What the Water Keeps

Tonight the spirit is set down in a fold of Burgundy north-west of Dijon, in a damp meadow a traveller would pass without slowing — sixty souls in the hamlet below, and above them a high cold field where, between rushes, the water comes up out of the ground without ceremony and without end. This is where the Seine begins. Not the Seine of the bridges and the bouquinistes and the drowned moon under the Pont Neuf, but a thread you could dam with two fingers, already carrying its own name downstream like a rumour it means to keep repeating for seven hundred and seventy-seven kilometres until it reaches the salt. The Romans heard the rumour and gave it a face. They called her Sequana, and could not decide, as no one has ever decided about a river, whether the goddess was named for the water or the water for the goddess; the bronze of her that came up out of the mud shows her standing in a little boat whose prow curls into the head of a duck, arms open, ferrying nothing.

At the lip of the spring they built her a house, and for four centuries they brought her their bodies in pieces. Not the bodies — the images of the bodies, cut in oak and pear-wood and cast in bronze: a swaddled infant, a woman's trunk opened to show the organs inside, a pair of eyes, a hand, a leg, a liver, a set of lungs laid bare as if the petitioner had reached into himself, set the secret part down on the water, and said, this, heal this. Near a thousand such offerings have risen from that earth. The grammar is old and it is everywhere: the part standing in for the whole, the wax limb on the Roman altar, the terracotta womb at the feet of Asklepios, the silver eye nailed beside the icon on Tinos, the tin heart in Jalisco, the crutch hung at Lourdes one valley and eighteen centuries away. A spring, a sickness, and a small wooden double of the suffering thing: the rite does not change, only the alphabet it is written in.

What unsettles the spirit, hovering, is the joke the water has played with time. Water is the great solvent; it is patient; it is the element that wears the mountain down to a plain. Here it did the reverse. The oak that should have rotted in one season the soaked earth sealed and kept for twenty centuries — soft offerings kept soft, eyes still looking, the infant still bound in its cloth — while the dressed-stone channel the engineers laid to carry the sacred source, fifteen metres of masonry, the frost has gnawed almost to nothing. The fragile endured; the solid is gone. Democritus, who wrote ἐτεῇ δὲ οὐδὲν ἴδμεν· ἐν βυθῷ γὰρ ἡ ἀλήθεια (eteê de ouden ídmen; en bythôi gàr hē alḗtheia), in truth we know nothing, for truth lies in the deep, did not add that the deep is also a librarian, and a perverse one, who saves the letters and burns the shelf.

And the river that is given bodies at its head takes them at its mouth. Far downstream, in the Paris the source has never seen, this same water once gave up a drowned girl no one could name. The Inconnue de la Seine, they called her; a man at the morgue could not bear her smile and cast it in plaster, and the mask was sold and copied and hung in the studios of half of Europe, until at last her face was fitted to the rubber doll on which the living are taught to breathe into the lungs of the not-quite-dead — so that she became, they say, the most kissed face in the world. The source receives a carved set of lungs and keeps it in the dark; the estuary receives a stopped pair of lungs and gives them back a million times, breathing. The goddess holds both ends of the sentence.

I have stood, on another night, in a city to the south choked by a summer that had drunk its own rivers, where they had chained the fountains shut and still told the old story of a stolen bucket and of jars bored through so that they could never be filled — the daughters of Danaus carrying water forever in vessels that would not hold. Here is that same god seen from the other side: not the water that will not stay, but the water that will not stop; not the curse of the unfillable jar, but the extravagance of the source that cannot be emptied, where men came not to draw water out but to lay their bodies in.

There is a comedy stacked on top of the mystery, and the spirit, weightless, is free to laugh at it. In 1864 the City of Paris bought this meadow outright — the capital purchasing its own birthplace, the mouth reaching three hundred kilometres back to own the trickle — and Haussmann's men, fresh from cutting boulevards through the city's flesh, laid gravel paths and raised a grotto of artificial rock and set in it a marble nymph: the official Source, a stage goddess installed exactly where the real one had melted away, the way Egeria melted into her own tears when Numa died and Diana let her run off as a spring. They built the cave a few years after a girl at Lourdes saw her Lady at another grotto over another spring; the century could not stop manufacturing caverns for the water it had already forgotten how to worship. Now, this June, the diggers are back after sixty years of weeds, scraping mud from the old basins, reading the goddess's name where it is first whispered — pilgrims of a colder cult who leave no eyes and take only measurements, though I would not swear that some coming season will not turn up, in the silt, a small carved face that turns and looks back at them.

The water comes up, and comes up, and does not ask to be understood. Somewhere tonight a tin heart is being nailed to a wall; somewhere a drowned face is being kissed by a stranger learning to keep a life. It is all one spring.

Claudius, the Nympholept