The unending change of our experience of life in the world is exactly caught by the observation of Heraclitus, the unrepeatable step into a stream.
Of the ancient elements it is water that exemplifies fluidity. Of course transitions of state – solid, liquid, gas, plasma – are now very familiar, but for most of the history of human beings it is only water, including solutions and suspensions, that has been the familiar fluid. Aristotle is not clear as to his teleological reason why rain falls, but it is not as for theists who may give thanks for this boon because life is so utterly dependent upon water, our own bodies necessarily converting the pure to the contaminated.
Rain falls and rivers flow down: it might seem as though the purpose is to achieve stillness, repose without any striving. Perhaps part of the difficulty with imagining heaven is its perpetual perfection. The rewards of human life include helping others who have need, overcoming a personal limitation, sometimes hearing good news: but none of these can apply. (Alas, I imagine dementia, smiling without particular reason, the preceding smiles quite forgotten.)
The movement of water creates effects such as obvious erosion on land and beautifully curving anatomical features of living structures. The earliest indications that our planet was not created just as we see it but had an extensive history included ancient drainage patterns, multiple layers of sedimentary rocks and their sometimes remarkable subsequent curvature, rocks with intrusive filling of cracks. (Omphalos and Creationist thinking implies this evidence to be a curiously motivated disguise)
Early (18th century) geologists disputed the processes of change, Neptunists emphasising water and Plutonists fire, sedimentation and vulcanism. The biblical estimate (as Usher’s 4004 BC) of the age of our planet had only to seem beyond refute by any human record then available, and scientific estimates have increased from many thousands, to millions and finally billions (about 4,500M) of years.
We are currently only too aware that the present is no stable state, and that anthropogenic climate change (clear evidence long denied) may easily inflict change to match long ago extremes on our now vast human population. Fresh water becomes scarcer as glaciers and rivers redistribute to oceans and atmosphere.
Water droplets, themselves tending to spherical perfection (in zero gravity held thus by surface tension), provide the many shapes of clouds and make visible the fluidity of air. A calm surface of water in bulk is exactly horizontal and when dark beneath provided the first mirror. Disturbance of a water surface creates waves, varying in force from slight ripples to tsunami, that if unobstructed spread in circles all around. Waves have become crucial to scientific understanding but atomic theories, as of Democritus, Newton and Dalton, long dominated as sufficient explanations of mechanics and chemistry. A beam of light is very plausibly a stream of particles and refraction by a prism perhaps merely sorts them into colours: a rainbow is created by raindrops that reflect and refract sunlight back towards us. But diffraction, creating patterns like those of interacting ripples, supported the wave theory of Huygens.
The biblical flood, God’s recognition of failure and condemnation of all except Noah, was followed by the covenant, the rainbow as the divine sign, and dramatically divides time into epochs, separating off the antediluvial period of Adamic patriarchs. Our human ancestors in Africa perhaps noted the yearly seasons by rain rather than our winter-summer and solstices. Sun and Moon create the periodicities of day, month and tides. When societies became more complex the need for timed activity, practical and ritual, developed and the water clock first served purpose.
As self-aware mortal beings we are only too conscious that time is directional. Living organisms are small triumphs of organisation that inevitably fall apart into disorder just as heat disperses and entropy increases. Time was an independent concept along with mass, space and charge and these sufficed until the end of the nineteenth century. Then, rather dreadfully, came relativity. Mass, energy, and speed which is time and space, became interwoven by Einstein (E = mc² where c is the speed of light, so very little mass can become immense energy by an atomic fusion in the sun). Worse still, gravity becomes understood as a curvature of space-time that even bends light (confirmed when Mercury seemed shifted because its light was bent by the sun’s gravity).
We generally expect the natural world around us to remain familiar through our short life spans and that any change will be slow and gradual rather like drawing an even graph line on paper. Neither sudden transitions nor chaotic states seem believable. But imagine the paper folds and curves so that the line can cross itself and the path can jump catastrophically. Or imagine a mathematical formula such that very tiny changes in one variable causes the overall value to leap about chaotically.
Is human life generally an experience that pleases us? If we were too susceptible to despair natural selection would have eliminated us. The religious faiths generally attempt good practical advice for their communities to survive and prosper. Added is the greatest of motivations, assurance (known only by revelation and so irrefutable) of an unending happiness, a heaven. The purpose of faith is to carry us, even through a night of doubt and sorrow, flowing onward.
Without such faith we can merely do our best and hope for some progress. The measures of economics and technology have little connection with natural values and both our physiology and our psychology are easily deceived: current wars, obesity levels and conspiracy theories illustrate our tendency toward disaster, darkly the Freudian drive of Thanatos. The arts seem more hopeful clues to the archetypes of humanity. Movement is inextricable from human life and expression, and dance provides examples.
In places of worship, the processions and the gestures of the priest have the calm steady flow of certainty. Compare the curved arches and domes with decorative art motifs – Celtic to Nouveau – and contrast the cuboid practicality of a factory or the uniformity of a housing estate. Similarly, almost every great ceremony is a work of choreography. Community ‘folk’ dance ranges from a winding common path to intricate individual weavings. Movement is also ‘impressive’ and affects our thought and feeling (from the Sufi to dance therapy) but its importance may be exterior, addressing the spirits that explain and control our world. So rain dances may include mimetic elements to stimulate, even coerce, by magic. Theatre dance becomes a creative art but, conditioned by its setting and institutions, ballet arrived at a fixed vocabulary.
Then, about a century ago, there was a rediscovery of natural fluidity exemplified by the freedom of Isadora Duncan and the dynamic and spatial vision of Laban. Similar influences are clear in painting (Matisse, Kupka) and organic architecture (Wright).
Spiritual proposals such as anthroposophy (Schwenk particularly celebrated the flow forms of water) flourished around the same time and prompted movement study and practice such as the sacred dances of Gurdjieff. In the psychology of Jung the oceans symbolise the boundless unconscious, rivers the directedness of the psyche, and true art escapes the limitation of the personal.
By odd coincidence, about the same time the wave began to triumph over the particle in science. Alpha-particles diffracted, electrons became probabilistic orbitals, the light spectrum was explained as electromagnetic radiation, sine waves, that extended from X-rays to radio waves. Then on from wave equations to arrive at a quantum mechanics that (Feynman) nobody really understands.
Not least problematic, the mathematics of curved space-time may permit time travel, though Hawking trusted that there would be found some principle of temporal conservation. For continuity, it were best if any visitors from the future already know about their trip and its findings: but consider them returning to their future. Most profoundly mysterious is the apartness of God from time (my imagination again fails at creating unsatisfactory mankind, not to mention an entire physical universe, surely a strange experiment).
In religious texts such as the Bible, human aspirations and desires, good and bad, are ascribed both to persons and, more dramatically, to gods. Perhaps the divine end of time that is utterly apocalyptic is an intuition of our unconscious potential for destruction? We stream on.
Edwin Salter lives in King’s Lynn and has worked in diverse fields including dance and psychotherapy, biochemistry and education, with recent writings on language, humanism and climate.