greetings from the shallow end
This Week in Reading:
Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton
Leanne Shapton is a former competitive swimmer that once swam at the Canadian Olympic trials. She was very good, at one point ranking eighth in the country—but not Olympic good. In sports, being talented doesn’t count for much unless you are one of the most talented people in the world. There is no point if you aren’t the best.
Her memoir is a series of meditations about swimming: the discipline required, the repetition, the underwater quiet. Swimming Studies is a multimedia book, Shapton’s writing interspersed with watercolor sketches of pools and former teammates, studio portraits of every swimsuit she ever owned. It is interesting that Leanne Shapton’s second career is in illustration. Art is a field with a similarly narrow window for success, but whose metrics are a more open to interpretation than an oversized stopwatch hanging above a diving board. In some ways it makes perfect sense, an art practice requires the same discipline and repetition as professional athletics. Shapton works primarily in watercolor for this memoir, water both the subject and medium of her story. Watercolor, like swimming, is a material that requires both precision and confidence.
In recent years I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by jock culture— the strength, the dedication, the fixation on winning. I want the stopwatch on the wall, the measurable improvements, a quantifiable victory. Who needs nerds when you can be fast and beautiful?
My mother dutifully enrolled me in swim lessons for the first decade of my life—a side affect of being a boat person is a steadfast insistence that your daughter learn to swim. The early years involved diving for colored rings in the shallow end, the later ones required endless laps of freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke—passing again and again beneath the blue and white pennant flags strung across the pool, noticeably outpaced by my classmates. I never managed to perform a flip turn without inhaling a lung’s worth of water. When I was thirteen a friend asked me to take scuba diving classes with her brother’s Boy Scout troop. I had a panic attack on the bottom of Puget Sound and swore that I would never dive again. Pools make me nauseous, the chlorinated air causing me, without fail, to dry heave in the locker room.
Suffice to say, I’m not a swimmer. In the water I am aware that it is not an environment I am meant to inhabit. I prefer to float, my head firmly above the surface, (where the air is!) my toes bobbing down to periodically graze the bottom—reassurance that I have not ventured too deep. I like natural water (shallow, please): an alpine lake in August, a Nebraskan quarry. Shapton draws a distinction between swimming and bathing. She writes, “Bathing: the word itself feels like a balm, a cleanse, rather than the wavy struggle of swimming.”
I don’t know what makes me a bad swimmer. Is it that I lack courage? Or endurance? What does this reveal about me? Like most things I am bad at (basketball, chess, crossword puzzles, ceramics) I have decided that it isn’t a very important skill to have.
In writing this newsletter, there are easy parallels I could draw between Swimming Studies and our current moment— 2020 has been a year of treading water. But this feels trite, obvious. Lazy writing. Writing about quarantine at all feels trite; the same phrases recycled over and over— “uncertain times”, “unprecedented situation”, “extraordinary moment”. I start every sentence with “when this is all over.” When this all over, we will go back to that Thai restaurant we love. When this is all over we will drink cold white wine in the park. When this is all over Igo to Maine or Oregon or Mexico or Finland. Writing about the pandemic may be trite, but to write about anything else seems insincere, as if to pretend that my thoughts aren’t, too, orbiting the same tired subject. Doing anything in quarantine feels futile—completing two thousand laps in a pool gets you no closer to the other side of the Pacific.
I realized this week that I am depressed. Depression is at once a natural reaction to these extraordinary times (extraordinary times! Again—trite), and at the same time—extremely mundane. Depression, unlike a global pandemic that has frozen the world economy and locked each of us in our own homes, is familiar, even manageable.
A decade of swim lessons has not made me a great swimmer, but I know enough not to drown. I wouldn't be able to get myself to shore but I can keep my head above the water long enough for someone to come save me. I, a land dwelling creature, am treading water—growing more weary with every passing minute. It takes a lot of energy to not go anywhere.
Sophie is a true water baby, scissoring across the blue with clean, even strokes. Under her tutelage, I have started swimming, or rather, bathing, off the Southern California coast. When this is all over, I will go where the edge of Pacific brushes up to kiss the Malibu sand and submerge my body in the ocean.
Studio-ing
I have been avoiding my studio space during this time, but I’ve been chipping away at my jock tarot cards at home. I only have 10 left! I’m hopeful I can get them done before quarantine ends. In honor of this book I made this swimming star:
Further Reading:
Reading this memoir has made me want to reread Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw, a novel about a Olympic swimmer that falls in love with her competitor.