Total Immersion
I had to go in at the other end,
where diving is permitted, for
unusually, the pool was crowded.
Children were criss-crossing the water with
their parents and, as with ducklings on a river,
I knew that one or two would soon be
losing touch, and paddling frantically
to reattach, regardless of whether I was
in the way or not. I stood, my toes curling
round the pool’s ceramic edge, reluctant
to plunge in and take my chance.
A group of older, West Indian girls
was playing with a huge inflated ball.
One of the girls flung it high into the air. Then,
whoever got there first had won the game.
All over the pool they thrashed through the water,
trying to hang on to their opponents
and slow them down, as well as reach the ball.
Such fun, such glee, but not for me, standing
there, on the edge of everything – not just
the pool, and noticing for the first time,
in several months, the waves painted half way
up and all around the wall, and, for a
ceiling, the plastic, cuboid sky that filtered
natural light, whether from sun or through cloud,
so that always there shone down an intense and lurid blue.
Now from opposite sides of the pool some
Asian youths were swimming towards each other
with such flashy, slashing strokes there must be
someone here they hoped would be impressed.
Needless to say it was not me, still perched
above the chlorinated deep, beginning
to feel cold, and increasingly concerned,
for how was I to swim one length, let alone
the number that I knew I had to do?
Of course, the lanes would soon be physically
in place; then all these people, they would have
to go, every single one of them.
I had been here ten minutes early,
as I like to be to ensure that I
can swim the distance that I know will
calm me down and tire my body out.
But those ten minutes now had gone
and there was just an hour left
to cram the necessary distance in.
It had been ages since I’d dived
and I just plunged straight in,
(legs bent and flailing in the air, no doubt)
confidently expecting soon
to beat the surges under me.
Yet I’d not thought to tighten up my goggles
and the sudden rush of water round my head,
skewed them from my eyes. Out of my depth,
I had to struggle to the side, and even when
I’d readjusted them, they were never really clear again,
as if something on the lens had reacted with the chlorine,
leaving a smeary deposit, like the scum on tea in areas of hard water.
It lasted all the time that I was there; so that dim
through the misty panes and turquoise light, was how
I saw it all that strange, miraculous afternoon.
And this was how I saw her one-piece swimsuit, first,
- an impressionistic flash of scarlet -
before it slipped down the steps and her head
was bobbing on the surface like the polystyrene
floats on ropes now strung from one end to the other
to mark the lanes for different speeds of swimmer.
She was in my lane, the one for ‘medium’ swimmers;
yet she was not, I saw, following the arrows on the board
indicating which side was ‘up’ and which was ‘down’,
and now she was heading straight for me, and I for her.
And then I realised I knew her from before.
I thought she’d looked familiar
when I’d entered the building,
as she locked her bike up to the railings:
fair hair put up, but sprays of it escaping,
red scarf, with cheeks flushed by the cold to match,
Amazonian in stature, but also a painting by Rubens,
perhaps an English rose as well, who knows? I didn’t.
Although I knew her from before, I’d never spoken to her.
She was just someone I’d noticed from afar;
and now she was coming straight towards me.
Who would give way, I thought, as I breaststroked up to her?
I did. It was as if I was invisible,
mere scum on the surface of the pool.
And it got worse when she moved on to backstroke;
for then I really was invisible.
And all the time my difficulties were being intensified,
by one of the Asian youths, who had not left with all the others,
but was hanging round the steps halfway down the lane,
and very definitely not swimming.
The scarlet swimsuit ignored him too,
which was something, I suppose.
(probably she was oblivious of us both.)
But as I swam up and down the lane,
gurgling underneath the water,
then surfacing to survey the scene,
hoping we would not cross
where this young Asian man was hanging round the steps,
(with all the attendant risks of actual bodily contact),
I began to wonder, what was he up to?
There seemed to be a friend of his, also not swimming,
on the other side of the pool, which would explain
to some extent his smiling and his shouting,
but what on earth was the substance of their communication?
Then focusing upon our lane again,
as she back-crawled up to the steps,
I saw she would collide with him.
She had definitely not ever noticed he was there.
Perhaps she didn’t care.
But he did,
and, inanely grinning, almost seemed to will her on.
Yet in the event there was no collision;
for, as she approached,
he ducked under the water
and she passed over him.
A miracle, I thought.
Then, as I swam past the steps,
and, with my forward thrust,
plunged underneath the water,
there, through the milky distance,
as through a cataract in an ageing eye,
I saw it, like a spear, jutting out
from underneath his billowing boxers,
while he, now with his head above the water,
(I’d surfaced and glanced backwards)
continued to grin and gesticulate across the pool.
The stretched out feeling in my stomach
which had been with me all weekend
(and to relax which I had come out swimming)
pulled at me, like tears that could not happen,
as if the ratchet of the rack that I was lying on
had suddenly been turned on another notch.
Then, just as I was wondering how to cope with this,
all around the learner’s pool,
(ten feet from the one that I was in)
there rushed a congregation of West Indian
men, women and their children,
rupturing the rhythmic swish and glug of water,
with singing, and concerted clapping that
echoed and reverberated around the lofty building
to produce for me a kind of pandemonium:
it felt as if my rack had been turned on,
not one, but several notches, all at once.
It was a baptism in which those wishing
to declare their faith would be totally immersed,
as Jesus was by John the Baptist.
I had witnessed one before, but not like this:
from behind my smeared up goggles,
surfacing from water, like a creature of the deep,
to look up at a wall of people lit by
the elongated halos of the pool’s fluorescent lights.
I could hardly make out anything at all.
I certainly saw no one being totally immersed.
To me their singing sounded more like wailing,
their clapping like the beat of drums,
and their swaying from side to side
- and up and down -
caught at the stretched out feeling in my gut.
It felt so sexual and primitive,
as if an orgy was about to happen.
Yet they were here to wash away their sins
and start their lives afresh.
It must be me.
Most of the other swimmers had been drawn
to the shallow end, nearest to the learners’ pool.
They were looking upwards, goggle-free, at the spectacle
trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on,
chatting and exchanging comments with each other;
while I, still through my smeared up lenses,
could only see this wall of swaying people,
gray and pink, with card board cut-out hats and suits.
A look of sugar candy, set off by all their deep black skins.
I knew that unlike all the others I had to go on swimming,
or I would probably have been magnetically sucked in
to what they seemed to be for me.
I could not just gawp up at them
as if I were a tourist or a student of anthropology.
I also had to swim to stretch this thing within my gut
to keep it flexible, for otherwise it felt as if
the weird cacophony that I was hearing
would tune in to my brittleness inside
and make it shatter, like the walls of Jericho.
The Asian guy and the scarlet swimsuit had now left the lane,
attracted by the spectacle of the baptism, I guessed;
but every time I swam by where
he’d ducked and she’d passed over him,
I thought of skeins of semen in the water,
like floaters spoiling the vision of an eye.
Was that water eddying round my limbs,
or him, I wondered, as I took a wide berth
round the steps where it had happened.
I was reminded of a dream I’d had last night -
of a butcher selling meat to me,
huge slabs of steak, grained through with fat,
much more of it than I could ever eat.
There’d been a woman with me buying steaks,
but hers were tuna, and one of them had
somehow accidentally touched the meat.
The butcher had just wiped it off;
but though I’d had to make my purchase,
I knew I’d never eat it. To me it was contaminated -
which was how I felt right now, swimming in the lane
where that had happened, as if it were primordial soup,
in which I was immersed, the source of all our lives originally,
yet now its fishiness was hard to bear, as the root of me.
Water eddying round my legs, which could have been his semen,
got me thinking of the theory that the development of a person
from conception onwards is supposed to recapitulate
the evolution of the species as a whole; and I shuddered
at its apparent confirmation of our slimy origins.
For, as I swam along, immersed in life’s lubricity,
this wasn’t just a theory any more; for me it was reality:
sex was the primordial in the present.
I was appalled.
(Yet dimly, and, perhaps much worse, I knew I was excited too.)
Oh, where had all the usual swimmers gone?
That was another way in which
everything was so odd today:
the guy with the gammy leg who’d
always just come back from Spain;
the violinist with diabetes, who’d told me,
Michelangelo, in painting Judas in the
Sistine Chapel had just made Jesus older;
the woman who had swum all through her pregnancy,
and beyond, to recover her shape and fitness;
the man who’d lost his watch, only to find it
later in the day when taking off his shoe:
none of them was here.
In reality to me they were all the slightest of acquaintances;
yet now I found myself yearning to see them.
I felt like the ‘ducklings’ I had noticed earlier:
to me these slight acquaintances, were the parent I had lost.
So what was I to do? It was too late to leave;
I was already totally immersed.
And anyhow, if I left now,
I had not swum enough to sleep tonight.
So swim, swim, swim, was all there was for it,
on the downward thrust breathe out to hear
air gurgle through the water frothily;
then, as I pull back with my arms, lift up my head
to glimpse the blur of sugar candy
and fluorescent strips, glow mistily
like candles on a birthday cake
being brought out in the dark,
for the waiting tribe to clap at fervently.
Such unearthly sights and sounds,
which were, I knew, not really there,
but only in my head:
It wasn’t just my goggles that were smeared.
It was me, smeared by the something in my soul
that closed me off from what was going on
and made me think that contact
with my opposite would damage me;
that somehow I and the ‘other’
could not be together in one space:
meat with fish,
white with black,
man with woman,
gentile with jew,
west with east,
straight with gay
and so on ad infinitum
and vice versa, too.
And, perhaps, we couldn’t, if the connection
only happened consciously, on dry land, as it were,
remaining at best a willed political correctness
that was bound to wither
because it lacked an animating river;
or came as the result of a sudden flood
from the depths of the unconscious,
swamping everything,
(through Hitler, for example)
with death and psychosis.
But here, now in this swimming pool,
where the clapping and the singing had at last subsided,
and the congregation had dispersed,
almost as quickly as it had come rushing in,
an apparent total silence filled the space.
For the first time that afternoon, I noticed
the fluorescent lighting, and the plastic, cuboid sky
flicker on the gently lapping turquoise water.
And simultaneously, with a warm, illuminating glow,
I sensed the tension within my body and my brain
had eased and clarified – not just now, but previously.
It was as if I’d finally found the parent I had lost,
(though not the one I had been looking for)
and at last had let myself be comforted.
How had this happened, I began to wonder?
Was it the little boy, dressed in pink and brown,
running from his mother, like any naughty child,
who had individualised the mass for me?
Or had something occurred earlier that I’d missed
and would never be able to pin down,
like the baptisms I had never actually witnessed?
I could not tell.
Yet did it really matter?
I looked back at what had taken place with the Asian guy.
Was it so unusual for him to have found
a woman in a scarlet swimsuit attractive and appealing?
Perhaps he’d been embarrassed by his bodily response
and that was why he’d hung around the lane.
Maybe I had not seen what I thought I saw,
through the dim and misty panes that I wore,
and now still wear,
yet somehow differently.
Perhaps I was the one, from whom
I wanted to protect the woman:
the black panther, rampant sexually,
uncaged and finally at large.
That was what I saw in him,
because I could not face it in myself,
and so accept my whole humanity:
my fishiness and finitude,
and find how to transmute
these aspects of me into gold,
as if the swimming pool were
some huge alchemical retort
containing in one space
all the baser elements within me
and compelling them to interact
with the necessary intensity,
if only for an hour.
And has this happened?
As I swim my last length and everyone,
both in the pool and out of it has gone,
(except, of course, the lifeguard
standing stoically around),
nothing is certain logically.
An hour could be
just the blink of an eye,
or an eternity.
Yet for now it does not seem to matter any more,
I think, as I touch the end bar for the final time,
and stand with water at my waist,
my chest heaving more than I had realised,
my skin stretching, but holding me together and intact,
not just literally, but in a deeper sense as well.
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