A Stream of Consciousness “On Water”

“MEANWHILE THE CONCUSSION OF THE WAVES BREAKING FELL WITH MUFFLED THUD, LIKE LOGS FALLING, ON THE SHORE.” — VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE WAVES (1931)

Water soothed Virginia, who carried it top of mind in the middling part of her hair, an open rippling. She disappeared under that ripple in the River Ouse, her constant coach. David Hockney painted pool water so solid that even a splash stands strong. Water craves the bodies it displaces, Archimedes’ vision. Fitzgerald sunk his Gatsby into the blue of water coolers, those gurgling confessors of executive realness. Depress the blue tab like a diving board. A tsunami scatters people and things unaccounted, but the Ganges archives the dead in currents of ochre and ash.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Argonaut, 2017. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and Maureen Paley, London.

You can't host a talk show without watering the ferns. Everyone drinks the universal media to chill the reactors of progress. Water is a watershed of prodigal return, especially when bottled. Where that came from, there’s always more. Welcome back to the new me, 100% natural purity. Some people make promises that sound like bottled water. They can return what you, imperfect and unsuspecting, know how to waste. 16.9 ounces’ volume collects the drip of trans-global flow in the size of a fist. Punch restart. In this age of the advent of PH balance, water wants only the best for you. Invariably, the life coach, healer, instructor is the color of water, because that's what it takes to feel like spandex, to align your aura with your calorie intake.

How far do you reach for water? We have counted the miles that women and children walk fetching, bone-crushed under the weight of it. Minus the anti-corrosion agent, the having burns no less than the getting, even when it runs from a designer faucet. The environment is just an idea to which we add a fluoride smile. Design thinking discovers water all over again. Nonprofit solutions rephrase the jerrican of liquid hopes from blackwater to blue. Virginia carried it all along her incremental martyrdom.

“THE WAVES DRUMMED ON THE SHORE, LIKE TURBANED WARRIORS, LIKE TURBANED MEN WITH POISONED ASSEGAIS WHO, WHIRLING THEIR ARMS ON HIGH, ADVANCE UPON THE FEEDING FLOCKS, THE WHITE SHEEP.” (THE WAVES)

Going blonde is sheepishness, punched up for the sake of a headshot. A shampoo commercial illustrates what we do for a fleece of credibility, soaking the whiplash of simple pleasure under a showerhead — fresh! Around gushing water our natty innocence sparkles. While the lion abides, we marvel at the river like a good narcissist. Water covered the face of the deep and God saw the waters on the first day of Genesis. Naturally, I’ve read that glycerin should suck moisture out of the air and into your skin. Ceramides, then, trap the goodness and that's how a good moisturizer works.

“AS WE FEEL ... WE EVAPORATE ... WE BREATHE AWAY WHAT IS OURS LIKE STEAM FROM A HOT DISH.” — RAINER MARIA RILKE, DUINO ELEGIES (1923)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Nightswimmer, 1999. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and Maureen Paley, London.

At Trieste, above the sea, Rilke saw angels, ladling the beauty that streamed away from them over their own faces, those spoiled darlings. The hands cup to meet this depleting resource, catchments of airborne beauty, everything left from a primordial glacier.

“AND THERE’S NO HARM IF SOME OF IT IS LOST, AND OF THE SPEECH THE LIVING SOUND DIES, AWAY.” — FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, PATMOS (1803)

Text by Pierre Alexandre De Looz.

Taken from PIN–UP No. 22, Spring Summer 2017.