Swimming Without Water: unwritten essays
I listen to Teju Cole talk about swimming on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, how he counts himself among swimmers, though he cannot, in fact, swim. He is talking about Anne Carson’s story ‘1=1’, where swimming becomes ‘ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time’. Where swimming takes on a ‘stoniness, water being as different from air as stones.’ Teju Cole is a swimmer because he has read about swimming and because he has written about it, imagining what it would feel like, the particular actions required, even though he himself cannot and has never swum.
Essay on imaginative swimming practices?
What happens to the body when experiencing swimming through the medium of literature, film, sound, visual art, others? Swimming without water?
I read Halldór Laxness’ fat novel, Independent People, and feel—no, know—that I’ve lived the life of a poor Icelandic sheep farmer, that my children have died one by one and my wives with them. The roads have come to carve up the moors and my land has, in the end, been sold to cover debts. The old sagas and the sheep the only holdfast truths. I weep in the night about all that has been lost to the broken promise of good weather, though I’d never do such a thing in my other life.
Essay on the social and emotional consequences of weather?
Its many possible pleasures and dreads. How a new wind can whip around the body, making you conscious of your density relative to the air around it. Joyous crunch of frost beneath feet and languid heat rising from concrete after dark. The kind of downpour that drenches clothes and topsoil. Roiling clouds in a fast moving sky. The way weather determines what we wear, how we hold our bodies, how we move through space?
I read The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, in which he spends one long English winter tracking and watching peregrines and feeling their growing absence in the landscape, which he knows to be caused by ‘the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals.’
Essay on things mistaken for other things?
The inevitable intertwining of productivity and destruction? How easy it is to confuse the two.
I watch a string of TV shows with fictional detectives wearing big coats in cold places. It makes them look silly, the way they have to waddle around. But they are very serious, in the chill and the dark, the blood splattering across the snow. The mystery unravelling.
Essay on the appeal of procedural crime TV?
Landscape as character? The comfort of knowing that all the threads will come together and the camaraderie of the team. Unease that it might all be propaganda for the police state?
My sister is driving from San Francisco to New Orleans and all her photos are of bleak cityscapes bereft of vegetation. The dry, I suppose, and the lack of civic infrastructure.
Essay on the colour green?
On how chloroplasts are enveloped bacteria, once a separate organism entirely, a permanent stable consumption. Corporate greenwashing? The backlash against the green movement. To be green with envy. To be green, as in inexperienced, as in a new shoot?
I used to be able to swim laps and swim out past the breakers, but now due to chronic illness, although technically I can still swim, it is more like dipping, my swimming practice has become immersive and still.
Essay on VR technology?
What it offers and what it risks? On travel without movement and violence without consequence. On extending and curtailing the possibilities of human experience? On the way that technologies can become vilified without considering their application as supportive technologies for people with disabilities. On how the screens we spend the most time looking at have actually become smaller—rather than immersion, which implies a kind of focus, we are leaning towards a constant state of disruption.
I buy an extremely simple watch, the face has only a dot and a hand, and I put my fitness tracker into the drawer of doom, where the old cords, broken Stanley knives, out-of-date warranty cards and other miscellanea are kept. The new watch receives many compliments for its clean simplicity. However, it is so inscrutable that whenever I wish to know the time precisely I must look at my phone.
Essay on the collection of bodily data?
On what it means to record a body in only its measurable quantities? On how a body becomes stretchy when its characteristics are tracked and stored, on how an amount of steps can eclipse what it actually means to move through space, the quality of that movement, etc.
I sit next to my cousin’s boyfriend at a wedding. He is an archaeology student researching early agriculture. His Honours thesis was about a single grain of rice, its context within the region. He spends his days working out how we began to harness plants to our own peculiar needs.
Essay on the popularity of farming simulation games?
Growing plants from seeds requires patience, imagination, optimism, a willingness to sit with blank space. The farming games speed this all up. The cheap satisfaction of fake hard labour.
The novel I have been trying to write has a novel inside it. This has happened a few times, as in, the novel inside the novel also has a novel inside of it. And so on. The novels, by necessity, becoming smaller each time they are consumed by the new novel.
Essay on stories within stories?
The trope of the found document in gothic fiction. Conversation novels. The framing of podcasts as told stories. The growth of misinformation: lies as truth, truth as lies. The way a story within a story creates an illusion of intimacy, being privy to something secret.
I watch action flicks on my laptop, and am thrilled by all the gunfights, by all the flesh meeting flesh with wet thunks. There are still smears of dog snot on my screen from when I looked after a friend’s greyhound and it ran its nose over the moving pixels. I rub and rub but can’t quite get it clean. I used to be averse to violence onscreen, especially stylised violence without real consequence. But something has shifted in me. I find myself open to it. A hardness, a lack of care, a desensitisation to spectacle.
Essay on dogs in the John Wick franchise?
On the choreography of violence. On how a killer can be coded good via the love of a dog. On the violence inherent to the human-pet relationship. On the feel of a dog’s too-easy loyalty.
At work my colleague jumps out from behind a shelf with a Boo! I get such a shock that I fall face first to the ground. She was not expecting her prank to be so effective, she says. That night my partner shows me videos of Tennessee fainting goats. In reaction to small frights and shocks these goats invariably drop to the ground, their legs having involuntarily seized up, due to a genetic myotonia. They have been bred to be the sacrificial animal in a herd of more valuable sheep: the predator attacks and the goat falls and distracts, an offering, as the sheep all run away.
Essay on the pros and cons of work personas?
Another colleague of mine has two drawers full of broken plates, in case, one day she might need them. For what? I ask. Who knows? she replies.
Essay on objects I have kept but probably shouldn’t, and objects that I have lost and can never retrieve?
On old bottles dug up in the garden, and hard drives full of photographs. The man in Wales who is considering buying a rubbish tip so that he can search for an old hard drive he accidentally threw out, which contains the keys to millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. How hard it is to decide what you might need in the future and what you’d be better off losing.
Someone else at work tells me that the square root of 2025 is 45. The next year this will happen with a whole number will be in 2116 with the number 46. We will all be dead by then, he says. Good fact, I say. And I mean it.
Essay on the appeal of doomsday cults?
What counts as the end of the world?
I watch an Artweek clip of British painter Rose Wylie explaining that she doesn’t use a palette; instead she smears her paint onto newspaper laid out on the ground, which she never clears. She just lays out new paper on top of the old—an endless painterly strata.
Essay on the palaeontology of the Anthropocene?
Layers of plastic and chicken bones, little dinosaurs. Homogeneity in excess, fast change, the actual process of things turning to stone, calcification. The incomprehensibility, really, of widespread extinction and the long stretches of time needed to recover.
I think about swimming in the kind of lake featured in Anne Carson’s story, ‘1=1’. It is one of those great North American lakes that are so different to the lakes I know, which are shallow and muddy and prone to drying up. The kind of lakes that could never be mistaken for the ocean. There is a commitment to swimming in a body of water. If you swim out, you must swim back. In this way it is not like the imagination, which allows movement from one place to another without strict rules. This is why it is so pleasant, swimming—this lack of choice. Drown or come back to land. A no-brainer.
Essay on the way that a piece of writing is always at its best before it is written?
The complete devastation of this fact. The way it frees and constricts, paralyses and offers a way out. The shore and the depths always beckoning.
Emma Yearwood is a librarian and sometimes writer who lives on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne. Her work can be found in Sick, Island, Aniko Press, The Suburban Review and other places.
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