A Solitary Swimmer.

To slip into the ocean, to actually be there, not imagining it any longer- not isolated by the abstractions of distance that invariably separate a memory from the sensations that etched it into our past. When one recalls a sensory impression, an event, the body arches backwards toward it. The brain reaches out through the fingers and toes and face, imaginary arms extend to feel again what was once not at all an impression, but an instant of the numinous and ineffable present. Something lifts which was weighed down in the center of the body, and images accompany and accentuate this completely motionless motion.

As the body sinks into the ocean the mind changes. It is as if the eyes are reading a piece of musical notation, and the brain at the same time is attempting the dual effort of visually conjuring every gesture of each living member of the orchestra. A friend said to me, “When you submerge your body your thoughts focus only on the acquisition of the next breath”, which isn’t entirely true. That notion is there, but it is reflexive, like the stride of your legs as you walk when you are not aware of your gait and the swing of your shoulders because you are distracted by a particularly lovely building or the height and depth of the sky. Your mind is not detached, rather, your mind and your body coalesce into essential movements. Your breath is taken, but you do not notice, you thrust your limbs through the darkness, you think to open your eyes- but not yet! You hold off, treasuring the last few seconds of such an unaccustomed experience. I was tempted there to say “unnatural”, or “inhuman” experience, but this state is utterly natural and utterly human. Sometimes the instant after one awakens from a long sleep, there is a momentary disconnect between the mind and its surroundings, when there is no immediate lingual response, when nothing is named. All of what we sense is contingent on our associations to what we have named. Sinking into the ocean, we are briefly without names for things.

On this particular trip to the ocean, advection from the south had carried smoke on its winds from a wildfire in North Carolina. There was a slight acrid smell in the air, and here and there hung low clouds of white smoke in the windswept trees and long grasses along the island, giving it an even more alien look than usual. I have always been struck by the trees here, short and wiry, with trunks like bleached vertebrae and tufts of white-green vegetation exploding from the limbs, all grown sideways and off-kilter from the force of steady sea wind. I come here and I too strip myself down to my essentials. I wear as little clothing as possible. My back and shoulders become red in the sun. I lie in the sun with my eyes closed and feel its warmth touch every hair on my arms and legs. I eat the food of the ocean, scallops, crabs, shrimp, and fish. I bask in the water from which my sustenance is pulled, I eat vegetables grown and cooled and strengthened by the salty breeze. To eat what comes from the land you live on, to be of the land and the water, to know your humanity all the better.

My shoulders and back and cheeks are red. I walk across the hot sand, not feeling the heat at all. My eyes peer off to the horizon; they are inevitably drawn to that long, endless arc on the other side of which I dream someone is looking back toward me in their imagination. The cold at first stings when the waves begin to touch my knees and thighs, so I throw myself into the break. I am under. I am swimming outside of myself and inside myself. My head and shoulders break the surface. The water is no longer cold, but has diffused a perfect equilibrium of temperature throughout me. My head bobs and watches simultaneously the sun glinting off the sea through the slight haze of wildfire smoke and the motion of gulls circling above in an almost perfectly unbroken sky.

It is said that those who love books are those for whom the world is not enough. On the contrary, at times such as these I am absolutely content with this world. And it is because I will eventually leave that I set down in words all that I can recall in my thoughts and body, so I may understand my contentment.