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