Going in

And something happens to me every time I am close to water. I see it and feel drawn to it. I walk to it and enter it and start walking through the water. Inside the water my creativity explodes. I start making up a story in my head. Mostly I’m speaking it to myself while I’m making it. I am imagining this story in the moment. It’s like meditating I guess. I walk through the water and I feel the water flowing between my legs – and its like I’m in a trance.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

The nostalgia I am talking about is cultural nostalgia. Culturally, I think there is this longing (towards the ocean). A longing to be swallowed by it. The ocean suggests a (possible) disappearance of the human being(s) into it. You see people going into it , far out into it, + you don’t know if and when they are going to come out. You get the sense that you are going in to an environment that makes you vulnerable.

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and rock formations.

There’s a French film (Welcome by Philippe Lioret): about a refugee crossing the channel by swimming. The film describes the process of him getting ready for the crossing, training like mad. I don’t remember if in the end you actually see him entering the water, but I have a clear (perhaps imagined) image of him progressively getting disoriented + getting sleepy.

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).