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| 1972 |
Much of our lives is spent just hanging
around. Waiting, though, is a very singular occupation, and deeply deceptive;
for there is a bustle of unseen, and certainly unobserved, action actually occurring
behind the calm appearance of inaction.
The other night I dreamed about diving again… 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
necessarily any fear or anticipation or intimidation, although Lord knows that
there were some dives I hated doing because they scared me, and others simply
because I did not like diving from anything higher than a 1-meter diving board;
nor 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
waters.
My body in
these dreams is both subject and object, which seems to be a distinctly
different entity from my watching and “feeling” mind-self, although these two,
mind and body, are co-happening in the same exact space using precisely the
same tools. This is Cartesianism at its best. My diving dreams involve me
watching, as a detached outside observer would, my body falling through unoccupied
space—but the observer is actually watching the action and anticipating the
movement, 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 letterman; 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 an
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 I was going through some of the local diving camps as a
high school hipster, those camps were being flooded by 10-year old kids who
were already doing more complicated dives (i.e., with higher degrees of
difficulty), and with much greater technical ability, than I ever would do.
But I
excelled in one area, anyway—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. 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.
At the very least, my dreams 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 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 the 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, as I was telling DAW about my dream, 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.
As none of these seem to be the case with my dream (animals
diving?...), we can blithely pass on, secure in remembering that, per Jung,
ultimately only the dreamer can know the “truth” about his dream.
DAW found 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 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.
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. Myron’s s-curved Diskobolos
was not re-presented in that day’s competition.
 |
| Vitruvius_left; Diskobolos_right |
A 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 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, on one occasion during a competition with a local high school, 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 move—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 a 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, 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, and for a very long time: 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
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. 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 the hidden forces of the world—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, any other Great Work
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].
