There was a time when you could hardly spit without hitting a french film that didn’t include a scene wherein the heroine swims laps in a dark swimplex, the water lit from within. Ordinarily the heroine is under some kind of powerful familial distress and is swimming as a way of ‘drowning out’ the roar of her situation as it were. Also it is presumed she is swimming–like one of Joan Didion’s characters might–to keep a particular kind of figure.

Maybe I’m imagining there are hundreds upon hundreds of scenes with women swimming laps in dark swimplexes. Maybe there’s only two. I think Charlotte Rampling swam some laps in Ozon’s Under the Sand in a dark swimplex. Not to be confused with Rampling’s scenes from Ozon’s La Piscine, which features a different kind of swimming. And there’s this heavyhanded scene from Blue.

I was a swimmer growing up. I swam on the swim team and I have a nice swimming stroke. I have not lap swum for many years.

As hundreds upon hundreds of French directors know, lap swimming is an especially existential activity. There is no point A and there is no point B, mostly. There is no sound except for the sound of your own struggling to move through the water. It is like having a dream. The kind of dream where you are struggling to move forward but your progress is frustrated by a kind of palsy.

It is remarkably meditative. I don’t mean like, “yeah, swimming is really meditative for me” like people say about practically everything. Maybe I should say transfixing instead of meditative. Swimming is remarkably transfixing. Because of the composure of the swimming stroke. It’s very, you know, tricky. It’s complicated to arrange all the parts of the stroke into one, forever-dawning motion. And, like yogis attaching their breaths to special parts of their dramatic movements (thereby transfixing themselves if I’m not mistaken), swimming is built upon metronomic, transfixed breathing. Not metronomic. Waltzic. Like a waltz. Breath, stroke, stroke,breath, stroke, stroke. Lastly swimming is repetitive and the scenery never changes no matter what. If you happen to be swimming in a dark swimplex, the effect of struggling alone inside the featureless ocean of a distant planet is particularly palpable. Insofar as your interiority suddenly disengages from the ordinary, now swim-dampened, frequencies.

Alas, a woman alone in a pool is in fact alone within herself. That’s what all these french directors are trying to impress upon us.

I went lap swimming today at the East Portland Community Center because I don’t know what to do with myself when my family is away. That’s what I was getting at. I checked in at the E. Portland Community Center.