ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the river provides more food for the imagination than its metaphorical value, as a facile universalism would have it. From the poetry of Eliot, Bishop and Hughes to Pedro and Marcal's cult, the river shapes mental and physical routines. As Cunha writes, the river infects the person by getting inside his or her mind and body. The brief example of the cult provided the opportunity not just to examine the liquid imagination as situated practice but also to use it analytically. The imagination in these cases produces a human/environment relationship through flow, depth and genealogy. Starting from practice and experience, the liquid imagination has proceeded to an ever more profound involvement with the lived world, leading more comprehensively into it, not out of it. By drawing on related literary representations of the riverine imaginary, the chapter explains how other writers have explored the self's movement across the border zones of the special mental and physical landscapes.
