Forever Overhead
Updated: Oct 1
Or, small to medium musings
Hey readers, for this week's post I'll give you three mishmash journal entries, from shortest to longest.
9/25
I finished my first Danish arch project!
9/30
I was on a nighttime speed walk to deal with my witching hour 8pm energy and nearly ran headlong into my two lady friends on the Torvegade bridge. We stood chatting for a while as people whizzed home past us. A few minutes in we got catcalled through the medium of bike bell, which was such a jolly little peal it took me a second to clock it as malevolent, and was deeply difficult to take seriously. The prowling men of Copenhagen are going to have to pivot to something a little more effective if they're going for impact. Immediately after we saw a fellow pulling his hot dog stand home by hand down the main road with a stack of increasingly aggravated cars behind him. If you're bored in this city it's your own fault.
9/28
Every few days I have to roll back my shoulders, muster up my confidence, and prepare for what we call the American humiliation ritual.
If you’ve ever taken a ballet class in the states, you’re familiar with révérence. The révérence is a closing sequence of flowing movement ending in a bow or curtsy, performed to thank the ballet teacher and pianist. Like most things involving the word curtsey, it descends from European court etiquette. After every class, you go up to the teacher and dip demurely and mumble thanks, if you’re lucky and they're kind you'll get a hug, if you aren’t and they're Russian you’ll get a grim nod. After our first Danish dance class, my two American friends and I approached the teacher to bow and curtsey. What followed was a beautiful thirty seconds of awkward head nods and confused half smiles, and we realized we’d just run headlong into a stiff Cultural Difference.
But we can’t stop the révérence. It’s so deeply ingrained in the dance ethos of me and my American compatriots that it feels rude to not thank the teacher. I am not an anthropologist, I haven't figured out what is so different about Danish ballet schools that they've just dropped a seemingly important part of ballet respect culture, but dropped it they have. We’ve now hit a point with the teachers where we just all mutually accept this strange ritual. The class disbands and three dopey Americans come up to say thank you, and damn it, they will continue to. The piano player bows back sometimes, and the teachers knot their lips and move their head to the side in amusement. Sometimes they throw on their scarves and flee before we even have the chance to say thank you. We actually got to meet a fellow DIS student after class yesterday because we witnessed her try to curtsy to the teacher, and then look around in mild embarrassment when she saw we were the only other ones doing it as well. We said:
"You American?"
"Yes...do they not–"
"Don't worry about it babe." We patted her knowingly on the shoulder and welcomed her into the fold of the American humiliation ritual.
9/27
I’ve been doing a lot of jumping into the harbor lately. My toes hit the water first, (if all goes to plan) or my fingertips, and then a last gasp before my head is submerged. There is no room for control or revision. It’s a complete emptying of consciousness in the first moments you’re underwater, maybe the body doing a quick scan to make sure all of you is still intact, and stillness. It’s a brief reward for the agonizing moments on the dock, rocking back and forth over the balls of your feet, flexing your knuckles. My mind stream usually runs something like this : WHOANOWWEDONTWANTTOBEWETANDCOLDMAYITSCOLD. If I am lucky, there will be some external pressure, like the sun about to dip behind a cloud, or a friend whooping, counting backwards from five. Unfortunately most of the motivation usually has to be intrinsic. Time is suspended in such a clean way when you’re about to jump, like a universally held breath.
Last summer I was in a Croatian airport wedged into a chair that hadn’t been reupholstered since the Siege of Dubrovnik, absolutely devouring a collection of short stories. I had it tenderly cracked ¾ of the way open, trying not to crease the spine. I had bought the book as a gift for a friend and wanted it to at least have a semblance of newness. It was a collection of short fiction called Birthday Stories, compiled by Murakami. I remember this, because I remember reading the story Forever Overhead by David Foster Wallace.
Forever Overhead is the story of a 13 year old boy jumping off a diving board into a pool. DFW takes 2,087 words for him to get out of the pool and walk over to the ladder of the diving board, then another 778 to climb onto the actual platform, then about seven for him to jump. The boy spends most of the brief story paralyzed by his own thoughts. DFW gives all of the balance to the anticipation and anxiety before the jump, and then the boy decides “It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking.” It ends with the slap of water.
I think what I like about jumping is that it has no grey. You can change most decisions, apologize for them, turn around halfway through, or spend the next interval of time wondering whether you chose correctly. I think about buying ice cream (I think of this often.) When you’re presented with a wide variety of options, it is so human of us to cling to the what if, and refuse to be satisfied with a binary path. You are never fully satisfied with your scoop, because maybe, just maybe, there would have been a better flavor. A jump into the Danish harbor is none of that. The instant your feet leave the dock, regret goes from a course of action to an observation. You may think, wow, no, terrible idea, but gravity does not accept amendments.
I am writing this because I’ve been spending too much time thinking about what could be, whether to jump or not, and not the tangible reality, or the water before me. Copenhagen has blown my mind right open, and the world that was so, so far away from me in my little California town is now under my soles. Sometimes I dream so much about the future that my chest aches, thinking about all my options, what I can do with this precious life, where I could end up and the million routes I could take getting there. It’s so beguiling and in our nature to do so, especially when you’re a chronic day dreamer like me.
Though it feels harmless to get lost in the reverie of tomorrow, there is a line from The Teaching of Buddha that I think about rather often. “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” This is beautiful advice, and its best meditation, for me at least, is to spend time entering the water.
And so I jump. Not necessarily to suspend thought, but because cold water is a very good meditative catalyst. For the second between the dock and the water, there is no alternate May somewhere doing everything more fabulously, more carefree and chill and cool. There is only smooth water and the hope I don’t belly flop, the mind releasing everything it has been grasping and clinging to. And then I surface.
a little photo roundup
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