Instead of being choked, I prefer the wingspan of thumb and index be pressed to my neck during sex. Thus, I’m a simulacrum; all throat and no threat. What if all our world is a mundane copy of the purest version of the universe?
Swimming in a pool, lake, or even the sea, is just a pale representation of the swimming of the Samurais. Ensconced in armor, weapons in hand, they whipped the underwater with spinning, splash-less legs.
To sneak and snare.
To slice and tear.
Their silence in wave was as stunning as their combat in water. Samurai swimming isn’t an elevated form of swimming, so much as what we call “swimming” is just a failed copy of Swim.
I swear Brautigan wrote a poem about making love in a swimming hole swelled with dead fish. I’ve yet to find the poem that matches the memory tho, so maybe I imagined it and then attributed it to Richard. If you know, do tell.
Two lovers swam in a pool under a sky with no moon. Edges descended into obfuscation in the absence of moonlight, so the water was made murkier, and elbows were no different than knees. The water was warm as piss but less crisp. They embraced through the viscous, a slime of dying coated their limbs and reminded him of her insides as fish slowly buoyed to the surface congregating in a gathering of dead-eyed voyeurs.
The sensation of a slow-floating fish passing across your back could be thrilling, once you remove the smell of decay and the conscious understanding of death of course. French ticklers are not the design of Man but a simulacrum of Nature’s slick scale and stiff fin.
This was the first summer in years that I went swimming only once. We used to populate the cove with our halieutic mimicry. In a freshwater lake, on the warmest days, your toes will feel five degrees colder than your nose. Even if 20 of us were swimming, two people were often seen bobbing in the center of the cove, taking advantage of the watery platonic confessional. Inch closer to shore and the connected vulnerability lessens. Swimwear has the same effect, which is why skinny-dipping in a secluded inlet is a form of intimacy. It’s been years since we all swam like that.
Murakami compared emotions, and their fleet, to migratory birds, and their fly. But migratory birds, by definition, return. And feelings don’t always boomerang back, sometimes they just break and die.
Butterflies also migrate. Twenty years ago I stood in a swarm of monarchs and watched as they hung upside from my mom’s hair. Their wings opened and closed en masse in a blinking of orange and brown And all I saw was a million fresh wounds languidly winking at me as if to say “wake up, this moment is the primordial.”
This all reminds me of a most beloved film by Nicolas Provost.
"our halieutic mimicry."
Great new word. Overwhelms my brain with 'catfishing,' 'there are more fish in the sea', 'fishing for complements' puns and that high school folk knowledge of the apparent smell of vaginal excretions.
Papillon D'Amour is amazing, thanks for sharing it. Gonna keep Provost's website open and look through his work later.