The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  What options of action or inaction present themselves to him?

  To sleep or to wake, to rest or to rise.

  Which does he choose?

  Raising his upper body and placing his open right hand on the seat of a chair, he hoists himself upright, and stands still. Test of steadiness. The walls are tilting. Bursting to pee. Next stop, Kidney Junction. He puts one foot forward, then crosses the kitchen slowly to the sink. He pushes cups and cutlery aside. No harm, piss is sterile. He stands on his tippy toes and urinates. Such relief. The way ordinary things are undervalued. Why has he never read a good account of urination in a book?

  How does he slake his thirst?

  He takes a glass from the draining board, rinses it, fills it from the cold-water tap and drinks it in large glugs to the sound of the running water. Then he splashes water on his face.

  As the water flows from the tap, of what is he reminded?

  The reservoir at Roundwood. That he loves Leopold Bloom more than anyone else and he remembers well his first fall to the thrall.

  Which was?

  When Poldy fed the gulls. No, when Poldy said, ‘Be kind to Athos.’ No, that wasn’t … When he saw Rudy’s ghost in an Eton suit and glass shoes and a little lambkin peeping out of his pocket.

  How does Luke further slake his thirst?

  With glass in hand, he crosses the kitchen, opens the lower-right press of the dresser and pours himself half a glass of Jameson whiskey. The first sip burns his tongue, his palate, then flows down his gullet. He emits a deep luxurious sigh. He steps towards the window, weaving a little. He rubs his chest. A touch of heartburn. The whiskey-blood swilling through his veins, rushing to the organs, the brain, the shrivelling corpuscles. Scorching the nerve endings. The cry of nerves, the worst cries in the world … Something to do with the Israelites, or Doomsday. He lifts his eyes to the clock: 1.25 … a.m. He drags a chair to the window, stands up on it and looks out at the full moon and the spilled down stars and experiences a moment of great clarity, expansion, increase. An inkling of revelation. On the cusp of something, maybe everything. He raises his face, opens his heart. He is high on the brow of the world now, in the universe’s glow. On the moon’s surface, his fellow-face. On the moon’s surface, the marsh of dreams, the sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the river of fecundity.

  What visible light attracts his vision, followed by what mental images?

  The glancing light of the moon on the dark Sullane. Previous moons on previous water. The mind of the river winking into being. The first ever rain on Lougher, the soaking of ground, the splitting of earth at Meenganine, the spring-water rising, the pure, clean gathering stream; water trickling over stones, stream becoming river. The descent from Mullaghareirk; the dark of Duhallow; the silence of bogs; the changing of light; the rounding of bends, the turning of tides, the telluric vigour, the sublunary snow. Solitary wolves at Caoille tuned to the pitch of the earth; the caves at Duneevin; the artefacts at Lefanta; the first human settlements with men sheltering in trees; scavenging dogs and rats, harvesters with sickles and stones. St Carthage sailing upriver, his band of monks silenced by the vision of God’s green beauty on the banks; plundering Vikings sailing upriver, silenced by the abundant possibilities. The monastic settlement, the Episcopal city, the glorious university when Oxford was still a cow-path. The massacre at Molana, the ruins at Rhincrew, the Templemichael Knights, the bloodbaths, the hooded hordes. The great houses on hills, the kitchen-hole drownings, the queuing of the scrofulous. The midstream islands, the mud-holes, the iron-ore mines, the weir at Rathmore. The boats and barges and schooners plying the waters with coal and corn, sand and gravel, salt and stone; the glint of salmon and lamprey and the heads of otters. The snow-white swans, the roosting birds. The river’s longing, the Illud Tempus. The remembrance of water. The cosmological clock ticking time back to zero.

  What thought now strikes him about the river?

  Parataxis. All that is lost. All that is concealed. A sudden verticality in the horizontal. The primeval, medieval, coeval contents of the riverbed: drowned forests, ancient sap in the veins of ancient trees, eons of flora and fauna, incrustations of deep riches, of fossils and sand and silt, bipedal bones, teeth, fur and feathers. Calcious sediment of cold-blooded fish, warm-blooded mammals. Ancestral ooze: human, ovine, bovine, porcine, equine, lupine, corvine, canine, feline. The ancestral stock and sins of the multitudes. The soup of swamps and birdless forests before the age of man, before green-fringed banks and primitive ferns, before rocks and roots burst forth; before the river capture. The myriad of minute organisms below, above and beyond the perceptual register of man. The watery echoes of sonically different raindrops falling on multifarious leaves. Wetlands, mudflats, flyways of migrating birds. The chorus of thrush and blackbird, the warblers high and hidden. The brown river, the bright air, the running sky, the hidden lairs, the habitat of millions. The otters, eels, minks and minnows looking back at wading, half-amphibian man.

  Let him now elucidate the geological phenomenon that is the river capture.

  When a river erodes the land and acquires the flow from another river or drainage system, usually below it, the first river is said to have captured the second in an act of piracy. The waters of the captured river are usurped by the captor and, at this point, the two become one. The causes: erosion, the superimposition of drainage, tectonic earth movements, landslides, the formation of natural dams, the movement of glaciers. The natural course of one river is altered, thwarted; the river departs its own grid of understanding, changes direction, flows on and enters the sea at an entirely different location. An eternal separation from the source ensues, a catastrophic event – the tail severed from the head, the worm cut in two. The bend in the river, the turn of the Sullane at the Inch, is the very point of capture, where, seventy million years ago, one river beheaded the other and the aggressor lost its way and cut down into the sandstone ridges and pirated the lower river and its route. A calamity for both rivers. But is not evolution punctuated by such calamities, such upheavals? Is not the sixth extinction near at hand?

  What point of this explanation now confuses him?

  Is it the low that takes the high or the high that takes the low? He is not sure. Who is the pirate, the aggressor – the lower or the upper river? His head starts to hurt. He had always thought the upper river – at a weakened, eroded point in its riverbed – had dropped down into the lower river or a lower, dry riverbed and, being the stronger one, had taken over the weaker lower flow. But the geological accounts, if he recalls them correctly, say the most common form of capture, called abstraction, occurs when the river that flows at a lower level cuts through the land dividing it from another river flowing at a higher level, causing that higher river to divert and rechannel itself. But how can river water cut through the land above it? He squints into the darkness outside … Once there were two. Now there is one. He holds his head in his hands … Poor river … A broken will, a spectral presence. A savage grace.

  What epiphany does he now have concerning himself?

  That the rug has been pulled. That his life has been thwarted. That his destiny has changed.

  What epiphany does he have concerning water?

  That it forbears, is ever patient, ever suffering, ever enduring. Long forgotten by the gods, ever in the service of man. Holy, seminal, giver and sustainer of life, sanitator, hydrator, germinator of life, quencher of thirsts and fires, cleanser of bodies and souls, gladdener of hearts, delighter of eyes. Docile accepter of Fate. Where once it carried memories from the realm of the dead to bubble up in poets, the pure hue of blue now carries human waste to the sewers and moderates nuclear reactors. That, since time immemorial, its collective experiences and memories in all its states (solid, liquid, gas and those derivative thereof), during all its cycles and circumambient journeys, in all causative occasions of joy, beauty, suffering (the glint of salmon in its rapids, the tranquil spring well, the swimmer’s graceful stroke, the taking of lif
e), and its presence at all natural, unnatural, scientific and unscientific actions, reactions and occurrences are all recorded and imprinted in its DNA. Bruised, battered, debased, diverted off course, forced through taps and pumps and pipes and turbines, catapulted through locks and dams and reservoirs and hydraulic colliders; endlessly recycled; swarmed with pathogens, sickened with leachate, bleachate, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, with PCBs and TCEs; choked with micro-beads, fossil fuels, trash-entrapped gyres; subjected to sedimentation, acidification, chlorination, eutrophication, humiliation, anoxia, hypoxia, electrolysis; physically degraded, chemically altered, molecularly distorted, atomically perverted, metaphysically defiled. Used, abused, electrocuted … poor exhausted water.

  What compels him to leave the house?

  The sudden conviction that he can perceive the mind of the river.

  How does he go?

  In the moonlight he runs. On the avenue he stumbles, falls, rises. On the road he walks towards the bridge of souls.

  With what thought is he suddenly uplifted?

  That he is walking along the riverbank into eternity.

  How does he perceive the river?

  As a seer, an augur of all that was and is to come.

  How does he perceive the mind of the river?

  Divided, exiled from itself, each half eternally mourning the loss of the other, looking south – nostalgic for the old route, for the whorls of old currents and stone pillows, the original neural way. Longing for reunion. Longing to be known. Longing to be understood.

  Perched on the bridge, what does he see?

  On the far bank, under a canopy of trees, two Charolais bulls hitched to a bronze plough. Above the trees, the church, the steeple. On the water, a trail of God’s saliva, the glint of little fishes, the lustre of reeds and grasses. The tremolo of wind in the trees. The blood-wounds of the town and its hinterlands trickling into the river. People crowding to the water’s edge. The river parting. The drenched world made visible: reeds and rushes, old boats and bicycles marinating in mud; bottles and cans and footballs and dolls and chicken bones and old mattresses and Madge Corcoran’s yellow Escort and Milo Finnegan’s VW Caddy. Madge and her baby, serene in the dark. Perished animals and the drownded dead, long accustomed to the depths now. All washed in the blood of the river. Tom Donoghue the county councillor in his suit and tie, Bina Rabbitte in her nurse’s uniform; Conor Mahon with his 21st birthday badge still pinned to his shirt; Jimbo McInerney still weeping for his horse, and Paudge Fleming and Bridget Flynn and Paddy Boyle and Ulick Veale and Ulick Vesey among the swarming souls. And on the surface, oblivious to it all, anglers angling and families boating and jet-skiers skiing and skinny-legged herons at the Inch and tractors barrelling over the bridge into town and trucks nosing up Main Street and Dilly Madden on the footpath cursing them all and Bun Heapy in from Botany for a barrel of gas and Paddy the Vet above with Paddy the Gas O’Donnell pulling a calf as their sons walk hand in hand into the river at Drumona and Paddy the Gas asking Paddy the Vet, Is it the Euphrates, Paddy, that’s the fourth river of Paradise?

  What spectacle, in need of his contemplatio, consideratio and designatio, appears in the sky above the Inch?

  A polygonal shape, a celestial templum, a sacred imago hovering above the water. Attended by a flight of birds, a trail of clouds, an eagle with the liver of a sacrificed goat in its beak. At the exact point of the river capture the heavenly templum aligns its axes with the river’s stars, lowers itself over the water, fixes itself to the river mundus, and is inaugurated. Ego te inauguro.

  In this full and absolute moment what is revealed to him?

  His life was justified.

  As he enters the river, what does he foresee?

  His soul in repose in an aqueous kingdom. The river in repose. Man and nature in perfect harmony. Time and space in perfect symmetry. The world a work of art.

  YESTERDAY I SAW Andy Mullins coming out of the post office after collecting his dole, then hurrying along Main Street to the Tavern Bar. As he passed SuperValu the glass doors slid open. I wanted to burst out laughing. What if mankind has been on the wrong track for thousands of years? What if Aristotle and Plato took a wrong turn in assuming that everything that happens has a purpose, instead of accepting the free movement of atoms in space? What if the theosophists were right and the purpose of reincarnation is to test and refine the soul until it emerges as pure spirit?

  Last week I took Lily to the vet to be spayed. She had never been in a pet carrier, so I covered it with a blanket to keep her calm. That’s how they brought the Duke’s horses out of the fire years ago. If they can’t see, they won’t panic. Rachel, the vet, is a chirpy woman of about forty. She was wearing a blood-stained white coat, tight across her middle. Later that afternoon, she phoned to tell me that when she opened the carrier Lily leapt past her and bolted out the back door. She’s probably nearby, she said. If you come before five, there’s a good chance she’ll come out of hiding.

  We now know that the structural memory of water persists on a picosecond timescale. Is it not possible that the human measurement of time and the human experience of the time-space continuum differs from water’s measurement of time and water’s experience of the time-space continuum, and that a picosecond in human time equates to a greater measure in water time? Or that water time advances not just in a forward-future motion but backwards and outwards, too, in a radiating nexus of pan-aqueous interactions and ripples that follow their own bliss? Is it not possible that we are wildly underestimating the ways in which water experiences its life?

  Some mornings when I’m getting dressed or when I turn my head suddenly towards the window, I get a whiff of the river off myself. It is a woody, mushroomy smell that I can almost taste and I bury my nose in my upper arm or in the angle of my elbow and sniff myself.

  I was euphoric that night, as if the thing I had always been waiting for had finally arrived, as if I was about to be married. The moon’s glow was on everything. I pushed off and dropped vertically into the water. In that moment I could see myself gliding gracefully to the bottom, as if I was looking down from above. I foresaw it all: a beautiful descent, eyes slowly opening and closing, arms raised and hands joined as if in prayer, the muted sounds and slow-motion swoon of an underwater dream. Then, my serene repose in a hole in the riverbed.

  But that is not what happened. As soon as I broke the skin of the river, a vicious wave pummelled me with fragments of foam and debris. I lurched and banked and from my brain and then my stomach came the irresistible urge for violence. I banked again and turned and thrashed the foaming waves and dived under into a strange, viscous world lit up by a green watery light. I could feel vague presences and a low humming vibration, as if music was reaching me from a different sphere.

  And then came a moment of sublime clarity. Lured by the light and the quivering frequency of the water I felt my soul approaching the soul of the river, entering synchrony with the tremulous water, and, lucid, tranquil and in thrall to the mysterious conjunction and the radiance of water, I let my soul commingle and become the river’s dream.

  What I remember next was the sound of water lapping and faint cries echoing through it. I was stretched out on the riverbank, my face on wet reeds, my pulse beating in my ears. I raised my head and, with half-open eyes, I saw the dawn. In the distance I heard Lily crying. I lifted my gaze to the green wet world of the Inch, with the river running and willows dipping and the earth’s breath around me. My head fell again and my eyes closed. Again Lily’s cries broke through, insistent. I hauled myself to my knees, crawled over soft mounds of moss. Dazed, damp, shivering, I stood on the riverbank and opened my mouth and inhaled the cold air of the atmosphere. I could no longer doubt I was alive. I stumbled onto the road and walked towards Lily’s cries. At the bottom of the avenue she came bounding towards me and leapt into my arms.

  I walked on. The sun was rising in the east. I could feel Lily’s heartbeat, very close to the surface. I stopp
ed in the middle of the road and looked up at Ellen’s house on the hill. I waited for ten or twenty – or maybe more – seconds. Then she appeared at the window and raised her hand and waved. I waved back and something passed between us. I walked back the way I had come and when I turned in the avenue a small cloud of vapour appeared before me and with it came the thought that the signature of all things is inscribed in water.

  I sat in the vet’s back yard that night Lily went missing. In the darkness the bushes and trees took on ominous shapes. I could sense Lily’s presence. I was barely breathing, alert to every sound, willing her back. I thought I saw her on the wall a few times, her silhouette. A rustle in the bushes then and a flock of crows rose out of the trees. I thought of Ezra Pound imprisoned in his wire cage near Pisa, counting birds on distant wires to stay sane. I thought of the experiment on swallows to determine the energy costs of birds’ flight and how, before releasing the birds seventy kilometres from home, the scientists passed a thread through their nostrils and tied their beaks shut.

  By midnight I could feel Lily’s presence waning. I could feel myself moving towards a more impersonal, non-physical view of the world. I could sense the universe itself becoming conscious.

  Last night I dreamt I was walking along a Paris street with Joyce. He was animated in his talk, spritely in his walk. You are my metaphysical magnet, he said. Then he explained his books to me. Ulysses is Hell, he said, Hell being the state of the soul fixated upon earthly experiences. Finnegans Wake is Purgatory – a halfway house before people became attached to themselves. And my next book, he said, will be Paradise – a pure, simple heaven, my final achievement.

  Today I made a mental list of the invisible yet enduring rivers of the underworld. I thought of my own riparian existence. I thought: this is my only available body. I thought of the birds in flight with their beaks tied, and the little bull calves in New Zealand, and Lily, alone out there somewhere. I feel such liquid love in my arms for her now. I feel such pity for water now. I’d like to talk to Poldy now.