Not Dry: iii - Dephlogisticated Air

March, 2021

It may storm or it may be a rather sunny day, at this stage it is a toss up. I head for a swim at the Bogey Hole, a sea bath constructed by convicts in the early colonial years of the city. When I arrive there are a half dozen young men and women standing on the steps that lead down its hillside, watching as the ocean heaves mountainous waves over the expanse of the hole. The Welsh poet Thomas Harri Jones drowned here under similar conditions in the sixties. I head down, stubbornly, to check out the conditions for myself and consider that the waves have significantly lessened by the time I am at the edge of the pool, however not thirty seconds after I dive in I look to the ocean and see a twenty foot wave making its ascent, shadowing the Bogey Hole and the hillside. No time to get out, I dive beneath the eruption of foam and grab onto two metal bars cast down beneath the hillside steps. The receding extraction of water pulls at me beneath the waves with severe force, as if some great aquatic vacuum cleaner is suctioning out all the foreign matter from the area to deposit far out in the depths of international waters. As the sea finishes taking back what it has given I breach and climb out and say to the concerned onlookers, well that is enough adventure for one day.

Still eager for a swim I walk around the edge of a public garden and onto a walkway that leads to the public city baths. There are some two dozen heads bobbing on the water, most of them wearing colourful swim caps, looking like candied fruits floating in a bowl of cyan punch. I am not a strong swimmer and this is my first time at the baths, so I walk out slowly from the ramp that slopes into the water, foot after tentative foot, waiting to see if the sandy bottom should give way to some bottomless trench at any moment. All the while I am walking I keep thinking how much I hope that I am able to walk the whole way across the baths because of how enjoyable it would be to just languidly stroll the length of the pool, first slowly one way, and then slowly the other, and then slowly back again, slowly. I want to live in slow motion, to live my best slow life. And then what do you know, this is exactly what happened. I made it all the way to the edge, some fifty metres from where I began on the ramp, now holding onto the wall that separates the baths from the ocean. Like they were at the Bogey Hole, the waves here are steep and pour over the edge of the wall, although granted have nothing of the ferocity from earlier. The water foams over and shakes the surface tension of the baths here at the edge but it all soon dissipates and returns to ease. After scanning the area for swimmers doing laps and realising that I am in a nonintrusive position, I lay back and take a deep breath and begin to float.

Intentionally, there is almost nothing on my mind. Well. What I am thinking about, the one alternative to nothing, while I float, is a video I saw earlier that morning. It is of a young lady in Myanmar, in an area near the parliament building, performing an aerobics routine in front of a camera on a tripod. She wears a neon green top, black tights and a medical pandemic mask. The song she dances to is a high energy electronic tune, lots of vocoder (how to recognise speech, how to wreck a nice beach) and distorted bass. And then, at nineteen seconds in, without her displaying any noticeable recognition to disrupt her dancing, a procession of black armored military vehicles stream in behind her, driving up to the parliamentary security checkpoint, and then on through the checkpoint. Some of the vehicles have police lights flashing, others have what look like mounted guns sticking out of their roofs. What we are observing here is the beginning of the military coup in Myanmar on the first of February two thousand and twenty one. Party leaders were taken away and members of parliament were placed under house arrest. On the website that I viewed the video on, the headline was: Dance Dance Revolution.

This is what I am thinking about, while I float in the baths this morning. Dance Dance Revolution is a video game from nineties Japan that asks the player to perform dance steps in accordance with colourful neon arrows that float up the screen. The fact that video of an aerobics dance routine filmed in front of a government overthrow exists in the same reality that the video game Dance Dance Revolution exists for a website headline to create a joke connecting the two is enough to short circuit my head. The event and the joke feel not only made for each other but mutually reliant on each other, as if the event did not chronologically come before the joke or the other way around, but the existence of the aerobics routine and the video game in relation to the joke headline were all given life in a moment of contingent revelation. It makes me question whether the video is even real, or was it perhaps staged just for this headline. Is this a marketing ploy by the makers of Dance Dance Revolution to reboot the series. Meanwhile, a nineteen year old girl, Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing, was shot as part of civilian protests, and died as she turned twenty. Enormous posters showing the moment she was shot have been hung from bridges by fellow protesters in Myanmar. Where does this young girl fit into the mess of spectacle and political violence, of uncanny video and tragicomic headlines, of economics and meaning, of international response and meaning, of her being described as a grocery store clerk and being able to view photos of her funeral on the same social media networks that facilitated genocide in the country only a couple years prior and meaning, of something and meaning, anything, come on.

I continue to float. The ocean waves keep pushing up and over the boundary of the baths. I wonder if any fish ever get in here. For a moment I try reaching my arms back behind my head so I am sleek like a fish, and I marvel at how much more air I am able to get into my lungs this way. How have I never tried this before. Lately I have felt like I have not been getting enough air when I breath, but now my lungs are rejoicing in oxygen. Floating in this posture I begin to sink a little, only slightly. My face gently dips under the water but I can still breath fine. The water laps over my eyes. There is nothing beneath me, nothing above me, just air filling my lungs that makes me feel lighter, emptier, with every breath.