To Be Rowing

There is a lake in Transylvania, Lake Sacalaia, a natural body of fresh and clear water, with a surface that is 26 hectares wide and about 10 meters deep. But this is only an estimate, and the actual depth is not known; divers have reportedly gone as far down as 28 meters without touching the bottom. Lake Sacalaia, which dwells in Cluj County, in the Bont Valley, is said to be the deepest freshwater lake in the country. It is deep enough to hold several species of fish: pike, salmon, crucian, carp, flounder. It is deep enough to hold a few legends. At one point when the water was clear some 30 years ago before sediment deposits settled over whatever lies at the bottom, someone in a boat on its surface could see down, down into its depths and just recognize the rooftop of a basilica. It is said that divers would plunge into those depths in search of evidence of a Romanian settlement that was said to have sunk or have been swallowed up. And it is also said that some have not returned from their explorations. This is where Cornel Fodoreanu has staged his photographic study, a place where myth and folk tales meet ghosts and explorers, divers and fishermen, those who wish and those who are wished upon. They all meet — via the visual tendons and sinews of Fodoreanu’s images, in a geographical location that may be pointed to on a map, but on examination leads to someplace else that can’t be found by conventional means.

Fodoreanu gives us images of Lake Sacalaia depicted in a topographical scheme, first seen at more distal and then increasingly proximal resolutions. Then I see an individual rower, like Fodoreanu perhaps, at the first encounter gliding across the surface of the lake, trying to peer into its depths, which, at a certain angle, acts only as a mirror which reflects back his own striving. And then the angle shifts and he notices: other rowers, children reaching into the river for something only they can see, couples lounging and using the lake to buoy them up and rock them gently toward each other, the tip of a spire on a Christian church, a series of ghostly arms, phantom gestures, muddled water and sky. That must have been what the original dwellers of the swallowed village saw when the water began to fall in on them: bits of clear sky seen through hazy, murky fluid — a life abandoned, an imagined fate turned into wet, heavy reality, a dream deferred, with its phantoms haunting the photographer’s sleep.

Some images show children leaping over the lake, jumping from one small hill to another, over a valley, over a declivity with water at its bottom. There are images of children in boats, saved from their drowning fates and those who are rowing away to discover what their lives might be if they simply refuse to drown. And there is a boy peering down into the depths. Does he see himself decades from now, rescued from regret and failed prospects, alive and well breathing in time with the rhythm of the water he has not forgotten? The images are a metaphor for the children that swam up from that underwater village, or the ones that escaped their fates, for the ones that found boats and started rowing. They are all images of what might could still be, and what haunts us because it might have been. That’s the nature of myth and legend: It is always beautiful, tempting and horrifying.

Anne Sexton wrote in the poem “Rowing,” that “This story ends with me still rowing.” This prophecy does bear itself out in the body of her lifetime work. It also bears itself out in the photography of Cornel Fodoreanu, who has created a visual testimonial which seems to be addressed to a lake, but is actually more about the lives that have escaped it, that are right now escaping the lakes and streams, lagoons and ponds that might pull them into oblivion. If we are living, still intact, we find ourselves at the surface, in the boat, still rowing.

Seph Rodney, PhD, is a former senior critic and opinion editor for Hyperallergic, where he remains a regular contributor, and writes for The New York Times. He received the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism in 2020 and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2022. His book The Personalization of the Museum Visit was published by Routledge in 2019.

First published in C Fodoreanu, Ode to the Lake Sacalaia, Cornel/Henry Art, 2022.

Return to all writing & press  ·  Learn more about Ode to the Lake Sacalaia.