Text by Brian Coman, photographs by Harry Oldmeadow
Of all the forms we encounter in the natural world, rivers and small streams are surely amongst the most attractive. It is, I think, because they present to us as active and not passive forms. We admire flowers and trees and mountain ranges, but the flowing stream has an added dimension. It presents as active to both sight and sound. And, if one has a good nose, there is even a certain smell, impossible to describe.
There is, not all that far from where I live, a small park with lush lawns, a picnic area and spreading, shady trees. Some distance away is a small permanent stream, gurgling over its bars. Time and again, I have watched small children, when they arrive at the picnic ground, run immediately to the little stream and there proceed to float their gum-leaf boats or to throw small pebbles into the little pools at the end of the runs. They ignore the playground, the spreading tree limbs with their invitation to climb, and even the proffered picnic fare. They take delight in running water. We are born with this attraction, and it never leaves us. I can draw on a great cloud of witnesses who will attest to this – writers, poets and composers, in particular. Have you read Aldo Leopold’s The Elder Fork? Have you pondered Wordsworth gazing out over the river Wye above Tintern Abbey? Have you listened to Smetana’s Die Moldau?
Let us, from this particular scene I have painted above, draw one of our first Aristotelian principles. In their upper reaches rivers and small streams have a particular telos or end. They will always form runs and pools, this being the proper end of any stream in its upper reaches. I will admit to exceptions where the gradient is very steep, but even there they at least strive to form pools.
Now the particular character of those runs and pools will differ, dependent very largely on two factors, the size and speed of the flow and the nature of the surface over which the water runs. The type species, so to speak, is a stream running over a sandy or gravelly bed, but in rocky terrain the runs and pools can sometimes take on an extraordinary form. Often, the pool is a deep and circular pothole, formed by the constant circular movement of a small rock trapped in an original crevice.
But once it leaves the mountains and hills, and rolls out upon the plains, this youthful enthusiasm of the stream gives way to a more sedate – shall we say middle-aged – nature. The stream bed widens, the waters glide in a serene motion and most of the noisy chatter of water over rocks is gone. But there is still work to be done. Observe how at each bend, the outer margin is ceaselessly carved away, whilst the inner margin deposits its burden of sediment. Is this not providential? By this process are the vast alluvial plains of great rivers formed, and it is these same rich alluvial soils which provide us with much of our food. This is the telos of a river in its middle course.
Rivers mirror the human condition in this respect – they are active, noisy and boisterous in youth, sedate in middle age and slow and ponderous on their final course to the sea. And do they not, like us, have some fears about joining The One at the end of their course? They meander about, they become murky and they show little appetite to join that which is their Final End. And the sea, for its part, senses this doubt, this hesitation, and puts between itself and the river a great bar of sand. And this occluded estuary is then a sort of Purgatory from which the river can only escape by the providential flood – the Grace of heavy rain in the mountains far away.
So far, we have dealt mainly with final causes of a river. But what about formal and efficient causes? Here, the ancient Greeks were well ahead of us (and Aristotle for that matter). We have for instance, the Naiads. The Greek name Ναιδες translates as ‘flowing ones’ and they were, so we are told, the ‘spirits’ of rivers and springs. But that term is far too nebulous because, in these benighted times of ours, we are all too ready to make an immediate association with fairies, elves and the like. The spirit world has been ‘Disneyfied’. But the Naiads, I feel sure, are actually formal and perhaps efficient causes in the Aristotelian schema. I have made this claim in relation to the Nereids HERE and now I propose to do the same for the Naiads.
I note, for instance, that the Mirriam Webster Dictionary defines Naiad as: “any of the nymphs in classical mythology living in and giving life to lakes, rivers, springs, and fountain”. The term ‘giving life to’ is important. Us Aristotelians would rather say ‘giving form to’. And the Greeks themselves have given us plenty of hints here. They had a distinct classification schema for the Naiads. One class inhabited springs, another the upper reaches of a river and yet another the lower reaches. To be sure, they performed other functions as well. The most common ‘auxiliary’ function, so to speak, was in providing healing to those humans who partook of their water.
Now I have already made reference above to an earlier post of mine where I make similar claims of Nereids (sea nymphs) and refer to certain lines in Eliot’s Prufrock. Let me return to Eliot again now, and this time refer to what is arguably his greatest poem (and, perhaps, the greatest poem of the 20thC) – The Waste Land. Consider these opening lines of ‘The Fire Sermon’:
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
The river (Thames) nymphs are mentioned twice. In their first appearance, I believe Eliot is associating them with those of a much earlier Thames – that depicted for us by Edmund Spenser in Prothalamion. The second stanza begins:
There, in a meadow, by the river’s side,
A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy,
All lovely daughters of the flood thereby,
With goodly greenish locks, all loose untied,
As each had been a bride;
Now each of the stanzas ends with this same line: ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song’. Eliot borrows this from Spenser to marvellous effect. The first group of nymphs in Eliot’s account we might think of as those which gave the river its lovely ‘form’ in the days of Edmund Spencer (16th C). The second group of nymphs (line 7 in the stanza above) are very different. The new ‘form’ of the river is, indeed, a waste land – ‘empty bottles, sandwich papers, /Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/ Or other testimony of summer nights.’ The ‘modern’ nymphs have as their friends here the ‘loitering heirs of City directors’. And just to drive the point home, Eliot uses Andrew Marvel (To His Coy Mistress) to again make his point. In Marvel’s poem (17th C) we have the lines:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Marvel uses the negative idea of ‘vast eternity’ to entice his girlfriend into what they called back then ‘amorous dalliance’ – time was running out!. Eliot uses ‘vast eternity’ (by association) to deliver the proper note of despair and utter despondency associated with the Waste Land where ‘The Idea of the Good’ has been utterly abandoned. Even the new and ugly nymphs with their ’empty bottles, sandwich papers, … cigarette ends’ have gone, leaving only the utter vacancy and formlessness of the Waste Land.
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