peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
Lakes and
Pools
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 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…
Copyright 2007, Peter Nesteruk