Water Meditation in 13 Images

maria deguzmán

A face appears, the lips of a wide mouth above prominent chin bones, strangely familiar. The rest of the face is masked by something like diving goggles furnishing an hourglass window onto another dimension, far away across the desert sands of an ocean floor. What are the parted lips saying? Don a Siebe suit, its helmet and aqua lung, passport to the depths. A mute photograph sings a siren song, luring me into another dimension. Something in the distance is burning, the coal black smoke plume from a moving train along ghostly tracks barely visible as they recede toward a vanishing point. A scene from another age, another century. And yet, here it is, in my slippery present, the culmination of the past, waves rippling from the burning vanishing point back to where I stand over a bowl of water, not seeing any of this at the time, of course, the water, like quicksilver, stirred by a spoon. Only later, upon review of the photographs I took while stirring the waters, do I see this familiar unfamiliar face, the parted lips—memory an act of salvage? 

And now to drop below the surface in a diving bell named The Black Madonna or Yemayá or Magdalena Divina. Seeing, as if through smoked glass, sunglasses… sun and shadow, a liquid medium, thicker than air, taking on form. Fluid slipping through itself, water moving through water. Currents. Dropping below the sunlit surface into the complex darkness and its crisscrossing currents from which our own circulatory systems are borrowed. The human infant is up to 78 percent water; an adult, 60 to 65 percent. Water in which we live and move and have our being. Living water. 

On a roasting afternoon in early July 2017, I first filled a small bowl with water and with one hand began stirring it slowly, almost absent-mindedly, while taking photos with the other, relying on a digital camera compact enough to be held in one hand only. The summer had been one of the hottest on record and no relief was in sight. I had taken to living with the lights off and starting the heavy mornings with meditation. It was in this manner that I began my experiments with a small bowl of water. Just the sight of the water made me feel cooler. 

And then, one morning, two weeks into these experiments, the strangely familiar shape of a man with black hair came swimming up as if from under the surface, in the border zone between water and air, dark glasses covering his eyes and a white handkerchief or an oxygen mask over the lower half of his face, like the inhabitant of a smoggy megalopolis. At the interface between O and H2O, the camera caught him signaling among the waves. Hello? ¡Socorro! ¡Socorro! What?

Another morning, a hot one with the sun lost in a white haze of climbing temperatures, a fever-pitch chorus of cicadas camouflaged among the wilted trees, a topographic picture emerges: both a map and a landscape. Mountains, lakes, rivers. From a low brown mountain range, rivers pool into an ocean with a creature that looks like a baby whale breaching in a back flip. I get an eerie feeling that I am reading a vintage postcard sent from the edge of a world that once was and is no longer. 

Then a hazy oval portrait appears in the face of the spoon: a seventeenth-century pilgrim, perhaps a Puritan, dark felt hat, long white hair, a doublet, a long face with sunken eyes and a hawk nose. The water is roiling and jumping up all around a storm-tossed spoon in three-dimensional Edgerton drops and splashes, as if the waters were staging a getaway. What is this stern pilgrim (or is he a starving Jamestown settler?) doing in that spoon? Stubbornly renaming the troubled waters? Appropriating and applying mispronounced Native American names for parts of rivers to the entire river, possessively confusing the part for an elusive, ungraspable whole that flows out of reach?

Still July 2017, on a steamy North Carolina afternoon, by a golden bubble or dome, a fish swims into sight—after the fact, of course, since I did not see what the moving waters were doing until later. It looks like a bluish East Asian wild carp (aka goldfish) or a small koi or maybe a Siamese fighting fish. Or perhaps it is the Sacred Cod in the House of Representatives’ chamber of the Massachusetts State House … the City on the Hill owes its gold to a fish … and now the fish has broken loose and is floating above the golden dome of the State House where all that’s solid melts into air. The cicadas are singing frantically on this boiling July afternoon and way down South, I contemplate this tiny prodigy, displaced. 

A couple of days later, on a cloudy morning, sharks appear, circling around an eyeless face, their bodies wreathing around a head, partially covering its lips—as if something secret were being conveyed. But what speaks most loudly is the silence of the sharks, their mute gliding around this pale face smooth as a pregnant woman’s belly. I double-check the shape of their tails in an encyclopedia. The tails of sharks, not dolphins. 

A forecast of tempests: the depths of the ocean raging in the shallow oval of the spoon. A nocturnal image reveals a bearded old man grimacing out of storm clouds streaked with lightning above a churning sea blanched a sandy white. An image captured at dawn is more ominous: noticeably elevated levels of a fluorescent gray choppy ocean under wind-driven storm clouds, and the oddest detail of all, the dark face of a woman, her hollow eyes cat-like, looming in the left corner as if passing out of the frame at great speed. Later, I will count Harvey, Irma, José, María, and ten other storms.  

The following month, in August, flaccid faces break forth, mouths limp, pouring liquid waterfalls out of their corners. Some of the images feature only lips, lips parted, the lips of the unconscious or the once-conscious. The exhausted? The drowned? The sickened migrant workers, Mexican and Central American, sent to wade through putrid waters to rebuild Houston and Miami and other coastal cities and towns? By the edge of the spoon, something flows, amoeba-like, water shapeshifting into a mercurial tapeworm, head full of suckers. Is this what our hope has come to—giving up the sucked-out holy ghost with a nauseous groan at the ratcheting numbers of those whose roofs were ripped off and whose lives and livelihoods were reduced to rubble and flotsam?

A brunette in sunglasses and a black satin dress with charcoal wings flies high in a chiaroscuro sky, one arm stretched across the silver lining of a looming thunderhead. She hovers over a waterway that pools into the head of a largemouth bass lying sideways up—Edisto, Santee, Great Pee Dee—blackwater rivers of methylmercury vying for first place with a river near a Nevada goldmine. From the belly of the high-flying brunette—she, too, looks strangely familiar—a thick umbilical air hose descends into the top of a diving helmet with alien eyes. Another Siebe suit on a reconnaissance mission. Where? When? In this scene, the brunette is parent to her own father whose company manufactured the metal parts of those watertight copper and brass diving helmets. Metal spinning. The water around the spoon gets the bends, tiny bubbles in its golden blood.

Cryptic letters of light tumble out of the heavens. An alphabet both strange and familiar. Eyes and tiny fishhooks. Alchemical signs for metals and materials. Forgotten scripts, unfamiliar yet nearly legible. A L M. An audio linguistic method, in this case with no audible sound, only these multidimensional pictures of ALMost people and animals and things montaged and mixed, morphing into one another. Here a huge dark dolphin, perhaps a whale, rears its head to the sky. There, adjacent to it, a smaller one turns its rostrum toward the viewer. ALM, alm, alms in relation to what? As opposed to what? A culture of extraction and extinction? The seismic detonations and drillings that are killing the whales and the dolphins and other marine life and seeding the atmosphere with the stuff of mega storms, of hurricanes and tornadoes and typhoons that drown low-lying communities of color and the economically disadvantaged? The Grampus griseus who raises a rostrum to the luminosity of the sky above the rolling surf—what is it thinking?

The naval officer is looking at me. How do I figure this? Though I never saw him in the flesh, he has appeared in old photographs. I know no other face quite like his. The Spanish naval officer with thick, groomed hair, large sad eyes (Phoenician blue), prominent eyebrows, and a small mustache above full lips. An islander, a Majorcan who married another islander, an Afro-Hispanic Puerto Rican woman who saw the place of her birth pass from one master to another, Spain to the United States. The naval officer’s entire life depended on the ocean, what he lived of his life—asthmatic, insomniac, and dead before his time. His sons would be naval officers, too, and he was fated to outlive them, something that likely made the drawing of every breath even more difficult. ¡Socorro! ¡Socorro! But here he peers out, with an almost serene curiosity, at the viewer. From behind a curtain of light and the pale green of shallow water, his eyebrows are thick, his eyes characteristically large, his once brown moustache white above full lips. Suspended in the shadow beside his head is a question mark like a sinewy fish with gills and a pearl for a punctuating dot. What is your question? ¿Cual es su pregunta?

Artist’s Statement

I obtained these photographic images by agitating water with a spoon in a small bowl and photographing the water while stirring it. The naked eye cannot see what is happening at the time. What intrigued me about the experiment I conducted with light, water, and motion was the uncanny “historicity” of the forms, caught on camera, that appeared in the bowl of water. The basis of this creative non-fiction is my own memory journey with these forms interpreted as time images.