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Self-destructive fool

Those of you who know the murder ballad tradition know to be wary of lakes and rivers. Despite involving large bodies of water, “The Swimming Song” is not a murder ballad—decidedly not. You’d be forgiven, though, for being suspicious of what lurks beneath. It is a song of summer. It is whimsical on the surface, and with Wainwright’s signature wordplay, more is going on than meets the ear.  “The Swimming Song” is not an especially old friend of mine, but it is a good one. It has come through for me in meaningful ways in two instances, which I’ll relate in a moment.

LW III, poolside (source: uncredited Facebook image)

You may not want to call it a “Conversation with Death,” either. Rather, the song turns and thumbs its nose at death before diving boldly in and swimming off in the other direction. Wainwright’s good humor often puts a fun, shiny coat on a darker core in his songs. Consequently, you can usually spy some pain under the humor—perhaps his, perhaps your own. What you take from it will depend on what you bring to it. He does, however, get something right about swimming, and something right about life, too.

Perhaps it is just a fun summer romp. Perhaps “drowned” is just a convenient rhyme for “around.” The song hints at something more, though. It invokes that risk I mentioned, and a confrontation with death. This mortal, embodied sentiment finds an echo in “salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes, I’m a self-destructive fool.”

The first time the song came through for me was after I had taken a big career leap. I had been doing work that just wasn’t working for me. It was exacting some significant costs on my health and well-being. Taking the leap helped on that front, but made for an uncertain summer. I stayed busy, and had plenty of time to play, but didn’t know what things would look like when I reached the other shore. As the fall began, the job situation began to clarify. I discovered “The Swimming Song” around that time. It became part of the emotional soundtrack of that season of my life—based entirely on the strength of the song as metaphor. “Swimming” was not literally swimming.

The second instance when “The Swimming Song” resonated was when I took up the lake workouts. In this case, “swimming” was literally swimming. The song got that right, too.

I don’t say what I’m about to say to be boastful, but not everybody can manage in open water. Even strong swimmers can find the movement of the water, diminished visibility, cold temperature, and lack of a nearby place to stand or a wall to hold too much to manage psychologically. I once accompanied an accomplished, long-distance open water swimmer by kayak for a 5-mile lake swim. It was clear that the challenge was, at times, as much one of will as of body. Even swimming in small, choppy waves can pull you out of your rhythm and disrupt your breathing.

(photo credit: David Travis)

As I mentioned earlier, I swim with a group of regulars. Some are artists. Some are triathletes, including one world age-group champion. There is usually a steady, social banter as people emerge from their morning workout. The humor of “The Swimming Song” matches tone with what I often hear before and after swims—“So glad you made it back.”

Robert Christgau, in his review of Attempted Mustache, the album on which “The Swimming Song” originally appeared, wrote this of Wainwright’s songs: “the fact that ‘Dilated to Meet You’ and ‘Lullaby’ and for that matter ‘The Swimming Song’ are funny doesn’t mean they don’t add to the great store of human wisdom.” What is “The Swimming Song’s” contribution? Your answer may differ from mine.

The unofficial leader, or the spiritual leader perhaps, of our swimming group is a legendary open water swimmer in his late 80s. One of his swimming colleagues says here that he swims to quiet the mind—perhaps finding the “contact” described above. My wife quotes him as saying “You pass through the water; the water passes through you.” It’s a physical and metaphysical connection. It can also be quite primal. Another lakefront regular swims in the lake more or less year round, even in winter. He swims with a monofin. I’m told he does so to tap into an ancient mammalian reflex triggered by doing the wave-like dolphin kick the monofin supports.

The author, exiting the water on slippery rocks (photo credit: David Travis)

For me, the morning swim is always a small test. It grows a little more routine now, but it’s a good opportunity to begin the day with a small test of courage. Some days, it calls to me. Some days, it doesn’t, but I go. At the conclusion of my swim, I don’t just feel like I’ve worked out, I feel just a little bit like I survived. I have reclaimed the day. It makes me think that conversations with death and conversations with life may sometimes be the same conversation. “The Swimming Song,” to my swimmer’s ear, agrees. It captures that the water is simultaneously what threatens you and what supports you.

The other analogy that occurs to me is that swimming can do for the body what music, and particularly murder ballads or “conversations with death” can do for the soul. There are immersions, literal and figurative, and something to move through, and something that survives, perhaps even thrives. In swimming, you feel the difference in the body. In music, you picture it in the mind. They both touch the spirit. Contact.

Poet Stephen Dunn writes of something like this feeling in “A Primer for Swimming at Black Point.” You can read the full text here or here. After the cold in the first stanza, and the fear in the second, the third delivers you here:

 And when you get out
there’ll be no evidence
you were ever in, just a
tingling, an aliveness
that hints insurrection
in the deepest parts of you,
and it too will pass.
Don’t expect to know more
than your body has absorbed.

The season is winding down now. The lake has a lag that can make the water warmer than the air for a while as summer ends and fall begins. I expect I’ve gone for my last lake dip until next July. Until then, I’ll have to come up with some other ways to kick my feet and move my arms around.

“Splash Angel” (photo credit: David Travis)

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