Waterfalls I (from Chinese Gardens)
Listen, when the crowds are gone. Only one sound can be heard; a
perpetual background murmuring, nature’s white-noise, the sound of splashing
without end. Eternally present.
Drawing our attention. Our eyes seek the source.
The sound of water falling. The sound of a waterfall.
A feature. To hear… To look at…
A focal point.
A shining movement, motionless… framed by rocks and greenery.
Dancing light, motionless… A waterfall.
In sound, as in sight, a centre, a calling out; a calling out of itself as a centre. A centre to look at, to
fix at the centre of ones
vision, to fix all that lies around as in relation to this centre,
to transfix all that lies around it, as it transfixes our vision. Like all
features: like statues, whose standing also reorders the landscape around
themselves; the waterfall is a mobile, evanescent, statue. A writhing statue. A
perpetuam mobile, a thing of perpetual motion.
Its appearance for us, unlike any other thing. Made of motion, movement
unceasing.
And as the unstopping sound
calls forth our attention, it provides an alternate background to all the other
sounds we might hear; for the other background now silenced, drowned in falling
water, is silence itself… The sound of the waterfall, providing… a new silence…
one you can hear… present behind things, behind the noise of things (at times
conjoined with the voice of the wind as if in a duet; the sounds of silence…).
Contrasting stillness;
water and growing things, stones, and sound, splashing of sound, and splashing
of light, a falling sound and a falling of light, from the sky and in the
motion, the falling of the waters. A reference to moving light, all else
around, its frame, context, home… is slow moving or visually still; the
waterfall creates a point of noise, of activity, of life moving at speed… all
else is placid. The light reflected is unlike the light reflected in the water
of the pool, or that above, all changing with the time of day, days passing,
and the passing of clouds - yet all still relatively still. A waterfall changes
constantly, but changes less… because always the rush of white noise, always
the laughter of flowing water. And then the ‘white noise’ of the eye, the
mixing of air and light in water falling onto water and stone…, a splashing of
light, an image of life, of world time moving, transforming, amid slower
geographic, geologic, epochal speeds of the rhythm of time, time of day,
season… and that of the waterfall… its own time... its own temporality…
To which we connect.
Energy filled, energy generating nexus, like a quote, or a cut and
paste citation on the stillness of the surrounding and so-different texture of
space… and time... the bubbling of the eternal present out of… the eternally
splashing present… the gift of life, the waterfall as a symbol of the presence
of self. A coming into being… and a disappearing; a short duration of being,
but irresistible. Unforgettable. Because if we listen, still there. Splashing
in the stillness. Stillness moving, Just like ourselves…
Focal point of view or feeling.
A shrine made from water; unlike other shrines, a shrine made from motion…
scattering of light and sound as the sign of the sacred… set in its landscape.
As landscaped by itself. Or by some other self; perhaps the genius loci, the spirit of the place, is
the architect of this landscape so reordered, so ordered around the fall of
water, the focal point of still motion…
Fall of water and trapping
of light, a transformation of light. The fall of light from the heavens,
visualized, made matter, living, moving, shining matter… the waterfall as
shrine, in motion, a shrine perpetually in motion, again figure of renewal,
self-creation, and in its apparent self-standing and renewing, figure of the
gift of life, and the gift of value of making sacred. Like a spring, font of
life as eternal as the stillness of the traditional shrine, where perhaps too,
candles flicker, and smoke rises restlessly from burning incense sticks… For
the magnetic force of the waterfall is like that of the fire, the flame that
hovers, flickering above that which it consumes, as a waterfall wears away the
portal that allows it to exist as a shining fall of water - manifestation of
the forces of life and change. Symbol of the world as an offering made to us…
offering to us. Eternally offering to us…Of us as recipient of an infinite
gift, the waterfall as natural symbol of this giving, symbolizing absolute gift
in its appearance. This appearance pointing back to our feelings so activated…
a species sense organ we harbour in secret; the
secret of being human, the ability to find this transfiguration… wherever we
look for it. Fall and Flame as witnessed by us, so suggesting that the world
may be sacred if we so wish it to be so. That the sacred sense of place, of
space and time, is not the gift of the heavens, not the moon, or even the sun
and stars, neither of light (though we would believe it so) nor of darkness (if
we cannot believe), but solely of ourselves. If we so wish to give it…
As it gives itself.
Fore-ever.
For it is not ‘its own temporality’… but ours.
Eternally present.
Water falls.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2019