Text by Anna Dot

When I approach it during the day, I see its body, extremely different from mine. I envy it. It embraces the earth in a way that is impossible for me. All its weight falls on top of it as it shifts, sketches and carries in its wake, delicately, steadily and unhurriedly, whatever lies beneath it. And all this I see from the outside, from its restless edges. My boundaries are defined. My skin separates me clearly from what is outside me, or so my eyes tell me. I look at my hands and I can see where my fingers end. In contrast, I look at its body, I look for the line that defines it and I can’t find it. It doesn’t have one. It’s not that its skin is blurred, but it moves so fast, and permeates everything it touches, that it is impossible to delimit it, just as its life is also indefinable. We do not know exactly when it was born. In fact, by its nature, it seems as if it has never stopped being born. As with a film, a book, a word, a song, or as with the life itself of any living being, we cannot see its beginning, its life and its end simultaneously.

Some say it is a person (1) and some say it is an ancestor (2). Some people consider it to be a god or spirit (3). There are also those who disagree with this and say that it is a resource or element of Nature. I approach it during the day and clearly see it alive. If it is a person, I would say it is old, vital and noisy. If it is an ancestor, I would say it is one of the oldest and wisest. If it is a resource, I would say it is essential to my species and all others. If it is an element, I would say it must be a complex one, made of the most primordial. I look at its body and I see the sky, the setting sun, the pebbles, the crayfish, the carp, the seaweed. I see cobblers, skating overhead, and willows wetting the leaves on the tips of their branches.

I can put myself inside and then I am part of it. It can, also, enter me and, at the same time, still be in many other places. It can be inside me and inside you and, at the same time, outside both and inside everyone else. If I approach it in the daytime and stare at it, looking into its eyes, it gives me back the reflection of mine, of yours – if you are by my side – and it gives me back, too, the reflection of the world where we are.

One day I stayed by its side until it got dark. There, as my eyes could no longer see each other, I could look at it in other ways. The stars, little holes to the Beyond (4), also seemed to try to do so. Its unreachable body was now, like mine, a black spot. I don’t know if it was because I was tired, because of the darkness, or because I fell into a deep sleep, but suddenly it seemed to me that its voice was made of many. One of them explained to me that, in addition to barbels, frogs, newts and trout, there also live a kind of invisible beings: the demons, capable of going between our world and that of the immortals – some of the latter are not mortal because they have already died. I don’t know how they do it, but they communicate between one edge and the other. They are the messengers between the here and the Hereafter and they like, above all, to inhabit the springs. It is there that ancient humans had gone to cast spells written on lead plates for these intermediary beings to carry their messages to the gods. These objects are called defixio and the author of the spell used to read it out loud (5).