Holy Water
Cancer season: Cheever's The Swimmer, La Piscine, Didion's Holy Water, and Hockney's pools
My astrology and tarot books are open for July, then closed until autumn. [Discount code on individual sessions at the bottom of this email for subscribers.] And I have a few more slots for 5-session 1-1 art of astrology studies package. This is a way to work with me longterm, at a discounted rate: on your chart, astrology in general, and/or a creative project. The sessions can be booked and used however/whenever you’d like over the course of a year.
“He had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow into his chest.” — John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
Who is this swimmer? This bonkers idea, to swim pool to pool until home, suddenly seems truly tragic. Why do we wade into the water or avoid the water? How water stupefies, makes blurry, allows escape from weight and forces other, more liquid revelations—-titrated, teeming. By the end, he arrives home. Bone-tired, alone. All altered: himself, his home, the hot, drink-soaked cove of summer.
But first: pool season in this hemisphere. When the sun’s high in the sign of Cancer, a sign which rules the center of the body. Cancer is first water, waters of the womb and early summer, nutritive, protective, and lunar. How we get weightless in pools as gravity-filled life moves all around us per usual. Pools are surreal zones of enclosure. A pool in the waterless west, Joan Didion wrote in “Holy Water” is a symbol not so much of opulence but of control—-soothing to the arid eye. The trip we take in the sign of Cancer is different from the trips we take in the other water signs, but just as trippy. Unlike rivers and oceans and lakes, with their critters and tides and currents, pools are