“As you swim,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her soulful meditation on summer and the art of presence, “you might be washed of all of the excrescences of so-called civilization, which incorporates the incapacity to be completely happy underneath any circumstances.”
This ablution is not any small present to our civilization-stifled lives, wherein the physique is an afterthought of the thoughts and the ego. However beneath it’s one thing extra primal than mere pleasure — we’re every fashioned, in spite of everything, within the moveable ocean of the womb, having begun our collective evolution within the immense womb of Earth’s primordial ocean. As we swim, we’re not a lot forgetting civilization as remembering our elemental nature. It’s hardly stunning that swimming figures into a few of our deepest sensemaking — Kafka drew on it in exploring the nature of reality and Alan Watts wove it into his summation of a basic tenet of Taoism.
That interpenetration of the basic and the existential what Invoice Hayes explores within the pretty opening pages of Sweat: A History of Exercise (public library).
He begins his magnificent chronicle of working out the body and the soul the place all of us have all the time begun: with swimming — one thing he grew up doing along with his father, onetime captain of the West Level swim group, after which rediscovered half a century later along with his late associate, the irreplaceable Oliver Sacks, a faithful swimmer himself.
Describing the unusual thrill of plunging right into a mountain lake on the peak of autumn, he writes:
There’s violence on this: the physique breaking the glassy floor, crashing by means of it, the blasting noise in a single’s ears — and the sensation on one’s pores and skin, of one’s pores and skin and nerves, right down to the bones. It’s a sensation not not like ache.
I suppose it’s ache. I consider icicles breaking. There’s sharpness. I’ve my goggles on and see what I really feel: chaos, a watery chaos, a chaos of sensations. Murky greens and browns and blacks and likewise splashes of white, like slashes of paint, by means of the transparency, by means of the vitreous of the attention of the lake. I see my arms akimbo earlier than me, and bubbles — air bubbles. I really feel like a scuba diver with no gear, and there’s a flash of panic; the water is chilly, fifty levels I’m instructed, and I’m virtually confused by it, the not-rightness of it. However in that very same on the spot, I’m shifting ahead, pushing by means of the water, onward.
As he particulars the physiology of the expertise, the native poetry of the physique emerges:
I kick onerous, instinctively feeling that by kicking I’ll get away from the chilly. There’s nothing else to do. Now I see my arms stretched out earlier than me, my arms in a V, and I’m bulleting by means of the water, acutely aware that I’m shifting — flying — and that the air in my lungs is working out.
I see the inexperienced transparency lightening, the floor nearing. I attain my proper hand ahead so far as I can and my left arm again, as if pulling the string on a bow, in place to launch into freestyle as quickly as I emerge.
Surfacing is the other of plunging, nevertheless it feels the identical, the large chaos of sensations — sensations of temperature, water, pressure, mild. Sure, now there’s mild as I break by means of and see the shore, the boathouse, bushes, and I seize for air (that’s the way it feels, gasp isn’t the best phrase, it has a bodily, muscular feeling to it), seize a lungful, and thrust, pull, kick, rotate: swim. I’m going so far as 4 or 5 breaths will take me, so far as I can go with out considering of anything, then flip round. Climbing onto the dock, my pores and skin and muscle tissues are taut, oxygenated.
Later, a buddy asks me why I might do that — it’s October, for God’s sake; the lake is freezing.
“As a result of I can,” I say.
Complement with artist Lisa Congdon’s illustrated love letter to swimming, then revisit Invoice Hayes on the scientific poetics of sleep, with a salve for insomnia from Maurice Sendak.
