Air Apparent
Posted By Paul Kotik on 6 March 2006
Now, I’ve known more than a few breath-hold divers over the past several decades who may well have had mental or personality disorders, but not one was ( so far as I know) the least bit interested in the Dark Side of Apnea, you know, with the lemons and the knotted neckties and occasional obituaries afterward. I don’t know who those people are. I guess life would get a lot more interesting overnight if this column triggers a wave of freediver emails telling me I’m wrong, and confessing an interest in Autoerotic Asphyxiation, but I don’t see that happening. Freedivers may be nuts, but not that way.
I’ll offer another quote here – the last, since I get paid only for original words. Dr. Johnson : “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
It does. Our minds are generally rather less wonderfully focused because most of the time, under most circumstances, most of us don’t suppose we’re actually, really mortal. These days it’s widely considered bad manners to recall this elementary fact. Why, you’re probably thinking as you read this that I ought to be sent off to Sensitivity Training. A perhaps I should be. Apnea, I think, and apnea diving especially has an effect on our consciousness not unlike that of the prospective hanging seen by Dr. Johnson to so wonderfully focus the mind.
If we are immortal, invulnerable and to live life without end, then why would we concentrate at all ? There will, after all, always be more. And more.
The apneist is a humble student of mortality, one who engages in dialogue the most fundamental constraints on life, and in coming to know them so intimately is gifted with a moment of extraordinary being. A wonderful concentration. A change in one’s relationship to life itself, which persists to a greater or lesser degree for as long as one may live.
That doesn’t seem pathological to me, not at all, but then I’ve already broken the taboo against acknowledging that our time as young, strong and beautiful is finite, as is life itself.
Oh, dear - I’ll never eat lunch in this town again, unless . . .can you please forget this whole discussion ? There’s a giant freediving world records event going down in a couple of weeks in the Caymans, and I’ve got to get ready for it.
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