him—self-dormant in a plush cubbyhole. Burrowed into myself in spirals, safe from ice and fire. Protean, pliable, humble handmaid to gravity, down there only water can reach me.
Zooplankton, phytoplankton. In a handful of quietest water, new life can generate. After the great fires, when we emerge from bunkers of introspection, we’ll step through the ruins, across fields of hot ash, carefully carrying our cupped hands before us. The city will begin again in a puddle. Theodor and I and others pooling our portions. Hamburg sutured like a wound, banking its hopes on a scar.
Jets of water arced from hoses and the smoldering ruins were extinguished. More could have perished, and nothing might have remained of their homes, but this element worthy of his reverence, and I suppose now my own, jumped into flames to spare them a higher dose of misery. That was enough to recommend it—to ratify it worthy of his full attention, for the remainder of his life. He would write a book to honor it, since it went unrecognized as heroic in the classic sense. He would harm no one marveling at how, for instance, a gram of water absorbed eighty calories when it morphed from ice to water; nor how each increase of a degree thereafter inspired another calorie per gram to be absorbed. These were details that offered life to life, if anyone was interested enough to begin reading. Trees were the first to die, unfortunately, when he published it. But as he perhaps had learned through the writing of it, the way to true love required long passage through certain ironies. In the large intestines of the beloved, a pilgrim could find himself lost for a lifetime. But as long as he kept walking, the promise of tenderness remained ahead of him. Dissolved mind and body, extracted of nutrients for benefit of the godhead.

The ear, the intestine, the heart. These are exemplary. These will prove useful. Please join him in appreciating the influence of water’s many avatars on the specialized processes of these three vital organs.
Angling a mirror to reflect for inspection the image of their own ear, a curious observer will note its spiraling qualities terminate in a funnel. Earlier they had been introduced to vortices; had learned of their habits and preferences; little did they know sounds had originally been born from and were continually kept alive by them. The auricle, the eardrum, the ossicles. Let’s go further—deeper into the middle ear. More to be seen there, before we gain proper appreciation for the extent of water’s many echoes in a human body. Our aural docent, Theodor S, leads us into a giant model of the ear, pointing to notable features, describing their function and significance to the central theme of his lesson—creatures raised by water retain the imprint of its many shapes and identities. “The passage into the cavity of the inner ear,” he explains, “is like a journey through the elements, from air via the solid medium to the liquid, and every form on the way reveals its origin in the archetypal movements of fluids.” Perhaps that’s true—we’ll follow and see.
In throbbing dark, he leads us to the edge of three small semicircular canals. Look how they’re set at right angles to each other, he tells us. In each there is liquid and hair cells immersed within it. He invites us to move our heads; to enjoy the smoothness of the movements, the lack of disorientation experienced when doing so. Notice how we don’t lose our bearings, our footing, orientation in space. Every time we turn our head, we should thank those liquids and little hairs that we don’t lose our balance. Every movement causes the liquid to move and these movements the little hairs track, converting their sensations into nerve signals, which are relayed almost instantaneously into appropriate regions of the brain for processing.
This is the cochlea, he continues. In illustrated diagrams of the human ear on the walls of doctor’s offices, it’s usually one of the first shapes we admire. A perfect spiral. A snail shell buried in the depths of each ear-burrow. In its nascency, in its infancy and throughout its childhood, there’s no actual rotation of fluids to scaffold its formation—this is simply the shape evolved to serve its assigned purpose. There are three turns in the spiral and high and low notes register at specific lengths; but this three-ness isn’t a set feature: some creatures hear with much more range, variety, acuity. A kind of rodent, the agouti, for instance. Its cochlea twists five times, and one can only assume survival was the primary motivating factor for this. Once long ago an agouti ancestor was born with five, and this provided access to finer-grained attunement to the approaching slither or footsteps of predators. This agouti lived to breed, others didn’t.
There then, so concludes our lesson in comparative anatomy, as it pertains to the ear. On to the intestine, he tells us. A very different expression of water’s imprint to be found there.
He walks us down an esophagus, through the acidic foyer of a stomach. We step into a small intestine and walk a while through its sewer-like switchbacks. We presume he will mention our walking seems to track the patterns of a meander. To our surprise, he doesn’t. Instead he stops, asks us to gather around, lay hands on, mesh fingers with the wormy villi protruding everywhere from its surface. Wait, he instructs. Keep quiet. A ripple rolls through the length of intestine, wave-like beneath our hands. Those movements, he says—feel them? Those are contractions. These come regularly in waves, and the technical name for this is peristalsis. Rhythmic movements can be found playing through every part of the digestive tract. These work to break down, liquify, transport, extract nutrients from matter, and the whole process thrives in water and is guided by rhythm and plasticity of movement. Here is a human example, a model of what we might find in any of us. But if we were cased in the interiors of a different creature, we might discover a general design that diverts from the familiar. The intestine of Cyrptoplax oculutus expresses itself in screw-like formations. The large intestine of the common rabbit assumes the shape of a spiral, complimented by the counter-spiraling of an appendix. In pigs, the large intestine multiplies into several spiraling twists. Such is the intestinal variety to be found across the animal kingdom.
Rhythmic processes in time and space, the shaping actions of boundary surfaces—our final exhibit, Theodor S tells us, provides perhaps the most dynamic illustration of these. Before us, cased in an outsized ribcage, buffeted by the flag-and-swell of lungs, is a heart scaled several times its normal size, its dimensions more suited for a blue whale than for Theodor S or ourselves. We walk a full circle around it while he describes the ventricles, how blood flows through contraction and expansion, articulating currents of a sort reminiscent of the curves of Cassini. Here it is difficult to refer to form and movement as separate concepts, for in the pumping actions of the heart they are married; only after movement has stopped and heart is dead, can form be properly dissected. Much can be missed by considering it alone. More can be gained by standing back to watch its influence on the whole, through branching causeways of vein and artery. A suction point into which blood is drawn in “ever increasing speed from the periphery, thither to return again, slowing down and spiraling out”—see how it functions as a kind of vortex? Located between ear and intestine, it occupies a location central to all bodily activities. Nothing that moves doesn’t pass through it. Nothing lives for long that exceeds its reach.
The tour ends at the top of a staircase, viewing the heart from a height. The heart pauses a moment, for our benefit. He points to designs in the surfaces of mycocardial tissue. See those? Spiraling fibers at the apex? Soon as he directs our attention to them, they seem to rouse into swirling flows—like cloud formations on a weather map. Intricate asymmetric curling patterns made visible by our looking, the way fingerprints are rendered visible by ink. If it wasn’t clear before, Theodor says, it should be obvious: just as water’s archetypal forms summon shapes from an opposing play of currents, a heart is composed of spiraling fibers gathered around a perpetual, flowing rhythm. True fact about its infancy: before the heart assumes its earliest shape in the fetus, myocardial cells begin contracting even before they’ve meshed to share a common tissue. One by one they begin contractions, they catch the rhythms of others around them, then synchronize. Before the first official heartbeat, it could be said there are countless isolated heartbeats. They join together and through efforts of their community achieve a greater good: a heart to sustain an unborn body.

The future of hearts—motherless, bodiless, they would take shape slowly while orbiting earth. This is what the husband told me. The husband at the party, standing near a tangle of dusty tomato plants in the backyard, mosquitoes playing about his hands and forearms so he was made to rub himself as if cold. He was more than warm already—this was July and beads of sweat clung to his forehead like pore-born mosquitoes. He worked as a contractor for NASA, coding for a pilot program that wouldn’t be launched for another ten years at least. He described the future to me while we sucked on beers through our proboscises: medical labs would orbit the outer layers of the earth’s atmosphere and in them live cultures of stem cells would be shaped by 3-D bio-printer technologies to create human hearts primed for transplant. The stem cells would be stimulated to develop into myocardial cells, and these would bind together over weeks and months on a scaffold frame in a near-zero-gravity environment. A typical embryo takes shape in amniotic conditions, so hearts there are spared the full tug of gravity. Without mothers, hearts developed near the earth’s surface would collapse before they could achieve their final form and functionality. So the scientists had decided motherless hearts would best thrive in orbital conditions, cultures free from any pull and stress that might result in the warping and damage of delicate binding tissues. These would be submerged in a nutrient-rich gel similar to amniotic fluid, to feed their growth; and once they had achieved a healthy size would be harvested not unlike tomatoes. People placed on donor lists would no longer feel like they were waiting on someone else’s death: they’d be given hearts that were sired by no known lineage. In the time it took the husband to describe all this, each of us had donated several milliliters of blood to stray phlebotomists on the wing. We were feeding their short lives in a way, sharing our beers with them. The husband excused himself and went looking for his wife, who the whole while had more than likely been doing fine without him. Last question I asked before he stepped into the house: How’d you get the job? The answer was flat and honest: I knew somebody. It left me wondering about the meritocracy of donor-ship, who received hearts and how quickly, and how this might be less an issue of inequality in some vague future, arriving not-quite-yet daily.

*

Another husband, another way to make a living—a harder one. He was my age and we were friendly, met at the top of a hill where owners brought their dogs to set them running. We kept odd hours so usually we’d find the other alone on the hill, waiting for other owners and dogs. While our canines chased and sniffed and tangled, we’d share updates about what we’d been up to since our last chance meeting. He worked as a firefighter but we clicked after discovering a shared past between us: both of us had been made to work on farms when we were young. Neither of us missed it, yet there was unmistakable nostalgia in our complaints about it. Across a year we’d find one another on the hill and talk then call our dogs back to the leash and go our separate ways, knowing we’d meet again in a week or so. It went that way for a while until near the beginning of winter there had been a lull—either he’d opted to take his dog to a different park or the dog had died or he’d been busy. I didn’t think much of it and in fact had forgotten about him, until one early afternoon at the end of the following fall I found him standing at the top of the hill, as if no time had passed or all that time he’d been waiting for me.
He greeted me with a hand raised, no wave. Seeing his dog was in fine health, I asked him where he’d been, what’d he been doing. Once the dogs left our shadows and cantered down the hill, working the edges of the lower forest, he told me. He’d been on extended leave from work, he’d been traveling; had returned a week ago. Why the leave, I asked, and here he paused and his face tightened, as if he were deciding on whether the question should be met with an explanation or politely passed over. Catching the reaction and not wanting to press, I was about to brush the question aside and shift to something lighter and less pointed when he unhitched from his hesitation and described what had happened. The previous October he’d caught a bad call, a house fire in Irish Hills. By the time the truck crew arrived, the roof was smoking heavily. The owner ran a meth lab in the house and it’d caught fire. He’d been the first through the door and helped clear the place; in a backroom found a baby in a crib, baby and crib covered in fire. He grabbed the baby and rushed it out, snatched a blanket from a guy nearby, wrapped it and rolled it on the ground. Third-degree burns over most of its body. The worst thing he’d seen in his five years working; had nightmares about it for weeks. His girlfriend had suggested therapy. The guys on his crew didn’t seem open to discussing it. You saw those kinds of things and you dealt with it or you didn’t. He thought he had been, working his shifts like always. But showing up isn’t the same as seeing things through; he started having panic attacks whenever an alarm rang at the station. His captain suggested he take a leave of absence, so he did. A couple of weeks on leave, he called in to the office to extend it. He filled out the paperwork. He discussed with the Union. They’d hold a place for him; get himself right and come back when he was ready.
His girlfriend had suggested he leave town, travel, visit friends in Cleveland or Miami. He thought on that option, carried it around for a day or two, to see how it felt. No, he decided; he didn’t want to bring this feeling around to people he knew; didn’t want to have to explain it. There was another idea, one he’d considered a long-shot, but had been thinking about off and on for a while—but especially after his father had passed years before. When his father was young, before he’d met his mother and had him and his brother and settled into work as an accountant, he’d joined a migrant harvest crew with a friend of his, worked south to north from Texas to the Canadian border through the summer. His father spoke of that summer with mythic reverence, though the labor described seemed redundant and exhausting. It was the closest his father had ever gotten to participating in an epic gesture: leaving home as a teen to disappear on an adventure. This promised a more thorough reprieve than Cleveland or Miami, so he got online, checked the crew-call ads on a custom harvesting website, applied to a contractor in Oklahoma. Within days he did a phone interview and was hired, on condition he secured a Commercial Driver’s License. Soon as he got the license, he left. His girlfriend was confused and a bit hurt by the decision, but supportive. But really, what other choice had he given her?
He was on a twelve man crew. Carved a path north up Route 83. Most of the guys he worked with were single or keeping their distance from some past that hadn’t yet come looking for them. The only woman traveling with them was the operation manager’s wife Gloria. She followed the trucks in an R.V. and made them sausage, eggs, and toast in the mornings and chili dogs and pork and beans for lunch. They worked twelve hour days, a caravan of combines, pick-ups, tractors, service trucks, grain carts. He started on a tractor then after a guy on their crew dropped off, graduated to operating a combine. They harvested soybeans, wheat, corn, sunflowers. Through the summer they worked their way up the middle of the country, farm to farm, until they reached North Dakota. Then through the fall they worked their way north again from Kansas to South Dakota. Six straight months hypnotized by perpetual exhaustion, taking off days when it rained. In pimple-sized towns along the route they stopped occasionally to spend their money on slightly more decent lodgings and beer. He'd talk with his girlfriend and coo to his dog on speaker-phone, hollering over the roar of the combine, describing the sights of flat-land sunsets from the cab. It was a long dream that carried him through the middle of the year and by the end of it he returned with a fair amount of money, dazed and sated. He slept the better part of a week in the home bed that had been waiting for him, girlfriend at his side, dog at his feet. After the sleep-week, he stepped onto the front porch with coffee and watched the leafless trees and passing traffic, strangely distant but familiar. He was calm without wanting or needing to be. There were years folded into the months left behind him. The next morning he called the Union and his captain, asked if there was a place still waiting for him. There was, he was told. Come by the station, if he was ready, beginning of next week.
So there, he told me, watching the dogs running up the hill towards us—that’s what he’s been up to most of the year. What about me? I told him I’d been keeping the hill company while he was away, throwing sticks to keep a lonely dog running. I was sorry to hear about what had happened but glad he’d taken a break from town, and glad too he was feeling better. It was temporary, he told me—here were patterns that would need breaking. He was thinking college, something else, a desk job. Anything but fires and running into buildings and skull-dragging. Skull-dragging? What’s that, I asked. Fire lingo for lugging a hose, he explained. Damn heavy even when there’s no water running through it—though yeah, I’d never thought about it until you asked: what does any of that have to do with skulls? Those aren’t particularly heavy, I’d imagine. Can't say I've ever held one.

The book is laid open, its pages lifting and lazing in the breeze. Currents of incredible range and size made visible as they flow across the surface of the land, cutting through chainlink fences, climbing to roll over houses and errant buildings. Leaves flicker on their stems; grasses tremble. The skirt of a woman crossing a street snatches and billows—with both hands she anchors the cloth to her thighs. Alone, on a wrought iron table, the book is reading itself. Someone may have sat here minutes earlier, shielding eyes from the sun’s aggression, but they’re at best a parable now and elsewhere, fishing another beer from a refrigerator.
The book was once a man, but the man shed his life to become anonymous and left this as a trace of his preoccupations. It should be mentioned the page currently splayed before far-traveling light was once a tree—were all pages that comprised the book fashioned from the same tree, or were there dozens in hybrid, cut from broader sheets and ordered and bound? This is a late chapter and presented to no one, harmlessly quoted from to evoke the occasion of its self-reading. “The organic form slowly and gently appears, as though surrounded and permeated by invisible streams.” Breeze slips beneath the page and the page hovers, as if considering whether it should extinguish the ontology of streams by flipping. The page falls, settles. The dreamy philosophy printed on it lives a while until the next breeze.
Thought, the page continues, doesn’t thinking express itself in flowing movements, similar to water? Since the book is alone, without an audience, there’s no critical discernment available to test the verity of such assertions. This seems at best a metaphor and more so when the page calls on its effusive mentor, Rudolph Steiner. Disordered, flitting about, thinking loses coherence; gives shape to scraps blown hither and thither by distraction. But when directed to flow against a fixed obstruction, emergent interrelated ideas shed behind it in trains. These we call ideas. Each hatched from and echoing the shape and character of whatever we choose to disrupt and catch the smooth continuum of thought-flow. Likewise, the page’s little Steiner asserts, thinking that sheds its calories and solidifies as ice, that hardens into an immobile idea, an ideology, will find itself “a captive of form”. It’s an apt and useful metaphor but loses more from the comparison than is gained: water’s wholly different from thinking when no one’s around to think of it.
No sooner does the page begin quoting from Goethe’s “Theory of Colours” when unsubtle forces rush the book and table and chair pushed from the edge of it—the book thrashes and pages cartwheel. The chair, catching the brunt of the wind’s lowered shoulder, topples and clatters. Now the book is open to a foreign page; the reader, if there ever was one, is lost. After a fashion this aligns neatly with disorganized thought. A book read out of order, skimmed violently—its carefully elaborated thesis shredded into strobe-impressions, evocative at first flush but upon more deliberate consideration implausible and wishful, somewhat short on coherence. It's a good read nonetheless and best read outdoors, among the sun and open air.

Above is the sky, below is the water. The two blend their grayish blues on the horizon. Standing on the western coast of Isla Mujeres or Nova Scotia, the blue is a disguise for miles that dissolve into faraway continents. A skipped shell or stone can travel a few steps on the water’s surface but waves swell and swallow them. The same can be thrown toward the sky but soon feel their weight and drop back to water. Air and water, Theodor S would have us know, rarely present themselves as wholly separable. There is oxygen in the water molecule, of course. But it should be noted water is usually permeated with breathable air and other gases, mixed into it according to circumstance.
An interbreeding of the elements—this is the next topic. How water and air converse. How they transform one another and work together for mutual benefit.
“Cold water can absorb more oxygen than warm,” he informs us, this being why fields are often more profitably irrigated during winter months than during summer. Are they? we ask. Is this fact? We would need to ask a farmer. We would have to ask our grandfather’s headstone in Owensboro or the grass growing around it.
While we’re busy following that thought, he’s on to other details—the role of oceans in regulating the climate. When there is an excess amount of carbon dioxide in the air, the oceans will absorb it, maintaining a healthy balance in air and atmosphere. Should levels in the atmosphere decrease, oceans will release their fund of carbon dioxide into the air. Another detail worth emphasizing: water rich in CO2 gain an increased ability to dissolve solid matter. Limestone disintegrates more readily when metabolized by this hybrid element, air-and-water. In a similar manner, oceans regulate the earth’s temperature, but surely we know that. That much we learned in middle school, but forgot; so relearned it in high school; forgot it again; well into adulthood we remember and forget it at irregular intervals; meanwhile, slowly the oceans are overwhelmed and the earth’s temperature rises.
Heat’s effect on air. A good segue to the next subject: the movements of air currents over the Sahara. Over the wide open spaces of the desert, “enormous cylinders of air with horizontal axes are made visible through the flight of desert birds.” Between adjacent cylinders of rolling hot air, birds hover in long thin lines, riding the ascending air currents from horizon to horizon. Theodor S is fascinated by birds, their physiology and adaptive strategies, the biomechanics they animate effortlessly with wing-flaps. He never tires of citing them as fine examples of some point he is making, whether appropriate to the topic at hand, or not.
High and low pressure zones. The life cycles of cyclones. Air currents over woodlands and open fields. How pilots, when flying over misty ground, can spot the courses of rivers by the movements of mists over them. How on a planetary scale the confluence of warm and cold fronts churns masses of air into vortices. He explores each and leaves their connection to his main point loose, associative. “We see air by way of water,” he might’ve said, and that would have been enough. Just as leaves and grasses flicker and flow, revealing the strength and directions of a breeze, glacier-sized vapor colonies twist and rove across continents and oceans. It’s not a matter of being convinced or not, if we look out the window watching rain sprout from the ground, running in place. The clouds above are showing us.

Eighteen breaths per minute on average, for healthy adults. Twenty-five thousand nine hundred and twenty times per day. Breathing can be measured in a ratio of 1:4 to the circulation of blood; therefore there are seventy-two beats of pulse for every eighteen breaths drawn. These are Theodor’s calculations and since I’ve yet to track my pulse against inhalations, I’m left to take his word for it. Whenever he supports this assertions with numbers, I’m wary to take the numbers as bona-fide, up-to-date. There’s a bibliography in the end pages of his book but the dates of the sources are uniformly old and the names of their authors obscure. Many are works of geology or zoology or hydrology. But among these are curious outliers: Early Christian Irish Art, Speech and Hearing in Communication, Holy Wells of England. More than a few were published before the war and some even during it.
There is one researcher Theodor is fond of citing, a Frenchman—Idrac. While the other sources remain anonymous until the end pages, mid-book he cites Idrac by name on several occasions. The collaborative flight strategies of birds in migration. The above-mentioned heated cylindrical air currents over the Sahara. One afternoon a century ago Idrac stood at the edge of a pond observing the glide of a swan across its surface, appreciating how its cygnets floated along in the wedge-shaped span of its wake. Decades later Theodor decorates his doctrine of air-and-water with this detail; decades later I read it. How long has Idrac been gone and here I’m made to stand beside him, swan-watching? The count ran out: he reached the final average number of breaths allowed a person. I continue the count for him, and mete out measures of life reading second-hand of his expedition to the Gold Coast of Africa.
On the deck of a steamer Theodor stands next to Idrac, in his shadow. Reading the account, I stand in Theodor’s shadow watching and waiting. Idrac points past the rear of the ship, to its wake. In the flow-formations trailing behind, local people are rowing their canoes—having matched the ship’s speed, they “place themselves on the forward facing slope of a wave, ride the slanting plane—carried along without great effort.” As it is with cygnets, so it is with human beings. The steamer-swan is their mother, and there’s teeth in the comparison, for natives benefit from her iron matriarchy.
There are differences between swans and steamers, cygnets and natives—Theodor doesn’t notice or describe these. He does emphasize and describe, however, differences between air and water.
Air is compressible, water is less so unless converted to steam. Air has an ability to flow much faster; but must do so fourteen times faster than water does, before it can give rise to vortex trains. He lists and elaborates. He differentiates carefully. There’s a dutifulness to his efforts, as if differentiation was a price he had to pay before he could play freely with their similarities. Would his hero Idrac do the same? No, I think in order to generalize he would have had to step from Idrac’s shadow to gesture from water to sky, cloud to wave, bird-in-flight to bird-on-water. Idrac, as much as we can know of him, seems engrossed in the observable habits of creatures and their skillful collaboration with currents, be they of air or water. Idrac seems more a man with eyes, unstigmatized, un-bespeckled by philosophy. But since this book is where he survives, he’s made to wear someone else’s glasses. The lenses thick as posterity.

Two people are falling, each from separate planes, both from a height approximately thirty-three thousand feet. The sky is timeless but as they fall each carries a specific year with them; if they die when they hit ground, they’ll become timeless too; if they live, which seems impossible, given their rates of speed and lack of parachute, the year that’s dropped them will survive.
Twenty-six years and some change separates the two fallings—one hurtles breathless through the last days of 1944, the other through the earliest day of 1972. Both freeze at winter velocity: though the sky may be timeless, the season colors it below zero. They both tumble through high pressure zones, ejected from mid-flight explosions, meaning: they are falling toward land and not ocean, where pressure is lower during winter because water is warmer. Across the planet the air is not equally cold everywhere but here, threaded like needles through their trajectories, it’s coldest because certain death waits below. The planes had ruptured a few seconds before, a shock of suction: sucked free of their planes’ interiors and cast into startled animal terror and miles hungry with gravity. Six and a quarter miles; rate of descent irrespective of body weight. The earlier fall-subject, Mr. 1944, weighs one hundred sixty-three pounds. The latter, Ms. 1972, a feather-esque one hundred-ten. Galileo’s experiment dropping objects of differing masses from the Tower of Piza predicted how the eternal sky would treat them—fairly, equally, with careless indifference. One fell toward Germany, the other toward Czechoslovakia. But for a long brief while they were nameless and without country, fated for timelessness.
A British Lancaster bomber—damaged by anti-aircraft guns, on fire. Its tail gunner tossed from its turret, parachute scattered in wisps behind him like burning tissue paper.
A DC-9, Flight 367—belched to shreds by a briefcase bomb. Its one flight attendant flung in the direction of a food trolley and fuselage.
Did they splay flat against the onrush, increase their surface of air resistance? Did currents, strong winds to the east or southeast, temper their rate of fall? Those are questions asked by landed people, sitting at desks or standing with binoculars, scanning an empty sky.
Heavy snows waited below, an evenness of land. One was threshed by pine branches and dropped onto a snowbank, both boots gone, still conscious though bewildered. The other was less fortunate, discovered by a villager a day later, comatose. In a hospital doctors took inventory of her injuries: a fractured skull, four broken vertebrae, legs and ribs and pelvis splintered. They were birds a while, then they were survivors. They spooked and amazed newspapers. People told and retold the accounts of their falls as if the sky was a time-capsule and any time they looked up those two could still be tracked as miraculous grains tumbling toward the horizon. They were experimental angels, of a kind. They reverse-engineered the flight mechanisms of birds, in real time, rushing through a succession of screams towards the ground. Between their times of arrival, damaged but alive, a man drawing occult connections between the morphology of fluids and aeromechanics wrote a little book and published it. It was popular for a time, then the times changed, and it wasn’t. The sky is the same as it ever was. As I write this it’s December on the other side of the window, glass cold to the touch.

First birds, then seeds, then insects. Theodor S would like to bring our attention into sharper focus, observing adaptive responses of each to the element that affords them flight. He presents frame-by-frame illustrations of a bird’s wings at each phase of lift and fall. See there, especially in the middle frame, the transitional phase, “the twisting and turning of the wing about its longitudinal axis”—how the wing articulates a spiraling surface? Compare these to the illustrations below them, of the design principles and volitant functions of various airborne seeds. Maples are famous for the helicopter swarms they shed near the end of spring—conforming to the currents of the breeze, a chaos of vortex trains. Look how these seed-leaves resemble still shots of wings caught in one phase of rise or fall; consider how these fixed pairs of leaves catch and shape the force and direction of breezes. These evolved through a protracted history of trail-and-error, written solely by survival. Seeds don’t have thoughts like us, so have no concept of birds—yet are eaten by them, and are carried a ways from the shade-reaches of their mothers, defecated safely in a sunny place available for rain and provided a starter compost rich in nutrients, among feces. Having passed through the gastrointestinal meanders of many a species, had they absorbed optimal design secrets essential for flight? Had they grown their own versions of wings as a result, under digestive avian influence? This is only a theory, and one that would explain what’s already come to pass: our understanding of the flamboyant breeding strategies of trees is superfluous to them. They were creating seeds long before sperm started swimming. Which brings us to the last of Theodor S’s illustrations: the joint formations of insects. This deserves a paragraph of its own, so let’s lift a wing here, catch a pause, indent.
Wasps, mosquitoes, dragonflies, beetles. Watch how they take flight, a blizzard of wingbeats per second. Look how they conform to the movements of the air, ever-adaptive to its whims and commitments, “consolidating the movement outside and around them into a permanent form.” Scrutinize with particular care the patterns cohering as joints—vortical in their delineation. There are spiraling shapes in the membranes of their wings, and in the growth actions within their chrysalises alternating rhythms of invagination and unfurling. What is latent in their anatomies bears obvious fruit as flight: watch as minute vortices trail past their wings. Observe the shared current of air that accommodates a swarm of midges on a summer evening. Hundreds of tiny wingbeats per millisecond stir a communal levitation, relieving each somewhat in their efforts. They hover there like cells in an organism and together create breeze to cool themselves against the heat. Unaware as we might be of their nature, they are immersed in a different order of sensitivity to nuances in the air. They deserve our consideration if not our respect. Next time we are bothered by them while crossing a field, we shouldn’t hurriedly brush them aside. We should stand a while at a distance and watch them, breathing the very air they fly.

It was our last chance to visit the farm before the grandparents left the land. My grandfather had taken the ruse as far as everyone could allow: he’d been prescribed eyedrops to slow the glaucoma’s progression but had been too stubborn to take them. It would be fully in his character to fill a dropper with holy water blessed by his favorite priest, to squirt on corneas twice daily, believing it’d reverse the inevitable. Aunts and uncles and farmhands and the owner of the land, Mr. Bartlett, and the Bartlett sons, had watched him leave in his pickup down many a gravel access road and driveway swerving until he hit grass or nicked a fencepost; progressively for a year or so the swerves ranged wider, more ungainly, until my uncle, the one famed for shooting up his own car with a rifle because it refused to start once long ago in the ‘70s, shook his head, standing to face the dust cloud in the wake of the great man’s departure, said: “There goes the blind man.” Not long after that on a Sunday the house was called by a policeman halfway across the county, who stated he’d found a man pulled to the side of the road near the south side of Sorgho, crying at the wheel because he was lost and his eyes had betrayed him.
It was the logical decision to take his means of making a living away from him. He was older anyhow; four decades managing the farm, he was due. Retirement, though it would humiliate or kill him, would suit him. His wife, my grandmother, however, was pleased to have the situation put out of its misery. She was through with that life; she’d raised her family. She wanted to move to town and play house, wait for the coming avalanche of great-grandchildren.
A house had been purchased, but only she could see it. She’d viewed it with a realtor and some of her daughters, described the amenities and pleasantries of the place to my grandfather. He would have to accept her at her word that it was not too expensive, too lavish. They had the Kingdom of God to consider: they were humble people and shouldn’t risk their entry into heaven by a late investment in foolish indulgences. She bought the house she wanted anyway and told him only what she thought he wanted to hear. It was the pattern of their marriage, tested by hardships and pride of family. They would move by the end of the week, so the children and their children’s children travelled from little and larger towns across the state for one last visit.
It was a fall afternoon, the sunlight warm but the air cool. The drive was checkered with cars; once filled, cars were parked in the yard. Family stood in the mud room and sat at the big table in the kitchen; they stood from the couch and walked from room to room, sharing memories as stories. This house was their childhood and they were talking their way through it one last time before they closed its doors behind them. They slept many to a bed and knelt side by side to pray the rosary every night like galley slaves. The curse of the rosary is its circularity: it can devour a person while it joyfully goes about the business of eating its own tail. In the very small dining room there were (I once counted so can report here as verifiable fact) fifteen portraits of the Virgin Mary within view. It was the myth they lived by and which, in their minds, justified the divinely-assigned privations they had to withstand. The loss of an infant son. Early bankruptcy. The loss of a daughter. Toes severed in an augur and afterwards Demerol addiction.
A few of us were talking our way across the land. Describing memories born in certain fields to the east or south or west: there were as many memories as there were acres. This soon became a recounting of what had occurred before we had known it, the thousand heads of cattle, the swarming fleets of swine so numerous and shit-proficient on a downwind day their stink filled the house and could carry far beyond it. These we hadn’t seen; we hadn’t yet married into the family or hadn’t been born. There was before us in our minds an ideal none had tested, though the opportunity had always been available—we’d been too chicken before to try, valued our lives too complacently to climb it: the long steel ladder that began at the grain station then rose to a woozy height to a crow’s nest that afforded a three-hundred-sixty degree view over the grain silos below, across the land around it. We’d never dared; but by the end of the afternoon, the land would be lost anyway. Best to try, while we still could. So three of us walked over and one by one took turns climbing it.
At ground level there was a slight breeze. The first third of the ladder was quick work. From there, the breeze strengthened, became a wind. Sunlight sheered off the sides of the silos, shocking eyes to wince and blink, red tracer smears behind the lids. The wind was bratty at the top: either stuff your baseball cap in a back pocket or lose it. Improbably, at the base of the steel platform clung a wasp’s nest; the clatter of footfalls dislodged them: I had to stand very still to avoid being stung. Wind cut across the anchor lines running from platform to each surrounding silo—the timbre of cut-sounds emitting from them almost digital, electric. The platform swayed with the blows and lulls and gripping the railings I felt motion-sick. The fields were there and they stretched smoothly in every direction and it was difficult to discern which ones had been farmed by the family from the ones that hadn’t. My whole life until then I’d known them at eye-level; high above their usual provenance, they were newly recognizable as something desired and imagined. Hands clinging to the railing, I lowered myself very slowly through a crouch to lay belly-flat on the platform. My body was terrified by the smallness of everything below. Moving by finger-creeps and inches, I lowered one leg to a rung, then the other, then worked my way painstakingly back to ground. When both feet met earth, my knees went to water. I took a seat on a curb to watch the others take their turn. What was the purpose of it, I asked after climbing—a crow’s nest above silos? There didn’t seem to be one. It seemed to exist for the sake of scaring mere mortals from ascending. For one such as I, who didn’t buy into the bonanza of an afterlife, a fall to ground was final—concrete meant the end. For my grandfather, a man going blind all his life, it meant something else: an ordeal of climbing that tested his worthiness for eventual entry into heaven. Fear was proof his interpretation was accurate; whereas my fear was indication of the opposite: fear was most real and any assignation of meaning was at best a benzodiazepine, at worst an opiate. When the last of us descended from the ladder, we thanked it. It had shown us a future memory, one we would cherish and embellish upon. Closing my eyes thirty-two years after, I can picture the patchwork fields, the toy-sized barns and houses. I can imagine as if they were real the wasps and their meaningless stingers—which spared us that day because we treaded lightly and did not bother them.

It can’t be seen by the naked eye, nor by one clothed behind the ocular lens of a microscope. The movement of air through a forest, stirring every leaf and pine needle. The breeze cleaves where it meets leaf or needle, then merges into itself again flowing beyond it—vortex trains of unacknowledged delicacy and craftsmanship feathering along behind it. As they grow, the patterns they shed change accordingly; though the growth is so gradual, the naked eye can’t track the changing character of what it can’t see. Theodor thinks this is consequential and worth careful emphasis; I take it as another way to walk through a forest, gazing up into its canopy, imagining lower branches flocked by spark-like vortices.
There were ways to grow eyes capable of seeing such things. An esteemed inventor from India had devised the means, and from modest components—a few clockwork gears and a smoked glass plate. With these he could track minuscule grades of growth and movement of plants; how they responded to different lighting or temperature, to electricity or specific gases. Slowly a plant-tip would steer its reach to bask in a sunbeam and across brief intervals the machine would mark its trajectory on the plate. The first prototype was put to work almost a century ago and, improvements and adjustments of design aside, versions can still be found in use, though mostly as hobby-mates. Its father named it the crescograph, after the Latin word for “grow”. A breeze lifts a leaf; a Virginia creeper's apical tentacle turns left one tenth of a millimeter. A German naturalist-romantic spots archetypes rousing on the glass. A kind of spirit photography for vegetal sensitivities and their will to rove.
I have beside me another book, a gift from my wife’s cousin. A picture book of machine-drawn illustrations of layered sound waves created by a Victorian-era invention, the harmonograph. Overtones and ratio harmonics, dissonances. Something called Lissajous Figures. Something else called Chladni Patterns. Across three short pages at the end of the book there are instructions for how to create one—an instrument for registering and sketching sound waves into fluid looping patterns and intricate weaves on paper. It’s a Schwenkian invention if there ever was one and if he had known of it, surely he would’ve included illustrations from one among the end-leaves of his book on air and water. Instead, he discusses a study that examined the many ways flames are sensitive to sound, initially conducted by one P.E. Schiller. It’s old science also, but the photos of flames under the influence of different sounds—notes from a flute, a French horn, an organ, a well-bowed violin versus a badly-bowed one—are filled with vivid nuances. Pitch and tone, the size of vortices and the intervals in their trains.
A flame stands up. It flutters a bit, then settles into streaming stillness. One by one each instrument is given a turn to play for it. In each case the flame improvises a dance unique to the music. Each is photographed mid-dance, photographs then laid next to each other. Observe the differences between flame-shapes. Such variety to be discovered at the granular level among their general sameness. Compared to the range and expressivity of the human voice, this is nothing, he says. Imagine how much more varied and particular the flame-dances might become, were we to sit before it and cough, whisper, cackle, holler, sing falsetto or baritone. On the wings of such disturbances, his favorite forms flow through continual pirouette, gather and toss their dress-hems. As it is with air, so it is with water and with fire. All three are accomplished dancers.
He holds a high note—the flame grows shorter. He draws out a low note—it lengthens. He sits quiet and it resumes a stature most natural to it. For the past few minutes for our benefit he’s been an invention himself, of flesh and blood, an ignisograph (ignis: Latin for “fire”). So ends his lecture on sound waves and living flames. The flame, sustained like the man himself by oxygen, is too unaware to thank him.

Experiments with the human voice—Solo Composition #112 (Child and Electric Floor Fan). The stage is the floor of any hallway or living room during one of the family’s annual summer visits to cabins at the state park east of Bowling Green, at Barren River Lake. Performance is best if there are three or four siblings or cousins kneeling in semicircle on the windy side. The kids should be laughing; no adults should be within earshot. The fan should be switched to high, the soloist positioned crosslegged behind its motor. Once the audience is seated and attentive, the soloist should lean forward, take hold of the fan’s box frame on either side, mouth within an inch of whirring blade-blur—then with volume greater than their usual speaking voice, utter a curse word, cocksucka or motherfucka or pussy, drawing the vowels out at their end for dramatic effect. The children on the wind’s receiving end giggle: taboos have hit the fan, all their faces are covered with them. Passing through the fan, the voice changes timbre and sheds its humanity and friendliness; it’s robotic and sinister now, and all the more ridiculous for it. From there the piece evolves to include arias of high-pitched shrieking mock-threats and fart sounds. One by one children from the audience will have their turn, will improvise in previously untested foreign accents and impressions of famous persons. From their attempts to collaborate with the soloist they discover the windy side of the fan is not as generous, as hilariously destructive of their voices. The fan’s inventiveness flows almost entirely in one direction: where its synthetic breeze blows. The children squint from the force of its windiness, hair smoothed back and t-shirts fluttering. The performance concludes with an adult entering through the front door in search of more bourbon and ice for their Coke. Fan is switched off and children scatter; from a bedroom they listen for the door. Once door has been closed and adult has left, the curtain rises again for another performance. This piece, #112, is part of a series; though composed collaboratively and in sequence by a number of symphonists, they are best re-interpreted for later performance alone, nostalgically and with much amusement, forty years beyond the age of the oldest soloist. All pieces are dedicated to a rural inheritance since discredited, by desultory moves from city to city, in one of which could be found a bookstore in which Mr. Theodor Schwenk’s magnum opus was first perused and purchased, Chicago. That copy has since been lost but another has been gained, during which time a childhood of funny voices and fans has passed and dispersed and returned. Having returned for another pass, its next dispersal promises to be more final.

The larynx, Theodor asks—it’s a work of art, is it not? An intricate orchestra of cartilage and muscle. Beginning here, he says, pointing to the top of his throat, and ending there, he says, pointing to the soft dip at the base, where throat meets the northernmost reaches of sternum. Hyoid bone to trachea: the seat of the soul, he proposes, must lie somewhere between.
The epiglottis. Vocal cords abducting and adducting. Images of these shiny with damp, spongy, pinkish and reddish. Almost vaginal, he might remark if he weren’t such a gentleman. He is praising the anatomical origins of the human voice, not its sex-place or birth-place. Watch the layers mesh, narrow, close. Watch them flex and part. Deoxygenated air rushes through; these veils of flesh shape it as it leaves, sculpting pitch and volume. The larynx is talking, so its whole person must be also. The larynx is speaking for the person or the person is speaking through it—like a voice through a fan. People on the far side of exhalation hear it with ears made for larynxes; and when they speak a larynx hears with similar ears. A conversation is happening. One person is asking questions and another is answering.
“The resting form of the larynx and its adjacent organs,” he informs us, “is less significant than the moving form with its immense possibilities of variation…the stream of air is obstructed by a great variety of forms: narrowing slits, elastic membranes, pouches, spiraling curves—obstacles of the most varied form, elasticity and plasticity…” These obstacles he lists lovingly, evoking their superiority over a mere iron rod or twig dragged through water: the soft palate, the uvula, tongue, teeth, lips. A Wunderkammer of fleshiness.
Several illustrations accompany his descriptions, and they have the feel of skillful reproductions of a masterpiece. An anterior view, a posterior. Every angle reveals more details worthy of admiration. He could have ended his book with these and it would have had the desired effect: take nothing for granted. But as has often been the case in earlier chapters, the urge to advance unverifiable claims about The Spiritual Nature of Air or the Soul-Character of Water spoils a simple accounting of the larynx’s abilities and artistry. Instead, he ventures into a lengthy disquisition on a pseudoscientific modality of voice-and-movement therapy: eurythmy. The descriptions of its techniques and benefits are vague and inscrutable, like much of what issued from the mouth and hand of his guiding inspiration Steiner. To speak, it’s true, first you must inspire. But this is preliminary for the crucial part—when it leaves you and expires. As breath dies, it can be sounded and molded; words conjured from throat-art.

In the waiting room my name was called: standing up, I saw the surgeon waiting by the entrance to a side room, holding the door open. Door closed she sat with phone in hand to show me a photograph of the tumor that had been growing in my wife’s abdomen. It was benign, she said, and the surgery had been successful. The tumor was glistening and pale and smoothish and symmetrical—like the fruit of a certain tree that grew in the forests around the city. The fruits would drop to ground, inviting passersby to step on them. They looked firm but split open into a crumbly seed-meal quite easily. After a short cystic infancy, the tumor had grown quickly; the ambushes of sharp contractions that would double her over at random moments throughout the day, dropping her to the carpet, were ugly gift-samples of labor pain. She didn’t have children; neither of us wanted one—and that was a good thing because most likely we couldn’t. Instead we had a tumor; the “we” part here merely rhetorical, because she was the one who suffered its growth and was anaesthesized for operation. And here was the doctor pulling it up on her phone showing me its first baby photo.
It looked like neither of us. It was large, the doctor said, and to illustrate its scale was reduced to the usual sports comparisons: the size of a baseball. Worse than a ping-pong, better than a softball. It didn’t matter; I was glad it was no longer in her.
With practiced neutrality the doctor affirmed my relief then informed me my wife would be ready for release within an hour. An hour? After surgery? It didn’t seem safe though the doctor assured me it was, though my suspicion was it was largely due to what insurance did and didn’t cover. An hour later my name was called and I was led down a hall and in a hutch behind a curtain my wife lay on a cot in a hospital gown, woozy from painkillers. She smiled and it was enough to make me bite the inside of my cheek. Together the nurse and I helped her into a wheelchair; but the wheelchair accompanied us only as far as the car. After helping my wife into the passenger’s seat, the nurse left with it. In the rearview I watch her: a nurse pushing an empty wheelchair into an elevator. The elevator closed and the car pulled out of its spot, and my wife’s hands lay folded in her lap. Did she feel any pain? I asked. A little, she said. A dull kind. But mostly the painkillers made her feel a bit nauseous. I drove home carefully but quickly then helped her to bed. The cats, curious where she’d gone, emerged one by one from their hiding places to leap to the bed and sniff her. The keenest of them spent a good five minutes—I counted—sniffing up and down, laterally then horizontally, every inch of her belly. I pulled open the blinds to let in the sunlight. The cats curled next to her like furry vortices, purring. She was home again and already they’d forgotten. This was typical: transitions were difficult and significant, but once routine had been re-established, time returned to its unconscious, unbroken continuum. They left it for other, less accepting creatures to be thankful.

What does it say—that such a short book should require an afterword? Theodor felt his needed one. The themes he’d developed by turn patiently and haphazardly throughout called out to him for one final iteration: “Forms of Flow in Art”, simple and direct, the title. As surely as his review of flames and their sensitivity to the human voice had led to an examination of the larynx, his speculations about the healing properties of intentional coordination of speech and movement led to a wide-ranging exploration of flow-forms in art in general. In ancient times, speech was charged with sacred potential. “Not until later did it lose its creative force and become merely a means of communication.” So he begins, gambling on an idealization but buying into dualism. Wasn’t it sacred enough to turn to another person and sculpt air through a larynx, and state in no uncertain terms, “No, this is my spear; get your own”? A weird assertion, even more to the point, for someone who had taken the time and effort to write a book that read like a shy manifesto.
In the past everything was magical because no one really understood anything. Storytelling was mistaken for science, myths were treated like complex equations. Beautifully crafted intricate mistakes came from this, and whole cultures formed around them: these were inheritances that could be easily lost, if people remain unconnected from and disrespectful toward nature. This is what Theodor believes. With solemn conviction and much enthusiasm, he says so. In every instance, his pedantry is gentle, forgivable. Once he’d been a boy amazed by the forest around and above him, when it rained. Later he’d grown into a man and desired a theory to organize and account for that feeling. This required he try a hand at anthropology, no matter how amateur its fingers were. He references a threshold stone of a Bronze Age initiation chamber in Newgrange, Ireland. Notice, here, how the tumulus is decorated with engraved spirals. In a Toltec depiction of the Seven Caves, clearly one can also spy the appearance of spirals. In a Celtic stone ornament from Central Europe, a running animal evolves through several interlinking sketches to resemble a train of vortices. He calls our attention to a capital from a Romanesque church in Oberstenfeld. The spirits of the four corners of the earth are depicted here, “pouring forth bread and wine and the tree of life (fleur-de-lis motif) out of the stream of speech.” This last detail is noteworthy, he assures us, for in olden times the fleur-de-lis represented nothing less than The Tree of Life, not merely a clutch of lilies.
He doesn’t pause for long over these; he notes their existence, provides a quick sketch, then moves on. A dance shield of painted wood from the Trobriand Islands. A palm leaf design from May River, New Guinea. Sphere, wave, meander, spiral, vortex—these can be found everywhere in pre-modern art forms, and with good reason. In our ancestors' esteem, to live among air, earth, fire, and water required reverence along with understanding. These elements were sacred and sustained them. If they did not worship them, they would die of them. They would be cast down from The Tree of Life and never allowed a chance to climb back into its green graces. It's his conviction a thoughtful culture commits its people to those branches like singing birds or like leaves. Implication being: ours is not one.

*

There’s the sense he’s writing things out of the hope that by writing them, they might become true. There are worse delusions, and given that no one is reading or listening, the hopes, if realized, would harm no one. At the end of his humble tour of natural forms wherever they may be found, Theodor S has somehow reached the upper reaches of utopian wishfulness: he would like to speak of the possibility of reintegration. It’s a vague concept and he doesn’t spend much time describing it—two short paragraphs, half a page. He boldly calls for “a new conception of the nature of man which will open up new sources of inspiration”, before cutting short the prospect of what that might look like or require of a person: the book has ended and here comes the bibliography. His call for “the reintegration of the human spirit” is curiously unintegrated. The surest, subtlest way to avoid defeat is to withdraw once the shadow of a challenger has been spotted. I’m almost shamed to arrive with my meager armaments of critical thinking: I’ve stolen his beautiful world from him, by picking him up and reading him.
The city in which I write this has as its official standard a vestige of its colonial ownership by the French—the fleur-de-lis. An American city named after a French king—Louisville. Here on a daily basis The Tree of Life drops many people; some climb their way back by morning, some aren't so lucky. A river runs through the heart of the city then turns south on its way west, where later it joins The Mississippi in an Illinois town called Cairo. The Mississippi must have reminded its earliest inhabitants of the Nile, or maybe they hoped to claim a portion of greatness through association. If towns could be named aspirationally, why can’t books be written with the same intention—though, granted, they would do so at their peril.
The Tree of Life was pulped and from it books were printed. Books were written to chase a dream, wherever it may lead, even across the scattered leavings of outdated research. These were precious to him; these were relevant. Theodor acknowledges his many forebears and sources and then, upon turning the final page, joins them. Idrac takes a bow, Goethe takes one. Dozens of illustrators step forward and do so individually, then in unison. The Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. Rivers major and minor, ponds and lakes and clouds, the many standard-bearers and nurturers of his precious archetypes. Having said his piece and written it, Theodor crawls back into the ground, beneath a small plot of grass in Filderstadt. His boyhood joins his elder years there and sunlight falls equally on both of them. Merged wholly with what he adored and devoted his mere life to study; one could even daresay in this plot of grass he has achieved reintegration with it. I can think of a few whom I’ve known and loved who’ve done the same. It would be missing them from the wrong angle to ask, Where are they? Truth be told, I hardly miss them when I don’t think of them, and more and more that’s the foundation for what else I’m thinking about. This little book and the kindly man who wrote it, for example. The many forms that engrossed and enlivened him, though they were everywhere to be witnessed and taken for granted—all the more sacred for being commonplace; joined where they were broken. The circle at the end of the line made whole again.

Women and Parrots

01 December 2023

Sensitive Chaos Revised