AT THE SOURCE. HYDRAULIC MEDITATIONS

The essay is a humble attempt at interpreting one sentence taken from Barbara Skarga's text 'On the Source and the Experience of Beginning' comprised in her book 'Metaphysical Quintet'. The sentence, which reads 'Let us, however, begin at the source', provides an excellent opportunity for considering the notion of 'beginning' as well as the moment and place of first appearances of beings. These concepts inevitably lead us towards experiencing whole sequences of events, i.e. they alert us to the immediate urgency of the question of time. Starting from Barbara Skarga's sentence the aurhor would like to demonstrate - with the help of poets (Hölderlin, Whitman), philosophers (Schelling, Derrida), and writers (Calvino, Calasso) - that the source only marks the beginning, does not coincide with it but functions as its sign. In consequence, in turn it also searches for its own 'beginning', for its 'source' in the depth of geological structures, thus becoming a threshold upon which the human experiences the non- and pre-human. Therefore, the experience of the source is not an affirmation of a radically separate and self-sufficient being, but just the opposite - it brings about the awareness of a profound connectedness of each individual being with, and therefore its thorough dependence on, the world which always precedes its appearance. While 'at the source', we only recognize the fact of being on the way towards it.