Here is a short video that I’ve been working on .
Like my car park beach back in Liverpool, this particular plage privée is associated with ritualistic rhythms of movement and daydreaming: as I swim first upstream and then down, against the current, and then back with it again, I mark my course with the same staging posts each time (this overhanging branch, the rock where you can dive, the jutting irrigation pump, the shallow stretch where you can feel the bed of the river bumping my knees). Moving through the water, I also find myself intensely aware of different smells that cross my path – traces of marshy, slightly sulphurous algae from the murky little pools to my left. This is slow water, but then I take a few more strokes upstream and water flows faster against me, with cleaner, earthier smells – geosmin, carp and warm granite; invasive whiffs of sun tan cream and sweat, then back to tree pollen, grass, leafy muddiness. A really delicate but intoxicating smell drifts in thin pulses across from the undergrowth, but I can never quite trace it to its source… maybe it’s coming from the trees.
I’ve taken a gleaning approach to putting the video together – it’s a kind of collage of family photos and videos (almost all taken on my phone). I’ve woven in scraps of songs and films and sounds to give a sense to give a sense of my thoughts and feelings while swimming up and down the river. The middle section features images and film footage of Alfred Nakache, the amazing champion French (Algerian Jewish) swimmer, who competed in front of Hitler in the 1934 Berlin Olympics. Then in 1944, under Vichy rule, Nakache was deported to Auschwitz. He swam in drainage tanks at the camp. SS officers made him fetch daggers (in his teeth) from the bottom of their pool. His wife, Paola, also a competitive swimmer, and 2 year old daughter, Annie, died in the camp, but Nakache survived and then swum in the 1948 Olympics.
Inventory of material used in the video:
Philippe Este (dir.) Comme Une Poisson Dans L’Eau
Gaston Bachelard (1942) Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter
John Berger (2016) ‘On Vigilance’ in Confabulations
Roger Deakin (1999) Waterlog
Thomas Eakins (1884-85) ‘The Swimming Hole’
Joni Mitchell (1976) Hejira
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca.1560) ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’
Marc Chagall (1975) ‘The Fall of Icarus’
Leon Barnard (2017) ‘Reflections with Hannah at Hoylake Model Boating Pond’; ‘Emsworth weir – where the river meets the sea’
William Carlos Williams (1962) ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’
Deanna Templeton (2016) The Swimming Pool
- H. Auden (1938) ‘Musée Des Beaux Arts’
Frank and Elaeanor Perry (dirs.) (1968) The Swimmer (based on the 1964 John Cheever short story)
André Kertesz (1917) ‘Underwater Swimmer’; ‘My Brother as Icarus’ (1920)
Everard Digby (1587) De Arte Natandi – trs. into English as The Art of Swimming by Christopher Middleton
US War Department (1944) Watermanship
Melchisdédec Therenot (1696) L’Art de Nager
Henry Marlow and Martin Aitchinson (1971) Ladybird Book of How to Swim
Paris Match (21st March 1938) front cover featuring Alfred Nakache
Christian Meunier (dir.) Alfred Nakache: Le Nageur D’Auschwitz
Thomas Eakins photos of ‘study in human movement’
Edward Middleditch (1953) ‘Sheffield Weir II’
Alice Oswald (2016) ‘Severed Head Floating Down River’ in Falling Awake
Sally Mann (1987) ‘The Last Time Emmett Modelled Nude’ in Immediate Family
Clara Bow Hollywood’s Lost Screen Goddess
Archive Photos of Hoylake Baths from Hoylake Village website
Archive Photos of German officers (‘Wehrmacht in swimming trunks’) http://histomil.com/viewtopic.php?t=16191
Archive photo of diver at Hoylake baths (uploaded to Pinterest by Joyce Jennings)
More Swimming and Dreaming…
Here is the link to another ‘swimming’ video, dedicated to John Berger.
And here is the abstract for a paper I gave to accompany my video at the Berger Now conference in September 2017:
In ‘On Vigilance’ (2016), when John Berger writes about swimming up and down his favourite municipal pool, he conjures up an almost utopian vision of the ‘egalitarian anonymity’ afforded by such communal spaces. As he dives under water, he describes ‘the sensation of having entered another time-frame’. And at first it seems that breaching the surface of the pool allows Berger to escape from ‘the pain of living in the present world.’ After all, ‘the cruelty towards others like ourselves…is difficult to imagine here as you turn to swim your twentieth length.’ Yet, as he ‘swims on (his) back and ‘looks up at the sky through the framed glass roof’, Berger also meditates upon traumatic events happening elsewhere. ‘Held by the water’, he recalls ‘stories told by miniscule ice crystals in the silence of the blue’: he charts the patterns of a cirrus cloud’s ‘undulations’, and follows the drifts of this ‘material reverie’ (c.f. Bachelard) to Gaza, where twenty Palestinians have been ‘blown to pieces in their homes’ the previous day. And he thinks of ‘35 illegal immigrants…found suffocating in a shipping container that had crossed the North Sea to dock in London.’
Placing the relationship between water and dreaming at the axis of my paper, I aim to explore connections between the work of John Berger and Gaston Bachelard. According to Bachelard, ‘a being dedicated to water is a being in flux’ (1942) and my contention is that both Berger and Bachelard use a water-borne vocabulary to write about suffering. I am especially interested in tracing continuities between Bachelard’s phenomenological text, Water and Dreams, which was published in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, and Berger’s recent work (see for example: Confabulations [2016]; Bento’s Sketchbook [2011] and Here Is Where We Meet [2005]).
I would also like to offer a rhythmanalysis (Henri LeFebvre) of my own annual ritual of swimming and daydreaming along the Chassezac river in the Ardêche region of France. Every day, for a couple of weeks each year, I swim up and down the same stretch of water. And when I am swimming (or floating) in this riverscape, my thoughts, like Berger’s, often seem to drift ‘elsewhere’ (c.f. Merleau-Ponty). It is as if my refrain-like movements, and my immersion in this particular medium – the ‘clear green water’ (Bachelard) of a French river – provoke a heightened sense of subjective permeability and exchange. A key concern in my paper will therefore be to consider how, through the sensorium that connects us with water, we apprehend ourselves as porous beings. We absorb the world. The world absorbs us. ‘Inside and outside exchange their dizziness’ (Michaux). Or, as Berger suggests at the end of his 2016 essay, we can even change places with the clouds which float above the swimming pool: ‘I’m no longer observing them: they are observing me.’
Car Park Beach 