Solace, Après-Swim
A picture was taken after swim on 31st December 2016, walking out from London Fields Lido. I was unemployed. The ground was frozen, as this month's, after the first snow. Feeling like the whole world is collapsing.
Knowing Lido will be reopened from 4th Jan is one of my best birthday gift from London Fields.
((Only if life was measured by pool length.))
A length of the pool is a week.
A lap is a fortnight.
§
READ
THIS:
Floating Swimming Pool, Rem Koolhaas, 1978. Photograph: Rem Koolhaas/Madelon Vriesendorp
Floating Swimming Pool, Rem Koolhaas, 1978
Dutch Architect who goes swimming everywhere is Rem Koolhaas.
Koolhaas's pool illustrates the last chapter of his book Delirious New York. It's an Orwellian fable about a group of Soviet architecture students who build a vast, floating swimming pool that they propel across the Atlantic by swimming laps. The journey to New York takes 40 years, and the pool's arrival is met with a hostility they had not anticipated. Koolhaas, himself an avid swimmer, satirises the utopian beginnings of Russian constructivism and its slow morph into corporate American modernism with his usual intellect, idealism and rancour.
“‘I swim every day wherever I am. And I always swim in the public baths. I think it is a way of injecting yourself, as naked as you can be, into a particular society. I swim one kilometre in the evening.’ ”
Elsewhere he wrote that 'the function of baths is to create and recycle public and private fantasies ... a stage of a dialectic between exhibitionism and dictatorship.'
For Koolhaas, the theme of the pool symbolises “an enclave of purity in contaminated surroundings" (Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 307.)
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Every Sunday dusk I would have this thing, I used to a name for it, it's called 'Anxiety Sunday'.
Therefore, I would have 'Anxiety walk' at London Fields Park
prior to that there will be a Swim at dawn
It gives certain solace
of anxiety at dusk
another year, another length,
starts all over again
except we don't need another 2017 again.
