The Bathers
Part 6, WATER Photographs
Part 6, WATER Photographs
1. "My grandson, River, wading in a puddle"
WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles
Introduction
This, the sixth part of the WATER Photographs project will focus on the theme of bathing, wading, swimming, and in general human immersion in water. Bathing is one of the most common visual tropes in Western art history. (See this recent article which provides a brief art historical overview.) As a metaphor or symbol, bathing imagery has the potential of relating to religious and even alchemical purification rituals; indeed, bathing--immersion in water--is known to have palpable creative power or energy which can invoke real psychological and spiritual transformation.
In the Christian church, it is said that baptism--which can take the form of a mere sprinkling of holy water on the head, or an entire immersion of the body in water--purifies the soul of the initiate.
In the Islamic, Jewish and Native American traditions, ritual bathing or washing is a practice intended to cleanse (purify) the body of the worshiper in preparation for his or her silent conversation with God in deep, intimate prayer.
The yogic saints teach that the grace of God is being showered upon us constantly, and, in those extraordinary moments when our hearts are fully open, when we can receive this blessing without reservation and absorb its Shakti, or divine energy into our entire being, we will be transformed, purified by that energy.
Wading in water is a form of immersion that can manifest transforming experiences especially in one who "wades deeply," that is to say, one who is immersed no only in water but in deep concentrated states of Mind and Heart. Over the years I have made many photographs of people experiencing water in various ways, and wading is a common theme that runs through my creative process, as you will see in the pictures I have included in this project. Because wading is so often performed in public places this subject has been readily available to me; and, for whatever reason, clearly I am attracted to photographing people who are noticeably introspective when they are wading or bathing in water.
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For example: my photograph above shows my grandson River dressed in a red coat and rubber boots wading in a large puddle in the meadow path just beyond our backyard. As he splashed his way through the puddle and stirred up the mud under the water, the image of an animal-like figure manifested in the water--a kind and playful image, perhaps of a dog or cat. River's reflection in the water falls between the the animal's two eyes and then extends down to nearly touching the animal's nose or mouth. By all appearances, it seems as if the water (and the Imaginal animal) has enjoyed River's playful and yet contemplative presence and has warmly welcomed him with a smile on its face.
This puddle-wading image is, for me, one of those gifts that comes with the grace of my creative process. I did not see the animal in the water. And just now, as I look more carefully at the image, the puddle suggests to me a mother's womb--an intimate, nurturing place full of warm, sustaining, loving water--which has not only lovingly embraced the contemplative child, but his "animal friend" as well.
Bathing, purification, transformation
In a wonderful resource book entitled The Book of Symbols - Reflections on Archetypal Images, its multiple authors write about ritual baths and how they mark major life milestones such as birth, burial and marriage. They also quote from Lyndy Abraham's book, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, who wrote: "In medieval alchemical symbolism . . . bath, submersion, drowning and baptism are synonymous and symbolize the breaking down and cleansing of old outmoded states of being, leading to the birth of the rejuvenated illumined man."
2. Bathing in the Illuminated Universe"
The authors go on to write about swimming, bathing and showering in term of depth psychology--as forms "of immersion in unconscious forces that can dissolve the dreamer's cramped outlook and bring the possibility of change."
The concept of immersion can of course be considered in many other terms as well. Later below I will introduce the idea of immersing one's self in three forms of yogic practices, including the recitation of sacred yogic texts. It is said the sounds and rhythms of ancient Sanskrit words and versus carry tremendous creative energy, or grace, which can transform those who becomes deeply immersed in them.
Bathing and dissolution in deep primal waters
For now, however, we will return to Gaston Bachelard and his poetic study of water and dreams. He writes about immersion, in his "Introduction" to Water and Dreams, An Essay On the Imagination of Matter, the kind of immersion that brings one "to their destiny;" the kind of immersion that takes the form of merging with and disappearing into . . . not only "deep" water, but also "far horizons," "infinity," and "the destiny of water:"
To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon,
to become a part of depth or infinity, such is the destiny of man
that finds its image in the destiny of water.
3. " A Bather (and two buoys) approaching the far horizon" The Lake Series, Collage
To bathe, to wade, to swim or float in flowing water . . . is, according to Bachelard, related not only to the process of purification but also to dissolution and death. He writes: "In his inmost recesses, the human being [who] shares the destiny of flowing water . . . dies every minute; something of his substance is always falling away."
Bachelard explores at great length Shakespeare's character Ophelia in the play Hamlet. In her deep despair Ophelia ("incapable of her own distress") apparently drowns herself in a brook. Her young, innocent body is found--lying still, silent--below the surface of a brook's flowing water. One poet who writes of Ophelia imagines her long hair swaying gently in sympathy with the water's continuous rhythmic movements.
"Primal poetry" says Bachelard, allows us to "taste our inner destiny." True poetry "is a function of awakening." In the realm of the imagination, he says: "favorite images are nothing but projections of a hidden soul."
4. "Persephone, bathing in dark waters, is startled by Hades, King of the underworld"
Persephone : Bathing in dark waters
My daughter Jessica was only one year old when she nearly died in a hospital from a bacterial mutation. That experience awakened in me something akin to a new awareness and respect for life and death. Indeed, the experience unveiled an abundance of archetypal patterns, though I didn't recognize them until after I had completed a photography project in 1976 which involved photographing my children and their friends at play using experimental photographic techniques including multiple-exposure-in-the camera, flash-off-the-camera, and a transformative printing technique known as "local solarization" of the print. These techniques helped me work very intuitively, on impulse, for I could not pre-visualize how these techniques would manifest as finished images. I simply had to trust my creative process, my intuitions and the transforming power of the photographic medium and see what Imaginal fruits they would yield.
When a friend (who was well versed in literature) looked at the completed body of photographs, he saw multiple thematic ideas within the imagery that paralleled in uncanny ways the greek myths associated with Persephone (the daughter of Demeter) who was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld (The Land of Death) to be his Queen.
Apparently, I had unconsciously-intuitively dipped into what C.G. Jung termed the Collective Unconscious as I immersed myself in my children's archetypal world of play and fantasy. See my 2011 digital online version of The Persephone Series for the entire story and a selection of 13 photographs. And be sure to see Part II of the Persephone Series, which contains 40 additional digital Persephone images.
Bathing in the Wisconsin River
About ten years later, in the mid 1980's, I made a photograph of Jessica holding my hand while she was enjoying the flowing waters of the Wisconsin River. This image conjures up memories (for me) of photographs I had made of her for the Persephone Series. And, with my recent reading of Bachelard's book, Water and Dreams, the image also invoked many of the passages in which he wrote about water and death and Ophelia. Indeed there is a famous painting of Ophelia that Bachelard mentioned that I have seen many times in Art History books which the picture of Jessica (below) reminds me of. (click here to see the painting)
5. "Jessica in the flowing waters of the Wisconsin River" Family Life series 1985-88
click here
6. "Bather in the shallow waters of the Wisconsin River" Family Life 1985-88
click here
Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death.
Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death.
Death associated with water is more dream-like
than death associated with earth.
Bachelard, Water and Dreams
Bachelard, Water and Dreams
The soul suffers from a deficiency of material imagination.
By grouping images and dissolving substances, water
helps the imagination in its task of de-objectifying
and assimilating . . . Water becomes a sort of
plastic mediator between life and death.
plastic mediator between life and death.
Bachelard, Water and Dreams
I took both of the photographs above in the Wisconsin River in a beautiful area north of Prairie Du Sac. I was working on a project entitled Family Life (1985-88) at the time, and I made the picture of Jessica during a camping and canoe trip I had taken with our two children, Shaun and Jessica (my wife Gloria was at home working on a graduate research paper.) During our adventure on the Wisconsin River I nearly drowned myself when I banged my head on a tree stump hidden under the water. The experience, though quite bloody and which left scars on my body, was life-transforming. It awakened me to what I believe had been an unconscious death wish that I'd been carrying around deep inside my psyche that undoubtedly related to the death of my father when I was nearly ten years old. (See Stories #5 & #18 in my essay Death, Art, Writing).
The following year, during another visit to the Wisconsin River, I took the above photograph of a man laying in the river's flowing shallow waters, enjoying the warmth of the sun. I cannot help but associate this image with my own near-death experience in the river the year before. Like so many others who have experienced near-death experiences, the immersion in nearly unconscious waters was--for me--like a ritual purification experience which changed my relationship to death--and my relationship to my dead father--in a profoundly deep, important way.
It is for me worth noting here that shortly after I made the above photograph of the man in the water, I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda (in August, 1987) who then became my meditation Master. Without question, that first meeting with Gurumayi was the most auspicious, purifying-transformative event of my life. It now seems to me that my entire life leading up to that meeting with her had been preparation for my experience of her divine energy which in Siddha Yoga is known as Shaktipat. (See my project Photography and Yoga.)
Novalis and his dream journey
In Bachelard book Water and Dreams - An Essay On the Imagination of Matter he mentions multiple times the writings of a young German poet, mystic, philosopher and author whose pen name was Novalis. In one passage Bachelard noted that Novalis once referred to water as a "dampened flame."
Novalis (George Friedrich von Hardenberg) was born in 1772, and he died at the very young age of 28, in 1801. I first learned of Novalis in the early 1980's through the poet Robert Bly, in his important book News of the Universe . Bly cited five aphorisms by Novalis, the first one, which I will quote below, sparked my interest especially in the way that it affirmed for me the ideas (which came via C.G. Jung) about synchronicity, the symbol, and the symbolic photograph. Novalis wrote:
The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.
Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.
When Novalis was 23 or so, he fell deeply in love with with a young woman named Sophie. Bly tells us that Novalis had what Jung would have called "an anima experience." Bly suggests that through that experience "his whole feminine side opened up to him, as well as the richness of dreams, the mystery of transformation, and the power of night." When Sophie died two years later, Novalis wrote Hymns to the Night, "an amazing book," says Bly, in which "all that had been ignored in Europe for centuries is praised: the unconscious, night, sleep, sexuality, and woman."
Bachelard writes at length about a dream Novalis had that involved immersion in water. The dream seems to have been sparked by a story Novalis heard when he was a young man that involved hidden treasure and the mention of a blue flower. Novalis was haunted by his image of the blue flower and perhaps it initiated a long, detailed dream journey, parts of which Bachelard wrote about in his book Water and Dreams - An Essay On the Imagination of Matter.
Novalis describes how his dream travels eventually takes him to a grotto. Inside the grotto the dreamer becomes dazzled by a mysterious light that showers down in sparks into a great marble basin. The light is quivering with every color of the prism. When the dreamer dipped his hand into the basin and then touched his lips to the water he felt a thrill of energy pervade his whole being. An irresistible impulse led him to undress and bathe in the basin.
According to M. J. Hope, who wrote the book Novalis-His Life, Thoughts, and Works, this immersion in the luminous-mystic water invoked in the young dreamer images of "immersion in sunset clouds, indescribable bodily enjoyment, while a rush of quickened thought and feeling called up new and amazing images and pictures which seemed, as he gazed, not fancy, but reality. The very element which surrounded him grew transformed into beauteous fire-maidens . . ."
Bachelard interprets the dream psychologically, like this: "the dreamer's 'uncontrollable desire to bathe' was initiated by the substance, water itself. The water summoned the dreamer materially by virtue of a magic participation."
Bachelard continues: "The dreamer undresses and goes down into the basin. It is only then that images come. They emerge from [the water]; the images are born as if from a seed, from a primitive sensual reality, from a drunkenness that cannot yet be projected."
Then Bachelard quotes Novalis directly:
Then Bachelard quotes Novalis directly:
From all sides unknown images surged upwards, images which blended into one another to become visible beings [which surrounded the dream-bather], so that each wave of the delicious element stuck closely to him like a sweet breast. It seemed that there was dissolved in this water a group of charming maidens who, for an instant, became corporeal again at this contact with the young man.
Bachelard comments: "It is a marvelous passage, manifesting a profoundly materialized imagination, where water, in its volume and mass, not simply in the fairy-world of its reflections, appears like . . . the liquid essence of maiden." And later in the book Bachelard mentions: "the maidens are quickly redissolved in the element, and the dreamer, 'drunk with joy,' continues his journey without experiencing any adventure with the ephemeral maidens." Bachelard Ch. 5 Maternal Water and Feminine Water
7. " A young bather, dreaming in water" from The Persephone Series II
8. "Bather, standing in a lake, her hair wrapped in a white towel " (Gloria, August 1969 )
click here
Everything the heart desires
can be reduced to a water figure.
Paul Claudel, quoted by Gaston Bachelard
Water and Dreams, Ch. 6 Purity and Purification
Water is the profound organic symbol of woman who
can only weep about her pain and whose eyes
are easily "drowned in tears.
click here
can be reduced to a water figure.
Paul Claudel, quoted by Gaston Bachelard
Water and Dreams, Ch. 6 Purity and Purification
Water is the profound organic symbol of woman who
can only weep about her pain and whose eyes
are easily "drowned in tears.
Gaston Bachelard (Ch. 3)
Bachelard writes of lying quietly in a tub, a pool or a boat: "All images are absent, the sky is empty, but the movement is there, living, smooth, rhythmic, in a movement scarcely perceptible, and quite silent. Water carries us. Water rocks us. Water puts us to sleep. Water gives us back our mother." Then he tells us that, following these reveries, other dreams will continue to give us "happiness and a taste for infinity."
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It seemed to me that I was swimming in pure ether
and being engulfed by the universal ocean.
Chapter 5: Maternal Water and Feminine Water
11. "Two Swimmers" Lake Series, Collage
12. "Two Bathers Looking At Each Other" Lake Series, Collage
13. "A young bather holding two dolls" (collage) from the Dream Portrait project
16. "Shaun bathing in the Wisconsin River" Family Life 1985-88
17. "Young Boy wading in water by a fallen tree"
from the "Images of Eden Series" 1983-84
19. "A streaming-down of light, a rain of grace, a down-pour of tears . . .
the transformation of a Bather."
the transformation of a Bather."
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Afterword
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Darshan and Contemplation
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One who knows the truth always bathes in the waters
of the Guru Gita to wash away his worldly
impurities and to become free from
the snares of worldly existence.
Verse 157, Shri Guru Gita of the Guru Gita to wash away his worldly
impurities and to become free from
the snares of worldly existence.
The Guru Gita is a collection of brief Sanskrit verses selected from multiple ancient yogic texts. It is chanted every morning in Siddha Yoga Ashrams, and in the homes of Siddha Yoga students around the world. Gurumayi's teacher, Swami Muktananda, the founder of the Siddha Yoga Path, said that the Guru Gita "is the one indispensable text" and "the King of all Mantras."
Swami Shantananda wrote in his essay The Significance of Shri Guru Gita on the Siddha Yoga Path (posted on the Siddha Yoga Website in January, 2019) that the practice of chanting the Guru Gita, its sacred texts and sounds, "Invokes grace, Quiets the mind, Purifies the intellect and emotions, Increases concentration, Strengthens and frees the breath . . "
When someone asked Swami Muktananda about the Guru Gita he said this:
Swami Shantananda wrote in his essay The Significance of Shri Guru Gita on the Siddha Yoga Path (posted on the Siddha Yoga Website in January, 2019) that the practice of chanting the Guru Gita, its sacred texts and sounds, "Invokes grace, Quiets the mind, Purifies the intellect and emotions, Increases concentration, Strengthens and frees the breath . . "
When someone asked Swami Muktananda about the Guru Gita he said this:
The Guru Gita is the foremost among all the Gitas. It bestows all powers and realizations. . . . If you continue to sing the glories of the Guru you achieve Gurubhava, or identity with the Guru. The Guru Gita says that Gurubhava is the holiest water. We bathe in the holy waters to purify ourselves. For purification, we practice yoga, mediation and prayer. Gurubhava is the best of these all. It completely purifies the inner being at once.
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Darshan
and
Contemplation
Darshan
and
Contemplation
I want to close this project with a brief discussion of a Hindu word Darshan (derived from the Sanskrit) which is often used in Siddha Yoga that has special meaning for me. Darshan more generally means "seeing" and in a more spiritual sense it means experiencing the "Light of God," the divine Presence within all the things of this world and within one's own Self. I especially like the way Swami Shantananda put it once in an essay published on the Siddha Yoga Website. He defined Darshan as "perception that takes place in the Heart, in the space of the innermost Self."
As a student of Siddha Yoga, and as a photographer who is using the medium of photography as a form of yogic practice, my intention is to have the experience of Darshan--the experience of being fully immersed in what I am seeing--directly through my creative process, and through my contemplation of the images I have made--very special images, images that function for me as symbols, images that were made with grace, images radiant and overflowing with grace.
Contemplation is a process of becoming immersed in an image alive with grace. In a meditative-like state of absorption, the contemplator allows the grace of an image (its Shakti, its divine, creative-transforming energy) to merge into the Heart of his or her entire being.
Contemplation is a process of becoming immersed in an image alive with grace. In a meditative-like state of absorption, the contemplator allows the grace of an image (its Shakti, its divine, creative-transforming energy) to merge into the Heart of his or her entire being.
Many of the greatest poet-saints have written of their experiences of Darshan. Here is an excerpt from a much larger poem by an unnamed saint who "sees" the Beloved in the pain of separation, in the darkness of night, in water, in the entire cosmos:
Wherever I look, O my Beloved, I see You.
Wherever my eyes turn, they meet a mirror
In which I see the reflection of my own heart.
. . .
You are in the pain of separation.
You are in water,
You are in the darkness of night,
Your vibration pervades the entire cosmos.
. . .
This life, truly speaking, is only a reflection of You.
Cited in a 1987 talk by Gurumayi published in
Darshan, #48 : "Doorways to the Infinite"
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This project was announced on my blog's Welcome Page
on February 2, 2019
Darshan, #48 : "Doorways to the Infinite"
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This project was announced on my blog's Welcome Page
on February 2, 2019
WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles
Related Project Links:
The Persephone Series, Part II (40 additional images)
Death, Art, Writing (see in particular stories #5, 17 and 18)
Photography and Yoga
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.
