The evolution of the subtle ties between water and the nude can be observed, in all its complexity, in the paintings of the period. The painter found it less and less necessary to justify the nude by presenting her in religious or mythological terms. By showing her as bather he could merge woman and water as part of “nature.” Only a rare genius such as Courbet could successfully paint The Source as a woman of incredible specificity, utterly lacking in self-consciousness yet bluntly assertive of her flesh. For the run-of-the-mill painter, this association of flesh with water served to render the feminine body innocuous. First, in the course of Ingres’s long life, the term nude became synonymous with the Turkish bath. Then the aging Degas filled his atelier with tubs, bowls, and basins in which to pose his models. His pastels offer a historical source for the domestic bath during the late nineteenth century. It is not so much the nude he paints as woman’s absorption in the relationship of her body to the water with which she sponges herself.1

The interrelationship between water and space may be explored on two different levels. The first deals with form. On this level comparison focuses on the common aesthetic features a period’s imagination has given to urban water and to urban space. An epoch’s contribution to the style of their perception and representation is at the core of this approach to poetry or painting, sculpture or dreams. The question is “How did baroque art use or show water?” not “What does the epoch believe water is?” Water itself, on this first level, has no history; since “the beginning, when the earth was unsightly and unfinished,” water was H₂O. According to this hypothesis all stories of creation from around the world tell about the origin of the same stuff, since the “stuff” as such is a-historical.

I do not intend to explore water in this fashion—nor, for that matter, space or the imagined bond that unites them.3 From the start I shall refuse to assume that all waters may be reduced to H₂O. I will not deal with city space as though it could be universally defined in terms of Cartesian coordinates or of census criteria. For not only does the way an epoch treats water and space have a history: the very substances that are shaped by the imagination—and thereby given explicit meanings—are themselves social creations to some degree.

I want to explore the historicity of matter, the sense that an epoch’s imagination has given to the canvas on which it paints its imaginings, to the silence of a room into which it projects its music, to the space that it fills with the aura that it can taste or smell.4 The attempt to do so is not new: and the evidence that it always fails is no reason for refraining from trying again, to write the history of life’s widow as Luis de Sandoval y Zapata, a seventeenth-century Mexican, calls this “stuff” in a baroque poem translated by Samuel Beckett.

Even the border between water and fire can shift. In Vedic mythology soma is the fire that envelops all being and that flows and ebbs around the sun; it is fire that can be drunk. In Arabic al Ko’hol is a fine metallic powder that is sublimated from mercury and used to embellish women; when applied as a shade to the eyelids it renders them intoxicating. Only after Paracelsus had distilled alcohol from wine was its intoxicating power ascribed to a spirit of water. Thus the very “stuff” that is watery, no less than its form, lies in the eyes of the beholder.

In making this distinction between imagination as the source of form and imagination as the wellspring of formless “stuff” I am building on a foundation established by Gaston Bachelard. In his writings he returns again and again to a fundamental contrast between two mutually constitutive aspects of imagination: a formal one and a material one. The form and matter of our imagining cannot be understood separately because one cannot exist without the other. But the fact that we cannot separate our experience of passion from the element of fire and cannot imagine fire without passion in no way implies that the two are at all times perceived as versions of the same principle. Love, the hearth, rage, war, and passion are kindled. They are set aflame by contact with a “stuff” that is imagined as fire. In each culture the line that separates the inflammable from the fireproof divides reality in a different way. In the south of Mexico there are two tribes which share the same territory: in one tribe women inflame men’s desire and in the other they liquefy men’s innards. But in both beneath the mass of images, verbal variations, moods, tactile experiences, and lights that shape water in our imagination, there is a stable, dense, slow, and fertile watery stuff that obscurely vegetates within us. It lies beyond the reach of any one of our separate senses: “its black flowers bloom in matter’s darkness” and become visible when the imagination lets them “sing reality.” The time has come for historians to begin listening to “the sonority of these dormant waters” (Bachelard) to become sensitive to the history of matter.

Following dream waters upstream, the historian will learn to distinguish the vast register of their voices. As his ear is attuned to the music of deep waters, he will hear a discordant sound that is foreign to waters, that reverberates through the plumbing of modern cities. He will recognize that the H₂O which gurgles through Dallas plumbing is not water, but a stuff which industrial society creates. He will realize that the twentieth century has transmogrified water into a fluid with which archetypal waters connot be mixed. With enough money and broad powers to condemn and evict, a group of architects could very well create out of this sewage a liquid monument that would meet their own aesthetic standards. But since archetypal waters are as antagonistic to this new “stuff” as they are to oil, I fear that contact with such liquid monumentality might make the souls of Dallas’s children impermeable to the water of dreams. In voicing this fear, I am not arguing against the construction of a lake that would provide moorings for inexpensive rowboats, cool the city, and sparkle at night. Pleasure boats, temperatures, and the reflection of skyscrapers are not my concern here. I want to deal with waters and dreams. I want to explore the moral and psychological consequences that will flow from the public display of recirculated toilet flush with pretense to the aesthetic symbol of a wedding between water and urban space.

“Where do you live?” and “Where do you dwell?” are synonymous. They remain so in most translations into other, even nonwestern, languages. This unusual constancy of meaning indicates that “living” and “dwelling” have traditionally implied one another; one stresses the temporal, the other the spatial aspect of being. To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by one’s own living, by which one always retraces the lives of one’s ancestors. “Dwelling” in this strong sense cannot really be distinguished from living. From day to day dwellers shape the environment. In every step and movement people dwell. Traditional dwellings are never terminated. Houses constantly grow; only temples and palaces can be “finished.” Dwelling means living insofar as each moment shapes a community’s own kind of space.6

The sort of dwelling that results from this vernacular activity must be carefully distinguished from an animal’s lair and—just as much—from a merchant’s storage. Animals are born with the instinct which dictates their behavior. The nest or the web, the den...