Flow and fall like water

In search of the miraculous

A metal mixing bowl I left in the kitchen sink makes an accidental water music that surprises me when I come back in to make lunch. In my absence, the tap has been dripping, and the steel bowl, now half-full of water, resonates like a bell with each drip, boing! boing! boing!

Outside, I can hear the heavy gush of water pressing through the concrete fish pass, churning as the water falls into itself and turns over and over. It has rained a lot over the winter. The loch is full. You can sense the sheer weight of it leaning into the glass-green water that sluices through the gap in the concrete.

I know this stop-start Spring is drawing water silently and invisibly upwards into the fleshy green stalks of daffodils and the swelling buds on the dog rose and sending it up into the air. I know that the sharp Westerly that’s blowing in from the Atlantic is lifting saltwater from the sea and sending it rolling over the fields.

But still, it’s the heaviness of water and its falling that I notice.

Water falls. And in its falling we recognize something familiar, an uneasy truth we know more as sensation than thought, something about the passing of time, how it falls and doesn’t come back. Something about ageing, about the passage of lives.

This is how it feels, anyway. The world flows in time and our lives flow and fall like water.

And yet physics shows us a puzzling world without time, where events are not ordered in past, present and future, where ‘now’ is localised, not global, where time passes more quickly in some locations than in others, where time is not absolute and singular but can only be understood relatively. Things are not how they appear to us. The solidity of the world is like the shining clouds that dissolve into an enveloping mist as we get closer. With a shift of perspective and a change of scale this ground, this chair, this table, my arm resting upon it, all dissolve into a fog of probabilities.

The physicist Carlo Rovelli describes our lived experience of time as relative, an emergent property of the self we gather up out of our memories and sensations. Our sense of time is, he writes:

…the approximation of an approximation of an approximation of a description of the world made from our particular perspective as human beings who are…anchored to the flowing of time.

The falling flow of time isn’t absolute, then. But it is real. It’s how things feel.

I find myself thinking of the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader whose performance art of the 1970’s saw him toppling, falling, dropping, sliding, from pitched roofs, from chairs, from slender tree branches, from his bicycle, into canals, into shrubbery, on to a forest floor among felled trees. Ader’s art is tragicomic, slapstick, with a deadpan humour that recognises the inevitability of our falling. Gravity always wins in the end.

Bas Jan Ader, Fall 2, Amsterdam, 1971

In Fall 2 Ader pedals calmly along an Amsterdam canal before veering into the water and toppling in, the dark water closing over him, bike and all. In another short film ‘Broken Fall (Organic)’ he edges himself along the slender branch of a tree overhanging a ditch. He dangles above the water, as if trying to float in the air, adjusting his grip until it begins to loosen. He can only hold out against the inevitable fall for so long. His legs swing and flail. He looks down. He releases one hand and then the other and drops into the shallow canal below.

Bas Jan Ader, Broken Fall (organic) 1971

Ader’s final fall was into the Atlantic Ocean. He had planned to make the crossing in his tiny 13-foot sailboat as the final part of an art project “In Search of the Miraculous” and set sail in July 1975. On April 18, 1976, his boat was found almost submerged off the coast of Ireland. His body was never recovered. It’s thought that he must have been swept overboard.

Bas Jan Ader, In Search of the Miraculous, July 1975

Ader’s films of falling end abruptly at the point of impact. It’s the teetering and toppling that seem to matter most to him. Hints of something left unsaid overspill from pratfalls that are as comic as Buster Keaton stunts. It’s the dangle before the drop and the brief moment of falling that linger in our mind, not the moment of impact or its aftermath. Ader never made it across the Atlantic. His boat never landed. But this does not mark the failure of a project that was always more about hope and longing than it ever was about arrival or success.

We know that water doesn’t just fall but floats in vapour, rises in sap, creeps up the damp stone walls of our house and moves in complex, multiple ways. We know that time does this too.

And yet here we all are, dangling, teetering, toppling, losing our grip, falling.

Here we all are, in search of the miraculous.

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Until next week!

Sam