CAYLEY: H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness began as a lecture in Dallas. How did that come about?
ILLICH: I was sitting at my desk in Mexico, puzzling out some passages in my sources with my miserably limited Greek, when the gardener called me to the other building where there is a phone. It was somebody from Dallas, asking me if I would come to talk. “I don’t want to talk, what’s it about?” “Well, we’re having a meeting, celebrating water.” “What? I’m just sitting on the waters of Lethe, a river which washes away memories from the feet of the dead, and carries them into the pond of Mnemosyne, where poets can go occasionally, in an altered state, and pick them up and bring them back to sing them. So what do you want?” “Well, you know, there is a large number of Mexicans living in a certain area which is to be washed away to build a central lake in Dallas.” So I asked them to explain, for a few minutes, what they were doing and said yes, who says A must say B. If I say Mnemosyne and Lethe and so on, I must say yes to Dallas!
They sent me the records of a seventy-year-long discussion on whether there should or should not be a lake in Dallas. Dallas wasn’t 130 years old, and for seventy years they had discussed that issue. Was it feasible financially? Would it contribute to commerce? How would it affect the environment? On each of these points, they had been looking at the pros and cons for seventy years. About one thing, everyone was certain: a lake would be beautiful.
So I got photographs of Dallas for as far back as they existed, which included those seventy years. It was quite clear that there was a little brook, or some kind of spring, which might have supplied a lovely small lake in a central park seventy years ago. But they were planning now to use the lake also as a reservoir for recycled toilet sewage, and to create fountains and waterfalls and reflecting surfaces with that goo which was, chemically, H2O, but for the imagination was something utterly distinct from what water meant in all the sources I was just then reading.
Now I had been asking myself, How can I introduce Gaston Bachelard into the conversation among my acquaintances, especially in the English-speaking world?200 This is a strange man. You spoke about Foucault. Bachelard certainly influenced me much more than Foucault. He was also an epistemologist, but an epistemologist who asked a question which, in my opinion, goes much deeper and is much less fashionable than that which was asked by Foucault. Foucault makes us understand that conversation — discourse — is the stuff from which social reality is made. We should become aware that things are what emerge in an epoch’s discourse. He speaks a lot about what he calls power.
Bachelard has a quite different project. Where Foucault is among many who in a very peculiar and practically applicable way speak about what emerges as discourse, and then shapes those who participate in it, Bachelard wants to go deeper. He wants, very presumptuously, to deal with the historicity of the deep imagination. There, in a dark, subtle, deep way, we also conceive stuff, that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain. In other cultures, that stuff not only comes down as rain but also comes down as the souls of women who have died and who seek reincarnation. That’s how it’s imagined among the Lacandon Indians in the south of Mexico. In India that stuff flows around the sun as soma.
That’s where a distinction comes in between stuff and surface qualities, sparkle or stench, perhaps. It’s a distinction between that which, at least in old times, people believed they could actually sense with their inner senses, their phantastikón, their inner eye, ear, touch, ability to embrace, and, on the other hand, that which appears to their outer senses.
Now there is a Canadian whom I met in Kingston, who, when I asked him at a faculty meeting, “And what do you do, sir?”, answered me, “I want to make stuff a subject of philosophy.” I wish I could remember who the man is, but I owe it to him that since then I’ve been thinking about it. Now I want to do this history of stuff, because I believe that in this world into which I see the young generation now moving, it is not only their voice they are losing — by imagining themselves according to the model of the computer — it is also that they are emerging as a generation rid of stuff.
Now water is one of the traditional four stuffs from which our Western universe is made. There are other universes, in other bodies, world bodies, which are made of five or of seven elements. Ours is made of four, and water is one of them. In this little booklet, I wanted to raise a question about the historicity of stuff and the possibility of studying it.
So I gave my speech in Dallas, and tried to convince a civic crowd, in a short and simple way, that it’s strange to agree on the presumption that recirculated toilet flush, H2O, coming out of a factory, could be the stuff out of which they would create the new beauty around which their city ought to be organized.
Then I sat down and wrote, for a friend of mine, a little pamphlet, a long letter, which was then published as H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. I tried to trace the history of the stuff of water, and to get at the age-old ambiguity of water, which is a surface and a depth, which can wash off dirt from the skin, by flowing, but also purify the depths of the soul with just a touch. These are totally different activities, washing and purifying. And this gave me an exceptional opportunity to speak about a stuff which at this moment is escaping us socially.
CAYLEY: If we take, let’s say, the question of baptism, then water — a natural stuff — is used to perform and signify a supernatural act. So this would be an example of how the stuff of water is conceived by the deep imagination.
ILLICH: I find it very strange to go to a tap, from which something comes out that is still called potable water but children are told, “Drink from the bottle in the icebox, don’t drink that stuff from the faucet,” and then to take this and baptize a child with it. That’s how things are. That’s what it means to live today surrounded by people baptized in that stuff. I’m not questioning baptism. I’m simply saying, Look at how humiliating it is, how horrifying it is, to live today. You will then learn how to appreciate the moments of flame and beauty.
CAYLEY: Are you saying, then, that when industrialization goes beyond a certain intensity, producing H2O, a cleaning solvent, this kind of water loses its imaginative resonance with the result that, in a certain way, a baptism can no longer take place because there’s nothing to baptize with?
ILLICH: I’m not saying that, definitely not. I’m saying something else. Other people worry about the human organism not being able to find, sometime in the middle of the next century, any more of the appropriate kind of H2O to make it work. I’m talking about the deadness which sets in when people have lost the sense to imagine the substance of water, not its external appearances but the deep substance of water. That deadness might be worse for those who live on than the diseases which will set in — the AIDS analogues which will appear because there are too many organic phosphate residues, or God knows what kinds of radiation-bearing elements in the goo which comes out of the tap. I’m speaking of the deadening of the imagination through the loss of water as a substance, as I spoke about the deadening of the imagination through the loss of the text as a reflection of our mind and its inner organization. So far, I have been able to recognize every book that was composed on a computer.201
CAYLEY: Truly?
ILLICH: Yes. I remember the first time it happened to me, with Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Somebody who was enthusiastic about it gave me that book in Berlin. I was fascinated by it, but couldn’t get into it. So I asked myself, What is this? I had just heard about word processors, and I suddenly said to myself, It must be written that way, in paragraphs which didn’t come out of an inner flow. It’s like reorganizing a river by taking a piece of it from here and putting it somewhere else, if it seems to fit. I then read the introduction and saw that the guy was proud, and grateful to the computer for having helped him to write the book. Even today, I can discover this in books.
So I made a vow — just as twenty years ago I made a vow not to buy a daily newspaper and have kept to it — not to type into the computer anything, any sequence of sentences, which I had not first written out with a much newer invention, the felt-tipped pen, which is so soft that you can even write on a moving Mexican bus with it.
CAYLEY: A child builds his imagination by his encounter with stuff. The child whose face is in his food is building his imagination. Now I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard that children will sometimes try to get inside television sets to reach the stuff they see there.
ILLICH: A horrible image ...
CAYLEY: Yes, it is a horrible image, but it may be a myth because I’ve never actually seen it.
ILLICH: I know that it’s not a myth. I arrived at my grandfather’s place in Dalmatia, when I was three months old, along with the first loudspeaker. For his world he was a very learned man. And he ordered that the loudspeaker be opened up because he wanted to see who was sitting in there! December, 1926, Dalmatia. Si non è vero, è ben trovalo, as the Italians say.
CAYLEY: Father Tom Berry once said to me, “Imagine that we lived on the moon. What would our imaginations be like?”202
ILLICH: What would water be?
CAYLEY: Perhaps, in a way, we’re moving towards living on the moon.
ILLICH: That “we,” I don’t care about. I’m concerned with you and me, him and her, them and us, the we who want to celebrate the stuff in a drop, even though the drop has become only symbolic of water, since it comes out of a tap. And here you have my reason for my violent no when you said that you can’t baptize with it.
CAYLEY: Yes.
ILLICH: Have you done everything you want to do?
CAYLEY: Yes, unless you want to say a final word.
ILLICH: No. I got into this out of foolish trust, full-hearted trust. I did it once — never again! — and instead of being a useful interviewee for you, in the old way, which I thought I could be, I had a unique experience besides making a new friend. Laus tibi, Domine!