Swimming

California's weather is wonderful, sunny everyday. In the summer, It's not hot with cozy breeze. I usually go swimming in the nearby pool around four or five o'clock in the afternoon. Sunshine breaks through the water to the bottom, leaving a chain of light and shadow. The celeste pool water mirrors the tree outline. Occasionally, a few stray ducks fly in, reluctant to leave. This week in Rio de Janeiro came the anecdote that the water in Olympic Games diving pool turned from blue to green overnight, whereas the swimming pool next to it kept blue. It was first blamed to the algae propagation due to the hot weather and little ventilation; the next day, the blue swimming pool turned green too, it was then blamed to a big change in pH of the water due to too much people using the pool and short of chemical indicators. Anyway, either hypotheses may be correct and there may be other causes too. I am afraid there is no time for A/B testing—the organizers said there was no health risk and the athletes play as usual.

Jumping into the water, stretching, adjusting the breath, and controlling the tempo, I began to practice holding breath. In the the bottom of the pool, the lane marking line is made of dark brown mosaics. Each mosaic is about 2x2 square inches and nine small squares makes a big square. The big squares are connected one by one from one end to the other end of the pool, about 25 feet long. I held a breath and dived into the the water, starting from one end to the other end and counting the numbers of small squares. I tried several times, could only count to one hundred to the most, when I insisted for one minute. Compared with playing Rubik's cube underwater, my game of counting numbers is much easier. According to the theory of evolution, human ancestors are fishes living in the sea. Having gills, they can dive deep into the sea. I wonder if they have their own language and decimal number system. If human invented decimal number system because there are ten fingers can be used for counting, the fish probably will never have their own number system because they can not see their bodies. Of course, those long fishes are excepted. However, long fish like eels have smooth bodies and nothing can be counted, unless they count how many circles they can rotate around themselves, but this is not a fixed variable. Thus the sea give the fishes freedom to swim but deprive of their freedom to think.

Roaming in the water over time, I began to feel myself turn into a fish,  intermittently breathing on the surface. Even a lonely fish can feel pleasant in the water. This pleasure is probably due to the feeling of buoyancy the water making of the body. The gravity is partially offset by the buoyancy, giving a feeling of unusual lightness. Humans have been in the pursuit of this feeling of escape from the shackles of gravity—swimming, racing, gliding, aircraft, spacecraft. The ancient people dream to get into the Heaven, the modern people dream to go to Mars (the gravity on Mars is 1/3 of that on Earth).

Fish is often the projecting target of human emotions. It can be done on the shore, without getting into the water. Two thousand years ago, standing on the bridge at Ho Leung, Chuang Tzu projected his happiness onto the river minnow: "Minnows swims freely and they are happy" (<Chuang Tzu.Autumn floods>). Of course, the minnows are maybe happy, maybe not happy, maybe they do not know if they are happy or unhappy. But never mind, Chuang Tzu felt very happy himself, so he thought the minnows were happy like him as well and that was enough. Of course, if you get into the water, there will be more happiness. Humans tend to share their happiness with others. I have had the experience of deep-sea diving and swimming with the fish schools together, and what did I feel? Probably quadratic that of Chuang Tzu.

Another famous exchange between human and fish occurred two hundred years ago in Germany. Christian Schubart, a famous poet and composer,  was imprisoned, when he wrote a poem for a trout fishing scene— "In a clear stream in happy haste, the imparted trout darted by like an arrow" (Scott Horton translation <Die Forelle >), the poet also felt the quiet sweetness; but as the fisherman made the stream opaque to catch the trout, the poet expressed great anger, compassionating their lost freedom. Schubart projected his own feeling onto the the trout, which is naive joy of young people. If you are Schubart, you'd rather be free than in prison; if you are trout, you prefer clear stream to opaque stream and fisherman's fishing hook. Later this poem was composed into song and chamber music by Franz Schubert and the famous <Trout Quintet> came into being; but it only expresses the happiness there.

It's Italian poet Euogenio Montale who made this projection to its extreme. He is a poet after World War II during the reconstruction period. In <eel>, he depicted in detail the life cycle of eel in which he demonstrated his strong will in pursuit of life. Like people who leave hometown in their young and return in their old ages, eels born in the Baltic sea will roam a long way in very young ages to the freshwater in the south, where they grow up two or three decades later before returning home to spawn and then die. Human leave their hometown in pursuit of a better life; eels probably do for the same purpose. After all, the resource-rich south is warmer and may has less predators, the hardship of long distance could be paid off. Eel do not eat on their way back home but just accumulate energy for spawning once they are in the home sea. Obvious the life in the south is easier than that in the north for eels. But Montale thought the opposite—eels abandon their resourceful life in the north and take a long trip to the harsh environment in the south to survive ("the green spirit who seeks/life there only/ where drought and desolation gnaw" Millicent Bell translation <eel>), which seems against common sense.