Poolside mythology

I just had a brainwave, and suddenly all the shiny dimes of impressions that have long since settled into the silt of memory reemerge as glinting constellations that are quite impossible to ignore, and which bring me back to this dusty shore of my universe. Funny how this continuum of inspiration operates for me -a sort of guerrilla-style expansionist force that relies on astrology to tell the time. This reminds me of the need for some kind of negotiation between the faculties of my brain that receive and interpret worldly data. The former needs to stop over-curating, while the latter has to stop blowing itself up into a cavern full of bubblegum-like atrophy. 


The subject matter that so agitates me at the present moment can be quite plainly inferred from the title -pools. Since this gleaming body of water made its first splash at my consciousness a radiograph of ideas has precipitated - a film reel dotted with the "luminous details" Ezra Pound spoke about, images that present "intellectual and emotional complex(es) in an instant of time", "radiant node(s) or cluster(s) ... from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing". Though I write "mythology", the details with which I am about to fill out this incandescent outline are more significant in the personal, rather than in the wider cultural context of pools and baths sort of way. They consist of bits and pieces of trinkets that I've collected along the way -not without some magic, of course, from stowing them under my pillow for a night or two. Kate Durbin very aptly summed up this magic in this interview as a "trendwarping" phenomena, where teenagers on Tumblr "hijack(ing) symbols from pop culture and disrupt(ing) their meaning". Perhaps my uncanny desire to constantly curate my perceptions is a reaction to the frustrations generated by this age of all too accessible excess -the eye glazes over much that is indifferently distinct, and the self has to cultivate its own choices. Infinity has eclipsed itself, and suddenly life in the vacuum has become both a necessity and a sin. Anyway what I really mean to say is that though the following list was born with the stretchmarks of my own tendencies I hope that sharing it can nonetheless bring something to you, dear reader, as it had to me.


Those of you who have been sticking around here will probably know by now that kitsch sits at the frontline of my preoccupations. They are in other words the things that evoke what I like to call supernatural nostalgia. It's the overwhelming sense of familiarity that makes you blink, the caress of the pulsating intuition that we carry within ourselves -the same sort of stuff that goes on in a synesthete, who senses the abstract truth via a shadow set of connections. It's a private celebration of the universal, the collective. It's a fucking Lana Del Rey song. And here is a verse of lyric that led me to write, some time ago, in a burst of feeling: "I feel like I'm living a reflection of a life. I was to be a savage, and lose myself in tragedy."

Yo we used to go break in


To the hotel, glimmerin' we’d swim


Runnin' from the cops in our black bikini tops


Screaming, "Get us while we're hot. Get us while we're hot."


(Come on take a shot)

This is What Makes Us Girls, Lana Del Rey

Say what you may about this being just another lackluster vignette from a post-authentic singer, but you can't dispute the fact that this pool scene is a gem in the sequence. Lithe wild girl gymnastics under forbidden waters, the clamorous ballet of sexual awakening. As the protagonist in Byatt's A Lamia in the Cévennes would describe in the words of Matisse, "swimming was volupté ... Luxe, calme et volupté". Swimming is sensuous, intimate as a waltz. The whole song is a lovely encapsulation of the American narrative of youth -shimmering with transient beauty, and dappled with foolish recklessness. 

A.S. Byatt rendered the lust of the pool with a different palette. In his turn Bernard Lycett-Kean was seduced by what he called a "combat" -the aesthetic challenge of reproducing the "dangerous" richesse of the swimming-pool. 

The two young men were surprised that Bernard wanted it blue. Blue was a little moche, they thought. People now were making pools steel-grey or emerald green, or even dark wine-red. But Bernard's mind was full of blue dots now visible across the southern mountains when you travelled from Paris to Montpellier by air. It was a recalcitrant blue, a blue that asked to be painted by David Hockney and only by David Hockney. He felt that something else could and must be done with that blue. It was a blue he needed to know and fight.

And with that Bernard promptly begins to attack the violent impressions emitting from the pit in his backyard. His work as a painter is both a demystifying and mysterious process. As he attempts to unpack the handicraft of the pool architect  -a compact creation of copulations between depth and geometry, texture and color- he is also compelled to navigate the labyrinth of desires and urges that has surfaced from the recesses of his consciousness. Though he can find no objective reason to justify his obsession he, well, can't stop being obsessed. And Byatt concludes this poolside struggle with a touch of irreverent wisdom. His brain hurt, and his eyes stared, and he felt whipped by winds and dried by suns. He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found in which to be happy.

Bernard Lycett-Kean was a middle-aged businessman fed up with "Thatcher's Britain", who moved to the Cévennes with a stock of red wine and began to paint for a living. Unsurprisingly the pool was also the object of reverie for another rich man in history, this time on a much more monumental scale. Adolph Sutro was the 24th mayor of San Francisco, a shrewd entrepreneur who was an engineer by training. In 1896 what was then known as the world's largest indoor swimming pool establishment swung its doors open to the Californian public, with seven different swimming experiences in pools of varying temperatures and water types in store for the visitor. The Sutro Baths was the Coney Island of the West -complete with a museum, a concert hall, an ice-skating rink, and an eccentric man behind the curtains. It's kitsh 101.

"I used to go there on a special night of the week, a Wednesday, and we waltzed. And I met a fellow every time I went there once a week ... We would waltz. He was a ... I can remember he was tall, very tall, and skated beautifully... Every couple was just waltzing. It was lovely."

A former Sutro Baths visitor reflecting on her memories there

I'm actually amazed at how far I have managed to stretch the associations of the pool. How complacent my writing sounds (I hope it does), in opposition to the helter-skelter tango that is skidding across the tiles of my brain in real-time. Since I was a child I've always been baffled with letters. I'm very inconsistent in my learning of languages -slow and stupid and unnatural when it comes to grammar, syntax and clear-headed expression, but always jumping over the hedge for liaisons with imagistic construction. Maybe it's because I'm too self-conscious when writing. They say that our mind reads a word in its entirety, which explains why it can still interpret one with all but the head and tail letters jumbled. Maybe it's an indulgence in the dance of unreal yellow, as Robin in Byatt's short story Art Work sees it, in the 'x's and 'y's. In any case I've still much to learn when it comes to this indispensable means of communication. I'm also amazed at how I've managed to rein in the temptation to insert pictures, relying solely on the written word -though I will have to start putting some in now, as I move on to film.


Nowadays it's quite a different crowd stitching up the fable of the pool. It's a roaming pack of kids taking over the drained out hollows scattered across California. These nomads on skateboards saw an opportunity in California's foreclosure crisis, reclaiming these relics from a more golden age of the past as novel skating terrain. It's a new turf sprung up from faded sunshine and peeling gold, an unassuming rejuvenation. (Remember Piscine Molitor from Life of Pi? Its walls became the canvas of graffiti artists after the complex was closed down back in 1989.) Watch the 5 minute short film here, under Cannonball; actually watch all the short films there, because one simply can't have enough of California's dreamscape, and it's fantastic how two people have created a portal specially for the transmission of its magic.


Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women opens with a pool rippling with the languid movement of pastel-purple plastered bodies of indifferent twenty-somethings and trance-like elderly. The setting is also Californian -this time in a small desert town where life seems to be waded through in slow motion. In between long, dramatic takes of the sinuous surface of a swimming pool Altman recreates an atmosphere and characters that linger after a dream of his. The two main protagonists Pinky (portrayed by Sissy Spacek) and Millie (portrayed by Shelley Duvall) work at a health spa for the elderly, and live in a beautifully manicured and resort-like place called Purple Sage Apartments, at the heart of which lies a pool. At the floor of that pool stares out creatures of obscure origins -the work of their neighbor muralist Willie (portrayed by Janice Rule; the murals are the real-life work of artist Bodhi Wind). At the faux climax of the film, Pinky jumps into the pool from a height and lies face-down in the water, her nightgown a bloated dumbbell. The tone is suspension -the minimalist plot rides on a magic realist mis-en-scene and improvised dialogue, but the rest falls short of imminent -phantom developments, the limbo of an aquarium.

Until next time.