The Swimmer

I am back in our São Vicente beach front flat. It’s 7.30 in the morning, and I am just about to swim across the bay to Itararé beach where I will sit and drink iced coconut water whilst gazing at the container ships on the horizon. I have many obsessions and swimming is one of them. Both my parents were born in Plymouth and the Hoe seafront with its magnificent circular art deco pool and the beaches of Devon and Cornwall are amongst my earliest and happiest memories. It’s the end of winter in Brasil and the water is on the chilly side, green and crisp, just how I like it. About five hundred meters off the shore, I pause for breath and look into the unmistakeable eyes and lizard head of a sea turtle. It swims alongside me for ten seconds and then dives. It is an emotional experience matched only by the Amazonian pink river dolphin, that appeared out of nowhere and glided past in a moment of Olympian synchronised swimming. There is now a library shelf devoted to the therapeutic benefits of swimming, and in particular its wild variant that exploded during the Covid pandemic when the Glasgow pools closed and forced people to venture out into the lochs, rivers, waterfalls and sea. To float on the black waters of Loch Lomond in the May sunshine, gazing up at snow-capped mountains, is as close to heaven as I am likely to get, and one of my most memorable swims ever was through the crystalline turquoise waters off the white sand beaches of Harris, that even with a wet suit, are icy at around seven degrees. I have temporarily swapped subarctic Scotland for the tropics and the range of aquatic options are predictably spectacular. Navigating through the morning mist in the Baia de São Vicente, silently sliding through the eerily Glencoe like ambience of the Lagoa de Lapinha, splashing like a child in the golden rivers and sparkling falls of the Serra de Espinhaço mountains, hapless body surfing the Atlantic rollers that batter the coast of Bahia, and tentative strokes in the lethal currents off the Ilha de Cardoso, one mistake, next stop Angola. Sport, exercise, therapy, swimming is all these things, but it is much more. Something happens to me when I enter the water. My brain switches into another dimension. I become at peace with the world. For a moment my worries vanish, and I begin to think. The rhythmic movement of lungs, body and brain does wonders for the concentration, whether metronomically ticking off lengths in the pool or pounding through waves, holding a thought, a question and pursuing it to its resolution. In this sense swimming is like a form of philosophy. Thirty years ago, a friend in Glasgow gifted me a wonderful book that has recently been republished. Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur, The Swimmer as Hero, (1992), traces the literary and cultural history of swimming. One of the chapters is on the Romantics, obsessive swimmers who he suggests suffered from a form of “autism, a self-encapsulation in an isolated world, a morbid self-admiration, an absorption in fantasy.” Exactly, I thought. I am not sure that I am a romantic, but his more general description of swimmers struck a nerve; “individuals rather remote and divorced from everyday life, devoted to a mode of exercise where most of the body remains submerged and self-absorbed…introverted and eccentric… involved in a mental world of their own.” The book is full of wonderful stories, perhaps the most famous being Byron’s crossing of the Hellespont. The cinematic history of swimming is not as illustrious as its literary relative. I enjoyed Swimmers (2022) about two Syrian refugees who battle against adversity to compete in the Rio Olympics, and definitely worth watching is NYAD (2023), the remarkable story of 64-year-old Diana’s perilous crossing of the strait between Cuba and Florida. But there is one very special film that I would recommend to anyone. The Swimmer (1968) directed by Jake Perry flopped at the box office, partly because the all-American hero Burt Lancaster is in the lead role and delivers a performance full of psychological menace. A dark disturbing film based on a short story by John Cheever, the film begins with Lancaster’s unexpected appearance at a suburban garden party wearing only his trunks. He plunges into the pool and emerges, manic and intent on swimming across the city, one garden pool after another. His suffering and mental instability is palpable, and as his journey unravels the sense of foreboding intensifies. In the final unforgettable scene, we find him in the porch of his abandoned family home, holding the pose of a Grecian discus thrower. Cut. True to all great films, there is no happy ending and no explanation.

Deco Delirium

Technological Deformations

Postcards From Brazil