1 hour
to east lake library and back
84 degrees
No open swim today. It wasn’t canceled, but I wanted to watch the tour stage live and the air quality was very bad this morning — wild fires from Canada. Hours later, I might be regretting missing it a little — and if it rains Sunday morning or they close the lake, I’ll be regretting it a lot. Oh well. I walked to the library instead. Hot with bright sun, hardly any shade.
10 Things
- leaving the house, a sudden swarm of bzzzzzbzzzzz — bees? nope, a drone hovering above the house. Google earth? Images for a nearby house for sale? Something else, more sinister?
- 2 people on bikes in bright yellow vests
- an older man walking by the church just behind the library, hunched, his head tilted to the side awkwardly, wearing a rumpled suit
- passing by a different church — in the courtyard, heard not seen: a fountain/water feature bubbling
- same church: a sign for “little sparks” (preschool?) and silver mushroom shaped lights lining the sidewalk in front of the door
- a woman on the public phone in the library — no I don’t have that, but I can tell you my social security number, my address, or my date of birth, which she then did, loudly
- someone sitting on a front stoop of a duplex, the front doors separated by 2 garages, listening to BBC news, 5 bodies were recovered, or something equally gruesome
- 2 people behind me, walking slightly faster, slowly gaining — not seen, heard: the occasional footstep sliding on sand or dirt or gravel
- as I walked past a car parked in a driveway, I heard a noise — sort of like an alert or an alarm or a ring tone. returning later, heard it again when I passed
- (noticed many times before) a free library at the edge of a yard, under it 4 or 5 stones, one of them with eyes, positioned to resemble a (book) worm
As I walked, I thought about water and being immersed in it, then I imagined being immersed in the air that surrounded me, not separating me from the world but connecting me to it, in a soft haze of togetherness, hearing all the other sounds, feeling a part of them. I thought about something I read the other day in Darby Nelson’s For Love of Lakes:
Sight insists on separation; hearing, like touch or taste or smell insist on connection.
Scott Russell Sanders, cited in For Love of Lakes
Sight insists on separation. To me, very little feels separate with its blurred lines and fuzzy forms, and sounds are often difficult to isolate and find their source.
Then, another thought: to be present in a moment requires soft absorption: not focused attention on what you are hearing, but an openness to taking in what’s happening now and only reflecting on it later.
Here are the 2 books I picked up from the library:
- Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir/ Maxine Kumin
- It is Almost Than: A Collection of Images + Text by Women Artists & Writers/ Lisa Pearson, ed.
Anne Carson, Water, and You
Found this passage from Anne Carson which I think fits with a conversation of immersion and being reminded of the self mid-swim.
There is a moment you are swimming in the pool, stroking forward strongly and down across the fingers of your right hand as you press it through the water, comes a hair. You feel this hair as a jolt of what should not happen. Just a single hair, so slight a sensation you could think you imagined it except, pushed against your fingers by the pressure of the water as you continue to thrust, it clings an instant, it will not go its way, you may have to shake your fingers sideways in the water spoiling your stroke and then it slides off, this hair that has no business there, someone else’s hair, this little nightmare of a hair whose touch has suddenly startled you out of the sleep of self-containment that swimming induces into the fact of dirt. Other people’s dirt. Other people. Your own dirt, you. Not this pure noncontingent forward motion unmarred by agent or accountability but you, a person, a person known all too well, a person in a swamp of others and others’ dirt, hair, skin, fluids, anger, who knows. You in all this. You utterly violable. Of course everyone is aware swimming pools are full of dirt but there is no reason to think of this now. The thought in fact is canceled by swimming by its sound aspect – both deaf and cavernous – that separates you from normal perception; by its blue aspect, an immaterial blue that reminds you vaguely of laundry ads or other planets; by its water aspect, which cannot help but evoke the whole history of purification and lustral joy not to say ritual rightness; and above all by its heroic, streaming, organized, forward motion. What could dirt have to do with this motion?
excerpt from Waterworld/ Anne Carson
Carson’s hair and dirt remind me of the “friends” I’ve written about in the YWCA pool (a few years ago), my sparkle friends in Lake Nokomis, and the floating vines I encounter in the middle of Lake Nokomis or Cedar Lake that wrap around my head or shoulders or slide (like a full body scan) down my torso and legs.