The Red Sea

Swimming:

- When I see a swimmer a paint a drowned man.

- For the Greeks water possessed magical, mysterious, and often sinister properties. There was spring that drove you mad, another that once tasted could make you teetotal for the rest of your life. In another Hera renewed her virginity every year. To render Achilles invulnerable his mother dipped his infant body in a river. Water caused men to fall in love with their own reflections, reduced them to hermaphrodites, those indeterminate figures of androgynous beauty that haunted their artistic imagination. ....With the coming of Christianity the West began to lose interest in the sea and the tradition that had spread gradually from Greece and the Aegean. All along the Mediterranean coast villages that had once looked on the sea turned their energies inland............In religious fables the fate of the 'ungodly' was compared to that of the swimmer, adrift in the vastness of the sea, denied the means of reaching safety, and finally overcome by despair....Swimming like sexual pleasure, came to be associated somehow with the devil, and was most suppressed during the domination of Europe by Christianity. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that its popularity revived.

- If I believed in the transmigration of souls, I should think I had been a merman in some former state of existence.

- Softer than sleep's are the sea's caresses,

Kinder than love's that betrays and blesses

....

To sleep to swim and to dream, for ever-

Such joy the vision of man saw never;

For here too son will a dark day sever

The sea-bird's wing from the sea-wave's foam

- He had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply, strenously as if he could gulp in his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow into his chest.

The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.

- O you foaming torrents ! You waterfalls and icy lakes. Shady streams, limpid springs, translucent halls of the sea, how your coolness tempts me! And then how sweet to rest on the yellow sand beside the backward curl of the waves! For it was not the bathe alone that I loved but afterwards the expectant, the mythological waiting for the god's naked and enfolding flame....I brought back with me, on my return to France, the secret of a man newly risen from the grave...Nothing that had occupied me before seemed now to have any importance. I was no longer the same...

- ...looked back nostalgically to his childhood bathing in Coate Reservoir near Swindon, where 'the water did not seem to resist him, it parted and let him through. Between the strikes he glided buoyantly, lifted by the water as swallows glide on the plane of the air. All this portion of the water was in his power, and it's elasticity as his strokes compressed it threw him forward. He did not see where he was going, his vision was lost in the ecstasy of motion, all his mind was concentrated in the full use of his limbs.

- When Charles Kingsley, whose swims in the Berkshire chalk streams restored him to his childhood, set eyes on the classical Mediterranean for the first time in Southern France, he ran ecstatically through it for miles. He felt he was coming home.

- Just as one's body has a natural tendency towards the surface and one has to make an exertion to get to the bottom - so it is with thinking.

- All good writing is as swimming underwater and holding your breath.

- A Buddhist Koan says: " The master holds the disciple's head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is."

Drowning:

- Death-dark and delicious as death in the dream of a lover and dreamer may be,

it clasps and encompasses body and soul with delight to be living and free............

So plunges the downward swimmer, embraced of the water unfathomed of man,

The darkness unplummeted, icier than seas in midwinter, for blessing or ban;

And swiftly and sweetly, when strength and breadth fall short, and the dive is done,

Shoots up as a shaft from the dark depth shot, sped straight into sight of the sun;

And sheer through the snow-soft water, more dark than the roof of the pines above,

Strikes forth, and is glad as a bird whose flight is impelled and sustained of love.

- Could I change you, help you to love me, sweet,

Could I give you the love that would sweeten death,

We should yield, go down, locked hands and feet,

Die, drown together, and breath catch breath.

- In entering to passion the individual shudders momentarily, as if entering an unknown element; but as he has yielded, he will be embraced and carried away like a swimmer by water. He revels in this and does not want to touch the ground until he loses his strength or ramp might drown him.

- Despite the ferocity of the scene, Trelawney 'hastily' cast aside his clothes, ' with nerves throbbing and panting breast, and clambering up to a ledge of rock jutting a clear pool, I sprang in head foremost'. Like all the English champions he used the breaststroke, ' his back bent inwards, his head reined back like a swan's and the chest thrown forward'. ......After reaching the bank on the far side he realised how close he was now to the Rapids ' which no boats nor anything can live in'. Plunging into the river again he felt a cramp affecting his toes and fingers, and his body drifting dramatically downstream held fast by the current. He began to panic:' I now remember the terrible whirlpool below me, I could make no progress, the stream was mastering me. I seemed to be held by the legs and sucked downwards, the scrumming surf broke over and blinded me, I began to ship water. In the part of the river I had now drifted to the water was frightfully agitated, it was broken and raging all around me. Why did I attempt to cross a part of the river that no one had ever crossed before ? I heard the voices of the dead calling to me, I actually thought, as my mind grew darker, that they were tugging at my feet. I saw the waters of the rapids below me ragging and all about hissing. '

- As I swam with a thousand twists and turns striking the water and drawing it towards me, threshing my arms about, I felt a kind of murmuring in the midst of the pool, and growing frightened, leapt onto the nearer bank...

- Some years later Matthew Arnold was to follow Shelley to the 'soft blue Spezian bay'. After hiring a boat and being rowed half a mile offshore, he stripped off his clothes and dived into the water. He too was to feel its fatal charm. He found himself reluctant to surface, and the sea so enticing that it was 'difficult ever to raise one's head out of it'. He had shown early signs of such susceptibility when a boy he disconcerted his father by spending an entire summer holiday imagining himself a corpse at the bottom of lake Windermere..........One night not long before he died Shelley dreamed that his friends had drowned, and their lacerated and decaying bodied were coming to warn him of an approaching flood. '

'..the look of agony he cast as the steamer hurried past him, the sight of his body sinking deeper and deeper, his arms outstretched towards the surface;....

Crabbe's experience of almost drowning in the river Waverney when a young man caused him to dream that he walked unharmed and breathing in the depths of the sea over which great tidal waves had rolled. The cities of opium affected writers are often sunk deep in stagnant seas, the inhabitants isolated from each other, unable to communicate.

The Unconscious

- It is generally accepted that in the area of the unconscious, water and any form and immersion in it suggests a hidden desire for a return to the security and irresponsibility of the womb and its amniotic waters. .....all the swimmers already mentioned were strongly attached to their mothers and felt alienated from their fathers.

- Think, for instance, of a writer who is trying to convey certain ideas which to him are contained in mental images. He isn't quite sure how these images fit together in his mind, and he experiments around, expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some version. But does he know where it all came from ? Only in a vague sense. Much of the source, like an iceberg, is deep underwater, unseen- and he knows that.

- John Cooper Powys describes at length and vividly the 'ichthyosaurs ego' that provided the impulse for much of his swimming. He related it to his concept of 'loneliness' as the soul's strongest link with all the earlier stages of evolution.'

- A psychotic is a guy who feels in touch with the underlying real.

- A river without end, enormous and wide, flows through the world's literature's. Over and over again: the women-in-the-water; woman as water, as a stormy, cavorting, cooling ocean, a raging stream, a waterfall: as a limitless body of water that ships pass through, with tributaries, pools, surfs and deltas; woman as the enticing and perilous deep, as a cup of bubbling body fluids, the vagina as wave, as foam, as a dark place ringed with Pacific ridges; love as the foam from a collision of two waves, as a sea voyage, a slow ebbing, a fish catch, a storm; love as a process that washes people up as flotsam, smoothing the sea again; where we swim in the divine song of the sea knowing no laws, one fish, two fish; where we are part of every Ocean, which is a part of every vagina. To enter those portals is to begin a global journey, a flowing around the world. He who has been inside the right woman, the ultimate cunt-knows every place in the world that is worth knowing.

- Utamaro illustrates the fantasy of the diving girl as she crouches on an island and looks down into the sea, which here and elsewhere symbolises the unconscious mind. Under the water she sees herself seized and outraged by two male demons, kappa-devils or river goblins that lurked in the sea in the neighbourhood of river mouths. Shunsho depicted numerous others entwined and raped underwater by human or beasts, a concept that was to take its most exotic form in the brilliant shunga design executed by his pupil Hokusai, of a diving girl and Octopuses. .....'..it is truly frightening: it is of a Japanese woman mounted by an octopus; with it's tentacles, the horrible beast sucks the tip of her breasts and rummages in her mouth, while its head drinks from her lower parts. The almost superhuman expression of agony and sorrow - which convulses this long, graceful female figure with aquiline nose - and the hysterical joy - which emanates at the same time from her forehead, from those eyes closed as in death - are admirable.

- Like those opium addicts of the 19th century analysed by Alethea Hayter, these swimmers felt themselves to be pariahs, elect outcasts, insulated from their fellow men. They too often experienced through their swims the classic constituents of an opium dream: 'the feeling of blissful buoyancy, the extension of time, contrasts of temperature, the bliss of the outcast'. Any one who submerges some way below the surface into deep water can experience those nightmare visions of De Quincey, inspired by drugs and the prison etchings of Piranesi, of sinking down through huge vaulted airless spaces , among rocks and columns that rise up from the ocean floor in a limitless and yet claustrophobic expansion of space, alone, but not unobserved; there is a sense that one is always under surveillance, invisible enemies and predators are somewhere hidden beyond in the shadowy gloom and remote recesses; the sensibility sharpens; the slightest touch or sound can cause alarm in this silent world........ Both the opium addicts and the swimmers tended to be solitary, remote figure, who felt themselves superior to dull, conventional minds. The descriptions of their experiences are like those of a man who has just explored an unknown territory, and returns to astonish us with his discoveries.

- To me the universe was all void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility ; it was one huge dead immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.....having no hope, neither had I any fear, where it of man or devil. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear, tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it seems as if all things in the heavens above and the Earth were the boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured'.

Biographie de Michael Mazière