from Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017)
[Chronicles of Shame]
“our doors are as wide open as our hearts”
(Sanatorium of Brothers Hospitallers and Kaiser’s Bath, Buda, 1806)
And so unbelonging to timelessness or time, imagine our
swimmer, on a leaping day, a misplaced day, on a day
familiarised as other, absent, defamiliarised as accident or
supplement, a surplus in pool’s global diary adapted to keep
the solar system synchronised, in which the year too was
wandering as no event, apocryphal insignificance, sans any
historic turbulence in some kind of meteorological miasma,
atemporally adrift in a temporary chronological amnesia or
coincidence, imagine our supplement swimmer, the
supplementary figure I supplementing I drifting in a pool
populated by other drifting extras, part but wholly part of
pool, a pool apart but wholly part of a global fog and this
international fog part of a much foggier, forgotten era, and
so imagine this pioneer I, a mutable Budapest iota on the
nautical map muting in mutability from Alpha to Beta,
swimming in a pool paralleling pool, being in a world in
which the world was world, not disparate but total, not
analogy but tautology, in Margaret Island’s repetitive fluid
magna flora, its substance substantial, its measure measured
in chance and mercy, with the budding body of the young
swimmer’s euphoria and jubilation. And so my dear scribe
inside the anti-scribe, let us imagine a winter in this drifting
almanac, drifting inside and outside, an outside which was
still connected to the inside, a type of connection fog helps
us comprehend, by a narrow underwater tunnel leading the
liminal swimmer, still not quite lost, still not quite yet
found, liminally drifting to and fro in a hydraulic passage
from the tiled inside to the tiled outside, and for this nascent,
phantom I derived from fog, and the fog from an era in
disguise, who was both inside and outside our story, that
was both outside and inside a much grander story, for this
emerging swimmer, a superfluous, swimming diorama
among other swimming data, submerged in language’s
unstoppable flow, who does not quite know yet how to
swim, think, write or loathe or love, restless, like figurines
in one’s first ábécé or alphabeta (floating from Alpha to
Beta, Omega, to Lethe), the primary within the posthumous
poet, the latter, still dormant, still silent, still still in the body
of the former, everything was what it was even though I
could not figure out accurately what was what; yet the
cosmological conviction that the pool was pool, the
swimming lanes visual signs to help the juvenile to process
the pool in small pools, in smaller portions of the much
larger pool, a micro pool within a macro pool belonging to
the swimmer’s body and body belonging to fog, fog to pool,
the world, and I, the minute, premature swimmer, a small
centaur, part of swimming pool, part of fog, was tangible,
even if the world in fog for the advanced swimmer sounds
or seems intangible, in other words, unimaginable,
undefinable, unnameable with any other name other than
itself. At early dawn, the close of day this kind of euphoria
with which the pool’s fog embraced me was oddly familiar,
like a stranger’s embrace. And in this unfamiliar enfolding
of fog the pool was pool, the lifeguard guarded lives, the
cleaner cleaned blue tiles of the tiled inside and tiled
outside, and above and below, our life guard who guarded
our lives was a concrete Epsilon etcetera, except the bronze
bodied Olympic swimmer, the thermodynamic human
Alpha or Delta, half deity, half aqua, who fills the common
swimmer with awe and pride. So viva hydraulic hyper real
swimmer. Viva simulacra. But look, awful, fearful
swimmer, when we swim from pool to pool, Omega to
Gamma, margin to margin, we swim from past to past, in a
pool half full, half emptiful, and so our now-pool is
perpetually eclipsed, overcast, veiled by hazy history,
wholly part of ourstory, and so our instant view, our
immediate panorama in this pool, like miasma, is always
already obscured, a single story which we post-a posteriori
hope to experience as antiquity, as epos, in other words, a
superhuman event, or a series of herculean incidents or
coincidences a priori, Esterházy, the posthumous author, set
in lotus position at the margin of our pool post fog era,
writes in Harmonia Caelestis, whose harmonious death
made the skies open above the city and from this
disharmonious sky, as from the wound of the dead lover, the
wounded poem or the unarmoured author, by now unarmed,
stretched out, harmlessly, horizontally on a renaissance
medical atlas, body incised, cut open, in order to understand,
not only the new, estranged human but the new, estranged
human texture, its humani corporis fabrica (given that there
is autopsy, given that the autopsy is requested by loved
ones, given that there is love, etcetera), the century’s
filthiest storm burst out full of dark and filthy human fluid
(viva reader, post-scriptum survivor), and the city became
unbecoming in which one-eyed pedestrians (cyclops and
centaurs) turned against the other each claiming to know the
absolute definition of the ideal lover, the original rules for
original writing, or even as to what constitutes the body (and
or the psyche) of the dead author and its dehydrated reader
of an ideal swimming nation, or let alone their rare chance
encounter (given that it ever occurs), rare as the rare chance
encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on a
Dadaist operating table, after which there was a long silence
in the Carpathian Basin. Look, we must look at what we
stare at, we must unveil the pool’s curtain of lethargy and
apathy and confront our pan-national, transglobal cyclops in
shade, the dead novelist, premortem, explained, fixated at
the tiny piece of pool, a blue aquarelle stretched out in front
of him painted by his painter friend as a mini watercolour;
you only have to gaze at something long enough to see that
vividly, translucently, somewhat even artlessly, sin has
already settled in there. Sin may be a heavy word in our
summer discourse we try and weave here from lightness and
light, perhaps it is a secret instead, a mystery, or simply, an
accident, that which is there in front of our very eyes as
nothing in disguise, until it gains the contours of the visible,
the tangible, i.e. a living thing, as something, because
everything that moves or lives with a long enough life span
has an effect on everything that moves or lives if it moves or
lives long enough to have an effect on things swimming
within proximity, i.e. everything that lives long enough has
the chance to fail, to lapse, to harm before it dies. At early
dawn, the close of day when I morphed into you and you
morphed into I, when the pool’s fog enfolded the swimmers
in a new, estranged euphoria, unfamiliar like the way
loathing lovers enfold, antagonistically, in some uncanny
heteroglossia (o loveless other, furious furia), as if we had
been in the conversation before, we did as we were dictated
and stared and gazed at the pool long enough and when we
gazed long enough we noticed the first sign of flickering
agitation of the water on the page, the agility of aqua, the
apprehension on the sheet of the blue aquarelle. Look,
anxious editor, it may sound trivial, the posthumous author
adds, yet the fact that we have books, the fact that dead
authors posthumously write and/or communicate, is beyond
fantastical, one which the reader, or the swimmer, let alone
the writer, for that reason, should not take for granted. In
this implausible book, between pre and post writing, finally,
until which point in time we are waiting, everyone will find
their own swimming pool, their fata sua, but prior to that
final finding (until then viva poor aporia) various versions
of the same future will be written of the original, the infinite
fate of figura etimologica, in other words a future with a
fixed point of origin but an alternating, unsettling ending,
fatal phantasmagoria. So let this book, bizarre and eccentric,
be about the conceit of swimming pools, the infidelity of
water, the betrayal of fluid homes. Krúdy, the fin-de-siècle
swimmer, the horizontal author, in his Dreambook suggests
that swimmers, via the daily practice of swimming, have the
chance to reach what they have dreamt of, but what we
dream of can give birth or shelter to the body of our darkest
deepest dread, in other words to arrive home, given that
home (or the swimming pool) is what we have dreamt (or
been afraid) of, is not tautological, translucent or light.
There is no fragmentation in water. Biography of water is
fluid, never ending, it’s sans conclusion, sans beginning,
even sans soul or temperament or time. But what if the
cartography of the swimming pool is drawn sans borders,
sans measure, sans price. The topography of water, sans
alpha or omega, sans chronology or frame. How do we read
liquefied maps of lawlessness, of shame? The outline of
floating islands, bodies of desire, the history of corruption,
the swimmer’s, the anti-lover’s darkest, deepest crime? All
optical phenomena are meant to be admired from a distance.
O fata morgana. I have lots of recollections of swimming
early winter mornings in the outside pool of the National
Swimming Pool situated in the heart of the city on Margaret
Island floating in fog. You had to swim out from indoor
through a tiny water tunnel to arrive outdoor at the Olympic
size pool always hazy, obscure, steamed up in the winter.
The pool was named after Alfréd Hajós, the country’s first
gold medallist who won his first gold medal at the 1896
Games that were held in the Mediterranean Sea in which
swimmers had to battle with the real elements and
themselves, (the real elements i.e. themselves), who plainly
pointed at the pool, when asked to reveal his secret. Dear
curious columnist, cartographer of tour de force, of triumph.
Where else could we learn to swim, while alive, other than
in water. Later, by then an architect, when asked again to
confess, he gestured again at the pool cloaked in fog and
said his will to live, under duress, had overcome the
ambition to succeed, to build, to overcome. And there is
more to it. The pool has an old motel attached to it, in the
old motel a secret room, Room 100, in which, according to
the clandestine chronicle the nation clandestinely chronicles
about, writer Krúdy in the early 1900s used to stay
overnight in order to have a long snooze and sober up. From
this room 100 that still exists, the posthumous Krúdy, who
no more exists, sketched the first versions of his Dreambook
in which he depicts the pool milieu as the place of
homecoming to an alternative home that also always
superimposes peril, danger, and hazard, a pool in which
chlorine and thermal water can easily turn into human hair
and blood. On the actual day, the posthumous author writes,
the Island, in that time zone named Isle of Hare, a tiny
landlet in the middle of the dark Danube, like the city’s long
chambered heart, flickered, effervesced like an oasis or
mirage, hallucination of ideal fin-de-siècle fauna and flora,
fake water, the secret isles of Ithaca or Eden. The speaking
fountain was fountainously foaming, the national swimming
pool colonised by pompous bathing and sunbathing pathos
and bathos, the sun at its summit in the ideal blue sky when
the animal, already half slaughtered, exsanguinated via its
carotid artery and jugular vein, escaped the butcher’s fatal
strike causing havoc amongst the fragile, filmy figures of
femmes d’esprit & femmes savantes (that of the undercover
angelus fatale), who took the afternoon to walk around the
Arboretum holding onto the elbows of their escorting
conversationalists who were holding onto their walking
sticks conversing about fate and time. And the bewildered
pig, half pre-, half postmortem, ran around bleeding,
squeaking, screaming amongst the yelling screaming crowd;
the noise so deafening that the writer could not tell the
scream of the butchered from the roar of the butcher. And
when it was over there was no final word, the posthumous
author warns, there was only silence. O swimmer, o bathos,
wash your body for Thanatos, not Eros. The same routine,
similar ritual: clip your toe nails, shave lower legs, wax
bikini line. Love poems are diplomatic death poems in
disguise. Death poems are love poems, unconcealed, veiled
and amorously masked. But as fades the glowing orb of day,
at early dawn, the close of day, when I begins to believe
faithfully in doubt and the pastoral turns, first into denial,
later into catastrophe, I saw what the fog was genuinely
made of, the pool’s fake tissue, skilful texture, in other
words, what the fog was genuinely not. And in this sinister
hue, eerie illumination, for a fractured moment that did not
last long but lasted long enough, we saw, as if apparition or
as if in a scene of Greek bucolica, a group of swimmers
gathering in water, their deltoid dark bodies coining a
priceless configuration, as if by the swimmers’ (well-
practised) transubstantiation, figures in fog transfigured into
pool’s stunning symphony, while encircling, in a circle
wholly part of this harmony, another phantom swimmer, her
body, a spectre or a centaur, half-fog, half-aqua, out of air,
out of despair, under and above the simulacrum pool
simulating pool, caught in a tight ring of the swimmers’
synchrony, and so one fluid moment to the next the
mesmerising act, in front of our eyes, metamorphing from a
co-shaped geometric butterfly into the blurred outlines of
the ideal and impeccable crime. And a century later when
the heavy curtain of fog lifted and the old continent felt all
at once free, when we opened the newspapers and other
unpublished local records of anonymous archives in which
the vocabulary of the pool was new, altered and estranged,
we saw that irregularities were regular, abnormalities
normal, unfamiliarities familiar in the history of swimming;
in wildlife lakes, in city parks, in lidos and local swimming
pools. That day the sky was blue and the summer only just
hatched, only just bloomed. Dear Simulator Swimmer, dear
pool demon. Today swimming flew melancholically, the
date: June, 1951. There was an early summer breath which
made the outdoor sign, designed to invite, tremble in the
wind. The blue tiled corridors freshly wiped were echoing
with eerie gossip, muffled whispers, terrific chronicles. In
the shower room I saw us clotheless, shameless, showering,
cleansing our bronze bodies for life. But the pool, hiding in
the public bathroom behind the pool, showered us with
shame. And so, in our unsheltered shame we tried to hide
with hands or towels what we had to hide. And the next day,
or much later, the pool, historia’s, the heart’s typewriter,
commissioned by local, national and pan-national archives,
continued its fluid discourse, its own dictation so the next day
or much later we were told to keep calm and then to
shower and then to swim fast and even faster. And later,
much later, because our will to live was greater than
ambition, we began to forget. But as fades the glowing orb
of day, at early dawn, the close of day, I, the idle swimmer,
the phantom swimmer, the elastic swimmer without ending
or beginning, noticed in the morning shower that my body
had grown ancient, temporal, corporeal, final, in other words
as old as the pool. As old as alma mater.