04/18/2024
The Spirit of Rivers
A meandering monologue on rivers with our host, Professor Robert Harrison. Songs in this episode: “Getting Ready” by Frans Bak, and “You Better Move On” by Arthur Alexander.
04/18/2024
The Spirit of Rivers
A meandering monologue on rivers with our host, Professor Robert Harrison. Songs in this episode: “Getting Ready” by Frans Bak, and “You Better Move On” by Arthur Alexander.
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions alongside producer Ty Davidian in the studios of KZSU
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ready to lift and drop a question on your plate about rivers. What is a river?
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Here is one highly distilled answer to that question from a verse in Gary Snyder's poem "Endless
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Dreams and Mountains." Mountains and rivers are spirit condensed. I take that to mean that rivers
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and mountains both move on the scales of the great cosmic serpent that undulates through all things
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terrestrial and non-terrestrial. To us a mountain seems firm and fixed yet it too flows when you
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enlarge the view. The way AR Ammon's does in his poem "Tomb Stones" where he writes, "In certain
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orders of time stones blow by like the wind, starlight pricks them like bubbles."
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The neo-romantic German visionary, Hans Jurgen von der Vens, expressed a similar thought
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in one of his diary entries. Mountains are the chronicles of water, petrified oceans,
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all of our mountains once flew over us as clouds. Mountains and rivers, stones and wind,
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all are fluvial, all flow at their own pace in spirits differentiated currents.
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Like countless people, both past and present, I believe that the waters of our planet
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are more than physical substance. I believe that water is in spirited and that in addition to
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being the source of life, it is itself alive. Everybody of water, every river, breathes with its own
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inspiration. The millions of people in northern India who revere the Ganges don't project onto
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that river, its superordinate cosmic nature. They are receptive to something that emanates from the
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river itself. The same goes for the Nile, the Danube, the Congo, and all other rivers,
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large and small, each with a spirit of its own.
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There's a small town on the Tennessee River called Muscle Sholes. In 1959, Rick Hall founded
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a recording studio there called Fame, bringing white and black artists together in Alabama's
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cauldron of racial hostility. The music that came out of that place was so distinctive in its sound
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that caravans of famous singers and bands, both in America and abroad, flocked there to record.
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We felt the pulse of that sound said you to Spano, and we wanted some of it.
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The Rolling Stones, Aritha Franklin, Clarence Carter, Eda James, the Almond Brothers, Alisha
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Keys, and others all made pilgrimages to Muscle Sholes to incorporate the spirit of that place,
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and its singing river into their music.
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Here's Clayton Ivy of Fame Gang. You've got to understand that Muscle Sholes had his own kind of R&B,
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different from Memphis, different from Detroit, different from New York, different from LA.
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How did it happen in this little town of 8,000 people to start this whole style of music?
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Bono offers an answer to that question, like quote. It always seems to come out of the river.
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Even in Liverpool, you know the mercy sound, and then of course Mississippi, and here you have
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the Tennessee River. It's like the songs come out of the mud.
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Here's one more testimonial, and there are many more from where it comes from,
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namely the outstanding documentary on Netflix called Muscle Sholes.
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Towards the beginning of that documentary, Tom Hendrix, a descendant of the Uchi people, says,
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"We're at a place called Isha Tai. It's a special place, a holy place,
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it's a place of music, and it's a place of people. My great-great-grandmother was an American Indian
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and her people were Uchi. My grandmother's people called this river, and that we called the Tennessee
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today, they called it Nuna Sei, the river that sings. They believed a young woman lived in the
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river, sang song to him, and protected them. In the year 1839, my great-great-grandmother was
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removed from right here in Muscle Sholes. She was taken to the Indian nations, what is now present day
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Muscaji, Oklahoma. When grandmother got out there to Oklahoma, she said there were no songs.
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She went and listened to all the streams she could find, and there were no songs.
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They couldn't sing, they couldn't dance, they couldn't hold their ceremonies,
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and they got to be very sad people. So she started to come back home. She walked all the way back,
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it took her roughly five years. She had to come back to this river, the river that sings.
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The great dams have softened the woman in the river's songs, but if you go to very quiet places
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and listen, you can still hear her songs. I know, I hear her songs nearly every day.
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"To hear the song of river spirits, you need to know how to listen.
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Annmarie Sayers, an alony elder from Indian Canyon, water is the blood of the earth.
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In our language, water is Rama, and there is no word in English for it. Rama is not just H2O,
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it's a movement of the water, it's the sound of the water, it's a creek that contains the water.
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And if you know how to listen, you can hear the water talk to you, whisper to you.
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"I've never seen or heard the Tennessee River nor have I ever been to the Ganges.
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Having spent much of my life in Rome, the river I most familiar with is the Tiber.
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The Tiber these days is a profane, sullied and unloved river that meanders through Rome almost
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covertly thanks to the high stone embankments built in the 19th century, which make long
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stretches of it invisible to city dwellers."
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"I've known only two Romans who had a spiritual connection to the Tiber.
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I will save the bewitching story of one of them for another occasion. Today,
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I'll only mention Flaminia, a limbologist and Italian relative of mine,
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who used to lead tours to the more pristine upper course of the Tiber and Anyana rivers.
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The Anyana being a tributary river that joins the Tiber just north of Rome."
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Flaminia is the person who revealed to me just how mysterious and animate even a half dead
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river like the Tiber can be. Her intimate familiarity with the benthic life on the bottom,
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as well as with the great many bugs and life forms on the surface,
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left no doubt in the minds of those who joined her tours that in the various layers of a river's
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flowing substance, the organic permeates the inorganic to such a degree that they become indistinguishable.
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From Flaminia, I learned that every river has a hypo-ray-exone,
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namely an underground flow beneath its bed which extends far and wide beyond both sides of its
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embankments. Thus, when we think we're standing alongside a river, we are in fact standing above it.
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Most of us have no idea of the extended networks of rivers that flow under our feet,
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but Flaminia was always both above and below ground in her existential stream.
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"The pollution of the Tiber and her relative helplessness to do anything about it,
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despite her militant environmental advocacy, demoralized her greatly and may even have led to her early
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death." Flaminia believed that the befouling and poisoning of rivers caused the souls of the
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cities built around them to wither. She was convinced that Europe as a whole was dying a spiritual death
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in the viscous morass of its major rivers, which were no longer capable of flushing either the
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physical or cultural detritus of civilization out to sea. And she knew all too well that in the end,
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the sea would succumb to the toxic fate of its inflowing rivers.
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"I invoke Flaminia here because despite its ecological degradation, she had an almost mystical
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relation to the Tiber, whose spirit was indissociable from its body. When got the impression that for her,
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the Tiber held charismatic secrets that something esoteric lay concealed below its surface.
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She spent so much of her time on or in or around the upper reaches of the Tiber and Anyene,
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that her family and friends considered her deranged. It would not be going too far to say
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that Flaminia was in love with those two rivers.
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Are there any women out there listening to this show who have ever fallen in love with a river
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I wonder. I ask because in Greek mythology it happens often. In the Iliad we read of Perry Boa
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that she lay in love with the deep whirling river Axios. After holding converse with his mother
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shade and Hades, Odysseus meets the shades of various queens among the throngs of the dead.
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The verse one he speaks to is Tyro, daughter of Salmanaeus. As a maiden she was in love with the
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river Anypius, spending most of her days along its banks and in its stream. One morning she
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cut the lustful eye of Poseidon, who took the form of Anypius and swept Tyro out to see where,
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inside a huge billow, he ravaged her.
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In his Kantos Ezra Pound rewrites that story in four words, glass wave over Tyro.
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What kind of love draws women to rivers and rivers to women? Why all these nymphs, nayads,
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rusalcas, melousines, ladies of the lake, and other feminine water spirits of world mythology?
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Why does Ophelia climb a willow tree over a brook? Why does Olivia Lang in her book to the river
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right? I am haunted by waters, I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there's a river
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nearby. In the opening of the great cosmic mother, Monica Seju and Barbara Moore give a feminine
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declension to the Native American saying, "Water is life." I quote, "In the beginning was a very female
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sea, for two and a half billion years on earth, all life forms floated in the womb-like environment
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of the planetary ocean, nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar tidal
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rhythms. In the beginning, life did not just date within the body of any creature, but within the
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ocean womb containing all organic life. There were no specialized sex organs, rather a generalized
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female existence reproduced itself within the female body of the sea.
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If there's one book, I recommend unconditionally to the brigade, it's the great cosmic mother.
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And let's not forget that three-fourths of our brains and hearts are water, which means, if I may speak
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among friends here, that our sentient subjectivity is mostly aqueous, that the stream of consciousness
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is not merely a metaphor, but an organic condition of being.
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[Music]
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The passage I just cited from the great cosmic mother may help explain why so many of the water
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activists around the world are women. It's striking how many water rights organizations are
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founded and operated by women, women and rivers accelerator, for example, another one,
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The Women and Rivers Network was established by international rivers and partner groups in 2019.
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That network to quote its mandate is committed to protecting free flowing rivers and the land,
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forests and territories they sustain, to ensure women's leadership in decision making at all levels
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over freshwater resources for the future of ourselves as women, our families and communities,
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or rivers and our planet.
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Let me throw out the title of yet another book here, Women and Water. It's the exhibit catalog for
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Mary E. Burns woven portraits from around the world, which is the book's subtitle.
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The exhibit features woven portraits of 38 women in 20 different countries, many of them in
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indigenous who have taken up the fight and in some cases risked their lives to protect rivers,
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lakes and springs from the depredations of entrenched local, national and international forces.
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All of them believe in the spiritual nature of water.
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In the developed world, we've come to take for granted the miracle of clean,
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fresh water flowing from our hoses and household taps, while in many parts of the world,
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women still walk miles to procure less water than we waste as we wait for our shower flow to warm up.
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The saying, "Water is life is not a truism, but a critical everyday reality."
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With climate change, drought, and the ongoing trashing and exploitation of the world's waterways,
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springs and aquifers, the waters of life in their purity become ever more vulnerable to the death
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drive of an uprooted humanity.
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I will mention only one of the 38 activists in the Women and Water catalog,
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Autumn Piltier from the Anishina Beck Nation. She took up the cause shortly after her mother,
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brought her to a water ceremony in Serpent River First Nation, Ontario,
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where she saw signs on the wall that read, "Not for consumption, do not use for hand washing,
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boil water advisory." At age 13, she stood before the United Nations General Assembly and
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talked about the ancestral mandate in her blood to protect the waters of her nation.
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A year later, in 2019, she was named Chief Water Commissioner for the Anishina Beck Nation.
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One day, I will be an ancestor, Piltier, declared in a public statement,
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and I want my grandchildren to know that I fought hard so they can have clean drinking water.
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For an indigenous woman like Piltier, clean drinking water is inseparable from the free flow
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of ancestral spirits from the past into the present and beyond.
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For ancestors and their progeny belong to the same river of spirit and tradition,
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coursing through a tribe's native ground.
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Just as the source and mouth of a river are present in its flow,
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past any given sight along its banks, so too we humans come forth from a source and make our way
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towards some estuary whose primitive presence is with us from the start.
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Flaminia used a stress that we should not confuse a river source with its headwaters.
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The source lies in the complex interaction of sky, earth, sea, and the planetary circulation of
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water through trade winds, Gulf streams, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
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While all of our freshwater comes ultimately from above, in the form of precipitation,
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much of its sinks into what Robert MacFarland calls the underland.
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This underland has many dimensions.
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The great subterranean rivers of Hades, the Laithae, the Stix, the Phlegothon, the Acaron, the Cockatus.
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These rivers belong to the ultimate beyond region of human life, namely the underworld of the dead,
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where ancestors and those waiting to be born abide side by side, if we believe Virgil in Book
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Six of the Ania. Thus when autumn paltaea declared, "One day I will be an ancestor and I want my
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great grandchildren to know that I fought hard so that they can have clean drinking water."
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We should hear in those words a declaration to the effect that, "One day my spirit will pass
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into the underground rivers of the dead and I want my grandchildren to know that I fought hard to
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make sure that the waters that come forth from that source remain clean, free, and life sustaining."
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Water is life to be sure, yet the rivers of our planet also intimate death and dissolution
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into the greater sea of being, and they do so not because they traditionally symbolize time,
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but because in their underground, as well as above ground streaming, they are always underway
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and beckon us to the same region from which they begin their journey toward us, in ways
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we don't fully understand. The mysterious pull of the beyond region draws us into the unknown and
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foreign reaches of the river, even when we stay put in one place along its banks.
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It's what the river songs are about, yet let's not assume that the beyond region lies somewhere
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out ahead of us in space or time. The unknown and the foreign are present all around us at any given
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moment of our flow through world and time. By the same token, death is not a terminus at the end of
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life's trajectory, it's the ever-futative on-rush of our immersion in being. We self-extend
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into the strange and uncanny because as mortals we are awake to the mystery of presence.
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Much of that mystery remains invisible to us even when it's reflected off a river's smooth,
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glinting surface. Rivers have a way of coming toward and pulling away from us at the same time,
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leaving us to wonder what lies under the sliding surface of the present.
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I'm alluding here to Virginia Woolf, perhaps the most delicate question of writers in the
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literary canon. In a typically enigmatic sentence she declares, "The past only comes back when the
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present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river."
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That tension and inscrutable interplay between the depths and sliding surface of the river
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informed Virginia Woolf's dissolving or disillusionary style of writing, which goes far beyond a conventional
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stream of consciousness. I only wish that she had elided the simile in her sentence.
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There is nothing more common than to turn the river into an analogy for something else.
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Time, journey, generational continuity, consciousness, whatever.
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But when it comes to the relation between humans and rivers, or rivers in time,
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we should suppress the word like. A river is not like time, it is the condensed river run of time
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itself. When it comes to rivers, spirit moves freely between the terms of analogy.
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Thus we could rephrase Virginia Woolf's sentence as follows.
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The past only comes back when the present slides smoothly on the surface of a deep river.
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It was into the depths beneath that sliding surface that Virginia cast her thought one day
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on the Oxbridge campus when she sat down by the river cam to reflect on women and fiction,
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in preparation for a lecture she was to deliver on that topic a few weeks later.
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Here is how she describes the scene in a room of one's own.
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The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate
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had ordered his boat through the reflections, they closed again completely as if they had never
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been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought, to call it by a
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a prouder name than it deserved, had let its line down into the stream. It swayed minute after
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minute, hither and thither, among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink
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it until you know the little tug, the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line,
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and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out.
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Alas, laid on the grass, how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked.
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The sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter
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and be one day worth cooking and eating.
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We'll never know if Virginia in fact set out to retrieve that thought when late one night some
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thirteen years later, she filled her overcoat pockets with stones and walked into the river ooze.
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But what we do know, if we take the passage I just cited as evidence, is that our minds do not
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reside in our brains, but outside of, and beyond them. You don't go fishing for a thought in the
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depths of a river if your mind isn't already down there somewhere.
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Wolf enters directly into the watery element of thought when she goes on to remark.
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But however small it was, this thought of mine, it had nevertheless the mysterious property of its kind.
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Put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting and important,
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and as it darted and sank and flashed hither and thither, it set up such a wash and tumbled of
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ideas that it was impossible to sit still.
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And with that quote, the sea now comes into view. So to wind this river of words down to a conclusion,
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let me ship the scene from Oxbridge to one of the most riverine cemeteries in the world,
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poetically speaking. It's known as the Protestant or non-Catholic cemetery of Rome,
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where non-Catholic foreigners, atheists, and various eccentric others who died in Rome or near Rome,
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were buried in the 19th and 20th centuries and into our own century as well.
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It's especially famous for two graves, those of John Keats and Percy Bischelly.
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John Keats's headstone says, "This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet
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who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies,
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desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone. Here lies one whose name was written in water."
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On Keats tomb are inscribed the words "core, cordium, the heart of hearts, along with some
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verses from Shakespeare's The Tempest." Nothing of him that death fade but death suffer a sea change
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into something rich and strange.
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The beat poet Gregory Corso was born in New York in 1930 and died in Minnesota in January 2001.
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Five months after he died, his ashes were sent to Rome, where on May 5th some 200 people paid
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their last respects to him in the Protestant cemetery. I don't know how he obtained permission to be
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| 00:27:50.240 |
buried there since he was born Catholic, but somehow Corso managed to get his ashes placed right
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| 00:27:56.640 |
near the tomb of Shelley. On his tombstone is an epitaph that he composed himself. It reads,
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| 00:28:04.960 |
"Spirit is life, it flows through the death of me endlessly, like a river,
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| 00:28:13.200 |
unafraid of becoming the sea."
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| 00:28:15.760 |
A moving epitaph to be sure with his illusions to the famous neighboring headstones of Shelley and
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| 00:28:25.360 |
Keats, yet as I mentioned just a minute or two ago, when it comes to the relation between humans
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| 00:28:32.080 |
and rivers, we should suppress the word like. I for one would have preferred a slightly different
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| 00:28:39.280 |
version of the poem. Spirit is life, it flows through the death of me endlessly,
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| 00:28:47.200 |
unafraid of becoming the sea.
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| 00:28:50.080 |
I'm Robert Harrison alongside Ty Davidian and we're going to leave you with the first musical
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| 00:28:57.440 |
hit to come out of the mud of the Tennessee River in muscles/sholes. Arthur Alexander's,
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| 00:29:03.600 |
you better move on, recorded in 1961. Thanks for listening.
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| 00:29:08.560 |
[Music]
|
| 00:29:18.560 |
Asking me to give up the hand of a girl I love. You tell me I'm not the man she's with it all.
|
| 00:29:33.040 |
But who are you to tell her who to love? That's up to her. Yes and a lot of
|
| 00:29:48.400 |
love. You better move on. Well I know you can buy her fancy clothes and damn a race.
|
| 00:30:01.600 |
But I feel the things she's I have been with me with all those things.
|
| 00:30:13.440 |
Still you beg me to set her free. But my friend that will never be.
|
| 00:30:22.560 |
Better move on.
|
| 00:30:25.840 |
I can't blame you while loving her.
|
| 00:30:37.760 |
But can't you understand that she's my girl?
|
| 00:30:44.240 |
I'm never gonna let her go.
|
| 00:30:54.400 |
Oh
|
| 00:30:56.400 |
My thank you that the go now I'm getting mighty mad.
|
| 00:31:08.480 |
You asked me to give up the only love I'll ever had.
|
| 00:31:20.400 |
Maybe I would but I love a soul. You never gonna let her go. You better move on.
|
| 00:31:35.200 |
You better move on You better move on You better move on you better move on
|
| 00:31:45.380 |
You better move on You better move on You better move on
|
| 00:31:51.360 |
(mellow electronic music)
|