Swimming

Content note: very brief mention of drugs

I was an adult when I learned to swim, and I think that is why water is troubling and desirable to me, and why it appears in so many of my dreams and visions.

In the recurring dream I have about water, I am in a hot, overcrowded swimming pool, close to many other bodies. I feel clammy and claustrophobic, and flee for the quiet of a nearby lake. Though I find momentary peace, I realise I am too far out, and the water is freezing and dangerous. Reluctantly, I return from isolation to the crowded pool.

Water in this dream seems to signify intimacy. Neither the hot pool nor the freezing lake allow the right distance from others. But the sea has the possibility of the right kind of connection: an oceanic feeling. I long for the ocean in my landlocked part of the country.

There is plenty of water close by, even here. In her book, Small Bodies of Water, Nina Mingya Powles describes water very close to where I live, in the Peak District, in beautiful detail:

“A forest pool surrounded by soft ferns and foxgloves bent over by the wind. A blue reservoir glistens through the pine trees on either side of the little pool. The water is cool, and soft, the colour of jasmine tea, submerging my skin in flickering red and orange light.”

This sounds like the desirable water of my dreams, the kind that that can easily turn lethal. I am struck by how the nearness of this idyllic water to me makes it harder to reach, somehow.

On the last day of my recent trip to Brighton, we walked twelve or thirteen miles. To the marina where we lived one winter in an off-season holiday let, a cabin on stilts in the water made of corrugated iron and painted bright yellow. It shook in high winds and it felt like we were living on a wrecked boat. We walked past our old jetty and down the undercliff walk where the landscape changed and became more ragged. And were fishing boats clustered. A place where labour was more visible than leisure.

Later, we returned to the main strip, and I lay on hot stones in my bra and ate a cup of pistachio ice cream. I could see a beach club where I once danced to Shackleton, very high, full of oceanic feelings. I had experienced the temporary relief from the pain of disconnection from others. Recollecting that moment of ego dissolution, there, on the beach, I felt safe. There was nowhere else to go. The sea held me.

If you would like to learn more about oceanic feelings, you can listen to Jackie Wang’s compelling talk where she traces a history of oceanic feelings from the letters between Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud, where the term originated, to Marion Milner and Fred Moten. Or maybe you would enjoy reading Erika Balsom’s book An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea.

Perhaps you have an oceanic feeling of your own to explore in your writing: a dream to decode, or a body of water to trace.

I am dipping my toe into Are.na, and I have started a channel on oceanic feelings for anyone who would like to submerge in them.