Water Pools: When Swimming Becomes Artistic Reflection

Swimming pools have been, for centuries, more than mere structures meant to cool off on hot days. In cultural imagination, these pools represent spaces of transformation, where the body encounters itself and deeper forces. Some see them as paradise, others as hell. Swimming—this seemingly simple act of moving within the water—reveals itself as a gateway to exploring existence itself.

When film and literature discover water

The seventh art has dedicated numerous works to exploring the human relationship with water. Argentine director Lucía Puenzo captured in The Fall the complexity of someone immersing themselves in this element. Welsh filmmaker Sally El Hosaini explored similar dimensions in The Swimmers, while Luc Besson, the French director, took us to metaphorical depths in Deep Blue. These films acknowledge that swimming with style and ease requires a special synchronization: the coordination between inhaling and exhaling, a rhythm that transcends mere physicality.

Water pools on screen are not simple swimming pools. They are spaces where breathing becomes dance, where the body learns a different language. This cinematic phenomenon inevitably connects us with literary works that have meditated on the act of swimming, clearly differentiating it from “nada”—that absolute void where incidents are merely occasional.

Swimming as a mystical and poetic experience

Cristina Rivera Garza, Pulitzer Prize winner, transformed the experience of swimming into deep reflection. For three days, she shared her thoughts on social media while moving in an outdoor pool. Her words resonated with a simple yet devastating truth: “Between floating and falling, swimming. You go to the pool to be alone.” For Rivera Garza, these water pools were not just physical refuge but spaces of memory. She evoked her sister, a femicide victim, recalling how her strokes differed, her techniques varied, but both shared an ineffable connection to the aquatic element.

Argentine poet Héctor Viel Témperley elevated this experience to a mystical dimension. In his verses, he proclaimed “swimmer, Lord, man who swims,” wishing to become water to drink divine rains. He described his body as “a boot without a leg under the sky,” vibrant even in the shallow waters of streams. Poet Juan L. Ortiz reiterated with syntactic duplicity: “A river crossed me / a river crossed me.” These spaces of communion with nature—including water pools as cultural constructions—become sources of profound reflection on life, destiny, and the flowing connection between inner and outer worlds.

Contemporary poetry and solitary sport

Marcelo Cohen wrote penetratingly about the poetry collection Aguas by Alicia Genovese, winner of the Second National Poetry Award. Genovese dares to explore the contact zones between her craft, grammar, and the solitary practice of swimming. In her verses, “water is cyclical, pagan, and swimming is maintaining oneself between form and desire, between affirmation and abandonment.” The images are visceral: opening the chest pushing in circles, frog-leg positions, throwing back what does not belong.

What is remarkable about Genovese’s work is how water pools cease to be neutral settings. They transform through poetic language. Specific names—neoprene suit, rubber cap, broken shells, filaments of living water—give way to the generic, the neutral. The final line resonates: “and, again, the cry / of getting wet under the downpour / the drainage of the heart’s flow / and the rain on the dry.”

Pools, work, and transformation in writing

Félix Bruzzone emerges from a radical experience: thirteen years working as a pool cleaner in gated communities in Don Torcuato, in the Greater Buenos Aires area. His novel Pools is not merely autobiographical; it is a literary immersion into a silent, transparent world where the wealthy refresh themselves, observed by those who clean their waters. Bruzzone perceives himself as one of many “water maids without social burdens,” using phrases that fall like gentle waves, transforming the realistic into the fantastic.

His main narrator recounts anecdotes with disturbing yet serene humor. Colorful characters, pathetic situations appear. In an ironic twist, ex-champion Magui Aicega renames the character: the first time she hears the name “Félix,” she understands “Erik.” From then on, for her and her friends, the pool cleaner is Erik. Bruzzone captures how water pools, for those who maintain them, mean something entirely different from what they mean for those who enjoy them.

The swimmer as a tragic hero

John Cheever, the American master of short fiction, created the iconic story The Swimmer, featuring Neddy Merrill, a wealthy suburbanite who decides to return home by crossing his neighbors’ pools. As he progresses, reality fragments. What begins as a sporting act turns into a journey through different atmospheres, geological eras, temperatures, and memories. Burt Lancaster immortalized this character on screen, moving through increasingly surreal scenarios in a bathing suit. The physical journey reveals a psychological one: Neddy realizes that something fundamental has changed, though he avoids reflecting on it, sinking into depression.

The body in water: breathing, danger, and freedom

Leanne Shapton, former professional swimmer, turns to her experience in Swim Sketches. She does not narrate a chronicle of six-hour daily training, six days a week. Instead, she structures her work around swimming as a route, a language useful for accessing any part of the self: the most hostile and the closest. Swimming becomes a method both to narrate everyday moments and to develop romantic relationships or explore bodies.

Leo Baldo evokes an idea from Gaston Bachelard: “Fatigue is the swimmer’s destiny.” The French philosopher remembered that “the leap into the sea reawakens, more than any other physical event, the echoes of a dangerous initiation.” Those who have swum far from the shore—like some who did so with Mauro Aguilar, an extreme rescue lifeguard—feel the electricity of danger. But the foundation lies in well-controlled breathing: lungs, alveoli, and bronchi working in sync to maintain optimal, rhythmic swimming, aligned with the element. Perhaps the same happens with writing: a narrative that does not breathe well drowns like a swimmer, but one can always float and let the rest come to propel you.

The voice discovered in water pools

Irma Pelatan, the French swimmer, turns the experience of water pools into complete poetry in The Smell of Chlorine. An avid swimmer, she practiced several days a week in a pool designed by the legendary architect Le Corbusier. While her body fused with the water in a singular rhythm, she discovered something unexpected: her own voice emerged at night, insistent, disturbing her sleep. In the water, that voice receded from unease and reached “the territory of the without-object, floating.”

The materiality of water pools becomes, in her writing, desire, anguish, shame, freedom, exploration. Pelatan describes precisely the moment of deploying the body beneath the surface: “Below the surface I immediately unfold, long air in bright bubbles and suddenly a powerful kick, then I undulate, swim beneath the surface, reach this space I adore.” And she concludes with an affirmation of liberation: “after a blow; freedom ahead.” At that moment, water pools cease to be architectural structures and become portals to the very essence.