thick wake
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION:
The pressure of water on your skin is different depending on the type of water you are in. You know this, not because you can distinguish the minute variance in pressures of water. You know this because this is physics. At least the way you understand it. No, physics is not subjective. Rather, this is the way you understand what you’ve read in the National Geographic magazines that sat on the shelf in your grandmother’s living room. A little trivia bit you’ve carried with you since flipping through the glossy pages on the carpet, on your belly, heels kicked up and crisscrossing. There were stacks and stacks of old issues and every now and again you would gravitate by that worn spot in the carpet below the shelf. Your mom suggested getting rid of them, as they were simply collecting dust. You would lose yourself and time while your parents were doing the things that you will learn much later that you do with your parents at that age, when your roles start to reverse. But for now, you’ve proceeded to lose yourself in the contours and sinuous lines depicting the hydrodynamics of humpback whales as they dive to depths of hundreds of feet. And didn’t realize you were holding your breath. Crisscross, applesauce.
In an ocean, the water is more dense because of salt, dissolved over time. (That part is chemistry, not physics.) The salt content and depth of the oceans are much greater than the chlorine water of a pool, say, even the deepest deep end. Even the block-long Olympic-sized public pool in your neighborhood in Brooklyn. Or how deep you imagine it would be. You’ve never been there, after it reopened as an actual pool instead of an edgy venue for a massive outdoor dance performance. The performance’s success led the city to reinvest and refill the pool for all to use as it was intended. There were no more glass bottles and used needles that filled the pool, thanks to the performers who cleaned up the concrete themselves to make it usable for dancing. And then the city said, thanks, we’ll take it from here. Splish, splash.
Water pressure can feel more intense because of temperature too. The salty cold waters of the ocean put more pressure on your skin than fresh water or bathwater enhanced with epsom salts. Being in salty cold water brings on a feeling of freedom you can’t replicate anywhere else. Swimming comes naturally to you. You can’t explain it more than that. Our bodies are organized in such a mysterious way that no study of science can unlock the origin of our instinct to walk, breathe, or swim.
Five years ago, I edited home videos of my swimming competitions from 1990 for a video installation. A process in collaboration with my father, who carefully transferred vhs cassettes to the digitizing contraption he’d acquired. A process both of us took very seriously. He indexed and handled them as if he wore museum gloves. My dad loves artifacts. And I have loved film and video since I was a child. I only realize this now, some decades later. But as my friend pointed out, the first serious dance I made in college was full of video and projection. I somehow forgot about that, as I was so focused on Dance at that time. And Autechre, and Jeff Buckley and Ben Harper (…mmm Ben Harper). Video affords me an indisputable memory. I can see it and share, saying “look, this happened.” Rather than wait for my recall to fail me. It will entirely, inevitably, as unreliable as it is now.
This time, the summer of 1990, reduced to a video cassette tape, serves as my whole memory. I suppose a box keeps my ribbons in a closet in my parent’s house, as well. My mom is not as fond of artifacts. Yet she allows this box to consume a small piece of real estate in her home in my old room. A space not used, but not forgotten either. Our third place, the pool, most days of every summer for six years were spent there. My mom would take us for ass-crack swim practice and we’d stay until late afternoon when dad would join after teaching. All that remains is a digital file from a plastic cassette bound for the dump, and a deep affection for Lemonheads candy. Seeing these home videos now, I am struck by the constant cheering of supportive parents on the pool deck (that was thankfully silenced as I swam, after every breath between my stroke). As my home video-maker and basketball coach, my dad executed a zoom-in on my stroke, following me back and forth the 25-meter pool so I can review later and improve. He held it steady despite joining in with an occasional “com’on Leslie!” I imagine his old photography itch is tickled with this new technology as he gathers pick-up shots: artfully panning across an empty pool, capturing my mom floating on her back silently during adult swim, and films (out of mic-shot) my sister and I clarifying the rules of some game before both going underwater to see who could scream the loudest. Grainy and cam-corded, our bronzed bodies against the bright blue of the pool struck me as a beautiful and satisfying. A palette that just imbued Summer. My sensorial memory is fantastic, I should add. It lives deep in my bones and I can still feel the pool’s water almost too hot by the end of the day, smell the chlorine and bleach combo in the bathroom, and of course taste the sticky sweet Lemonhead secretion coating my fingers. I could feel my mom’s breath on my own face, as I watched her with my baby sister, blowing before she dunked her underwater to teach her the basics. As she had taught all of us kids to do. It was important to her. (She still swims, and advocates for it. I watched in awe as she convinced a member in her bridge club, some seventy years old, let her teach her to float on her back. Another basic move, according to my mom’s expertise.)
What’s missing from these images, this collection of magnetic imagery and sound, is contextual. The zoom on those cameras was shitty anyway. Often, artifacts like these chime the nostalgic bell so effortlessly, it’s too loud to make out any of its negligence. The noise, like the parents’ cheering, becomes a wall of sound, impenetrable by the realities that could cut down this memory at the knees.
Was it obvious and evident then and I was just too young? Or it happened so frequently, it was simply unremarkable? Or perhaps my parents, instead, sought out opportunities to infiltrate monotone spaces? This landscape, so wholly suspended by a single VHS tape, suddenly expands and races to meet me bent at the waist, staring me in the face thirty years later. Were we the only black family at this members only swim club?
They used to drain pools, you know.
You go to the ocean when you’re lonely, you get to float out there and disappear for a while. Not needing to catch up, for a minute. You kick your heels up and knock your head back and the two flat mounds on your chest start to dry in the air and sun. Along the back of your body, there’s a push, a snug, a holding up. And above the wind catches the hairs on your skin. A great inhale allows you to feel your chest expand both more deeply in the water, and rise above its surface, at once. Here, you are your most self: half in and half out. One is the future, the other is the past and only here can you be present. Your body intertwines with the alchemy of the water and so begins your most pleasurable decay. Flakes of skin, strands of hair, that piece of kale that’s been stuck in your tooth since lunch… is our first course. The sodium and chlorine jump to bind with your offerings, and will eventually become heavy enough to rain down for future formations of rock. You are not just spending time, this is time itself. No need for words—language is all messed up with feeling. There’s no sense in making meaning as it’s sloshing all around in arrhythmic crests. You belong to nothing for this moment. The sum of all of this negative space gives you great pleasure. Bit by bit each alchemical shift…your dissolve your demise. This could take a while so you speed it along with sips and of brine through your nose and mouth. Mmm you think, me-flavored water. Until the barrier between you is completely indistinguishable. Your very cells commingle and swirl far and wide, to depths where other, much older contaminants remain, awoken and swaying in reaction to this disturbance. A celebration for your stain, a seeping that can’t be collected and reassembled. Still, just a minuscule spot in the sea but you revel in this moment of greatness, being bigger than you actually are. Drip, drop.
The ocean is not like a pool, where a contamination can be properly handled. Where a pool has lanes to create the most efficient path, the ocean curves, meanders and changes its mind. There’s no salt to keep you afloat but a ledge and ladder to give you a clear way out. Your absence, makes stagnant what your movement made alive. Just keep swimming. One, two. Keeping the rhythm. Two, one. Like a needle on a record, put your head down. While the world goes by beneath, so that we can realize the song.
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