The Swimmer

Time is an unbroken line, an infinitely outward extending line. We race with one another, headlong into it, aware that the past can never be retrieved, or never consciously brought back from the depths. All time does is flow, taking us with it. Time as the relentless subtractor. In other words. Time is death, the Fall, quick or slow, never to be redeemed.

But what if, opposed to this modern view, time were circular, always bringing us back? What if time is a condition of life itself, an unending series of possibilities opening up before us? Each birth is a rose against the thorn of time. Insofar as we are modern we have lost the sense (or value) of the timeless and the older, cyclical views of time themselves appear dated. Time marches on (at war with who?), and all we have is this sense that it is taking us away from who we really are-not leading us to a clearer or more complete image of ourselves. Time is a broken mirror. 

Watched The Swimmer again yesterday with some friends (in one of the auditoriums). For Cheever everything is about the moral quality of the light. In the film we see Neddy himself becoming darker with time. In the end he doesn't even have the strength to haul himself out of the pool; he treads heavily, his face bowed down, broken, defeated by the realization that the life he thought he had was all a pretence, a show, a false coin. At the beginning he is all smiles, the symbol of youth, vigour, freshness (he even finds a dark cloud beautiful) but by the end he is almost like a wounded beast, struggling for all his worth for some comfort, solace, some way back "home"... 

There is a way out, I know-a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word-but I am unable at the moment to find it.

Home is the invisible axis, the still point of the heart from which all time is measured. The warmth fades from his body, slips from his hands. The green translucent waters of childhood are now replaced by the fallen brown leaves of autumn. Somehow the idea comes to him that all the swimming pools, the moments of his life, are connected as if really just parts of one river-and that connection goes by the name of his wife, Lucinda. Along the way he his friends will line the banks of this great river; he is noble, different, grand. The depth of life is found in the fact that there are no second chances, that history doesn't always lead us forwards. 

This is it. You had your chance at the good life and you blew it. The light is pure and very elegiac. I see it now, as if it was before my very face. The eighties, the nineties..there are no words for time gone, no matter how much you struggle; the imperfections absolved by summer light or simply forgotten, make their way back, press up against your cheek.

You stand in a line in your forest green blazer, your dark grey flannel trousers, counting the money with one hand in your pocket. You sit slouched on a plastic table, your head heavy with sleep, waiting...eight, ten hours for a flight out of here...when will this journey end? 

There is no-one serious left. The world is full of politics, shallow schemers, reality shows. Late at night the dark winds seem to be lost and there are so many re-runs on television that one has lost the sense of what's "live" and what's recorded. The wide net, all this casting out of words into those empty lives. Where are those subterranean waters that will take me back to the centre? Where is that summer's day when I shot a gun and hit the target and Andrew O'Brien said, exasperated, "beginner's luck!"?

Why do we think luck will stick with us, drag us with it to safe waters? For what is given us in the beginning can be lost, and only a late ace can turn the hand.