Advanced Breath Hold Technique
Or profusions of the sleeping mind
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames.
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek1
As I fix breakfast this morning a tiny pang of guilt reminds me I’ve neglected myfeelings.com and the cobwebs have begun to gather over it. That’ll be its own ongoing theme I’m sure. What’s a vanity project if not another small self-imposed anxiety to have simmering on the backburner? But most of what I’ve lately been on about in my little pink journal is too personal even for the craven exhibitionism of this website, so it hasn’t been clear to me that there is anything fit to transcribe here.
At this time of day my cat, typically poking around amidst the dew and the denizens of the backyard at first light, exercises his paranormal knack for sensing just when the cereal milk is poured. Now matter how far or wide and how engrossed in exploration, the moment the milk comes out, he bounds through his door and over to the kitchen counter at full speed, to make a nuisance of himself until I finish eating and allow him to lick the bowl clean. This is surely one of his most endearing traits. And utterly distracting if you are trying to attend to chores like feelings posts.
I did just now come across an excuse for inaction within the raw emotions on the pink book pages. It is unseemly self-disclosure after all, and so, very much back on-brand!
The weariness of long-sorrow reaches all the way into the bones and makes simply mustering words a great chore. It drenches the fabric of the creative sails so thoroughly that, sodden and drooping, they fail to catch even the strongest wind. The craft that carries the heart then stalls among the heaving waves; listing and swiveling, it remains in place though the currents of sea and sky move swiftly on. Even the slick of splinters and drift floating on the churn when the ship is taken apart by these forces remains unmoving, anchored by sorrow’s inertia.
Enough already! I did have a fantastical dream sequence I put to page a while back - somewhat reluctantly, I’ll share it below.2 The reluctance being that I find the recounting of dreams somewhere between banal and outright degrading. Like most prejudices, the one I hold against retelling dreams has no real claim to logic. In fact I find the riches of the dreamscape rarely surpassed by waking reality, and I spend half my waking life dreaming anyway, so of all people I should be among the most thoroughly bought in on dream-telling. I have barely anything else to talk about. But now I remember the seed of this predisposition. I read once from some etiquette coach or cultural critic a definitive statement that the most boorish and least forgivable subjects to bring up at dinner parties are the weather and dreams. Being impressionable to authoritative statements like these, this has been lodged in my system of values ever since. Maybe the noblest life, after collecting a wide range of such prejudices early on, sheds them one at a time through time, until there are none left and the heart reaches its widest possible aperture. Honoring this theory, you can find my silly dream below. Names haven’t been changed; everyone is innocent.
Vikas, my steady climbing partner of late as well as confidant and sometimes co-pilot, is behind the wheel driving too fast on an iced-over highway along steep embankments with no guardrails.3 Around a bend in the slippery asphalt, at considerable speed, our vehicle loses all traction and, spinning around exactly half a turn and facing backward, we launch off of a sheer ravine, clearing a stand of dead trees barely and plummeting upside down into a small pond that turns out on this frigid winter day to be both impossibly warm and impossibly deep. We find ourselves, for reasons lacking all causality like the succession of most dream events, outside the wreckage of the car, which begins to sink immediately as though the cabin were full of lead rather than air. With Vikas and me underwater are two other former passengers, his brother Vishaal and a fourth person whose identity is lost forever to the impenetrable mists of a dream on its way to being forgotten.
We are at this point at least a hundred feet submerged in the silty warm pond water that I remember being certain is at least a thousand feet deep. The scene is chaos. Vishaal floats by thrashing and in clear need of rescue. The unidentified fourth person meanwhile is swimming upward, apparently to safety. Vikas I judge at the moment to be able to handle himself too, though he is entangled in a long ribbon of seatbelt that trails like a streamer from the rapidly-sinking leaden vehicle. Held fast at the ankle, he is being hauled down into a lightless unknown. In a split second of decisive action I grab Vishaal, thinking to help him up and to shore and there grab a deep breath so I might dive down to retrieve Vikas, confident he can hold out a while longer. Sometime around arriving at the pond’s surface, assured of Vishaal’s safety, I find myself perusing the menu for vegan options at a Mexican restaurant, settling on taquitos after a lot of deliberation that evidently annoys my table of fellow diners. One being an imposingly mature and attractive woman with whom I feel somehow involved. She seems impressed neither by my order nor my speed. It's becoming clear I will lose her tonight. But I'm growing more concerned with just how long the restaurant is taking to fill my order. It's been hours, my companions have long since gotten and eaten their entrees, and Vikas is still at the bottom of the warm pond in the snowy ravine awaiting my assistance.
I finally abandon the dining area and my fugitive vegan taquitos altogether, refusing to pay the bill and causing a scene that culminates in being upbraided by both the waiter and this mysterious love interest who clearly detests me and will be taking her last leave of me now. All the while, I am executing my breathe-up routine... deep but rapid three second inhales followed by three second breath holds, then seven to ten second exhales through the nose, controlled, concentrating on relaxing my body and slowing my heart rate in preparation for the last breath, packing all the air I can handle in my lungs and up my throat for this thousand foot rescue dive.
Only now do I let the thought enter my mind that Vikas might not have made it, and that alive or dead I'll need a powerful light to find him at those murky depths, and that he too never received his dinner order and must be equally put out. It's really all beginning to feel like a mess, truly a lost cause. I'm not sure I can hold my breath for a thousand foot dive anyway, especially given how shallow my breath-up feels whenever I attempt it in my dreams, which is often. My breath hold lasts only seconds and I startle awake gasping for air. The predicament of my drowning friend and my dinner order begins to dissolve but I'm left wondering. Who was that woman? Who was that fourth passenger? Would there have been a sour cream alternative for my taquitos?
Ah, the stuff of dreams. Tedious? Boorish? Merrily we row along… Stay tuned for an in-depth post on the weather lately! I kid; the cultural critics are not entirely wrong.
This book is another banger y’all! Heart-aching naturalism rendered with such lyrical deftness. At my best I see the world just as Dillard describes it, and I aspire to describe it in such a way too.
In real life he was apparently not so long ago involved in a harrowing accident that ended with his truck rolling several times through a clearing that, if less clear, could have been fatal, and his telling of those details no doubt rooted in my psyche whatever blossomed in this dream. Vikas, if you are listening, you seem to be a fine and capable driver!
The ambivalence of sharing your dreams but committing to the task of the paradoxical dreamworld description which oozes its way back into the waking days kafkaesque goal of writing about feelings is a good argument for romanticism. Your blog posts are awesome.