Presence and Absence in Swimming

-- By CasidheMcClone - 19 Feb 2016

Swimming is all about absence. It is mechanical, and automatic. Left, right, breathe, left, right, left, breathe, turn. Once a swimmer knows the motions, he doesn’t need to be in the pool. Only his body does.

Swimming in a pool is absence

Swimming in a pool is often called “circle swimming,” a reference to the way that a swimmer will hold to the right side of his lane like a driver on the road. Of course, this creates nothing remotely resembling a circle. A visual map of the swimmer’s path through the pool would be much closer to an extremely long rectangle than to a circle. However, the label of “circle swimming” is appropriate for other reasons. Every swim stroke is cyclical, with the pattern restarting every couple of pulls. The cycle runs itself, executes its own breathing and turns. The body simply obeys the pattern, and the swimmer can, if he wishes, watch from a third party perspective. Of course, he doesn’t even need to do this much. He doesn’t need to be there at all because has no decisions to make. The pattern and the structure of the pool make all of the decisions for him. He doesn’t have to be there at all. So he steps into the water, and immediately leaves. It doesn’t matter if he’s working out or competing, the motions are exactly the same. The only difference is how tired the swimmer feels when he gets out. The pool is designed to make this kind of swimming easy, and it works; choices such as direction, where to turn, and speed are dictated by the pool’s layout. The pool is easy to enter, and the pattern is similarly easy to fall into.

Open water requires Presence

The ocean is entirely different. Swimming in open water is entirely about presence: mental, spatial, and temporal. It’s difficult. Even getting to the ocean is more of an ordeal than getting in the pool; loading the car and driving for miles is always going to involve more of an investment than walking to the gym on campus. But the real difficulty doesn’t start until the swimmer enters the water.

Position and Current

A swimmer in a pool can swim with his head “down,” that is, facing the floor. Relative to his body, the swimmers head is actually facing forward. It his attention, rather than his head, that is directed downward. Any lifelong swimmer will appreciate the relation between the position and the phrase “putting your head down and working through it.” The ocean swimmer, on the other-hand, has to practice “heads up” freestyle if he wants to make any real headway. While the “head down” position might involve a contradiction between body and attention, “heads up” refers to a vertical focus in both posture and awareness. That is, the head is kept above the water, but the body remains horizontal. The swimmer’s posture thus resembles a man standing and craning his neck to look at something directly above him. The open water swimmer needs to keep his head above the water because, unlike a swimmer in a pool, he needs to see where he’s going. There are a number of reasons open water swimming requires this extra awareness. Given any destination, a swimmer in open water needs to constantly check himself with regards to any markers he can find. If he fails to do so, unfelt currents will drag him off target. If he puts his head down for more than a few strokes, he may lift his eyes to find that he is in a completely different position from where he expected to be. Even a strong current can be difficult to notice without landmarks. The momentum of the swimmer’s body matches that of the water around him, and if he closes his eyes the water itself is all he will feel.

Waves

Waves are a far more immediate concern. Even on a calm day, navigating waves is a challenge. While the swimmer in a pool can keep his stroke uniform, the open water swimmer has to be aware to how his body reacts to the changing plane of the ocean’s surface. If he takes a normal stroke as he starts up the crest of a wave, his arm will enter the water early and his pull will drive him into the swell, rather than over it. If he makes it over a wave and rides down the back of it without changing his stroke at the bottom, his arms will pull him down, beneath the water. He has to stay aware of the wave in order to react to it. He can’t put his head down, or the ocean will have changed completely when he raises it again. Neither can he can’t develop the rhythm he had in the pool- no two waves are ever the same, and the pace of their arrival is anything but regular. Even planning ahead is difficult. At the crest of a large wave, he may be able to see another two coming his way, but he will rarely be able to predict further than a few seconds into the future. The open water swimmer must remain entirely present. He has to live in each individual stroke, and treat it with his undivided attention. This is not to say he’ll drown if he doesn’t, but he certainly won’t be going very far.

Your writing is good. You have a fine understanding of how to use the tool. Now you need in the next draft to put it to use on more rewarding material.

What is the essay's idea, the concept it intends to communicate? I believe the best statement of the theme is "I can apply Eben's metaphor of presence and absence to swimming." And indeed you can, with well-turned sentences, as I said. But, in the first place, the application is by way of correspondence, a pattern-matching observation about linear relation of parts. Substitute "walking" for "swimming," "pacing in circles" for "circle swimming," "outdoors" for "open water," "pits and gullies" for "waves," and one has another essay, equally smooth on the surface, but also hollow underneath. Creativity, which was the actual subject, the meaning of the metaphor, has disappeared beneath a set of mechanical correspondences.

Also, in the next place, this is law school. Invoking presence and absence as the linked roots of creativity, both sides of the coin with the tree of art engraved on it, the figure and the ground of every poem, was done to address how to be a creative lawyer. The meaning of the metaphor lay in its relation to its context. Your next draft should, in my view, eschew correspondence and present meaning in context.