The Water and the Wild

Fleet Foxes ‘Shore’ is a hydrous work from its title and cover art through to its frequent references to rain, waves and water. Liquid lines run from the opening track ‘Wading in waist-high water’ to the closing ‘Shore’ (‘Taking me in, When a wave runs me through, As a shore I ever seem to sail to’). On 'For a Week or Two', Robin Pecknold sings ‘Water stands, Waves just pass through it, Like something moves through you’ while 'I'm Not My Season' imagines helping a friend in distress as rescuing them from the water ‘can you catch a thrown line, Tied around neat’. Driving along the “Going-to-the-Sun Road" (an actual road that skirts the lakes of Glacier National Park in Montana) prompts ‘the thought of flight for water whiter’. Pecknold plunges into the water on 'Sunblind' - 'I'm gonna swim for a week in Warm American Water with dear friends, Swimming high on a lee in an Eden'. This is a song of remembrance for dead musical heroes including Da

The Midnight Swim, directed by Sarah Adina Smith, is the beautifully shot story of three sisters returned home in the wake of their mother's death.  Their family home is on the shore of the 'Spirit Lake', which their mother had campaigned for as a conservationist and dived in as a scientist and scuba diver - and where she has disappeared presumed drowned.  Much of the story unfolds in and around the lake, including a pleasingly spooky/witchy undercurrent based on folklore about seven drowned sisters and the spirit of one of them calling swimmers to danger and death. It is certainly not a horror film though, so much as a well observed tale of family dynamics and bereavement set against the background of what is apparently West Lake Okoboji in the Iowa Great Lakes. The mother was also something of a mystic, singing nursery rhymes about 'lake fairies' and reciting lines from Wordsworth to illustrate her beliefs in reincarnation: 'Our Souls have sight of that immort

  'My mother taught me how to swim... In old age my mother had found a swimming technique to ‘totally give herself to the water’. This involved floating on her back, ‘emptying her thoughts’ and ‘surrendering to the flow’. She showed me her trick in the murky swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath, floating Ophelia style with the ducks and weed and leaves. I still try to do her trick, but I can only float for ten seconds before I start to sink. Likewise, when I turn my mind to my mother's death, I can only do so for 10 seconds before I start to sink’ (Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living, 2018)

Still the Water is a 2014 film directed by by Naomi Kawase, set on the Japanese island of Amami Ōshima. The sea features heavily as both setting and metaphor, for instance there is talk of a life as a wave starting out far out in the ocean and picking up power before crashing to a conclusion on the coast. There are two key underwater swimming scenes in the film. Earlier on we see Kyoko (played by  Junko Abe) taking a long sub aquatic dip in her school uniform. Towards the end of the film she returns underwater for a naked swim with her boyfriend, shortly after we hear an elderly relative bemoan 'I can't swim anymore', passing on the hope for life to these young lovers. The closing image of the film (above) is of the two swimmers shot from below with the sun above them.  

Dock2Dock race (1.5k, 5k and 10k)  London Royal Docks, 12 September 2020 T-shirt design by Jonny Voss