There is no need for symbols.
But what are we to do, stuck far from the rushing currents in the relentless tide of information? So let’s focus on symbols for a moment. They carry more meaning than “the latest information”. The motif of death in water runs from Psalms 69 to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss”. (Part IV. Death by Water)
The catastrophic imagination needs neither facts, nor statistics. It is the projection of a soaked, flooded soul. May no facts this time try to throw their two cents to the sad tradition of aquatic motifs unnecessarily.
Psalm 69 speaks of despair, of misery, of grief.
“God, God, save me! I’m in over my head.
Quicksand under me, swamp water over me; I’m going down for the third time (…)”
(Psalms 69, 1-2; Bible, The Message).
What brings destruction, the substance that takes one’s breath away, is water, ordinary water, in a vast, incomprehensible excess. From the tradition of ancient Aristotelianism it was known that the best kind of soul was a dry soul. Ancient culture was saturated with the substantial presence of the elements hostile to man, the fear of fire, of water, of humid air, of the treacherous earth that gave way underfoot. We have become unaccustomed to such images. Two hundred years of technical culture have banished the elements to the fringes of our fears. It has almost liberated us, at least in the cities, from the cycles of nature. Sometimes the elements return.
