FOUR

The use of water as a metaphor for time may seem prosaic - but therewith the ancient flows into the now, from the fragments of Heraclitus through to the writings of Herman Hesse (Siddhartha) and on into the films of Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko and The Box) and consider not only time but time travel - movement, and life.  The famous 'river paradox' of Heraclitus has several formulations, so the original may be lost, if indeed there was ever only one. As logical propositions, each formulation is semantically distinct but still, perhaps, conveys the same truth:

"On those who step twice into the same rivers ever different waters are flowing". 

"'It is impossible to step twice into the same river', as Heraclitus says...'It scatters and regathers, comes together and dissolves, approaches and departs'". 

"We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not". "Heraclitus says somewhere that everything gives way and nothing is stable, and in likening things to the flowing of a river he says that one cannot step twice into the same river".  [1]

Water symbolizes time, flux, constant change: in one formulation against the timeless self that can step only once into the same river; in another against a transcendent, dialethetical self that both can and can not, is and is not. Time is the ultimate mystery - but is also immediately accessible, at once as ubiquitous as water and as ineffable as god. [2]

In Donnie Darko, Frank (the black rabbit, mirroring Lewis Carrol's white rabbit) guides the protagonist out of the rabbit hole of the "tangent universe" and back into the "primary universe", what we might call reality - and on to his own death, "the end of the world".

In The Box, the hero is given a choice between three gateways and told, "you may choose only one.  Be careful which gateway you choose, for there is only one path to salvation".  The gateways appear as pillars of water, and when he chooses, he is transported to, "a place...neither here nor there but somewhere in between...[where] despair is no longer the governor of the human heart".  Donnie Darko's last words, spoken in voice over so that we make no mistake as to their intended audience, are, "I hope that when the world comes to an end, we can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to".  Not a statement that would seem entirely out of place in the fragments of Heraclitus.

More (or less) earthly considerations arise from the setting of The Box around the 1976 Viking missions, [3] from which were first sighted the infamous "face on Mars", a common reference point for all things conspiratorial and paranormal.  Despite comprehensive, reasonable explanations for this phenomenon, it continues to inspire innumerable imaginative leaps, which is what concerns us more than the scientific truth.  The modern mythology of Cydonia is what gives us the supposed Mars-Egypt connection, in which pyramids on this, blue planet are somehow connected with pyramids on the red planet for reasons, of course, unknown. [4]  Scientific work on Mars today involves the search for water below the surface, since the presence of water may indicate the presence of life, even if only in the distant past (which naturally fuels the fire of irrationalism still further).  Without water, in fact, life as we know it (probably) cannot exist.

In Hesse's Siddhartha, itself a cyclical novel that begins and ends at the river bank, the eponymous seeker has a moment of awakening (both bodily and spiritual) by the river:

"His sleep was deep and dreamless; he had not slept like that for a long time. When he awakened after many hours, it seemed to him as if ten years had passed. He heard the soft rippling of the water; he did not know where he was nor what had brought him there. He looked up and was surprised to see the traces of the sky above him. He remembered where he was and how he came to be there. He felt a desire to remain there for a long time. The past now seemed to him to be covered by a veil, extremely remote, very unimportant. He only knew that his previous life (at the first moment of his return to consciousness his previous life seemed to him like a remote incarnation, like an earlier birth of his present Self) was finished, that it was so full of nausea and wretchedness that he had wanted to destroy it, but that he had come to himself by a river, under a coconut tree, with the holy word Om on his lips. Then he had fallen asleep, and on awakening he looked at the world like a new man. Softly he said the word Om to himself, over which he had fallen asleep, and it seemed to him as if his whole sleep had been a long deep pronouncing of Om, thinking of Om, an immersion and penetration into Om, in the the nameless, into the Divine".

Again, sleep is the gateway to enlightenment; and with the archetypal imagery of water as conduit, the symbol and the tangible presence of the life-force, a metaphorical landscape begins to emerge.  ("Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.  It is not dying...")  Enlightenment, whatever that may be, seems to require a mastery of time, simultaneous with submission to its unstoppable flow - time travel, stepping and not stepping in to, and out of, the same river of being and not-being.

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