WATER

Abstract

W isława Szymborska’s poetic take on water is driven by a paradox. On the one hand, the poem speaks to, and celebrates, water’s material heterogeneity and the multiplicity of its forms and hence meanings. On the other, however, it points to the impossibility to grasp the abundant materiality of water and to the inadequacy of language to keep up with its fugitive realities and shapes. The “names” are provisional and potentially countless, the lines suggest, turning the poem, it might seem, into a dubious exercise in poetic creation. Indeed, Szymborska’s piece does what it declares impossible: it offers beautifully crafted names in an explicit recognition of their insufficiency and futility. And yet the lines also, and perhaps by this very reason, suggest that there are no other ways to access water except through the endless acts of naming (as Jamie Linton provocatively puts it: “Water is what we make of it” (3)). What is at stake, however, is much more than water’s “symbolic potency” or its discursive life (MacLeod 40). These acts posit us as always in a relation to water – as observers, (ab)users, thinkers, admirers, and survivors, to name only the few the poem references. This is why in Szymborska’s poem, water is at once elusive though palpably material; offering itself but also withholding; historical and yet to come; life-giving and life-taking; scarce and excessive; violent and benign; an object of our deeds, needs, and thoughts and an agent constantly chiselling the limits of what we do, need, and think. Szymborska’s 1962 poem beautifully encapsulates some of the major currents of thought coalescing around what Cecilia Chen et al. have named a “hydrological turn” (3). More specifically, they have offered “thinking with water” in place of “thinking about water” as an approach most sensitive and attentive to the materialities of water and their political and poetic significance. To think with water, they argue, is to place water alongside our intellectual endeavours recognizing it is meaningcreating matter. It is also to acknowledge that water is a creative subject in its own right, generating our worlds, communities, and ways of knowing, frequently redefining our knowledges