The Muse awoken

La séduction suprême n'est pas d'exprimer ses sentiments. C'est de les faire soupçonner. 

(Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly). Whereas Aurevilly's words may fall smile-inducingly short of his own admonition, this photograph...

And what does any of this have to do with swimming? Try: drifts, currents, contours, or the 'billow maidens' of the Old Norse kenning for 'waves' -  'Ægir's daughters'. And if the pursuit of tactile  associations doesn't do it for you, then how about temporal ones: dips in the pool at either end of the night, summer heat, Tuscan light, a moment of respite. Or even literary ones: the Unbearable Lightness of Being.

And here's a linguistic association: the phrase 'the Muse awoken' is awash with currents from older stages of the language (the strong verb vowel-change, the a- prefix meaning 'at, 'in the state of'), and then there are cross currents between the a- prefix which suggests the present participle and the -en suffix denoting the past participle. And as if that were not enough, the word is awash with further meanings: aspectual in the difference between 'awoken' (state) and 'awakened' (recent event), and ergative in that 'awoken' can connote 'unleashed' - something that empowers the artist in whom she has awoken, whereas 'awakened' only refers to the Muse herself. 

We are sensitive to all these meanings, even if only in some linguistic equivalent of muscle-memory. It is as if the currents of past Englishes still  wash up on the shores of current usage, suggested rather than expressed.