A large body of water is often quiet, ringing only with the sounds of it turning over on itself, folding itself into infinite shapes, or with the noises made by other creatures that live in it. The calming effects of living by water might stem from its essential openness and ambiguity, its ability to stand in for life and for death, for the terrifying and the most comforting. We are seventy percent water, our brains are seventy percent water; the vision of a lake, a river, a sea, a stream, a mysterious pond, can fuel the imagination. It can be a blank, empty, shallow mirror, reflecting only the sky, or a deep well, absorbing light and seeming endless, a downwards place full of intrigue and strange detail. Water feeds and mirrors the mind, confuses and puzzles it. We are of the same substance. Inside our brains there is a small body of water through which the electric impulses of our thoughts move and spark, leaping through our own watery depths, as though we were a salty sea in miniature.

Living close to a body of water offers a separate, liquid, place, which, when

caught in the corner of the eye, provides a space where meanings have not yet been

decided, an opening in the mind for something else, something not so central or obvious

in a person’s thinking. Constant proximity to a body of water gives a sense of difference

and possibility: you can be on top of the water, beside it, swim to climb inside it, get it

inside you by swallowing it, wash in it, float on top of it, whizz across its tight surface,

fish in it, explore it underneath by taking air down there with you, reimagine it or ignore

it.

REBECCA LONCRAINE

STILL DAMSEL JAM 92