[Digital Poetics 4.19] Fountains and Futility by Rouzbeh Shadpey

Inverted and cropped image of Ablution Pool in Hafiz Jamaluddin Mosque, Kolkata https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hafiz_Jamaluddin_Mosque_-_Ablution_Pool_(1).jpg

1.

The well of human courage is deep, reminds me E, whom I love. One day, I take to its sounding. 

My task is simple: to approximate the well’s depth by way of its echo. Simple tasks require simple methods, so I hover my hand over Courage’s mouth and let drop a weight. A short lapse of time triangulates the blossoming of my fist, the water’s embrace of the diving probe, and the well’s reverberating response. In the play of simple parameters, time masquerades as distance and the unfathomable unbecomes. 

In an episode of Little House on the Prairie, a colonist's infant has fallen into a well down which the village adults cannot abseil. Earlier in the episode, we are recounted the hardships of a little person living in the colony, to whom employment has been barred due to the hateful influence of a wealthy shopkeeper’s wife. Unable to secure work, the man steals eggs from the shopkeeper to feed his aging mother and tend to his wounded pride. When eventually he is caught, the shopkeeper’s wife demands that he face trial. On his way to meet his fate, the man’s path intersects the town’s well. The short stature that rendered him abject in the eyes of his persecutors allows him—in a good faith display of heroism—to lower himself down the stoned pit and rescue the yet-undrowned child. He is exonerated of all accusations. He becomes a banker’s assistant. 

The well of human courage is deep, it reminds me of E, whom I love. I carry its sound wherever I go; it moistens my airways against the hum of dereliction, softens my breath with the humidity of silence. Instead of praying for rain, they dug a well; instead of digging a well, they unearthed a spring. (They too heard the rumours; they too knew them to be true). Forough turned the horizon on its head so that history could fountain. As a result, water poured from the abyss below to the abyss above and the sound, the sound, only the sound, the sound of the water’s transparent wish to flow remained. The fountain is prohibited; the fountain is futile. But its song is a refuse we sift through stolen memories. O fire eviscerate, water cull. An unknown artist dyed the fountain red with the blood of women. The next day, the spigots all spat red in unison. The sharks didn’t know where to turn their heads. [1][2]

2.

I listen to thirst and know futility’s the rule. To write about water—in fountains or still, sparkling or hard—is futile. Or rather, it is all writing that is futile, and writing about water is no different. To write about water is to write about futility (one is a metonym—or euphemism, depending on your view of things—of the other). To write water on the page is to riddle the page with words just empty enough so as to disavow the false hope of a cemented future or a liquidated past. In the end, futility makes us all into patients. Whether we acquiesce or not is a matter of grace. 

3.

A futile attempt at describing fatigue to my therapist involves me intellectualising about Kafka and watersport. “The rule,” explains Ernst Weiss' self-fashioned protagonist Boëtius, as he saves a drowning Kafka named Titurel, “is: hold the drowning person from behind. Expect a struggle in the water.” So the paradoxical lesson imparts: to save the drowning person from drowning, you must drown them first. The true irony, of course, is that Kafka was a good swimmer who could not bring himself to swim. This was not due to fear, for Kafka was not afraid—of drowning, of fathoms, of depths—this was not his affliction. He simply could not forget having once been incapable of swimming. 

4.

W.G. Sebald, discussing the subject of history, recounts an experiment involving rats in water tanks. As per science, the difference between a rat that lets itself drown, and one that swims until the point of exhaustion—and then drowns—is hope. Here, hope had been experimentally engineered during a previous trial by way of a surprise exit, which afforded some rats a last-minute escape from their tank, their fate: to drown. 

So it is: hope is a buoy we grasp just barely. Or perhaps, the warm smile of a stranger on an uncharacteristically cold August day spelling this too, shall pass. Lately, hope has taken on the image of hair—falling down backs, spiking up scalps, raining from knives, fanning the flames. 

The reasons we carry on are too numerous to list. The reasons we carry on are all the same. 

We can have hope only in what is without remedy. So goes the revolutionary prescription. [3]

5.

They dissected a fish just to claim it was dead. 

October 2010. In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and a centuries absence, cholera resurfaced in Haiti. The outbreak spread swiftly, killing thousands, leaving in its wake a trail of death that would persist a decade later. It was common knowledge that the U.N. was responsible for the outbreak; their peacekeepers, arriving from Nepal for matters of “disaster relief,” had brought with them the Vibrio bacteria and spread it into local waterways via the poor sanitation of their camps. Nevertheless, it took six years and a lawsuit for the U.N. to bear their responsibility. As is often the case, the conceit was strictly symbolic: among the lawsuit’s material demands, reparations to the victims of the disease and the installment of a national water sanitation system were never met. 

Cholera etymologically trickles from the word choldera, which means gutter. Its circulatory logic unveils the entangled streams of empire, health, and capital that undergird what we naively refer to as “global health;” a futile body whose unity only rears itself in moments of acute contagion overspilling the gutters of the world order.

6.

Drinking from the fountain is prohibited to the ill, who are rightfully presumed porous, incapable of containing themselves, and a contagious threat. There is a moment when water is not in one vessel nor in the other. This moment submerges some. When it does, we call it fatigue. [4]

Although it is believed to be both curative and prophylactic for the health of its practicing Muslims, the sick are not allowed to practice ablution. This is because all waters are not equal. For example, a tearing of the eyes due to an autoimmune disease  is a contraindication to ablution, whereas a tearing of the eyes due to laughter, sadness, or tear gas is not. 

It is recommended that the sick perform ritual cleansing with either sand or dust. I interpret this according to the logic that sand chokes fountains, and protects ruins. Another explanation is that gathering water with a sieve is futile. Nevertheless, I cusp my hands and wait for the sky to pour through me. 

7.

In a 1922 study published under the title Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine, the Palestinian physician and ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan attributes the inhabitation of a body of water by djinns to two factors: its source must originate from a deserted place and its reservoir must be sheltered from the sun’s rays. That is to say, it must be lonely. 

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Notes:

[1] Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing, 2022), 97.
[2] Mira Mattar, Affiliation (Bristol: Sad Press, 2021), 20
[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 109.
[4] Anne Carson, Plainwater : Essays and Poetry (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000).

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Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. He has exhibited and performed at TULCA (Ireland), documenta fifteen (Germany), The Mosaic Rooms (UK), Centre CLARK, MUTEK (Montréal), and more. His writing has been published in a variety of artistic and para-academic journals. His musical practice, under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر, combines Iranian sonics, electric guitar, and avant-garde electronics. He lives between Tiohtià:ke / Montreal and Berlin.