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bloody, bold, and dissolute
Aug. 25th, 2003 04:22 pmIntegrated Greenblatt into various parts of dis. Also worked a bit from R. C. Finucane's Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformations into the cultural history chapter, which I've been needing to do for, oh, gosh, three years now?
Tomorrow it's back to the library to read articles about Shaffer's Equus. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with the rest of today, although the possibility is strong that I will take another cold bath. It's too fucking hot to think.
Thanks to everybody who's posted reassuringly in response to last night's maunderings. I know that what y'all are saying is true--and it's certainly not that I don't want to finish the dissertation--but it's a cognitive leap that I'm not going to be able fully to make until I finish.
I learned how to do formal diving as a kid (with the approach instead of just sort of flinging oneself off the end of the board). When I was a sophomore in high school, I taught myself how to do a jack-knife off the high board, and it remains in my mind as one of the most simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying things one can do on a daily basis--and indeed, as many times in an hour as one has the energy for. (Also, of course, I am being tormented and tantalized by the tactile memory of hitting the breathlessly cold water on afternoons when the temperature was in the mid-nineties, which isn't helping with the whole overheated and cranky thing.) It's so high up, and the board seems incredibly narrow, and you know you have to be crazy even to contemplate flinging yourself higher. But you do it, and the world unfolds itself beneath you, and there's this single moment where it doesn't seem like you have to fall if you don't want to. And then the blueness of the water is rushing toward you, and you tuck your chin and point your toes and get your hands aligned, and it's like a roller coaster only better, because the speed and the force is what you generated yourself pushing against the board. Then you're plunging through water, not air, and the bubbles are rushing up around you, and the water embraces you like a cold lover. You turn and kick and break the surface, shake your hair out of your eyes, and swim for the ladder to start the ritual all over again.
About the time I graduated high school, they quit letting people use the high board. But I remember what it was like.
Tomorrow it's back to the library to read articles about Shaffer's Equus. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with the rest of today, although the possibility is strong that I will take another cold bath. It's too fucking hot to think.
Thanks to everybody who's posted reassuringly in response to last night's maunderings. I know that what y'all are saying is true--and it's certainly not that I don't want to finish the dissertation--but it's a cognitive leap that I'm not going to be able fully to make until I finish.
I learned how to do formal diving as a kid (with the approach instead of just sort of flinging oneself off the end of the board). When I was a sophomore in high school, I taught myself how to do a jack-knife off the high board, and it remains in my mind as one of the most simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying things one can do on a daily basis--and indeed, as many times in an hour as one has the energy for. (Also, of course, I am being tormented and tantalized by the tactile memory of hitting the breathlessly cold water on afternoons when the temperature was in the mid-nineties, which isn't helping with the whole overheated and cranky thing.) It's so high up, and the board seems incredibly narrow, and you know you have to be crazy even to contemplate flinging yourself higher. But you do it, and the world unfolds itself beneath you, and there's this single moment where it doesn't seem like you have to fall if you don't want to. And then the blueness of the water is rushing toward you, and you tuck your chin and point your toes and get your hands aligned, and it's like a roller coaster only better, because the speed and the force is what you generated yourself pushing against the board. Then you're plunging through water, not air, and the bubbles are rushing up around you, and the water embraces you like a cold lover. You turn and kick and break the surface, shake your hair out of your eyes, and swim for the ladder to start the ritual all over again.
About the time I graduated high school, they quit letting people use the high board. But I remember what it was like.
