River run 3

MANILA, Philippines - In a lifetime of delinquency-caused benightedness in science and mathematics, the equations and formula that nonetheless stuck with a planet’s gravitational strength on my mind’s tabula rasa are 1+1=2; e=mc2; and H2O – albeit I can’t say I have understood the latter two as clearly as I can make out the metafiction that Julio Cortazar plays in his story, Continuity of Parks.

Forget the fantastic, literally earth-shaking second. Take just the third, the chemical formula for water. Water molecule is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. You grasp what that means in your mind’s eye? No way, since the thing is microscopic in dimension.

Two atoms of hydrogen combining with one atom of oxygen equals one molecule of water. A glass of water means you are a billionaire. Nay, much, much more – a drop of water means you are a septillionaire! Too bad it’s in terms of molecules, not dollars or even pesos or even centavos. If it were, you’d be so rich you can make any girl’s wish come true – along with yours, of course.

 Actually the thing can be literal. A glass of water making one forget all the riches in the world is the same exact story in essence as that of one of Shakespeare’s kings who, fighting on foot because he has lost his steed and therefore dead any minute, shouted: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

The first time I experienced great thirst was in grade school, after joining a town parade in which, with the other kids, I walked at least a kilometer, perhaps two, under the sun. To this day I remember my amazement at the size of my thirst as, upon getting home, I quaffed glass after glass of water.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French pilot who wrote The Little Prince, wrote a shorter piece that made a deeper impression on me, Prisoner of the Sand, really nonfiction, in fact the autobiographical basis, out of which he wove the magic fiction that is The Little Prince. Prisoner is only a chapter in the book, Wind, Sand and Stars but quite autonomous in that it tells of how the author and his companion survived an aeroplane crash in the Sahara.

Three days without water in the desert walking on blindly hoping somehow to be rescued. Only my limitation as a reader restrains me from calling this piece the greatest account of thirst ever written.

In a writers workshop a world ago I heard Nick Joaquin say of Hemingway that one virtue the American possesses as a writer is that when he describes say a soft drink (example mine), the taste of the ice-cold soft drink will register in your parched mind’s mouth or is it mouth’s mind just reading it. Well, at a certain point in my reading of Exupery’s story it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say I was ready to see a desert mirage.

The whole passage when rescue comes is a veritable hymn to water, the only one I know. I won’t show it here without the harrowing tale of thirst that precedes it as the power would be missing altogether:

‘Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.’

Well, that’s poetry talking. Science, inclined to be amused by the word mysterious, says simply: H2O.

Yet, the first man of science, Thales of Miletus, looking for the primal origin of matter, thereby breaking epochally with myth, said in still gnomic fashion: ‘Everything is water, water is all.’ 

And twenty centuries later, Leonardo says: “Water is the driving force of all nature.”

But if this article is beginning to smell like antiquity itself, how about Loren Eiseley writing:

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

The Jorge Luis Borges of science-fiction, Stanislaw Lem of Poland, has a novel, Solaris, in which one of the characters is by insinuation the planet itself, Solaris, or more correctly, the ocean that is almost completely the planet’s surface. Is this to say Solaris is a thinly disguised portrait of our planet?

The ocean is sentient and, more important, intelligent.