peter nesteruk
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Lakes and Pools (The Space above Water).
Light glances on
the mirror, its dance obscuring all content. The parchment on which is written
the image of our furthermost hope is a palimpsest washed clean by water, washed
until only the light that illuminates all life remains (a page of our life
written in water).
What is it about a view over water? The place of water in
Chinese culture, like the place of stone that is its complement and constant
companion, is a long and cherished one and provides the inspiration for what
follows. The conclusions reached however need not be limited by geography nor
culture. Any reflection on role of the view over water upon the inner life of
the observer will certainly find an answering reflection in the many witnesses
to such places of water found elsewhere in the world.
Whether
on the shores of the Houhai, the Qianhai, the Xihai… or Beihai, with its white
pagoda… (the lakes of central
Once again
it is a question of Nature transformed: ‘shining Nature’: the presence of a
‘shining mystery’; the presence of a place where the light that appears,
appears to emanate from within... The dancing light found on the surface of
water.
Elements. Other elements (over and above the presence of water):
light, space and air. Light; falling, descent due to an opening onto the sky, gift
of the sun, or else the twinkling of artificial illuminations - in each case a
presence doubled by the water’s reflection. Space; the openness that sits above
an expanse of water, beginning on the surface that reflects it and ending with
the infinity that soars above; configuring space - conferring the magical
transmutation into ‘place.’ And the
air that fills it; more translucent than water, but itself rendered opaque by
the presence of mists… Nature’s elements tamed, contained, in the forms given to
garden and park.
And the
framing due to the encirclement of water by earth.
A setting
aside of space filled with a liquid substance at times appearing molten,
glowing.
A ‘gathering’ of
the work of our senses (Heidegger). A gathering together of elements (of
‘nature’, of perception). Air and sky, earth and water, and the ever-present,
latent sense of being before something. Of being placed before something… Even
more than on the square (perhaps because we are not usually allowed onto this
space, set aside, for looking only, and being next to - occasionally to boat
on, but then comprising a special experience, a participation, and one we pay
for…). What is the work of such a space? What alchemy is practised here?
The symbolic punctuation of the physical, of our visual realm,
our visible realm, the experience of our eyes, our space; a symbolic
overcharge, a translation of the things we see, a citation without origin in
our visual field, a hiatus in our access to space… and light. And the sense of
being before something special, laden with portent, meaningful… all of which
adds up to the transmutation of space into place: the magic we believe comes
from the space itself, but which is the gift of our humanity to our
environment, genius loci. Gift of our gathering, a gathering place.
This effect is also present on a smaller scale in the gathering,
centering effect of a garden pool (perhaps most perfectly expressed in the
‘Master of Nets’ garden,
It is in the aesthetics of lakes and pools, part of the art of
the park, leisure space, pleasure garden, that we find again the trope of
transformed space - now allied with the presence of open space. An opening at
once above and below… before one, above one and beneath one (the mystery of the
pool’s depths). Like that of a square, the space above the square, the
aesthetic of the square… (but how different from a square with its frame of
buildings; yet how like a square in its potential for trimming, to be fringed,
edged with places to eat and drink, to sit around and watch). But without the
ease, the immediacy of access of the square; for water presents a barrier,
lacking an immediate mode of transport - swimming, if allowed, boats, if any, our
transport on water. Like a square, providing for a space as frame (quite
literally, more picturesque, as if contained within the frame of a picture)
more specialised… So like a square… yet not a square - not like a square… (with
a different sense of ‘before’ …). Although temples and other important
buildings can often be found enhanced by a body of water, and so of the sense
of ‘I’ or ‘we’, of ‘me’ or ‘us’ (standing) before the body of water; yet the
water often lies before the building, the water between us and the building… so
barring the building even as it propagates its reflection. Propagating the
image as it would be seen ‘right side up’ from the other side, as if we were
offered the image reversed as a promissory note, to tempt us into imagining the
reflection of the building, lying at our feet, with ourselves included,
transfigured together in the surface motion of the water, there together on the
face of the waters. (Teasing us with the impossible image in the mirror from
which we are forever excluded). The mirror that reflects not us but that which
lies beyond; the place between doubled, twice present without us. Still here.
Before the barrier between, between us and what lies ‘over’… or beyond, over
there…
.
Whilst lakes and pools offer us a variety of experiences, it is
the difference between open and enclosed space that is one of the greatest
sources of symbolic significance. The key difference initially appears to be
merely quantitative, a matter of size, the sheer expanse of water we perceive
before us and its openness to the sky (whose final word is the sublime infinity
of the sea, the presence of the ocean, infinite plane of extension above and
below). This experience is then opposed to that of smaller lakes and pools
which may be fringed with overhanging boughs or even enclosed by a roof of
leaves. The degree of openness to the sky configures the water’s relationship
to, and reflection of, what lies above. In qualitative terms we have the
equivalent of an enclosed or intimate space, a ‘room’ in Nature, opposed to the
open vista of landscape. However the presence or absence of an opening to the
sky marks an important difference in the experience of the smaller place of water.
An opening above configures a space inseparable from the sky, a place where the
heavens and the earth are conjoined, where the image of the heavens is to be
found reflected in water.
By contrast, a more
fully enclosed space, the sense of a ‘room’ proper, the appearance of a
dwelling created by a turn in a stream and including a pool as a resting place
between the stream’s onward flow, is to be found protected by walls of rock and
sheltered under over-arching trees. With the uncanny feeling of an inhabited
space, a sense of place which implies a genitive, so prompting the question,
whose room? And the suggestion of genius loci… the pervading sense of a ‘spirit of the
place’. Here the opening to the sky may be absent, and is anyway only of
importance perhaps as a kind of skylight or occulus,
letting in the light which seeps through the enveloping branches and glances
off the water below.
The place of reflection. The surface… of but not from water. Flayed,
fallen skin of the sky. A surface edged above and below by that which surrounds
it, by that which touches it, the doubled shore line; reality and image
touching each other; as if looking into a parallel universe, world’s edge,
place of return, repetition of the Same. Where ‘out’ becomes ‘in’ and ‘there’
is but a replication of ‘here’. The irony of sameness offering yet another
shade of otherness in the space we behold, another colour to the palate of
other-worldliness, mood of anticipation; over and above that anyway conjured by
a stretch of open water… by the sense of another’s dwelling, abode of water
sprites, nymphs and dragons, the personifications of place in mythology. The
place of water, place of reflection, where the play of light alone guarantees a
sense of imminent annunciation. Together with its relative inaccessibility, a
place protected - we can not walk on water.
Yet the reflective force of water suggests the presence of
another element: the uncertain something that lies beneath… ever alien, always
other. The omnipresent something that waits behind the light of reflection. The
Other of land and air, inimical even (ever-present is the threat and promise of
drowning), resistant to penetration, waiting unknown behind the curtain of
reflection. In texture unlike any other thing, transparent at certain times in
certain places, yet otherwise opaque; fact and figure for the act of hiding.
The place of the hidden, the concealed: yet no matter what our actual control
over it (water levels, draining, cleaning) in its impression upon us, in the
realm of the image, in figure, in the world of suggestion, it always escapes
us… it will always escape us… is in excess of our ordered minds. For it seizes
our imagination and makes off with it… leading us to places we can barely
understand… and where we can barely understand ourselves.
Unfathomable.
A place
where we can barely understand ourselves… for the apprehension of the light in
the sky leads not the enlightenment of the mind, but to the night of reason…
As the half
light of the moon replaces the sun, so understanding confronts the face of its
shadow and learns the bitter-sweet lesson of its limits…
And what of a night spent on the margins of water, on the
margins of understanding. Night in such places, also governed by the role of
light, now artificial, augmenting the moonlight that conceals as much as it
reveals, and the stars which reveal only themselves. Moonlight realm, magical,
fantastic, a realm of fantasy. Shore of suggestion. Garden of the sexual… park
of promiscuous promise …
Once more, the question: ‘before’ what… garden or park, lake or
pool, what is it that draws us so?
In addition to the sky and its reflection, the open funnel to
the heavens, and the masked depths below, there is the sense of another place
before us, over on the other side… the sense of a barrier acting as a lure to
meaning, its framing effect an intensification of meaning
Important to both kinds of watery place, whether open or
enclosed, and particularly cogent in the case of a river, is the sense of
‘over’ - a place ‘over there’. The sense of another side most cogently found in
the presence of a barrier beyond which something lies... This is the myth-laden
‘other-side’ whose symbolic ‘otherness’ is multiplied by the intrusion of
something in between – of something that comes in between. The value, the very
desirability of what lies beyond, is become dependant upon its (symbolic)
unreachability. Opposite banks or shores, islands lying along the horizon, all
conjure this sense - our experience of these vistas is transformed by it.
Before. That sense of ‘over’. Of being ‘before’, this side,
gazing over at something ’over’ on that side. Called by something that was
there before, here, in our being before…
Other modalities of meaning, other ways of understanding ‘what
lies before’: mimesis (a copy of what lies elsewhere); metaphor (an unstated
comparison); simile (an obvious comparison or copy of what lies elsewhere);
metonymy (here, we are closest to what we desire from such a view); synecdoche
or part-for-whole (we are already a part of the whole effect - in effect, its
hidden origin lies in us). Or even a performance of our desire for… what lies
elsewhere. Performance because even as we look, so are we transported.
Participants now, no longer observers. Unless shaken by the experience of an
event or place, we are confirmed; by such places as parks and gardens, the
places of leisure, places of our investment in ourselves, are we confirmed. And
even if we are shaken, we are also confirmed. The economics of identity do not
rest but incorporate all (not least, the un-incorporable). The movement away
presages the movement back, the elastic holds firm, the pull of gravity holds
true, we regain our position, our place. A position refreshed, with the tireless forces of entropy tearing at the
edges of the old, pushed away (until next time). Like sleep, putative death of the
self, haunted by dreams in its nocturnal wanderings, leading to the rebirth of
the self, the sunlit awakening in the morning. Our machinery of self, like the
day itself, renewed. Open.
Before an
open column of space, before an opening onto the sky; portal and glimpse onto
the infinite…
The
presence that hangs over water…
The place
above water.
Copyright, Peter
Nesteruk, 2010.