A man once told a story about two fish. One asked: “How’s the water?”. The other had no idea what water was. This parable was retold by David Foster Wallace. But what he offered could stand beside any page of the Zohar or the Corpus Hermeticum.
The parable that begins with a fish unaware of its element conceals a wisdom older than its author. It repeats the ancient instruction whispered to initiates before the mirror of the waters: do awake within the medium that sustains you. David Foster Wallace spoke to graduates in the tone of a secular priest; his sermon touched the banal of a supermarket queue. He warned the audience of the invisible water of habit, of the slow hypnosis that turns the mind into a wheel of resentment and self-reference. To awaken, one must first see the element one breathes. The task is alchemical: it asks the mind, floating within its own liquidity, to recognise itself. That moment of awareness is the first ray of consciousness emerging from the sea of unconscious order; the first dawn within the head.
The ancients named the element of water Mem. In the Sefer Yetzirah it is one of the three primordial letters from which the world was spoken. Mem signifies the maternal substance, the amniotic silence in which creation gestates. All forms drift within its unspoken depth until a word divides them. Like the fish, the mind is born in that ocean of undifferentiated perception; the act of thinking moves within it without seeing it. The ordinary man lives suspended in this medium; he is moved by tides he cannot name. Wallace called this the default setting. The Hermetic named it the lunar state, ruled by Qoph, the letter that governs the back of the head, the dream-side of the mind. If we live under Qoph, we live in reflection, where the Moon governs, where the soul is shaped by forces it does not yet illumine.
I. Qoph and the Default Setting
The letter Qoph marks the nocturnal hemisphere of consciousness. It belongs to the Moon and the instinct that rules without words. In the Tarot it is the Arcana called The Moon, where two animals howl toward a distant light whilst a path disappears into mist. That scene depicts the state of the mind before awakening: caught between dual instincts, longing for direction, half-lit by borrowed light. The speech of Wallace describes this same condition in the language of modern psychology. His default setting is Qoph rendered in prose. It is the self in automatic motion, repeating gestures, reacting to traffic, cursing the slowness of a cashier. He did not need to speak of angels or of the Demiurge; he instead spoke of attention. But attention is the same gate the ancients called memoria Dei: remembrance of the Divine presence within the act.
When the fish becomes aware of water, it pierces the veil of Qoph. It glimpses the element as element and the unconscious as medium. The act of seeing transforms it. Awareness ceases to be a mirror and it becomes a lamp. The shift is subtle, complete. The same traffic jam becomes a monastery corridor; the same cashier becomes the Angel of Patience. The banal world remains, but its substance turns transparent. The fish never manages to leave the sea, but awakens within it. This is the essence of the Hermetic gesture: to realise that the world itself is the body of God, perceived through varying degrees of clarity.
II. The Passage from Qoph to Shin
When consciousness turns upon itself, Qoph transmutes into Resh. And Resh means the head, the face turned toward the Sun. It corresponds to the Arcana The Sun, where two children stand hand in hand within a garden of clarity behind them. The beasts of The Moon have been reconciled in this card. Reflection becomes direct radiance. In astrology, this is the passage from the fourth to the tenth house, i.e., from the midnight of the soul to its midday, from the lunar depth of the Imum Coeli to the solar height of the Medium Coeli. The interior ocean allows the light from above to pierce through.
The sermon of Wallace encodes this same change in secular language. He calls the listener to choose awareness, to create meaning within ordinary life. In Hermetic terms, he urges the soul to turn from Qoph to Resh. The very act of choosing to attend reshapes the cosmos within, since the microcosm and the macrocosm are mirrors. The point of choice is the point of light. To live attentively is to perform an invisible rite. Each act of awareness is a prayer of the intellect and each deliberate gesture a re-creation of the world.
In the solar state of Resh, we recognise necessity as expression of Divine order. The traffic jam becomes a wheel of fortune and the mundane errand becomes pilgrimage. The same light that burns in the Sun burns behind the eyes. This is the meaning of fiat lux: not a command hurled into chaos, but a quiet consent that lets consciousness dawn within form.
The passage between Qoph and Resh can be felt in the body. The letter Qoph rules the back of the head, where perception receives passively; Resh rules the forehead, where will radiates outward. The journey from unconscious reaction to conscious act is physiological and spiritual. When we move from lunar reflection to solar lucidity, we reverse the current of the nervous system; we let light flow from within rather than from without. Those who achieve this balance become the Sun of their own firmament.
III. The Monastery of the Supermarket
When Wallace speaks of the checkout line or the highway, he is describing the cloister of the modern age. The monastery has dissolved into the landscape of consumption, but its calling endures: to pray without ceasing. The monk once tilled fields while repeating the name of God; now the layman drives or shops while repeating fragments of irritation. The spiritual revolution he proposes is to replace that noise with awareness. It is the same command the old monks of the Beneditine order uttered: ora et labora. Work and prayer form one motion. Attention sanctifies labour.
The lunar mind ceases to resist the world and begins to mirror its harmony. The Sun within recognises itself in the light that strikes the surface of a cereal box. The supermarket becomes a temple of incarnate matter. All becomes part of the same living geometry.
The saint of the digital century no longer retreats to the desert. He awakens within the data flow, within the urban noise. His solitude is interior. His prayer is the act of seeing the world without hatred or indifference. The alchemy is conducted when attention, once servant of desire, becomes service itself. The word service regains its Sacred root. The banal ceases to mock the Spirit and it becomes its field of action.
The teaching of This is Water returns to the same truth hidden within the ancient letters: to know the element that sustains you is to become Light within it. The fish that perceives water already rises toward the Sun. The movement from Qoph to Resh is the journey of consciousness through the zodiac’s spiral. From the lunar home of Cancer to the solar summit of Capricorn, the soul climbs the ladder of attention. At its height stands the truth the mystics beheld: the act of seeing is itself Divine.
The Gnosis of attention is the only sacrament that cannot be taken from the human. When we remember the element that surrounds us, the waters part; when we looks towards the light of Resh, the world shines. This is water.
Κύριε ελέησον