First Mystery of Light: Water

When you peer through the peepholes of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, your eye is drawn past the reclining nude to a landscape in the background. There, a waterfall shimmers with a gentle, looping light, suggesting a tranquil, timeless nature. It’s an image of peace. But like everything in Duchamp’s final masterpiece, it is a meticulously crafted illusion. The "magic" is revealed in his instruction manual, and it's this stunning contrast—between the fabricated image and the real, untamable force it represents—that animates the "First Mystery of Light: Water" in Reasons for Étant Donnés.

One apprehends the protean concept of “movement” in two registers, inextricably bound: first, as the psychic and philosophical convulsion of Surrealism, that great historical enterprise of the modern mind; and second, as the literal, mechanical, and indeed elemental principle governing the assembly of a masterwork like Duchamp’s, as well as the very geological and biological processes of the cosmos.

Surrealism, in its most authentic ambition, sought nothing less than to revolutionize human experience, to forge a new consciousness by wedding the rational view of life with the superior power of the unconscious and the dream. This was a quest for a profound and absolute freedom, a Gnostic valuation of the irrational, the poetic, and the uncanny against the imposed norms of a fallen reality. The true engine of this interior movement is André Breton’s formulation of pure psychic automatism—the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral constraint. This principle compels the artist to unlock the phantoms and archetypes of the unconscious mind. Techniques such as automatism, the collaborative parlor game of the cadavre exquis, or the textural revelations of frottage are not mere methods, but rituals designed to invoke this deeper, truer motion of the soul. For its most ardent adherents, Surrealism became less an aesthetic program than a way of life, its liberation of the mind demanding a corresponding liberation in the political sphere.

Against this backdrop of psychic eruption, Duchamp’s Étant Donnés presents a colder, more deliberate theater of motion. Here, literal, mechanical movement is enshrined within the artwork’s hidden machinery, a ghost of the vitalism celebrated by his contemporaries. The Manual of Instruction reveals the waterfall’s motion to be a meticulous illusion, “produced by the rotation of the holes in the aluminum disk.”

This singular effect, described in a poetic fragment as “the only movement / in the otherwise eerily still grotto,” stands as a monument to controlled artifice. The uncanny stillness of the diorama is punctured by a single, sparkling, and deeply ironic pulse, initiating a stark dialogue between perception and reality. This tension is heightened by the work’s very nature as an approximation démontable, a construction whose potential for disassembly and relocation grounds its sublime mystery in the practical fact of physical transport.

The theme expands to a cosmic scale in the accompanying text, Reasons for Étant Donnés, where movement becomes the fundamental grammar of existence. It is the deep, telluric motion of the Asthenosphere, that fluidic layer aiding the inexorable drift of tectonic plates, a process envisioned as the planet’s sole sacrament, a “stew in magma roll, quake, and expand.” It is the circadian rhythm of the universe, cued by the Zeitgeber, the “time-giver” of the rising sun that initiates natural ceremony. Movement is rendered as both celestial passage and mathematical absolute: through the mythological transit of the Bifröst Bridge connecting the mortal to the divine, and through the trigonometric functions of Sine and Cosine that calculate the silent waves of sound and light. Finally, it is the signature of life itself, from the biological function of Lignin facilitating the transport of water in plant cells, to the Pterosaurs’ evolutionary conquest of powered flight, culminating in the primal endowment bestowed upon the archetypal man and woman: the divine “power of movement.”

Duchamp's private manual gives us the "Operational Instructions" for creating his waterfall. There's no water involved. Instead, the effect is purely mechanical, a projection. The "2nd OP. Waterfall," as it's labeled, is produced by the "rotation of the holes in the aluminum disk." To soften the projection and give it an ethereal quality, the instructions suggest that "scotch tape (ground-glass kind) can be stuck behind... the hole."

This waterfall is a "given" in the most literal sense: a human-engineered effect designed to filter light and create an impression. It is part of the "approximation démontable"—an assembly that can be taken apart—a piece of scenery as artificial as the "ad lib" clouds attached to the backdrop. Duchamp presents us with a controlled, contained, and completely fabricated version of nature. It is this quiet, mechanical illusion that Marron’s poetry proceeds to shatter with the force of a tidal wave

Marron’s "First Mystery of Light" plunges us into water as a fundamental, primordial force, teeming with myth, violence, and sacred power. This isn't the gentle loop of an aluminum disk; this is the chaotic water of creation and destruction.

The narrative summons ancient myths and rituals: the spiritual cleansing of a Shinto Misogi waterfall, the life-giving power of the god Enki born of fresh waters, the invulnerability of Achilles dipped in the River Styx, and the birth of Aphrodite from seafoam. Water here is a portal, a source of power, the site of baptism and coronation.

But this sacred force is also violent and terrifying. Marron writes of a "brutal baptism" and an ocean that spits and laughs at feeble human rebellion. It is a current that has been "clawing for decades, threatening through her teeth, I’ll return to you, whether you say stop or not." This is not a force that can be replicated with scotch tape. It is an entity with memory and agency.

This untamable power collides with our modern reality, a world of drained estuaries and marine animals with "stomachs full of plastic." The poem juxtaposes the "sacred bond of hydrogen to oxygen" with its desecration, creating a painful portrait of a life-giving force under siege.

By placing Duchamp's instructions alongside this raw, expansive vision of water, Marron stages a profound confrontation. The man-made waterfall—precise, looping, and illusory—becomes a powerful symbol of our attempts to control, contain, and recreate a natural world that ultimately remains beyond our dominion.

The "First Mystery" shows us that while we may be content to view nature through a peephole, as a filtered projection, the real thing is a raging, life-giving, and destructive current that flows through myth, memory, and our very bodies. It cannot be disassembled. It is the ultimate "given," and its power, Marron reminds us, is far more real than any illusion we might construct to represent it.