Shaving Spines

a foreword

Before I was born there was a drowning-a would-be cousin, a toddler. It was a death from which no one in my family ever recovered.

Because of the drowning, my grandfather paid for my sister and me to have weekly private swim lessons even before we could walk. We excelled at swimming, were told we could become champions, and then did.

Our lives, for a period of time, were, like Leanne Shapton's, completely defined by the pool. In Swimming Studies, the objects, images and memories of Shapton's swimming past are displayed as an accumulation of evidence. Photographs of her swimsuits, which range from chic bikinis, to vintage one pieces, to technical, high-necked Speedo Fastskins, are rendered, in black and white, with the aesthetic of archeological artifacts or murder weapons-numbered alongside explanatory text that consistently includes geographical locations and numeric dates and times.

In one of the many painting series in this book, Shapton depicts her memories of swimming with watercolors of blurred figures resisting being overtaken by the bleeding blue of water. These paintings point towards the strange, and slightly alien nature of swimming. We are land animals. We are not amphibious. If we stay in water long enough it will kill us. The impulse for a human to live in water for six hours a day, to spend so much of one's life inside an inherently hostile medium, is odd.

My sister had a greater natural aptitude than me for swimming, but, by our teenage years, had wearied of the monotony, which Shapton describes with such acute accuracy, of swimming in a pool, and decamped to surfing, in which she also became a champion. My sister still surfs most days. If you surf Beacon's Beach (a world-famous break in San Diego) you will see my sister paddling out with her powerful shoulders, an impeccable, classically trained swimmer's form. Swimming still pervades my sister's life in a way that it no longer does mine, which is why I think I, like Shapton, am deeply puzzled by my past self who swam.

This book has Easter eggs aplenty for people like me who lived a great deal of life in the water, but it also has surprises, radiant moments of recognition and clarity, for anyone who has ever had a self that they have left behind. Swimming Studies exemplifies the narrative paradox of the specific feeling universal. While this book is certainly about swimming, I think it is also a book about fashion, class, class mobility, art-making, motherhood, what it means to be a child, what it means to be an artist, what it means to have loved many people, and what it means to have a life where you've, like the greatest athletes, "[died] twice."

When Shapton was twelve, one of her coaches remarked that she, "had a 'feel' for the water." She knew exactly what he meant and is deeply aware that she still possesses the power. She has, "a knowledge of watery space, being able to sense exactly where [her] body is and what it's affecting, an animal empathy for contact with an element-the springing shudder a cat makes when you touch its back."

Because of my own background as a swimmer (and much more successfully as a water polo player), the seduction of this element is both relatable and obvious-who wouldn't want this superpower?-but it is no less confounding. Shapton's desire to swim, to become a swimming champion, seems to me obliquely but clearly related to the reason why, in some religions, you are discouraged from depicting faces. She states clearly, and in many different ways, that she was never interested in triumphing over one of her competitors. Her antagonist in a race, if one could even define it that way, was never another girl, but time itself. "Swimmers' goals are temporal and their efforts interior rather than adversarial or gladiatorial," she writes. "When I swam I saw familiar faces in my heats, but I knew them by their times-in descending tenths and hundredths of a second-as much as by their names."

Later, Shapton quotes Glenn Gould explaining his love of the recording studio and describing it as, "an environment where the magnetic compulsion of time is suspended-well, warped at the very least. It's a vacuum, in a sense, a place where one can properly feel that the most horrendously conflicting force of nature-the inexorable linearity of time-has been, to a remarkable extent, circumvented."

In one of my favorite passages in the book, one that will live inside me until I die, Shapton recounts her morning pre-swim-practice ritual of warming up her breakfast in the microwave during which she would set the cook timer to one minute and eleven seconds-her aspirational time for the 100-meter breaststroke. In this ritual, Shapton would put the food in the microwave, set the timer, and then close her eyes at the exact same moment that she pressed START. In the following one minute and eleven seconds, inside the sound bath of the cooking-whir of the microwave, Shapton would envision every part of the ideal race that would bring her to the wall in under one minute and eleven seconds. She would control her breathing in the morning darkness of the kitchen so that she was only breathing in when her imagined self wasn't underwater. She was training in the kitchen, inside the microwave moments, not to visualize a victory, but to bend time itself, to learn how to inhabit it and control it-to sense its passing at the most miniscule levels so that one might be able to stop it, fold it back, and force it to bend to one's will. Through Shapton we come to understand that the passing of time, like water flowing over hands, can be felt if only you can learn how to feel it. The goal of this exercise was always, for Shapton, eyes still closed, to hit the STOP button on the microwave at the exact moment that its beep signaled that one minute eleven seconds, her winning time, had elapsed.

At the height of her swimming powers, Shapton was ranked 8th in Canada in the 100-meter breaststroke. She writes that she, "wasn't the best; [she] was relatively fast . [she] was pretty good," which reveals itself over the course of the book to be such a hyperbolic understatement that one wonders how such a modest posture could possibly be maintained. I read it as the posture not of defeat, but of bafflement: who was the Leanne Shapton of the past and how did she become the almost-best in the world at something? How does one understand being almost-best at anything? Life at large, in all its mess, is never so clear, so understandable, as to gift one the clarity of a ranking. In this book, Shapton remembers the period of time in which she inhabited a national rank, and was identified by the moments, down to the hundredths of a second, with which she could swim one hundred meters using breaststroke in a race. Swimming Studies is her memoir of that past nationally ranked self, and of the many layers of selfhood that are deposited on the psyche as we move through time and space more generally. Like an archeologist, Shapton excavates the bizarre, occasionally disorienting, act of looking at one's reflection backwards. Her excavations are equal parts tactile and enchanting. This book includes a great deal of the specifics-the minutiae of goggle-design variables, pool architecture, photographs of swim apparel, photographs of her dad's cars, portraits of past competitors, paintings of smells-while also detailing the swimming world of Shapton's youth in broader strokes. This book does not offer explanatory declarations but rather, meditations. These meditations-these Swimming Studies-are total catnip for anyone who has ever had a close relationship to swimming, but they're also riveting for anyone who has ever had the impulse to look backwards, to question the boundaries, integrations and disconnections, between how one was in the past and how one is inside the roving period of time known as today.

Even though Shapton identifies time, not the opponent, as a swimmer's true competitor, she refutes the idea that she was ever pursuing triumph over anything. She cites fictional athletes whose narratives similarly side-step a desire for conquest: "Characters like John Cheever's swimmer Neddy Merrill, Don DeLillo's blocker Gary Harkness, and David Foster Wallace's tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza illuminate a wider, more complicated swath of culture by not winning. Their swims, games, matches aren't redemptive. Their trajectories don't set up victory." It is the desire for the binary of the win and the loss that Shapton accuses of banality. Anyone who has been gripped by an obsession knows that inhabiting the obsession is what is addictive. If you win or you lose then the race is over. You are no longer inside of it. Being inside the obsession, the act of swimming, is what Swimming Studies imbues with importance.

Another one of the (many) miraculous things this book does is posit a theory of the connection between art-making and athletics-a connection that seems, by the sheer number of writers (and editors) I know who obsessively exercise, anecdotally...