chaper 3. BEGINNING
chaper 3. BEGINNING
on cloud-number-nine and the many sources of the Vecht river
The text of this post has been translated from Dutch to English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon
THE IMAGE of two trigrams: Water above, Thunder below. Water evaporates and rises. The atmosphere becomes drenched with moisture. Small cauliflower clouds drift together, expand and thrust upward. High in the atmosphere, ice forms - the cloud is ready for storms, rain, lightning and thunder. Here is the king among clouds - cumulonimbus - Cloud Number Nine.
When the thunder discharges and lightning and thunder wake up the dormant tepid, the very beginning of life feels near. American chemist and biologist Stanley Miller envisioned it this way: a young earth, a primordial soup, a host of chemical ingredients, moisture - and then lightning! The beginning of life.
Thunder and lightning as catalysts in the emergence of life. Richard Wilhelm called this chapter Difficulty at the Beginning. Other I Ching translations use such diverse titles as Sprouting and Birth-throe. Birth and sprouting meet numerous resistances, but their power is irresistible. For the name of this chapter, I follow Alfred Huang's translation: Beginning.
The discharge of the thunderstorm marks a new fresh beginning. At the same time, the thunderstorm itself is the final stage of a long period of building tension. Every beginning is also an end - the origin of a germinating seed is found in a fruit. Which began as a flower - which in turn started as a bud - which grew from plant reserves accumulated in the previous year.
When did the Netherlands begin? And on what day World War I began? What was the beginning of a successful painting or book? A year begins on January 1, but a more logical beginning would be the solstice around the end of December. Or even better, the first warm day of spring in April? The Chinese new year - Chun Jie, the spring festival - falls around early February, when the days are at their coldest. The vital force of something is found in its opposite. Authentic strength lies in withdrawal - and that of unity in multiplicity.
The beginning of a human being - the beginning of you or me - is birth. But wouldn't it be better to link your birthday to your conception, nine months before? However, the real beginning of you as a human being was an orgasm - or was it that love letter from one of your parents to the other. Or does it go back to the egg, which was already present in your mother at birth. Life has no beginning, only transition, only change, and moves through opposition.
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
Woody Allen
In the 19th century, a fanatical debate raged over the origins of the Nile. The mighty river had been the umbilical chord of ancient Egyptian culture and had continued to define the lives of millions ever since. During the heyday of the British empire, men like John Hanning Speke, Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley travelled the interior of Africa and eventually labelled Lake Victoria as the starting point of the Nile. Their explorations were closely followed by the masses in their homeland and earned them hero status. A quest for an origin apparently resonates with many. Needless to mention, these Indiana Jones’ avant-la-letter discovered an unknown tract of land where people had lived since the earliest times.
The notion that the river owes its life to one source completely distorts natural reality. The source farthest from the delta determines the maximum length of the river, but the river is fed from numerous places. The true source of the Nile is the totality of its basin. In the illustration below, you see four of the major African rivers - the Nile on the upper right. It is drawn in as a thin meandering line between origin and destination - between Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean Sea.
The subsequent illustration does more justice to reality. All the dark red area is the true source of the Nile.
... But suddenly, when I tell him that I have been to the Alps to see the source of the Rhine, he looks at me with eyes in which wrath has flared. 'What do you mean the source of the Rhine in the Alps?" he asks. 'What kind of nineteenth-century nonsense is that'.
... 'If you follow the Rhine up the Alps until you find a stream in the snow, you still don't understand that river, you know. It is quite arbitrary that you chose to be there and not upstream at the Moselle, the Neckar, the Lahn, the Main. It is a nineteenth-century obsession that you have not unlocked a river until you have reached its farthest point. '
... Because a river is also the water you don't see,' he says and sits back down. 'It is the groundwater between its beds, the water along its lower course. A river does not stop at its banks.' ...
fragment of a discussion between Mathijs Deen and prof Kim Cohen. De Grenzeloze Rivier - Mathijs Deen
Several stories circulate about the source of the Overijsselse Vecht in the German Münsterland region, where, incidentally, the river is called Vechte. One story tells of the moat of a castle and another of the source under the altar of a church as the starting point of the river. The spring near a church or a castle - who wouldn't want to see a river of noble or religious origin flowing through their land?
But the reality is as poetic as it is sobering. This river, too, is fed from all over the basin. The sources of the water in its bed are numerous: a cowshed, the discharge of a factory, ancient groundwater, the cistern of a toilet, a car wash, a dishwashing sink, and yet again that firm thunderstorm! It is clear: bed and basin are two different things - the first visible and drawable, the other hidden present throughout the landscape.
Almost everyone knows who his or her parents are - with them lies everyone's closest origin. The four grandparents will probably also be known - they constitute four sources of a person's life. Going further back in time, we know less and less about who our ancestors were. Their names and stories have often not been passed down the generations and paper lore from records and church have been lost.
Genealogical tracing provides relief. With effort - and with a dose of luck - you rediscover one long generational line. You are gilded because you turn out to be descended from a master builder, a writer, a minister or a bailiff. Someone who was higher up on the social ladder and about whom more than the average person ended up in archives. You then landed in a life ten generations back - around 1700. Your source - and that of your immediate family - then seems familiar.
Well, to be honest, ten generations back you had about 500 ancestors. Had, but you don’t know who there were. Of the vast majority, name and fortunes pale - with the exception of the one family line you could trace back - that to the merchant or countess, who lived around 1700. Among the 500+ ancestors, however, were vagrants, crofters, a prostitute, one or more mercenaries, weavers, porters and misfits. Because of their low social status and lack of written testimony of their lives, their part in family history seems insignificant in comparison to the one ancestor of nobility or financial prosperity. But of course that is far from the truth - nineteenth century nonsense! All these unknown fore-fathers and fore-mothers form the basin of your life. With them all lies your beginning.
