Air Apparent
Posted By Paul Kotik on 6 March 2006
Man, said the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, is an obligate aerobe. An obligate aerobe, indeed: an organism indentured to the air for as long as he, or she, may live.
It’s actually a bit more specific than that, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that somebody figured out it’s oxygen that makes the air indispensable. The twenty-percent solution. The rest is just white bread to oxygen’s Marmite spread.
And it’s not just we humans on the oxygen dole. Sherwin Nuland, a thoughtful Yale University surgeon and medical historian, wrote: “ Oxygen is at the focal point of the lens through which the sustaining processes of living things must be studied.” Not all living things, to be sure, but most of them.
Aren’t we freedivers a rather odd lot, then ?
Nearly all of Creation, things that crawl, squirm, wriggle, fly, walk and, yes, swim in the waters struggle endlessly and mightily for the oxygen that is the terminus of the chain of intermediate rewards. Seen this way, things like food and water, shelter, money – everything else – are all just the means to another breath. Whence this bizarre practice of voluntary denial of that which all life craves more than anything else ? What kind of creature is this that chooses not to breathe ?
I think it unlikely that anybody who’s done more than a few casual freedives has escaped being accused of, well, of being nuts. Flirtation with eternity, daring of the devil, and pathologies much darker than slight eccentricity are suggested by our observers, and in truth it’s a stigma which most freedivers relish, whether openly or a-closeted. They think we’re mad, the dullards. Hah !
Are we ? This discussion is sort of taboo, but let’s have it anyway. It always comes around to one word.
Hypoxyphila. Quick – do not Google it ! The word’s etymology is innocent, implying nothing more than a propensity to, or a veneration of the state of oxygen deficit. Besides the heavy metal band of that name (!) the Google search returns a strong impression that this propensity/veneration finds expression exclusively in the erotic domain, although the Wikipedia entry reassures us that “There is no relationship between hypoxyphilia and mental or personality disorder”. Whew.
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