Rivers

Jan Maarten Voskuil. “broken light blue”, 2013, acrylics on linen, 120x90x10cm

The line of the river is a line of terraqueous flight; a flow flush with the substrate, conditioning and mutating its own channel, both wandering over the territory and slowly reconfiguring it, in a gradual mutation or decryption…

A river system is composed of intensive aqueous lines diffracted from a fusional substrate — a vorticial assembly of multiple planes of consistency in chaotic metastability.

The sense of the river is continuity of differential movement; in Heraclitus the river expresses a unified-discrete vision of a cosmos-in-becoming, of time as distance internalized in the permutation and meandering of the river.

There is no fixity to the river not only because of the continuity of particulate flow — at least after thermodynamics and calculus, we can formulate the system of relations that compose the river in its universality or eternity as well as in its mobile diversity of specific singularities, torsional lines capturing or emitting particles.

A differential machine can be established which fuses the disciplinary and discursive metamodels expressing, e.g., the river’s flow and meander over the local topology, relating this to regional ecosystems and global weather patterns…

Such “universal” machines invade with (or inculcate) an at-once cosmic and molecular perspective at the fusional heart of the dynamism of the river. —Yet how after all does the river strike us today — that river that cannot be stepped into twice; the river that is not the River…?

In this rarefied translucence, it is perhaps difficult for us not to interpose certain mediations, to recover a transcendental figure, the Idea of water, the ascent into an eternal rivulet of time permitting no change, motion or intensity. We preface Heraclitus with Plotinus and Plato.