The Element of Life

From In the Sea of Life Enisled - An introduction to the teaching of Geography in Waldorf education, Antropos 1998

by David L. Brierley

I walked on the banks of the stream. It was no ordinary stream, it was for me, a young lad in short pants, a Zambezi. It was later to become a stream of consciousness. It was my stream and only mine.

In the middle of industrial Lancashire my outings were mostly accompanied by mists and heavy showers. My Zambezi could easily overflow to become a Yangste. When water gushed through my stream the blood gushed through my veins, I became excited and was forced into a feverish activity. The dampness made no impact upon my young body, neither did I notice that the waters filled my shoes. There was plenty to do reinforcing the banks just like they do on the South China Plain. I was always alone but at one with the world. England was my island home, the sea ran round me but the river ran through me.

If a foreigner had come to my parts he would have disturbed my work. Coming to a manufacturing town in South Lancashire - he would hardly have been impressed. Hard ugliness would have met his eyes, the sight and voices of the people could be compared with the surroundings. Yet amongst the mill chimneys in the hideous little streets something was fostered that could never be seen. That was my world - my muddy socks were its witness. To understand my town and the kindred of its people is a study of the childhood imagination.

Our town was also their world. Later I was to realise that every individual must, in his own career, epitomize the phases of childhood, youth, manhood and decrepitude - each man mirrors in his own life the locality where he lives. Whether living in the mountains of Tibet or the plains of Mongolia, whether he dwells in the north, south, east or west, every person is, in some way or another, a representative of the home that gave him birth. In the people the country finds its reflection. Here lies the diversification, the characteristics which are mankind. One receives at birth a physical and spiritual endowment from which we cannot free ourselves. Its worth becomes more and more apparent as time goes on. I was fortunate that, although I lived in an impoverished environment by many standards, I had my Brahmaputra. Under such circumstances it is obvious that the first Geography must be to learn the limits of the realm in which one is fostered. I was allowed to make my home in a home, to try to understand its secrets. Alone, I was able to encompass the freedom of my own thoughts, the independence of my own will in my own stream. I was to learn that the direct key to the kingdom was the attainment of that place in the present and its destiny in the future. There is no need for a training beforehand, the way unfolds itself midst the conditions of a limited life.

Dusk made me aware that I was terribly wet and for the first time that day somewhat miserable. I shut the door behind me, my parents were both angry and pleased to see their dirty boy who had had a geographical experience. There was no need to ask where I had been. The door was barred, the curtains drawn, no longer did the world exist outside the threshold. I sat by the hearthside. The grimy rows of terraced houses were oblivious to me, they were just a product of scientific industrialism, centres for a scheme of life based on the ugly and the harsh. They had been there, unchanged, for the last ninety or so years and would probably be there for ninety more.

My stream was ever-changing, ever-flowing, flowing into eternity. I hated the few dry spells we had. The stream was then reduced to a trickle, I was no longer filled with a bubbling activity, I could sit on the banks in total seclusion for hours on end - dreaming. I could sail on my Ganges all day long, my boats had sails. Where would they end up?

Many years later I was to read The Story of my Life the autobiography of the deaf and blind American Helen Keller. As a youth I was particularly interested in learning how the world revealed itself for a person with a seemingly unsurmountable handicap. I read that a vital episode was to be a turning-point in Helen Keller's life when she was seven years old. She found out that everything had a name and it was this discovery that was to liberate her so that she could meet the outer world.

The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope and gladness. Everything has a name and each name gives birth to a new thought.1

Further reading certainly gave me food for thought because what was to come was connected to my own experiences. Helen Keller tells of an experience by the side of a well when her teacher, Anne Macy Sullivan, "let something wonderful run over my hand" and at the same time wrote the word WATER in the other hand. On arriving home Helen Keller felt that everything she touched was full of life. When she lay in bed that night she looked forward with excitement to the next day. In later life she was able to manage not only a university education but learnt foreign languages better than most and became a prominent cultural ambassador. All this started with water. She had recognized what things are and that they are.

'That's why, throughout the ages, mankind has seen water as the source of life,' I thought. Water - an element full of movement, a source of development.

I had just one book at home. A well-thumbed copy of Pears' Cyclopædia, entirely and absolutely new edition in one handy volume, over one thousand pages. I turned to WATER ...

Water is the simplest compound of hydrogen and oxygen. It is formed when an electric spark is passed through a mixture of gases, and is a product of combustion of all hydrogen containing compounds e.g. petrol, coal, coal gas and wood. Water is essential to living matter and is the medium which carries food to animals and plants. Salts in hard water may be removed by distillation of the water or by a process known as ion-exchange. Pure water freezes at O degrees C. and boils at 100 degrees C. and is used as a standard of temperature on this scale. Water gas is a mixture mainly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen by blowing steam and oxygen through red-hot coke. Water is one of the very few compounds which freezes from the surface rather than from the bulk of the liquid up.

Pages 671-702 were altogether more interesting, Upwards of Fifty Maps printed in Colours specially prepared for this work by Messrs George Philip & Son, Ltd., London.

London, the name itself gave wings to the imagination. By lamplight I could see from these maps that some streams had magnitude as their greatest characteristics - rivers that drain millions of square miles on their way to the sea. I could learn that their number was quite small, there are fewer than fifty on the whole earth. Then I found a number of short rivers, thin blue lines, which are none less important. They also connected highland to lowland. I found that some of them flowed northwards, I found the Nile and the Rhine. There are those that flow southwards - the Indus, Ganges, Euphrates, La Plata, Mississippi and Volga. I tried to find those flowing eastwards and after quite some effort found Hwang-Ho, Yangste-Kiang, the Amazon, the Orinocco. At first I couldn't find any that ran westwards.

I was now able to play that my river was the Nile. I was on a voyage of discovery.

For the child in love with maps and prints,
The universe is equal to his vast appetite,
Ah, how big the world is by lamplight!
And how small the world is in the eyes of the memory!
Baudelaire 2

Later I thought about scientific abstractions of the kind I was accustomed to at school. Everything wasn't lost, as I was considered to be a dreamer. "Needs to wake up and pull his socks up!" was a comment in my school report.

Heidegger says, "science opens no worlds but examines those that are already opened." Was there indeed a role for an artistic element in education?

On the other hand, Heraclitus said, "You can never go down into the same river twice because there's always new water there." Water is always new but at the same time always the same, the river is always the same river, even though it's always different water that flows past. Change and consistency at the same time.

Water sustains all was the keynote of the work of the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus a phrase included by Goethe in the second act of 'Faust' part 2. What on earth is meant by water sustains all?

In the middle of the Holy Land encompassed by the desert, we find the sources of the River Jordan which spring up out of the bowels of the earth, pouring a wealth of life into the region. We can hardly find a more illustrative picture of the connection between life and water. These waters are a formative power which mould the destiny of the landscape and the peoples who live there. The soils become fertile and the hostile, dry climate becomes milder. Deadly, terrestrial forces are balanced to bring life to the area. The River Jordan finally runs into the Dead Sea. We can realise that water is the most important constituent of life.

At the same time I had experienced as a boy that water was a formless substance that ran through my hands. Sometimes I had to work hard to keep the stream within its bounds. Whilst playing I had met three important forces in life-preservation, sustainment and renewal.

What is living water? First one must ask oneself: What is life? Life expresses itself in quite specific features within every living thing - in growth, in digestion, in excretion, in all processes. Are these attributes to be found in water? Can manifestations of life occur without water? None of these life-giving factors would be possible without it. Where water is lacking there can be no life.

At the same time, water has no life characteristics of its own but is the very basis of life itself. Water embraces everything in spite of the fact that it has no form of its own, no colour or taste, no rhythm of its own. It is, however, the instigator of rhythm elsewhere.

It became obvious to me, without being able to express my thoughts, why water was sacred in all highly developed cultures. Water cannot grow because it is growth itself.

When I travelled in my atlas by lamplight I could see that about 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water and I knew that the earth was a living organism. Every organism has a rhythm, a word derived from the Greek meaning 'to flow'.

Life forms wholes, entities which are greater than the sum of their parts. Life moves rhythmically and is not found in the mechanical measured beat as in the mills attributed to King Cotton which dominated by boyhood landscape. Life is ordered in cycles, metamorphoses where heightenings take place. Water is flowing life.

Some years later, when studying pedagogical Geography it became increasingly more obvious that a Geography curriculum had to be saturated, as it were. A lessening reverence for the divine is reflected in the diminishing of the life forces in our western civilization. Perhaps the only experience of water for urban children today is to see it gushing down the sink or coming out of the shower. Even so our holidays are usually spent near the water, fishing, swimming, yachting, paddling ... 'five minutes from the beach.'

Retreats of this kind enable us to experience renewed life forces and new-found energy; water is an integral part of recreation and the ability to create anew. We feel quickened when we drink from a cool, clear, mountain spring. We are filled with a new desire when we watch the waves breaking on the shore. We are well-acquainted with these regenerative powers. Our senses are enlivened by these etheric forces.

The four elements have, from earliest times, been thought to constitute the world. In geographical thought earth and water have been regarded as being of primary importance. The range of the subject has been the description of how the terrestrial stage has been formed by earth and water forces and how these processes have been formed by human activity. Intervention into the elementary world has gained momentum as time has progressed.

The supreme position of water in this context is due to its central position in all organic life. The geography of human settlement has always been shaped by water, first through the availability of drinking water, later as a means of transport and more lately as a bringer of well-being. Water represents a union with our material and spiritual needs.

The key characteristic of water is flow. It falls from the skies, gathers in ponds and lakes, forms into streams and rivers which flow towards the sea. Water is an element of movement. It also bears a threatening aspect as well as being a source of redemption and re-birth, a giver of life.

Both aspects are represented in the Bible:

And God said: 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so'.3

The Lord is my Shepherd. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters.4

Save me, O God, for the waters came into my soul. I sink into the deep here, where there is no standing. I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.5

Water is the sine qua non of human life.6

Notes

1) Keller, Helen: Autobiography. Doubleday & Co. , New York, 1955.
2) Baudelaire, Charles: from Le voyage
3) The Holy Bible, from Genesis 1:9.
4) ibid. Psalms 23:1-2.
5) ibid. Psalms 69:1-2.
6) Cosgrove, Denis: An elemental division: Water control and engineered landscape. In Water Engineering and Landscape, ed. Cosgrove & Petts, Belhaven Press, London & New York, 1990.