The water in my glass flows through the entire Hudson Valley region before entering my home. It comes from hundreds of miles around. It starts as a small stream that flows slowly down a hill in beau- tiful meanders, enters the soil and penetrates through levels of minerals, goes upward and gets energized by the sun, and absorbs oxygen and all the nature around. It evaporates into the sky, capturing all the views of the Hudson Valley to the horizon, and then falls and flows into the Hudson River from Nyack to Lower Manhattan. It is sucked up by the treatment plant, locked in bunkers, squeezed in pipes, up-down, left-right, down-up, right-left, thousands of times, until its healthy energy is completely killed. Then it is injected with chloride and fluoride and is shot in high-pressure pipes to the dark round monster tank on top of the hill with the sign “Hackensack.” It stays there, trapped, until I turn on the tap. But before it reaches my glass, it is blinded by the lead pipes under the street and deafened by the thunder of the million cars on Road 17, absorbing the sludge of human behavior and the madness of everybody around. The water that slips into my glass from the tap is stressed, confused, and lost, maybe in the same way that I am, and all of Hackensack and all of the people living east of Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tun- nel. The art I am making can only explain one part of what is happening with the water. Maybe my work can point to those who fill my glass with sick water. Perhaps my audience can recognize who they are and stop them. Maybe who poisons the water has to do with whom we pay to cure us of its consequences. Or perhaps it is the opposite. Water is fundamental for the human body. All our vital processes depend on its quality, quantity, and timing. Water regulates the brain and blood. Emotions are mostly water, and thoughts are mostly water. Decisions are water based as well. Water with low energy, broken by a pipe in this system’s struc- ture, destroys our cells. The water we drink absorbs information, memories, and energy over millions of years. It receives, retains, and transmits information from anything it has been in contact with, including the violence, hatred, anxiety, politics, and unhappiness experienced during its two years in Hackensack. If our way of living contaminates water, water will remember it forever. I am contaminated with the lives of others through my glass of water. 22
Observations and Thoughts
1. My thoughts when writing this thesis are interrupted, without clear structure, just as is the water I drank this morning. 2. (I hear myself saying these words under the lead water shower in my house. Probably, that day, it will be in the form of a video projected on the gallery wall.) The idea of reading these obser- vations in front of an audience is boring even as I am writing them. 3. I see myself writing these words in water, giving it a chance to memorize them, and then showing the water what the thesis text memorized. 4. I wish to exhibit these works at the General Electric (GE) Company headquarters in NYC and the Seaport District of Boston, MA, where most of the water authorities reside. 5. My body contains fifteen gallons of water. I’ll call it personal water. Five gallons of my personal water are from Lake Orestiada in northern Greece. This is the lake where Zeus saw the beautiful young woman Leda and seduced her in the guise of a swan. From that act, Helen of Troy was born near- by. Another five gallons of water are from the Sea of Marmara, where Gorgona, the mermaid, fell in love with Alexander the Great. Two gallons of my personal water were sucked into my brain directly from the mausoleum of Lenin in Moscow, together with residue from Socialist Realism. The last three are from the Hudson River near the GE plants. My body has been fed with at least a few thousand years of old water. 6. Considering that water did not originate on planet Earth but came from the universe in the form of ice asteroids, and that the same amount (345 M mi3) 4 has been cycling for the last 4B years, I can speculate that in my tap water on 144 Hopper Street can be found parts of outer space, of Jesus’ baptism, of the Great Deluge, of James Watt’s steam engine, and Napoleon’s urine. Maybe I am taking a shower with the same water that Tarkovsky filmed in Stalker and using parts of heavy water. 5 Could the tap water in the glass I drank this morning have been present in the hemlock taken by Socrates and the river mentioned by Heraclitus? 6
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