Today, the Olympic Games in Paris will finally open after the mayoress has tried to convince us that the Seine River is cleaner than ever by taking a dip in a wetsuit, which offers some protection. The last time I visited Paris, I didn't even consider swimming in the river. However, I did enjoy my morning run along the riverbank, and it was priceless.
The only time I had swum by myself in a river was a day before a rowing competition, and it was scary to do it, in fact, I did not stray just twenty meters from the shore. Because in the current of a wide river, there are no arms to dominate it and neither lungs to sustain the effort.
That singing angel named Jeff Buckley died drowned in Memphis swimming in the Mississippi River in 1997 when a passing tugboat put him underwater, where some branches would trap him. The English writer Virginia Woolf only needed two stones in the pockets of a winter coat to fulfill Shakespeare Ophelia's ambition and find a muddy death.
Of course, all this was in my mind when I swam among the green algae and never ventured to the other shore. And when the rest of the crew arrived the next day, despite the fact that rowing against the current left us exhausted because it was the last week of June and the heat was unforgiving, we chose a safe bend to bathe.
That same evening, we saw a catfish of two meters and almost 176 pounds that a British fisherman caught, so the lonely adventure of crossing the river by swimming stayed with me forever in my memory like a daydream. Now, it has leaped over the water like a nimble fish chased by a larger one. But it will take me a while to see it again.
Those who have never read the French philosopher Henri Bergson might think that Proust created the concept of involuntary memory, the only memory that transcends, the memory that is triggered by a sensation, itself attached to a previous event, suddenly brought back from a distant, seemingly forgotten past.
I also did think so for many years. But like an archeologist delicately brushing away layers of dirt and dust to reveal an ancient object, I freed myself from this misconception while reading Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Bergson distinguished between a quasi automatic memory which, inscribed within our body, facilitates our everyday actions and, on the other hand, a “pure memory” which requires an effort of our mental faculty to bring back to our consciousness specific moments in our life, in the shape of “image-remembrance.”
A century later of that period of unparalleled narrative experimentation, we have not managed to move the pointer of the beam balance. In the pan that concerns us, we have put Post-Modernism and Digi-Modernism. With the latter, the span of attention of the reader has dramatically collapsed, and the authors catering to their audiences boast without blushing of using AI to write without the slightest hint of complication, lest the snowflake reader feel overwhelmed, challenged, stunned, or offended immediately by a forbidden word.
And decide instead to quit reading to binge-watch any TV series while dozing, or worse, a reality show of alleged celebrities, while doom scrolling his social media like a goddamn digital junkie. I am not exaggerating one iota. That is the hollow reality we are living in 2024.
"I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality," wrote Flannery O'Connor.
Those who adore the quicksilver, the depth of mirrors, and their mercurial amalgams, those who write autofiction because they think fiction itself is already stylized in its sinuous forms, do not conceive the genre of memoirs as an unbreakable chain of facts, but as a narrative abstraction as well.
The only thing that can be compared to swimming across a wide river knowing the currents, the catfish, the algae—or the dragged branches that can carry you down at any moment—is to write about yourself without hiding.
I once read an American author—who I believe still lives in Portland, Oregon—called it Dangerous Writing. His name is Tom Spanbauer, although he has not written for a long time, sick of always staying away from the sales of his first works. Back in the day, I read Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, and Now Is The Hour.
But the funniest of all, by far, is Gore Vidal writing about the first forty years of his life before retiring to Italy, with a memoir that already says it all. Palimpsest. Namely, the multiple corrections made by medieval monks with a tissue of paper on the incunable books they patiently reproduced by hand.