Go for a swim this morning and immediately feel a billion times better. Recently it's been difficult to summon the energy and enthusiasm: snow, black ice on the roads, a cold. And, in the lead up to Christmas the pool was closed for repairs.

As I do my lengths I can't help thinking of analogies with writing. That simply making the effort is worth it. You do your lengths - like a line - allowing a rhythm to take over. The first two lengths come easy. The next few are tougher. By number eight it's coming more easily - you're in 'the zone' and a different kind of thinking and feeling is taking over.

Leaving the pool you feel limber, the air comes clean in your nostrils. Even though it is still January there is light over the rooftops. Fresh bread for breakfast.

Creeley speaks of writing and swimming (I've finally tracked down the notebook where I've stuck the quote on the front):

"I love the story of Neal Cassidy writing on the bus with Ken Kesey, simply tossing the pages out of the window as he finished each one. "I wonder if it was any good," I can hear someone saying. Did you ever go swimming without a place you were necessarily swimming to - the dock, say, or the lighthouse, the moored boat, the drowning woman? Did you always swim well, enter the water cleanly, proceed with efficient strokes and a steady flutter kick? I wonder if this "good poem" business is finally some echo of trying to get mother to pay attention."

Coincidentally, last week there was a woman on Radio 4 talking about open air swimming in the rivers and seas around England. It's one of a series - Something Understood - which can be a bit hit and miss but usually throws up something of interest. One of her theories was that committing yourself to the water was a re-enactment of more unconscious 'lettings-go' (birth trauma, surrendering rational control, etc.). She might be right. Certainly with my poor eyesight, even before I hit the water I'm pretty disoriented. Friends can be waving two lanes away and all I see are blurs.

Here's the link for the programme - it'll be available until tomorrow:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00pn3zx

*

Terrific as it is to have the Bil Griffiths Collected, I can't help regret the loss of the original look of the page, the feel of the volume. A History of the Solar System: Fragments of A History of the Solar System is a case in point. I love the small sewn green volume having read it in The Poetry Library a year or so ago. However, as so often happens, what do I chance upon but the MimeoMimeo site - http://mimeomimeo.blogspot.com/ - where the original has been reproduced! That's as near as I'm going to get. I hope they won't mind me pasting one page in here ...



This time of reading it dawns on me how Griffiths is weaving in the solfege system via syllabic underlinings. Highly recommended!