Be warned: this post isn’t really about river systems, hydrology, the Mississippi, the Amazon, or the Seine. Or the Thames or the Danube or the Styx. It’s not even about water. It’s about you, oh you reader you!
When you’re sitting at a riverside café in Paris, you might forget or neglect to think that the Seine is connected to an entire ecosystem of rivers, brooks, sources, canals, and multiple other intertwined geographical features.
Look at this intriguing map showing the Seine basin, spreading over a good chunk of France.
Its source is in a tiny little town conveniently called Source-Seine. Long ago the city of Paris actually bought the land right around the source . . . “Paris owns the source.” There’s a sort of grotto marking it, with the statue of a nymph. Did you know that the goddess of the Seine is called Sequana? The source was considered sacred by the Gauls and then by the Romans. Strictly speaking, water is indeed sacred, because without water we perish!
The image below is from the vicinity of the source. The Seine, the storied and beloved river, is but a puddle. (We Brazilians pronounce it “poodle.”)
The river grows and grows, until it discharges into the Atlantic Ocean near the city of Le Havre. Before it gets there, it receives the waters and the sediments from many other rivers. And each tributary to the Seine has its own trajectory, its own sacred healing source, its own magic and mystery.
Thinking all of this might enhance your enjoyment of those riverside moments, when you’re walking alone or with your wife or with visiting friends. And it doesn’t have to be the Seine or Paris. Any river, every river, all rivers.
Look at this wonderful map of the Mississippi. The name of the river is a French transformation of an Algonquin term which can be traced to the Ojibwa mshi- "big," and ziibi "river."
The thing is gigantic. It’s, like, really huge. It’s, like, continental. How many tributaries? How many towns and cities along it? How many people affected by its course? How many stories told about it? The true size and impact of the river system is incalculable.
Without meaning to insult my American friends who are rightly awed by their river and proud of it, the Amazon is much bigger than the Mississippi. The Amazon has more than 1,100 tributaries, twelve of which are longer than 1,500 kilometers. The Amazon basin cover 2.7 million square miles. Well, never mind about the numbers. The thing is “incalculable and unfathomable,” or as we say in Icelandic, “óútreiknanlegur og órannsakanlegur.”
I warned you, and now I remind you: this blog post isn’t about rivers or about water. I’m laying out a metaphor, an analogy. A human being is like a river system with interconnected sources, brooks, and canals, and with numerous tributaries. Every time you meet someone; every time you think you know someone; every time you want to categorize someone or perhaps judge someone, you might want to remember that the unique person in front of you is an unfathomable combination of more factors than anybody can list or comprehend or control.
The Marmoré, a winding river in the Amazon basin. Satellite image from NASA.
Biology and family dynamics are tributaries of the river-that-is-you. Much like the Seine, you’re born from a source, and to begin with you’re but a poodle. I mean, puddle. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents are all tributaries—including people you’ve never met face-to-face, but who somehow “discharge into you” through indirect means. My father’s father’s father’s father is in me. I’ll say that “he is I, and I am he.”
From Useful Charts.
Schooling is a major tributary. The teachers, the physical setting, the bus you take to get there, the classmates. The desks! All those things are feeding the river-that-is-you, and they’ve continued to feed you decades after you finished your schooling.
My late mother was a fine amateur pianist. My first memory of music is of her playing a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, and me running around the room in excitement. I think I was five, maybe six years old. Here’s my favorite pianist, Arturo Benedetti Michelangelo, playing Scarlatti. I still want to run around the room in excitement.
Decades of music, of listening, of playing, of studying, of bathing in the immense river of music . . . it’s a major tributary in my life, incalculable and unfathomable.
Languages; mathematics; metaphysics; travels; books, the ones I’ve read and the ones I’ve written; the visual arts; Zen and aikido, both of which I approached superficially but unforgettably; the Alexander Technique; Carl Jung and his insights, also Marie-Louise von Franz and her insights following Jung; improvisatory comedy; the worlds of creativity, intuition, and mystery . . . these are some of my tributaries. You, oh dear reader you reader, you necessarily have your own multiple tributaries, which interact in you and through you incalculably—or, as we say in Esperanto, “nekalkuleble.” (Believe it or not, I learned Esperanto when I was 14 years old. It’s one of my tributaries, now almost completely dry but still contributing something to the basin.)
Here's the main idea. The Amazon is each of its 1,100 tributaries—together and inseparably. Therein we swim. When you meet a person, you don’t meet her source or her tributaries or her canal locks. You meet the whole system, the whole landscape. And you meet her at her delta or her estuary—at the place where her totality is emptying into the infinite ocean of the here-now. The whole-person-that-is-you meets the whole-person-that-is-the-other.
This is the schematized river hydrology of Germany.
And this is an x-ray of a person’s incalculable tributaries.
©2020, Pedro de Alcantara