Waterfall.

Sehr gutes Ex. - Englisch. - Text / Beiblatt von Deborah Tall. - Moss Glen Falls; Green Mountain Power Corporation, Winooski River Vermont; Ice Falls Erie Canal; Niagara Falls; Great Falls of the Passaic; Fall Creek Falls / u.v.a. - They are pure verb - "shaking and quaking, pouring and roaring, flowing and going," as poet Robert Southey rhymed it. Waterfalls, after all, exist only in motion. The dry Rock of drought years is only a craggy cliff face - nothing much to write home about. Waterfalls in season, though, are nature's most reliable show. They are the river's current compressed to a moment, held up for view as if on a stage. The quieter waters of our lives pale by comparison. We take journeys with waterfalls as destination. We carry around their images and names in the travelogue of the brain: Niagara, Kaaterskill, Yosemite, Yellowstone, sites of some of the greatest American landscape painting and photography, our natural icons. Niagara Falls, a tourist magnet for hundreds of years already, was even consecrated by the Catholic Church in 1861 as a "pilgrim shrine." The great waterfalls of the nation remain, if not shrines, secular sanctuaries of the wild, emblems of the sublime view of nature that so shaped the early American imagination - oversized wilderness, landscape as revelation. Tradition aside, we do seem to have a particular attraction to vertical water versus horizontal. Maybe we think of Hercalitus's dictum that we can't step into the same river twice and realize that, standing before a waterfall, we can't see the same river twice. It arrives and vanishes in an instant, is endlessly in flux. We may try to follow a single drop of water from precipice to base, to measure its velocity, its drop and outward journey, but it disappears into the on-rushing whole. The waterfall broadcasts a perpetual carpe diem - over the edge into oblivion in the twinkling of an eye. Or, more accurately, over the edge into the dullness beyond - the suddenly still, sulky river that forgets it was ever anything as spectacu-lar as a waterfall. But if waterfalls are defined by their movement, their music and palpable presence in the air, the tension between their ongoing vanishing and very ongoingness, what hope is there of reproducing their impact in the still form of the photograph? Can the waterfall's performance survive still life? Not only do artists face this inherent obstacle in approaching the waterfall as subject, creative impulses. Our path to the waterfall is lined with markers pointing us toward the "appropriate" response. We earn the backpack of the sublime and the picturesque with us, reams of maudlin poems, the whole American mythology of Niagara and the Wild West. Can we ever hope to see waterfalls for what they are - an accident of nature, gravity, a moment of liquid energy:1 We almost cannot help but hear them "roar"; we watch their waters "rush" over the precipice as if it were an act of will. One must look far and wide for descriptive language free of personification. Whether as honeymoon mecca, spiritual emblem (the Almighty's handiwork), or symbolic slice of American wilderness, the waterfall has attracted its share of excess and kitsch. See it on any cheap calendar or dime store postcard rack. In ads for soap, it is an emblem of "cleanliness is next to godliness." As symbol of transcendence, it is the setting for any number of advertisements hawking uplift. � (D.T.) ISBN 9783923922994