TAP WATER OF LIFE

As I write this I am sipping on a glass of unfiltered tap water. And I am not keeling over and dying. This may come as a shock to you if, like most Americans, you would sooner drink warm, flat, diet caffeine free RC cola from your deceased grandmother’s attic than tap water, and consider it the healthier choice to boot. Drinking tap water is to the twenty-first century what bloodletting was to the twentieth century, a previously mainstream practice that everyone now recognizes as hazardous and, if taken too far, potentially fatal. Our enlightenment as to the dangers of tap water has coincided with the meteoric rise of bottled water. Since the breakthrough in plastics technology in the mid 1980’s that allowed the safe, convenient distribution of the single-serving translucent water-baring vessel, bottled water has saved millions of American lives from the silent killer lurking in our kitchen sinks and garden hoses. How else to account for the fact that in 2004 Americans purchased 26 billion liters of a liquid that they can get virtually free nearly everywhere they go? But since we all know that tap water will not really kill or even harm you, at least in America, the obvious question is why. Why, when we are willing to risk running out of gas to drive across town to save 2 cents per gallon, will we then go into the gas station quik-mart and pay a buck-fifty for something we can get for free from the sink in the quik-mart bathroom about twenty feet away?

Of course, another obvious question is why bother asking the first question this late in the game? Bottled water is now so visible it has attained the invisibility of the taken-for-granted; the average American now drinks an eight ounce “glass” of bottled water every day. We do not even see bottled water as bottled water anymore, we just see it as water. It no longer occurs to us that we are paying for something that we can still get for free. Bottled water’s transformation into water reflects a shift in American consciousness that dates back to the emergence of mainstream bottled water in the ‘80’s, but in twenty-five years is already so deep-rooted that it has made our consumption of bottled water nothing less than automatic. We would rather buy water than get it for free because we now automatically believe we are getting something when we buy bottled water that we don’t get out of the tap. The question of why we line up to pay 10,000 times more for a bottle of water than a glass of tap (according to Wikipedia) is important only if it is a springboard to understanding what we think we are getting in those plastic bottles. The new American consciousness desires to pay for what is free; how did this genie get out of, or should I say in, the bottle?

To understand what Americans are really buying when they pay for their bottled water one must first apprehend the central place that water holds in the western psyche. Water is used for purifying and cleansing rituals in two of the four major western religions, Judaism and Islam. But for those two western religions that shape the American consciousness, Christianity and Empiricism, the potency of water is revealed by both faiths’ vision of a “water of life.” Water is, symbolically, life itself. For Christians, water even exceeds life as Eternal Life (which I translate as living in God’s Kingdom in this moment here on Earth): “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water which I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:14) The Christian journey into the eternal life of God’s Kingdom “right here, right now”, to quote early ‘90’s one-hit-wonders Jesus Jones, begins, of course, with baptismal immersion into water. To be born into the eternal life of Christianity is literally to be dipped into the water of life.

There is no greater challenge, and nothing more important in a Christian life than taking up the Gospel admonition to “love thine enemy.” But this Gospel teaching obtains because God’s love, symbolized as the light of the sun and the water of rain (which is a blessing in the sense of rain for your crops, and not, as often misinterpreted, a curse in the sense of “rain, rain, go away”) reaches all, even one’s enemies: “You have heard that it was said ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:43-45) To live is to bathe in the blessing of God’s rain. Every act of hate, even against a deserving enemy (and there are no shortage of those in this world), is one step further into an arid dessert while God’s Kingdom is a rain forest. If God Is Love, and all life is a product of God’s love, then to drink from the water of life is to draw sustenance from the very source of life, eternal or otherwise.

But if water is central to the symbolic universe of the Christian religion, it is equally important for its rival claimant to the American consciousness. I place Empiricism, that soulless offspring of the western “Enlightenment”, alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as the fourth major western religion because it’s scientific discoveries are a distant second to its primary function as a culture-bound belief system. The recent “Intelligent Design” debate illustrates how incompatible the dueling belief systems of Empiricism and Christianity have become as now predominately practiced, which is to say that they have both mutated into closed, fundamentalist belief systems. As such, they are both useless to a would-be Good Society, and have reduced us all to bickering over whose reductionist, fundamentalist worldview gets to be taught in our rag-tag public schools. The boundary between healthy religion and empiricism is blurry, and a Good Society would encourage its students to engage with the shades of gray rather than build a Berlin Wall between the two. Albert Einstein, our greatest scientist, perceived this blur: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism.”

Welcome to uninspired empiricism. And just as the water of life feeds the spiritual beings of Christianity, it likewise nourishes the biological beings of empirical science. Water is, if anything, even more central to the empirical view of life than its spiritual counterpart. Biological beings don’t just drink from the water of life, they are the water of life. We have all heard the statistic about how the human body is approximately 180% water in composition, with the corollary injunction to drink 39 eight ounce glasses of water per day (it was not until I began my current job in a hospital that I learned that drinking water by the gallon could actually kill you; we watch our heavy water drinkers like hawks so that they don’t dilute their bodies’ sodium levels to fatal levels- think about that the next time you are on your fifth one-liter bottle of Evian of the day). But as the empiricists adore nothing more than facts, I found this rather succinct passage that nicely captures the fact that we are basically walking water balloons:

“Water is of major importance to all living things; in some organisms, up to 90 percent of their body weight comes from water. Up to 60 percent of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70 percent water, blood is 82 percent water, and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. The unique qualities and properties of water are what make it so important and basic to life. The cells in our bodies are full of water. The excellent ability of water to dissolve so many substances allows our cells to use valuable nutrients, minerals, and chemicals in biological processes. Water's ‘stickiness’ (from surface tension) plays a part in our body's ability to transport these elements all through ourselves. The carbohydrates and proteins that our bodies use as food are metabolised and transported by water in the bloodstream. No less important is the ability of water to transport waste material out of our bodies.” (Interestingly, I found this passage at www.reiki.nu, a website devoted to the practice of reiki. Reiki is a healing tradition which straddles the boundaries between science, as evidenced by its empirical take on water, and spirituality, as its therapy is basically a “laying on of hands” as we would call it in the Episcopal Church. Although, as I understand it, there is no actual touching in reiki, but the healing does transpire between the healer’s hands and the patient’s body. I have no firsthand knowledge of the “empirical” benefits of reiki, unlike my straight teeth, which were incontrovertibly courtesy of my halitosis-plagued orthodontist. But the idea of reiki as I understand it, the blending of empirical scientific knowledge with a recognition of humans as spiritual beings, is exactly the kind of marriage between Science and Religion that is unimaginable to everyday, mainstream America. In our current climate your full buffet of choices is between being either a practicing religious nutball who, if you don’t shoot abortion clinic doctors yourself, regularly lunches with them, or being Mr. Spock, only without his gift for mind-melding or neck-pinching prowess, i.e. all the logic and none of the sex appeal. So even if reiki is as empirically therapeutic as a tanning salon, the reiki people are definitely on to something, which is basically the possibility that the human race lives out the 21st century.)

Water also has a key secondary meaning in the symbolic world of empiricism. This identity reached full bloom with the broadcast on NBC in 1983 of the science fiction Miniseries V. V was your basic aliens-invade-Earth-to-eat-the-humans sci-fi fare, but with a twist. In addition to dining on Earth’s multiethnic population cum cuisine, the “visitors” also wanted our water, to be hauled away in their super-sized flying saucers. V, in addition to offering grade-A network TV entertainment (how I long for the days of network mini-series as cultural event amidst the current TV dessert of the real(ity)), cemented water’s status as Precious Resource. With this move, the empirical worldview, having laid the foundation of the body, or the internal, as water, now linked the “environment”, or the external, to water in similarly concrete fashion. The biological future of our bodies as water, i.e. the future of our very selves, became intrinsically connected to the future of the Precious Resource.

Salvation is just as real for the empirical worldview as it is for the Christian worldview. But unlike Christians, who would save us by saving our souls, empiricists will save us by saving our water (just to spell it out, remember, we are made from water- saving our water is literally saving us). Of course, empiricists must keep their need for salvation hidden from themselves (much like how as a Carolina fan I bury my need for Duke beneath a mountain of hate for Duke; Carolina fans all acknowledge that we can’t live with Duke, but we are all in denial of the fact that we can’t live without Duke). Empiricists hide their thirst for salvation in the best hiding place of all, the English language. On its website the United Nations preaches a little of the empirical Gospel: “Water is essential for life. Water is crucial for sustainable development, including the preservation of our natural environment and the alleviation of poverty and hunger. Water is indispensable for human health and well being.” The last line is invisible, but you can see it nonetheless. It reads “water will save us all”. Codewords like “sustainable development” and “the alleviation of poverty and hunger” are the empiricist’s equivalent of God’s Kingdom realized here on Earth (and with the way things are going they are as realistic as Jesus’ second coming).

Apparently, like the Millenarians, the Empiricists at the UN believe the time for salvation is already here, as they have declared the “International Decade for Action: Water For Life, 2005 to 2015.” But just as the year 2000 came and went for the Millenarians without the anticipated Rapture, the Decade for Action will leave the Empiricists struggling with a world still very much in crisis. Fundamentalist Christians and Empiricists are, ironically, in the same boat together. This boat sits on a lake of symbolic water, and, with passengers unable to compromise, it is taking on that water at an alarming rate. Perhaps if we all drink enough bottled water we can bail the boat out.

We are, indeed, up to something with all of this bottled water, and it does have something to do with salvation. Only it is a kind of salvation that neither the Christians nor the Empiricists had planned for us. Which, having sounded water’s depths for both Christianity and Empiricism, brings us back to the question of what we think we are getting in the bottle that does not flow from the tap. If one understands that Christianity and Empiricism, the bickering fraternal twins that divide the American mind, both regard water as life, then the necessary conclusion is that the act of purchasing a bottle of water is, symbolically, the attempt to purchase life.

This unsettling conclusion relates similarly to both the empirical and spiritual worldviews, as long as we remember that the Empiricists are every bit as on about salvation as the Christians. In order to streamline the discussion I am going to collapse the Christians and the Empiricists into one camp, a move that rests on my argument that the “saved” condition that the UN’s water-smitten Empiricists describe above is also a de facto state of grace. Just as Marx’s classless society was always just religion for atheists, the Empiricists’ vision of the salvation of and, implicitly, by water is a messianic movement for the secular (It is a testament to the potency of Jewish spiritual thinking that, try as we might, westerners are unable to get over the Messiah thing; it matters not whether the messiah is Jesus Christ, classless society, or H2O, we all just need to be saved.).

To get a better sense of the public act of bottled water consumption requires that we go behind closed doors. Bottled water’s first cousin, filtered water, is every bit as prominent inside the American home as bottled water is in the public square (To give a sense of how my home functions, my wife purchased a water-filter/water-pitcher, the kind any normal person never changes the filter on, at some point in the last eighteen months. I have not seen it since the day she brought it home from Target. It may be in that secret part of the house I have no access to where my wife also keeps all of my socks.) The act of filtering water in the home is the most important clue to solving the mystery of bottled water (and yes, I do fancy Miss Scarlet). Since American tap water, by and large, does not need to be filtered to be safely consumed, the act of filtering water is almost entirely symbolic. The water we get out of our taps at home or out of drinking fountains or sinks in public is not physically unhealthy. But it is, as all of our filtered and bottled water attests, truly repulsive. Tap water, 99% of which has no discoloration or aftertaste issues (in fact, according to Wikipedia, “a lot of the bottled water is actually very close to, or in fact is, tap water”), is repulsive because of the very fact that it is free. This interpretation comes into focus with our handy clue, filtered water.

Filtering water is a ritual of purification. Again, since American tap water does not need to be purified of any physically harmful content, the question remains as to what is being filtered out. The water of life that flows out of our taps is free, the equivalent of a gift. Quenching our thirst from the tap-water of life is drinking life as a gift, as a blessing, as grace that can be granted but never earned. Drinking free, healthy tap water is a powerful symbolic act. It links us directly to the source from which it flows, sans intermediary, and it links us to one another, as we all drink from the same source when we drink tap water. The act of drinking tap water is, symbolically, accepting that life is a gift of love, and is, at the same time, the choice to receive this gift in humble gratitude. The act of filtering tap water is symbolically the act of purifying the water by removing the state of grace.

I have said more than once that Christianity and Empiricism are dueling for the hearts and minds of America. This is, actually, abundantly false. They are both pretenders to a throne already buckling under the fat ass of American Consumerism, the fifth and final major western religion. It is America’s fundamentalist faith in Consumerism that makes the purification of tap water, via the filtration of any trace of grace, an act of salvation. The act of choosing to receive the freely given gift of grace is, by the logic of Consumerism, sinful, impure. We still like to believe the Beatles when we hear their anachronistic lyrics: “money can’t buy me love”. Consumerism knows differently, that love can only be bought. Love freely given and received has been made into an impure love. This type of love, the kind symbolized by the water flowing from our taps, must be purified. You don’t do anything chemically significant to water when you run it through your twelve dollar Target charcoal filter/pitcher. But, by running your tap water through that cheap plastic merchandise, you are processing your water through the marketplace. Like Holy Communion which symbolically transforms wine into the Blood of Christ, the filtration of tap water is a transfiguration of a free, i.e. repulsive, tap- water of life into a potable, i.e. commodified, form. Water that has been purified is water that has been Saved.

The salvation of water that begins with the sacrament of filtration is completed by the sacrament of bottling. Processing water through the marketplace, as one does with the variety of store-bought filters (someone who hooks up one of those expensive gadget filters directly to the tap displays more religious fervor than your cheap charcoal filter/pitcher type, but they are praying to the same God) is not enough. The water of life must not only be purified, it must be contained, which is literally accomplished every time a plastic screw-top tightens down on a bottle of water. Even better, bottling water for sale irrevocably marks the water of life as property that can be bought and sold. Bottling, then, is actually the final step in the filtration process. The water of life is completely purified of repulsive grace once it is bottled and tagged with a price. Bottled water says, yes, you can buy me love. In fact, bottled water tells us that in 21st century America, true, or pure love can only be bought.

It turns out the Millenerians may have been on to something after all. Bottled water consumption grew steadily since the mid-1980’s, but in the years bracketing the turn of the millennium, from 1994 to 2004, bottled water sales shot through the roof with a 75% increase (according to data available at www.wcponline.com). The sheer tonnage of bottled water, in addition to the billions of gallons filtered in the home, indicate that a cultural tipping point has been passed. The Millenerians may have expected the end of the material world, but they unwittingly witnessed the end of the world as we know it. The Beatles’ world has given way to REM’s, who saw the end of the world coming in 1987, right when bottled water began to seep up all around us. The world has come to an end, but like REM, we all seem to feel fine. Perhaps because we are all so well hydrated. Or maybe because we really believe that true love in a bottle is only ever $1.50 away.

I would like to think that the glass of tap water I drank at the beginning of this essay was an act of rebellion. Maybe it was no accident that my wife brought home the water filter, and that it sits unused, but lurking, somewhere (beneath my socks). This tenuous situation symbolizes how close we are at all times to being seduced by the belief that you get (only) what you pay for. But every glass of tap water is a testament to the old-timey religion that this “intermarried” Jewish/Christian couple can agree on: the best things in life are free.