Treading Water, Hoarding Swims

ABSTRACT

This auto-ethnographic essay explores the author’s ambivalent identifications as an academic researcher trying to write about swimming. Beginning with her tide-bound rituals of sea swimming near her home in Merseyside, the author reflects upon her shifting perceptions of her own physical and psychic interiority in the wake of her cancer diagnosis in June 2019. By drawing together forms of mobility associated with swimming, collecting and hoarding, the author seeks out some unlikely connections: through the trope of ‘treading water’, she represents states of immersion and suspended temporality, and she describes how – both as a swimmer and a hoarder – she experiences a heightened sense of permeable interiority, an ebb and flow of feeling between self and environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Swimming
• hoarding
• auto-ethnography
• cancer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jo Croft is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University, specialising in psychoanalysis, spatial theory, and eco-criticism. She completed her PhD. on ‘Adolescence and Writing: Locating the Borderline’ at Sussex University. Since publishing Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture in 2006 (edited, with Gerry Smyth) Croft’s research has centred on ‘material mobilities’ (especially ‘hoarding’, ‘beachcombing’, ‘gleaning’ and ‘swimming’). She is currently writing a monograph entitled Dreaming on Car Park Beach: The Eco-poetics of Matter and Movement. She is developing her research using ‘cabinet’ based installations, and audio-visual formats. Her short films about swimming have been screened at conferences, and as part of an exhibition about swimming (‘Nofio’) at Aberystwyth Art Centre.

Notes

1 It is interesting to note that Roger Deakin is portrayed as a hoarder in Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks – ‘Roger rarely threw anything away’ (MacFarlane [2015] 2016, 109). See also Patrick Barkham on Deakin’s ‘Walnut Tree Farm’ – ‘he was a hoarder’ (Barkham 2019). Another swimmer who likes to collect, or perhaps to hoard, is Leanne Shapton. She writes about her collection of swimsuits in Swimming Studies (2012), and her novel Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry (2009) takes the form of an auctioneer’s catalogue, telling a love story through a huge collection of seemingly random objects.

2 I take this idea of the ‘refrain’ from Deleuze and Guattari: in A Thousand Plateaus they conceive the refrain as ‘a territorial assemblage’ which ‘marks territory’ by drawing together action, sensation and material environment (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2012, 363).

3 These are the recorded voice commands given by a CT Scanner.

4 The term ‘bostrophedron’ is used by Jonathan Hsy, citing Karla Mallette, to link the ‘back-and-forth transit of texts’ with the sea’s ebb and flow (Hsy 2015, 182).

5 See also Anirudha Dhanawade on jelly’s ‘wavy, wayward rhythms’ as ‘emblems of liveliness’. He points out that ‘Haeckel believed that the gelatinous substance of cell plasm united all living things’ (Dhanawade 2017).