Waiting

~by David Aiken~

From confinement.fr, 2020

DA_1972

A whole lot of our lives is spent just hanging around, waiting. Waiting, though, is a very singular occupation, and deeply deceptive. For behind the calm appearance of inaction there is an endless bustle of unseen, and certainly unobserved, action actually occurring.

There are nights that I still dream about diving… springboard diving—flying through the air with the greatest of ease, and all that jazz. I have had these dreams regularly for most of my adult life, and after all these years I still really do not know what to think about them.

In these dreams I “feel” myself to be in an emotionally neutral state—there is neither fear nor anticipation nor intimidation, although Lord knows that there were some dives I hated doing because they scared me to death; other dives I hated simply because I did not like diving from anything higher than a 1-meter diving board. But neither is there exhilaration in these dreams—although I can still clearly recall some rare moments of body-soaring splendor associated with deliberately falling through the air and entering taut into the waiting arms of receptive, womb-like blue waters.

In these dreams my body is both subject and object. It seems to be a distinctly different entity from my watching and “feeling” mind-self; and yet these two, mind and body, are co-happening in the same exact space using precisely the same tools. This is intuitive Cartesianism at its very best. My diving dreams involve me watching my body falling through unoccupied space as a detached outside observer would; but the observer is actually also watching and experiencing the action, and anticipating the various movements and gestures, unemotionally, from inside the plunging body.

These dream states do not even seem to involve my body-in-motion as a process of an object succumbing to gravity. But rather, like Zeno’s arrow, my body is in a series of quasi stop-motion images where I observe myself at different stations or static moments in the stop-action motion picture of the dive. Where the true Outsider sees the split-second fluidity of action, the inside observer, poised in space, feels an eternity of inaction—of holding fast, of waiting. A fine phenomenological moment for a dream, I suppose. But our reflection here is interested in the question of the meaning of such dreams.

I was a fine-enough diver for the day: high school varsity athlete and letter-man; MVP in my senior year; district high-point scorer; athletic scholarship to dive for a large state university; Olympic coaches—tout le biz, quoi. However, I knew even then that I was never going to be a truly excellent diver, because I detested competition—even in those days of my budding, I was the hippy philosopher… I was in the game for the beauty of the experience rather than for the competitive win. It was obvious to me early on that I was never going to be the great competitor, simply because I had started diving too late. As the high school hipster version of myself, I was going through some of the local diving camps, which were being flooded by 10-year old kids who were already doing more complicated dives (i.e., with higher degrees of difficulty) than I ever would do, and with much greater technical proficiency.

But I clearly excelled in at least one area: the undisputed consensus of anyone who has watched me dive was that in the air I was “truly beautiful to behold,” as Frank-N-Furter says about his newborn monster, Rocky. I was graceful; balletic; strong; …and pretty. There was also the wayward opinion that I had “sexy ankles” when pointed. So, I was a young man who, although he had some natural grace and gymnastic talent to recommend him, was always going to be in the wrong competitive game simply because he started the sport too late.

One interesting aspect of my dreams, is that they take me by the hand and lead me back into a reconstruction of body-memories and sensorial states; and this leaves me with a pleasant feeling when I wake up remembering. But this observation takes me no further along my path of trying to assess what these dreams might signify. I suppose it could simply be enough that I have some pleasure in just having of these dreams; but it seems to me there must be some additional meaning that my slumbering intelligence is trying to sort out through these body memories, which are becoming more and more remote from my waking reality with each passing day.

In the morning after having one of these dreams, I was telling my bride all about it, and she immediately looked up dreams at an online dream dictionary, here, and discovered about springboard diving dreams the following meanings:

·      To dream that you are diving into clear water indicates that you have overcome your obstacles and setbacks. You have a new sense of confidence. Things are looking up. Alternatively, the dream indicates that you are trying to get to the bottom of a current situation or the root of your problems or feelings. It may also refer exploration of your subconscious. 

·      To dream that you are diving into muddy water suggests that you are feeling anxious about how you have handled certain issues in your waking life.  

·      To see others diving in your dream represents psychological and emotional balance.

·      To see animals diving in your dream suggest that are exploring your instinctual and sexual urges which have been previously suppressed into your subconscious.

However, as none of these seem to be relevant interpretations or even interesting explanations of my diving dreams (animals diving?), we can blithely pass on, secure in remembering that, per Jung, ultimately only the dreamer can know the “truth” about his dream.

A second interpretative possibility for my dreams under the rubric, Diving Board (dreams):

·      To see or stand on a diving board in your dream indicates that you need to think things through carefully and thoroughly before you take the plunge. The dream may signal a new phase in your life. Consider the height of the diving board. The higher the diving board, the more significant and more difficult it is to take the next step and make the plunge.

This second possible interpretation proved a little more insightful, because I had this particular dream the night before my first class in the new academic semester. But, I still have to admit that these cheesola dream interpretation Internet sites are not terribly insightful, even if, on occasion, their nuclear bomb approach to dreams may hit the platitudinous interpretative peripheries on a possible target of meanings.

Sometimes, most of the time in fact, my diving dreams are about the specific mechanics of a particular dive. Perhaps my favorite dive, and the one that occupies almost all my recurrent diving dreams, was the half gainer, which is to say, the reverse dive in the layout position. You leave the board on a forward approach, reach up and back, push your chest up into the ceiling, and let the dive “happen” until you extend for entry into the water—stretching from the tips of the pointed toes all the way to the joined fists over the head that try to reach down into the center of the earth. Not a high-degree of difficulty dive, yet difficult to make look pretty.

Vitruvius_left; Diskobolos_right

In a pre-Olympic qualifying competition I once saw an excellent diver perform this dive with uncanny, quasi-military mechanical precision. I never saw such a thing – a true mechanical marvel, perfectly executed, worthy of a child of the mechanical revolution. And yet, although it was truly a perfect mechanical dive, it was not a beautiful dive by any definition. The dive was not lyrical, had no dancer’s soul to it… no imagination, no curve, no grace. It was simply a keenly executed, cog-type mechanism of a dive– a movement that was at home in the geometrical spaces of the world, like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, but which was not necessarily at ease, which is to say, beautiful, in those spaces. The Vitruvian Man, rather than Myron’s s-curved Diskobolos, was re-presented by that fine mechanical diver in that day’s competition.

Another beautiful dive is the back dive in the pike position, if the pike is done correctly, which is to say, with precision. However, the back dive in the layout position was another of my favorites because it is beautiful in the same way that the half-gainer is beautiful; after all, it is simply the half-gainer going in the other direction, starting backwards at the end of the board. The difference for me as the actor, on the other hand, was, to put it philosophically, entirely phenomenological. On the back dive my experience of time and of movement-through-space was much shorter than on the half gainer. Also, I could not “feel” myself in the same way – my visualization of myself laid-out and moving through framed space was somehow less visually complete.

Again from a phenomenological point of view, the front half-twist in the layout position was perhaps, from my insider’s visual point of view and feeling, most similar to the half-gainer layout, except that I had the additional and distinct “feeling” that I was dropping down into the world from the very top of space… I had the entire area of the pool in my field of vision, right down to the little point of water that was going to suck me into its vortex at entry. Then, at impact, there was that stretch right to the bottom of the world, and the hard point of the toes that would suck any splash down with it into the vortex, leaving only a telltale bubbling at the surface – the only indication that a moving body had recently passed through that tiny point in fluid space.

Sometimes, some of my diving dreams seem to focus on spatiality. During the half gainer, for instance, you leave the board going forward, stretch up to the ceiling and lift your face skyward, pushing your chest up and up and up. Then, just when the mechanic of the dive brings the body to the horizontal position, I have the distinct impression of seeing all of my body all the way to my toes, a view encompassing my entirety: extended arms, torso, legs, and pointed toes, and the water framing me as well… truly an interesting sensation. I remember once, during a competition with a local high school, that I was doing this half-gainer layout and getting some great altitude from the board, and I had the impression, because the ceiling on their pool was so low, that my chest was actually going to scrape against it. I hated diving at that pool – it “felt” a dingy yellow and made me feel claustrophobic in the air. Diving taught me more about my interior spatio-emotional states than any other activity in my life.

Then there were the entries. A diving entry is made beautiful by stretching to fit inside Zeno’s infinite line, which, he mused enigmatically, stretched out endlessly along points between, and separating forever, point A and point B. The fists are joined together above the head in order to punch a hole in the water for the body to pass through, and the toes are pointed so that it would almost cramp the calves. It is at this moment that the waiting becomes most intense… because there is really nothing else to do but fall; you just have to do it beautifully. Waiting in a dive is really an explosion of focused activity, although there will be periods within the 1.4 seconds you are in the air when you simply do not make any movement—nano-seconds of rock hard stillness. This time of inaction is necessary to create an appearance of ease, which hides the flurry of real muscular and mental activity.

I remember that my university had an enormous Olympic-quality swimming pool called Trees Hall. The main pool was 4-5 Olympic-sized pools “super-glued” side by side to make one giant pool; and the warm-up pool was just a simple, ordinary Olympic-sized pool in a smaller hall off to the side. The entire back hall of the main pool was glass, which meant that there were certain moments during a dive when, as if suspended in air, you could actually see yourself reflected in the glass. I remember two things from my time at Trees Hall. The first was that I was always cold. Perhaps it was the fact that one could see the snow or rain or simply the darkness through the glass, and then from inside the womb one got the feeling of the cold that was dominating the world on the outside. The other thing I remember is the 10-meter tower for platform diving.

I freely admit that I do not care for high places… never have and probably never will. Anything above the simple household ladder is profoundly uninteresting to me. However, at the end of the day one does have to steel one’s mind to the discipline at hand, whether painting ceilings on a ladder or dropping 10-meters from a tower into some water. So, I mounted the flights to the top of the tower – past the 5-meter platform, past the 7.5-meter platform, right up to the 10-meter platform. I remember standing on the edge of the platform staring off the tower, taking in the world that was unfolding itself to me at that height. Then I tried a simple swan dive in a layout position – very simple mechanically, with not a lot of thought and a great deal of body control. However, from the height of 10 meters, the time for the mechanism of this simple dive to happen is different from a departure at one or three meters. So came the over-rotation with Newtonian predictability… and an inappropriate physical impact upon arrival at destination.

“Sh#t may happen” as a matter of daily course, so goes the expression anyway, but eternity happens in just under 2 seconds… in about 1.43 seconds, to be more precise, which is the approximate amount of time one spends performing in the space between board and water. Think about it, which I did after the fact of my 10-meter fiasco, and for a very long time after that: the traveling speed of an object (my body) falling for just under 2 seconds + distance traveled (10 meters) + impact with a stationary surface upon arrival (H2O). Formulaically, this relationship would look something like this:

-10m = -1/2(9.8m/s2)t²
        t = 1.43s

Unfortunately, though, my particular experience on this occasion was not just about formulas. The most desirable arrival into the water from any dive normally occurs in the smallest possible space… in a straight up-and-down vertical alignment, whether standing up with toes pointed, or taking the impact through the fists, then the shoulders, then piking the body under water to continue pulling the surface water under with you in order to leave only bubbles on the surface. I, as an independently acting exception to either of these two more desirable solutions, had obviously opted for the over-rotated, full-body back splay from 10 meters. And, in what is perhaps the purest Archimedean experience of my life, in a Eureka moment, I grasped, I felt in all the spaces of my body, all of the world’s hidden forces—from inertia to velocity, from momentum to acceleration, and, finally, torque. After the water that was displaced by the entry of the falling object that was me, slammed through my entrejambe from behind with all of its reciprocating and displacing force, platform diving ceased to hold any interest for me.

It is a truism of diving, and certainly of many another activity of life, that the higher one climbs, the faster one drops. The problem is not the fall, which we can make interesting or not, pretty or not, but one does need to have some care with the stop at fall’s end.

When all is said and done, I am not sure that my diving dreams have any particular psychological significance in and of themselves, as gateway symbols to some other level of meaning about me or my progression through space and time. I think, rather, that these dreams constitute for me a sort of personal lament for a period of my life that is now relegated definitively to the past, a nostalgia for the beauty that, once, I used to know how to feel for myself, and to create for others, through my body. Those days and those gifts do not belong to my body-life now, but rather resurrect at night as dream-state memorials about the body that used to be mine.

My creations of beauty now must be of a different order, using the different gifts I am able to discern and awaken in myself. The springtime and summer days of my outside, my body-me, are revolved; now it is the season for gathering that which was sown and for bringing the harvest to shelter. It is time, and world enough, for my inside observer, the mind-me, to set about, as though there were no tomorrow, other Great Works that I might hope to accomplish.

In 1988, at the Olympic games in Seoul, the American diver, Greg Louganis, proved that he was indeed one of sport history’s more remarkable competitors. In the early rounds of the diving preliminaries Louganis injured himself by striking his head on the 3-meter springboard, requiring stitches… then he continued his performance to take the gold medal in the event. Louganis would win another gold medal in those games, in the 10-meter platform, and would take the Olympic Double gold in men's diving.

Here is a short video of almost perfect body motion—at times perfectly motionless, waiting, fully occupied, as it falls through space. This is a must view for any definition of human loveliness and integrity; and in the midst and flurry of all the action, just watch him WAIT for the moment when the dive would “happen.”

The lovely GL in a compilation from the 1988 Olympic diving finals, for your viewing pleasure: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP20D5vQsmM].

(Reprised from a Phrontisterion essay posted in February 2014)