Aqua Vitae

[A modified version of the image above appears as the cover of Pascale Petit’s 2008
collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale. It also pretty much perfectly accompanies
Petit’s poem appearing below, as the first whiskey river entry in today’s post.]

From whiskey river:

What She Wanted

What she wanted was to return
to the original rainforest

hear water pushing
through the sapwood

and leaves eating light
as she wanted to eat light.

She knew her nature
was to be water, not wood.

She knew there was a grove
of vertical rivers

of roaring waterfall-trees,
and a grove of whirlpool-trees

with vortices she could dive through,
past the hollow years of her life

right back to the roots.

(Pascale Petit)

…and:

On those occasions when one’s serenity seems about to collapse, I recommend that one step out into the backyard and vigorously spit.

(David Huddle)

Not from whiskey river… a poet catalogues the waters and other landmarks on the map of her life:

A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born:
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden
dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world’s great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.

(Denise Levertov [source])

The Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water” has a long and marginally controversial history. Ostensibly, it’s based on the New Testament verse John 5:4 which, in the King James Version, reads as follows:

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

It turns out, however, that many more recent versions omit this verse entirely: it may or may not be part of the book of John as originally written. (If you really I mean reeeeally want to know why, this analysis [125KB PDF] will give you more background than you can possibly swallow at a single sitting. Apparently one of the venues in which the Lord moves mysteriously is the halls of Biblical scholarship.)

In its full version, the song also may — or may not — be a “coded” explanation to Civil War-era slaves of how to escape by evading pursuing bloodhounds, i.e., take to the water. (For more on this, and other “coded” slave songs, here‘s a good place to start.)

Regardless what it may or may not mean, authentically or not, “Wade in the Water” is one heck of a song. Among others, it’s been a hit for Ramsey Lewis (jazz instrumental) and Eva Cassidy (vocal); their versions might be the definitive ones. And yet, jazz organist Rhoda Scott (who is known — sorry, Ina Garten — as the “barefoot contessa,” for what will be obvious reasons) lays a pretty solid claim to it, too: