by Nils Peterson
On Water
Somewhere I have stowed my astrology reading so I could put my hands upon it when I wanted to see it again. I don’t remember where. So there is something about a water sign [Scorpio] — a certain muddiness and flow of memory. All is at the bottom of the sea. Why is it so important to remember the longitude and latitude of any one thing? That’s for earth people on their certain ways across the sea’s broad expanse. Whatever the shift in tide, the turn of the current, throws up interests the water person, though it is not what he or she set out to find in the morning.
Euripides says that “The parched earth loves the rain; and high heaven, rain-filled, loves to fall earthward.” So, water is this too, a messenger between longings, as anyone given a chemistry set as a kid knows — those dusts that sit desiccate in a test tube until water brings out the longing of each for the other and a third being is created. Yet there is something else. There is a poem of mine which ends with a walk by the sea after a great winter storm looking at the bits and pieces of washed up wreckage, then I look out at the ocean where:
The waves still roll fiercely from far out
breaking over a new sandbar then gathering up
again to break once more full upon the shore,
and I think of how on even the calmest day there
is a little shimmer against the solidness of land,
a little rolling againstness, and I feel the ancientness
of the anger hard and tight in her belly six miles
down in the dark fold of the Mindanao Deep.
So, water buoys, carries, flows, dissolves, beaches, creates, destroys. It sucks under. It throws up. It rains. It pours. Empedocles calls fire “destructive strife” and water “tenacious love,” and he saw that love and strife produced all change in their combinings and separatings.
On Fire
Black night. The greatest storm of the century swirls across the mountains. The castle seems scarcely able to withstand the sweep of wind and water. Yet, down in the basement, the scientist waits in a swarm of cathodes, Erlenmeyer flasks, and intricate tubings, waits for the lightning to erupt across the far sky and hurtle down into the erected receptors to animate, give life to, fire up the assemblage of stolen body parts. So, there is a secret love affair between water and fire, and so our Promethean imaginations conceive of life as a gift from their stormy mating.
Perhaps this is because of their opposing natures, for if water conjures up images of eternity, fire brings forth images of the transitory. Fire is “consumed by that which it was nourished by.” Its existence is contingent upon using up, finishing, consuming that which enables it to exist. What is left is ashes, “In me thou seest the glowing of such fire/ As on the ashes of his youth doth lie….” We are flames, slow flames, for metabolizing is nothing but slow burning, and it has been suggested that the aging process is the result of incomplete combustion, so when I look at my wrinkling face in the morning’s mirror, I am seeing the ashes of my life, or, as another poet put it, “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.” Another way of thinking about these things is that life is a meeting of the eternal [water] and the transitory [fire], a cross where now and ever meet.
Heraclitus says, “Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.” So fire is the mouth of this vast Ouroboros of life whose tail, logically, is also fire. Lastly, I think of Dante, who at the pit of hell found no fire at all, only ice which is fireless water. I think we have visited that place too.
On Earth
“Earth’s the right place for love:/ I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” says Robert Frost. Of course, he is not speaking of earth as one of the elements of the Greek sense of creation, yet his seeing seems true in that way too. The element earth makes place possible, since the other three are too watery, airy, fiery to settle down. Earth gives to things a kind of slow lastingness – for isn’t lastingness relative? Don’t mountains dance in as sprightly a fashion as fire given a few million years. So ultimately they are as transitory as a match’s flare. Yet, for now, Earth insists that soul wear feet of clay for “Earth’s the right place for love.”
Bachelard says that “the painter, with the fatality of primitive fancies, renews the great cosmic dreams that bind men to the elements – to fire, water, the air of the heavens, and the prodigious materiality of the substances of the earth.” “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” sings Richard Wilbur, and those things are made of those skittish elements caught at last in earth.
Earth and Air make sand, Earth and Water make clay, Earth and Fire make, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, fires caught in the Earth like Sophia – yes, “prodigious.” “Love has earth to which she clings….” Again Frost. Finally, aren’t a poet’s words a kind of earth, giving a shape, a lastingness, “a “local habitation” to “airy nothingness” — bringing to thought and feeling the “prodigious materiality” of consonant and vowel. Making jewels, if you will.
Some poems.
On Air
I find I know nothing of air, thought of it as space, not as an active element equal to earth, water, and fire. I’ve not thought of it in the serious way that that great lady Cleopatra thinks of air, “I am fire, and Ayre; my other Elements/ I give to baser life.” She is leaving this incarnation, returning to Isis as the fire and air that her life had led her to become. So, those must be the elements out of which passion is created and water and earth make up the vessel to hold it, the stuff which, when used, is returned to the clay bucket, from sodden dust to sodden dust.
Anaximenes, the philosopher of air, said, “As our souls, being air, hold us together, so breath and air embrace the entire universe.” Air, soul, and breath, then, are one, and they hold us together. Anaximenes tells us that air rarefied, became fire, condensed it became wind, then cloud, then thickened into water, earth, stone – and of these, everything else is made. Aren’t we sort of a thick air? Hildegarde Ellsberg says, “How little of us touches the ground. Just the soles of our feet.”
Air goes down into the bowels of the planet lightening the thickness until the earth at last with a sigh seals itself off, and it goes out out into space becoming thinner and thinner until it can be said, at last, the planet ends.
I think the first major poem I ever loved was Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” The sounds of it thrilled me: “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,/ Thou from whose unknown presence the leaves dead/ Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,/ Yellow and black, and pale, and hectic red,/ Pestilence—stricken multitudes….” I find it hard to stop. I want to type on. Wind is air off for a good time.