ways of swimming on dry land

In Memory of Maria Reimann
For Jagoda, Jan and Aleksander Latkowski

'Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.'

-– Ariel's Song from Shakespeare's The Tempest
to be found on Shelley’s grave

Before Martin picked me up at the station in X, we had exchanged kind letters. As a scholar of water, I was researching its iterative nature. I asked about the possibilities to swim extensively and conduct additional interviews with local waters. He reassured me about the corporeality of the local lake, river and pool. ‘Hark, do you hear the sea?’ I exclaimed to myself and welcomed the idea of spending four months in X. Driving from the station to the house of a famous Nobel Prize-winning writer, the fields stretched into long lines – the thoughts of a weary pilgrim wasted by heat and delayed trains. ‘So where is this nearby lake?’ I pictured myself dousing my overheated body with its waters. ‘But… it’s forbidden to swim in it’, answered Martin bluntly.

He was very eager to show me the pool in the garden. Now covered with planks, it served as a stage. The ladder’s hooked ears stuck out from a wooden floor, clasping the brink of the former pool. Its steps, which had once carried the prizewinning writer’s body to the water, rested underground.

All this did not discourage me from cycling up the hill for one hour to the nearby lake. The artificial reservoir lay embraced by concrete walls decorated with a tall fence and a huge ‘no swimming!’ sign depicting a crossed-out man swimming front crawl. Sweaty and washed-out, I stripped and lay down on the floor of a depthless river like some stranded Ophelia. Later, I watched the pool’s closed eye from a small window in the famous writer’s house. Maybe I could learn how to swim on dry land, ‘nadar en seco’, as Virgilio Piñera advised, which gave Witold Gombrowicz ‘a metaphysical chill’. In the gathering dusk and unrelentingly sweltering July evening, I longed to feel any kind of chill. A nonspiritual one most of all.

The Gotland refugee camp was tucked inland, not far from the coast. The strait’s thin chastity belt prevents Gotland’s lip from touching the lip of Fårö. The wind never sleeps; it’s busy. We could hear the endless swash of water. Inside the camp, kids were running around or busy doing paper cut-outs. One girl with eyes that seemed too big for her face guided us through the labyrinth of rooms. She and several women would join us for the swimming lesson. They came from various places: Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan. As we undressed in the changing room, they would leave their heads, arms and legs covered, obliged by their religions. You should have seen Kristin in her swimsuit. I wouldn’t have said she was a day over fifty, never mind seventy. Fatima, Somaya and Laila would later stand on the white tiles, motionless. Their affairs with water had gone dry. Former encounters had left them questioning its good nature.

In the past, some learned swimming along with other basics of life. Emperor Augustus ‘usually instructed his grandsons himself in reading, swimming and other rudiments of knowledge’, as Suetonius informs us, most probably following Plato’s proverb that scorns the simpletons who can’t read or swim. Swimming lessons were reserved for the high-born. Roman villas had enclosed private pools or cold baths, frigidaria. The one in Ostia is decorated with a mosaic of a swimmer most probably engaged in a front crawl, his left arm stretching far forward, hand elongated and magnified by invisible water, body floating above the moustache of a wave.

I talked well about water to Fatima, Somaya and Laila before we entered the pool, as if it were a long-time-no-see friend they were longing to hug and share intimate stories with. I showed them how to kiss this friend and let it carry their heads as the light entered through the windows and danced in pirouettes on the floor. David Hockney had engaged in grasping its swinging nature on cut-out paper for over forty days while waiting for his driving license, which he had lost in the UK in August 1978 just before leaving the island for New York. His friend, the lithographic artist Kenneth Tyler, managed to make Hockney stay and work with him on some prints. Hockney would have rather gone straight to California, without a driving license, it would have been like going for a swim in the Sahara. Eventually, he was persuaded by Tyler’s offer and, most of all, his pool. Its symmetric transparent body received and deflected sun rays, refracted them, turned them into Cubist pieces; it was a moving, watery stained-glass window projecting visions on its tiled bottom. Around twenty years earlier, Matisse too had painted his favourite pool. He filled his dining room walls with dark figures of cut-out paper divers he’d painted in Cannes. They kept swimming through the room like in a panopticon.

Eventually, Hockney’s license arrived and, having exhausted all possible ways of cutting paper into pools of frolicking sun ray vipers, he headed to California, where he’d have his true love affair with the pool. Or with Peter Schlesinger, whose buttocks we see covered with sunny curlicues as his half-naked body reclines against a car in ‘Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool’. But this is not what we remember best. What we remember is the ‘A Bigger Splash’ with the house, water and trampoline blazed by sun, and the immobile splash of water blossoming in the middle of the pool like a frozen geyser. The one who’d jumped in and swum away. It was as if Hockney’s heart had plunged like a stone into the pool when Peter abandoned David for good. All that’s left is the splash. ‘Old pond / frog leaping / splash,’ as Basho had it.

Or ‘Plunge’, as Kerry James Marshall has us think. Like so many other visitors to the Royal Academy of Arts that day, I left with a few postcards. I kept one on the wall of my residency and looked at it every now and then. With its white door at the back saying ‘PRIVATE’, as if leading to a secret garden, a deluxe hortus conclusus with rare kinds of annunciations going on, which we will learn about from the media too late. With huge umbrellas that seem to cast eternal shadows. With X and Y chromosomes caught in their Brownian motion, ready to arrange themselves in all kinds of constellations, defying the dichotomy of gender. With a Black woman on a trampoline, her arms folded above her head, contemplating a jump. And we’d be lying if we claimed not to pay attention to the black dots on her panther-like suit. The red cross floating in the water in front of her is ambiguous. This is where the Haitian spirits would cross their paths. This is the American charity that raised almost half a billion dollars after an earthquake had leveled Haiti in 2010, and nobody could tell where all that money went. How charged can two crossed red lines be. With white swans sticking out like periscopes investigating the pool. With a toy boat carrying toy slaves across the Atlantic of the pool again. Is the person behind it swimming the Middle Passage back or drowning?

It was dark and cold when we stepped out. Gotland’s body gives easily to the winds. On our way back, we would pass the closed eyelids of wooden boats on the shore. In 1944, eleven thousand Estonians had reached Gotland in such boats, seeking refuge from the Nazis. They were captured in photos taken by David Holmert. Would I ever forget the one of the rescued woman standing in front of a tent with her tantalizing, trusting eyes? Ingmar Bergman, living on the sibling island of Fårö, would later use one of the boats in his film Shame. Its protagonists, Eva and Jan, are entangled in a shameful domino of events in a country torn by civil war. Eventually, they escape their island, and lie at the bottom of the same boat, dreaming of another life. ‘How do you think someone dreaming about us would feel when he woke up. Ashamed?’ asks Eva at the end, or it is Bergman himself? As an insomniac, he would write all the lines that floated up to him in his notebook at night, marking good days with red hearts, bad ones with black crosses on his office door. Lots of crosses followed Liv Ullmann’s departure. Their daughter Linn enjoyed their outdoor pool as a kid. Bergman would swim there in the mornings. Linn indulged in swimming and escaping her loneliness. As a kid, ‘like most children, [she] enjoyed making lists and keeping count, and if anyone asked her about her father she could have said: My father has four houses, two cars, five wives, one swimming pool, nine children, and one cinema.’ Bergman was proud of the pool, and it was the only thing he addressed in English.

Romance languages admit it was originally a fishpond – piscina. In Rome, I needed a certificato medico to indulge in the local piscina. Which meant waiting one month for an appointment with a doctor who would examine my pulse and attest there was no danger of me having a heart attack while swimming. I would pay €30 and if I had a heart attack while swimming, my family could blame the pool for their negligence. If I was sick and spread germs, nobody cared. I was only there for a month, so I got myself a pair of running shoes and would run every day along the Tiber, or lungotevere, past the swimming pool conclusus.

The pool in Helsinki is a Taj Mahal among pools, with arcades and stylish lamps looking in the mirror of its turquoise water, in which everyone is welcome to swim naked. With separate days for women and men. There is no eighth day for those who do not identify with either, or do with both, even though there is no gender in the Finnish language. Ten years ago, I joined the women’s day, as back then I was sometimes mistaken for a woman. A man guarded us from a tiny booth under one of the arcades.

In Berlin, I’d get into both male and female cloakrooms. In Potsdam, I would be scorned for wearing a top, which I gladly got rid of. In Budapest, I was shouted at for swimming in circles instead of in zig zags. In Stockholm, I had to buy a padlock, and they did not mind what gender I was. In Paris, there was one common cloakroom and ten people per lane. In Wrocław, I was scorned for not wearing a cap; my red shorts were not an issue. In Warsaw, I’d get looks in both cloakrooms, either not feminine or masculine enough, or both at once. Some of the Hampstead Heath Ponds are also gendered. Trans women are no longer welcome at the women’s pond. They don’t seem to fit the men’s pond, either. There is one extra pond, in which no one is welcome but ducks and swans.

Swans are known for their grandiose beauty. Pure whiteness and elegance. When they fish for algae, they turn into the Sydney Opera House, showing us their rears and salient legs. One was taking care of its family in a nest on the opposite side of the wide Daugava River in Riga. My friends, aware of my obsession with swimming, alerted me to the issue of untrustworthy currents and whirlpools. As a polite guest, I committed to swimming right by the shore. While approaching a meadow of marsh marigolds, I spotted a swan starting in my direction. I counted my blessings to zero as it nosedived and sank me with its entire body. What saved me was an anecdote related to Czesław Miłosz, who used to live in a villa overlooking San Francisco Bay, on the edge of a wild woodland. At the entrance to the woods, there was a board informing what to do in case you encountered a puma. First you had to jump and shout so that it thought you were larger. If nothing else works, it said, fight back. I resurfaced with all my force, splashed and shouted at the swan, which was not at all affected by my efforts. With its two huge wings, it managed to sink me again. Well then, I fought back. I fought with my fists and my entire body. I was trans-Led, a new agender Led fighting against this god-like swan. I was Jacob fighting this river angel.

While drying myself on the shore, I learnt from my friend that this same swan had drowned a man the year before. It takes five men to ring a swan. Only 3% of birds have a penis, swans among them. The rest enjoy a cloacal kiss.

In the evening, we visited a local library. On display, I found a charming Latvian picture book informing its readers how to swim. The swimmers were lined up in the water like the notes of a water symphony. As if each swim were a music piece. Holding Laila lying on my arms in the water that day in Fårösund, I felt love. I was in love with life. I was being trusted. Eventually, Laila began to trust the water and float. If I’ve ever felt proud of anything, it was this moment.

Laila’s ancestors were excellent swimmers. In Africa, nearly everyone knew how to swim until the arrival of European slave traders in the 15th century, who couldn’t swim, and would use their slaves as lifeguards. In South Africa, Indigenous people were very good swimmers back then. Today only 5% of its citizens can swim, most of them white. In the US, white people would racially segregate beaches. Once pools became gender integrated, some owners would end up shutting them down, as white women did not want to mingle with Black men.

The majority of Indigenous people in colonized countries can’t swim. According to research, 64% of African American, 45% of Hispanic/Latino, and 40% of Caucasian children have very little or no swimming skills. More than 1,000 people drown every day, according to the World Health Organization.

In the 19th century, Europeans would approach swimming the Enlightened way, establishing swimming schools and issuing manuals. One such manual advised swimming adepts to ‘place a basin half full of water on the floor, put a frog in it, lie face downwards over a stool, and try to imitate the movements of the frog.’ One could also try the method suggested by a French printmaker Honoré Daumier in his cartoon published in 1841, depicting a man stripped to his pants practising swimming strokes while girded with a stripe attached to a rope hanging from the ceiling. ‘After three months of this uninterrupted exercise, one is reduced to the state of a fish, and even the most timid person can present themselves without fear… to the Chinese baths!’

‘You should watch out for the current,’ advised Charlotte as I entered the Alde estuary in Suffolk. It was a mild September evening. The water tasted sweet and salty. It belonged to the river greeting the sea. It belonged to the sea making itself welcome in the river. They mingled into a water. I swam like salmon, against the current. Until I felt another counter-current pushing me further in and growing in volume. I was a tiny fish in between water scissors. The river current was pulling me down and forward. The current coming with the ebbing sea was pulling me back. Putting all my force into each stroke would only keep me in the spot. What would a fish do? I let myself be carried away, swam aside, dived in and resurfaced close to the shore. The tide grew fast and covered the cliff. Charlotte had rescued our clothes and was standing above on the grassy flat plateau.

***

Before drowning at Pampelonne beach in Ramatuelle while trying to rescue two kids caught in the rough Mediterranean water, the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle published a book entitled Éloge du risque or In Praise of Risk. Her English translator, Steven Miller, was enraged by the obituaries, which stated soullessly and in a marketing-oriented way that here a philosopher who engaged in writing about risk, unlike the majority of thinkers, put her theory into praxis and risked her life to save the life of others. Miller saw it as a simplification of her work. What Dufourmantelle meant, said Miller, was the risk of life for life’s sake. ‘The greatest risk, we’ve known since always, is to love. To quit the enclosure, the belly of solitude, the haven of the familiar’, she wrote. She did not risk death. Every day, she risked being sad, being free, being real.

Every year, my friend Łukasz and I would go away for a few days. We would indulge in lying on a wooden pier in the sun in between a long or short swalk – a swim-walk. We’d swim to another pier, where Łukasz would read out passages from the book he was reading, or else to the other side of the peninsula or lake to buy a bag of ogórki małosolne (lightly salted cucumbers) in a small local deli. Łukasz would wake up before me, and I’d be jealous of his mornings in solitude on the pier. One morning, two years ago, I found him surrounded by a moka pot, a cup, a book, and a bowl of porridge with blueberries, crying. I was shattered by the news of a friend’s drowning on the coast of Sardinia. We sat and stared darkly into the water. We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t know what to do. We went swimming.

ariel rosé is a transgender poet, author of the books morze nocą jest mięśniem serca, PIW 2022 (the sea at night is a muscle of the heart) and Północ Przypowieści, Znak 2019 (North: Parables), and forthcoming: Ukraine–A Polyphony and ways of swimming; co-editor of Both Sides Face East/Durable Words (Academic Studies Press 2025), Borders por Todos los Lados (ibidem 2026).