Mike Saunders
After At Land
In the 1950s or 60s all of the swimming pools in Hollywood were drained for three days.
The news reported that each place has a mind somewhere, that in Los Angeles
the mind was in the water, and from the wry awe with which this sincere sentiment
was exchanged poolside I guess the implication
was that this place on the edge of the desert had suffocated for a brief moment,
but not really, that nothing could really hurt it, least of all a glut or lack of water, or of anything,
and that there would always be water here, if water was what was wanted. Maya Deren
was staying in town at the time, in Bel-Air I think, and I read a conversation
where she talked about loving an imagination of the truth
and about how cinema’s ability to show a legitimate version of the real
was something like a magical power. She went on to talk about marriage, and later
about the elaboration of a simple and casual occurrence
turning into a double ending, a critical emotional experience, a dislocation, with
unexpected simultaneities, contracted movements. I wrote a series
of poems about the dams along the Colorado river,
consisting mostly of lines
in which I imagined the cracks I would see along the way
in the dry dirt and in the pores of the old-timey concrete arcs, and how
there was something sweet and rotten
about their desperate ability to keep the rapidly dwindling reservoirs at bay.
The truth is that those poems were swallowed up
by the grant application written ostensibly to fund their creation
(and for the purchase of an accompanying car, and a camera to film the road movie
of our repeatable adventure), and were sacrificed
into the failed outline of some kind of rare and beautiful concluding performance,
somewhere between dance & theatre, or theatre
& art, or heightened emotional living & abstract expressionism.
Halfway through the second draft
any joy in the image of a drained state
seemed quickly to be drowning in its own morbid signification, if you’ll forgive the pun, and I thought
of the pictures I had stuck along the damp walls of my poorly ventilated office - of the Hoover, the
Glen Canyon, the Parker, the Davis, the Morelos, the Laguna Diversion, the Palo Verde, the Marble
Canyon, the Granby - and about how they could do with some quiet reflection. When I emerged from
this lacuna I understood that the photographs of the dams, which had defined me for such a long time,
turned out not to be useful and evocative representations, but were instead spells channelled against
the sublime, the whole setup an intricate transference of weight, a promise that the sources I was
seeking would never truly be found. After three days the pools were refilled, something to do with
overactive bacteria, and by early evening the ice was already starting to melt in glasses across the city
as if nothing had happened. No one cried for a while, and at some point it even rained a few times.
Maya got back to work, layered her ideas rhythmically across increasingly scarce and expensive film;
elsewhere, coincidentally, almost everyone sighed deeply with something like relief. We understood
again how easy it was to swim underwater. We all have the lungs we are designed for.
Mike Saunders lives in Edinburgh. A book, Dark Pool Ripple, is available from Gatehouse Press. New work is forthcoming in Gorse and Hix Eros.