Neutral Buoyancy: Scuba Diving and Experiential Vision
Interview with Sigurjón (Ziggy) Baldur Hafsteinson by Carolyn Merrit – February 4, 2004
C: Can you tell me about scuba diving?
Z: I actually have – there is a great book that I can lend you which has articles that relate to scuba diving and there is one in particular that would be interesting for you, by a French guy, Philippe Diolé, but he worked very closely with Jacques Cousteau. And in that article, he’s really talking about that other-worldly experience, about exchanging environment and going under the surface of water. There is an Icelandic artist, there was an interview with him in a newspaper a few years ago – he’s actually trying to describe the environment we live in right now, and he made references to his paintings which are almost like silhouette-based landscape, or minimalist in painterly forms – so we have one mountain barely recognizable or seeable on the canvas. And he was describing this pictorial world as being, that he actually looks at us human as being almost living in water. And you can especially feel it when there is this heavy rain. So this environment and the underwater environment becomes more like a change in degree than in essence – or there’s a change in levels of how condensed our waterly environment is. So it’s like a scale or there’s not radical change between environment. Basically, we’re like fishes in our environment. I really like that description, because it really alters my perception when I’m driving through landscape, especially when it’s raining and damp, and really humid. So, I thought that was pretty interesting, and there are more options of living in this water than just by having – you know, what the fishes have – gills. You know they have a different respiratory system than we have, but it’s basically not apart. So this is just one thought.
C: Was it your first time diving this semester.
Z: Yeah, that was the first time. Actually, maybe I should talk about it in terms of this guy that I’ve been reading for the past few months – this French guy, Paul Virilio, who has very interesting ideas about speed and time and the importance of movements in contemporary society. He has a very simplistic notion about our aesthetic, for example. He says there is the period before cinema and the period after cinema. And cinema actually created the perception that we are pictoleptic, that we are seeing everything like we are watching the cinema. This has changed our values in the sense that we no longer value more things that have substance or material base, but we value things more that are actually disappearing, things that are only momentarily present and then they are absent. This is based on the notion that we have 24 frames per second on the film strip, and each and every image is a still image. And this movement of my head or of my arm is actually on the film strip – if you film me and I move my head or my arm, the value of this movement is based on the disappearance of the next frame – another frame comes and another frame comes, and the frames that we are seeing and disappearing actually creates this value of movement. So he is dealing with this value system that changes the way that we are perceiving, and he also argues that there is this change in time where we want things to speed up; everything has to be speeded up, because we have multiple roles in our lives (you are a student, a mother, a daughter, a football fan, whatever) and everything has its own slot in life and we have to do every role as fast as we can, and in order to do that we create these devices, like computers or cars or whatever, in order to reduce the distance between the fulfillment of our roles. It’s cutting the middle time. That has created this notion about intensity, where we want to experience everything intensively. So that intensive time is how we spend our time as opposed to extensive time, as it was before cinema, where you actually had to spend much more time doing the things you were doing – it took longer. And I think to some extent – one of the things I experienced going below water is that time perception was altered in that sense. Although that intensive time is… well, much of the things that we are learning in the course is to maximize the amount of time that we can be below water. And much of the things that scuba diving teaches us is that we have certain dive tables, that we can go to the Cayman Islands and relying on these diving tables we can actually maximize the amount of dives during those five days that we are diving in order to use the time intensively for diving.
C: What is the dive table?
Z: I have a certain amount of air in a tank, and if I go 33 feet under water, I can spend x amount of minutes. And the ratio changes between the depths. If you go further down, you actually need less. So time is very important in really thinking about it. It’s even more, you really have to be conscious about the time when you go down, it’s a vital life-supporting device or thought that you have when doing this. And you also have to think about it while you are preparing the dive. So this notion about the change of time perception – I think it’s really part of the whole conception of going under water. It’s not just a technical thing, which is based on your survival or not – but this is definitely a recreational thing, and while we are doing it as recreational or sport divers, we are really shifting gears from our daily lives and going into this environment where we know we are going to have a really intense experience. Because this is a radical alteration of our daily lives. But this is also, I also saw it – this also alters the perception of how I actually saw things. You’re sitting here, and everything is at this order and at this level, but if I was in a tank I could actually flip myself and I could actually create this version of my perception which is very obscure. And I think that obscurity or reversal of angles is another strong point that I found interesting. Where you can actually play with this in the computer softwares that we have like Final Cut Pro and Acrobat and Photoshop, but you don’t change your position – you’re just sitting in the position you’re in and playing with this world. But there you can actually, you change your position and you really feel there’s an experiential feel to it when you really turn yourself and you watch the world upside down. And in that sense, this really goes hand in hand with people who have been writing about our senses in anthropology, you know how important it is not only to rely on knowledge that you get through the eyes, but that you let the other senses really pour in – touch smell, and the other 2 senses. Also, this really challenges this epistemology that is so heavily embedded in our approach to things. Taking this parallel where you can flip the world on the computer screen – you can have it horizontally or reverse, on the side or vertical – you are actually outside that world, you’re not part of it. It’s almost like this Albectian, or this Descartian perspectalism. Do you know this Albechtian grid? This 14th century notion about, where as a painter you have a frame and then you have grids in the frame, and I draw you based on this grid, so it’s a very mathematical approach to you and to your image. And this has been attached to Descartian dualism between the mind and body, where the scientist is not attached to whatever he’s actually watching. Like Descartes talked about how he shuts down all his senses and only relies on his intellect, and his intellect is not part of what he’s actually observing. But the sensual paradigm in anthropology is the total opposite of that, where you actually can’t step out of a situation, you are part of it. Like Jean Rouch’s cinetrans – you have influence on it, and you should take your senses into consideration of creating the knowledge that you’re constructing.
C: Can you talk about your sensorial experience underwater?
Z: I think the weirdest sensory experience was this exercise that he had us do. We were all (20 students) at the edge of the pool with our tanks and masks on, and he said “okay, go down into the middle, take off your masks and leave them there, and go the same way back.” And we all did that – we left them in one pile at the bottom of the pool, and then we went back. And then he said “okay, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to go down and find your mask, and you can’t come back until you have your mask.” So I went down, I just held the side of the pool and then the bottom of the pool and then I felt a foot and then an ass and then a head and all of a sudden I just grabbed a mask and I put it on. I cleaned it, I took the water out of it, and then I saw that it wasn’t my mask. And then I was looking around and I saw someone who had it, and then I just pointed, you know “this is my mask,” and that person took off the mask and I handed the person his mask. For me that was a sensual experience through touch where I was really in the dark. And I really sensed how limited my observation of space was. It was actually pretty scarey. The only range I had – it wasn’t beyond my fingers – it was precisely where I had my fingers. So that was pretty scary.
And another sensory experience is of course through the taste of water, because we did our training in the Temple swimming pool. And many people were grossed out because we took our masks and our snorkel and left them into a room, and then a few days later we came to the same room and someone had used it in between and it evidently hadn’t been washed, it was just lying there. Because in my experience, Iceland is very – there’s a heavy policy regarding when you go to a public swimming pool, you really have to wash yourself with soap before you go into a swimming pool, but here on the other hand in the U.S. there is no such policy, and that is why they use heavy chloride in the water in order to kill all the bacteria that are pouring out of your holes. And every time I went in I could really taste it. I really tasted this sanitation or hygienic product. But it’s not only a taste of chloride, but also the water tastes differently than in Iceland in the swimming pool there – the ratio of chemicals in it are slightly different, I think. That was another sensory experience. Although I haven’t taken that thought further – what it actually does or mean or whatever. But I think another interesting thing is talking about these big movements that we have in the water. This world really slows everything down. The only rapid things underwater are actually the bubbles going up, and they always seemed to me like they were in a hurry to go up. But everything else is pretty slow.
C: Do you swim a lot?
Z: Yeah, I do.
C: One of the things that Lisa Hardy said was comparing diving to sleepwalking, dreaming…
Z: I think that it really is an experience – it’s almost like you’re watching a dead person, a
corpse, as if you were watching a dead person experiencing that close relationship, or watching a photograph or a film of it. It hits me like, you somehow become reflexive about, that this isn’t given, you know I could actually drop dead right now. And I was watching tv the other night, and there was some Eastern European football player who was playing and just dropped down dead like that, in the middle of a game, he just died. And that happens, but for some reason… and thinking about how you actually breathe, it’s so vital in sustaining your life, that you’re really playing with the core of life in that sense. Maybe this thought gives these DNA experts and these physical anthropologists the finger, because life isn’t there to be found. Is the life maybe – you know, where is breath in all these DNA grids? So breath is this life-supporting system that really makes you conscious of your life and your body. It’s almost like you feel yourself, you’re breathing down your own neck, so to speak, but it’s somehow internalized.
I find it interesting that she’s paralleling it to sleepwalking, because one of the things that I’m interested in that goes back to when I was writing my Master’s thesis is that I was writing about 19th century travel books, and it was mainly British travelers who went to Iceland who had these elaborate descriptions of landscapes. This is what Mary Pratt has written about in her book about travelers as well – this is that the 19th century travelers were describing the landscape in Iceland, which is rather depleted of any high trees like you are accustomed to here and in England – and how do you describe something that you haven’t experienced before? How can you really describe something that you know the person you’re describing it too hasn’t experienced? And there is another, an American historian who has argued that the Europeans were so startled by the vast landscape of the American plains – you go there and you can see over vast distances, because it’s so flat. This is something that really altered their perspective of nature, so it was a significant contribution of how Westerners think about nature and it actually altered the paradigms of how they saw the possibilities of nature. But I think that all… maybe this is pretty close to this argument that we actually can’t see beyond, our observations are always theory-laden. We have certain filters that are always in between us and the things that we are observing. So the question is how can we discover new things and really see new things – if we always have to jump into the trench of, we are being confronted by apparently new things, and the only way we can describe it is to refer back. So when the British travelers in Iceland referred to the lava fields and the forms in the landscape they described it as the black chimneys in Sheffield or in Birmingham. That was the only description they could think of to make it really intelligible for the readers.
I don’t think that – I see the parallel with sleeping, but it’s more like with dreaming really. But then I think that the dream world is much more elaborated, there are more options or things going on there than down below. But one of the things parallel to my dream world is that one of the ecstatic dreams that I have is the dreams where I am flying, and I always wake up like “wow, this was great.” And that’s the only parallel that I can see with being down below, diving, is that weight, your weight disappears, you become weightless, but you are considerably constrained by the water. You can’t move fast, but you can fly, but you are flying on different terms than when you are in the air, or when you are doing it in your dreams.
C: You were talking about weightlessness underwater – is it empowering, or disempowering? Do you feel out of control or is it an enjoyable experience?
Z: Yeah I think it’s disempowering. You’re really, I’m really an intruder so to speak. I’m actually not supposed to be there. I’m intruding into this environment, and I think that all the gear that we have, all the technology, like the fins. It seems to me that the way they are developing them very gradually is to empower the scuba divers more and more, make you move faster through this obstacle – which the water is, for your movements – and the same goes for the buoyancy vest and the tanks as well. I read in some magazine that they are now doing experiments with the goggles that they are going to put information into the goggles, computer information about the state of the oxygen tank.
C: How do you monitor that?
Z: There is a meter that goes from the tank that you can actually just watch it or observe it like that (holds hand up). But the Navy is now experimenting with putting it in the goggles, just like the pilots in the fighter jets – they have these black helmets and they see everything around them and more, on the screen, on the black thing.
C: Can you also talk briefly about…
Z: One thought – there is this German filmmaker Wim Wenders, and he made this film where you see occasionally fish swimming over the screen, giving you the feeling that you’re actually watching an aquarium, which is parallel to the description of this painter – that maybe this is only a change of levels. Maybe we are just in this aquarium.
C: Was it difficult to learn how to regulate your breathing…
Z: Yeah, this was really, probably one of the things that really surprised me was that I’ve always been really comfortable in the water. I used the swimming pool a lot when I was younger and I practiced with a team, and it really surprised me that when we did certain technical things as an exam, I was often freaking out because I was losing my breath and I wasn’t staying underwater as long as I thought I could. So for example, a very simple exercise with your snorkel and your fins, going down to bottom of the deeper end of the pool, taking off your fins, taking off your goggles, going up, taking a breath, going back down and putting the fins on, putting your mask on, clearing the mask and going back up. It takes about a minute to do it. And I had to make several attempts, but the attempt where I could actually do it, I was really freaking out and I was thinking “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.” And I want to do it, because I don’t like this, otherwise I have to do it until I did it. So I was really pushing it, and at the same time I felt – it was a déjà vu for me to an accident I had when I was 19 years old on a trawler in Iceland. I worked on trawlers every summer and every school vacation that I had, and the accident was pretty severe. I was working in the middle of the ship where the fish come in, and I had to put ice over the fish. And they had hundreds of tons of ice in the middle of the ship and it goes into the little boxes with the fish. And one morning when I was doing this there was a sort of avalanche of the ice, and there were about 3-4 tons of ice that crushed me, and I just disappeared and I was crushed. And my back broke, my nose was cut into two halves, I had two noses, ribs were broken – I was a total mess, but I didn’t lose consciousness. So there I was like that (gestures being crushed), and the only thing that could move were my fingers, like that (slightly moves fingers). And I had a déjà vu of this claustrophobic feeling while I was doing this exercise while I was actually losing my breath. And this is the second or third time that I’ve gotten this very strong, very scary feeling ever since I’ve gotten into this accident. The other time was when I had a huge hangover in London and I had to take the metro at peak hour, and everyone was like that in the train (gestures being crushed), and I was freaking out.
C: How do you feel before you – did it get better?
Z: Oh yeah, it got better.
C: How do you feel before a dive?
Z: I think it’s more like, I imagine it’s very close to performance. It’s not only an intellectual performance where you have to have your head clear – or at least in my case, I really have to fine tune myself, if I’m going to talk, I really have to somehow be in the mood, intellectually. I have to have maybe five or ten minutes before in order to know how to start and in what direction I want to go. But in terms of this, I imagine that if you’re a dancer or a scuba diver or an actor or whatever, you not only have to articulate your mind, but you also have to feel the articulation in every muscle of your body. So, it’s in that sense, a sensual or sensory articulation that I felt. But it’s not only that, also you have to check your gear, because the gear becomes part of you - I imagine like costumes. When that is okay, then you have this confidence of doing it.
-----
Þetta viðtal var tekið í tengslum við danssýningu sem Carolyn Merrit danshöfundur var að búa til og frumsýnd var í apríl 2004 í Fíladelfíu í Bandaríkjunum. Dansverkið hlaut nafnið Neutral Buoyancy og fjallaði um reynsluna af því að kafa. Ég hafði tekið námskeið í köfun við Temple háskóla haustið 2003, sem var liður í undirbúningi fyrir doktorsverkefni mitt. Carolyn tók nokkur viðtöl við kafara og byggði verkið upp á þeim viðtölum. Hún fékk síðan mig og fleiri kafara til þess að taka þátt í verkinu með því að sitja á sviðinu og endurtaka sumt af því sem við sögðum í viðtölunum. Ég slapp því við að hlúnkast um sviðið í níðþröngum sokkabuxum.
C: Can you tell me about scuba diving?
Z: I actually have – there is a great book that I can lend you which has articles that relate to scuba diving and there is one in particular that would be interesting for you, by a French guy, Philippe Diolé, but he worked very closely with Jacques Cousteau. And in that article, he’s really talking about that other-worldly experience, about exchanging environment and going under the surface of water. There is an Icelandic artist, there was an interview with him in a newspaper a few years ago – he’s actually trying to describe the environment we live in right now, and he made references to his paintings which are almost like silhouette-based landscape, or minimalist in painterly forms – so we have one mountain barely recognizable or seeable on the canvas. And he was describing this pictorial world as being, that he actually looks at us human as being almost living in water. And you can especially feel it when there is this heavy rain. So this environment and the underwater environment becomes more like a change in degree than in essence – or there’s a change in levels of how condensed our waterly environment is. So it’s like a scale or there’s not radical change between environment. Basically, we’re like fishes in our environment. I really like that description, because it really alters my perception when I’m driving through landscape, especially when it’s raining and damp, and really humid. So, I thought that was pretty interesting, and there are more options of living in this water than just by having – you know, what the fishes have – gills. You know they have a different respiratory system than we have, but it’s basically not apart. So this is just one thought.
C: Was it your first time diving this semester.
Z: Yeah, that was the first time. Actually, maybe I should talk about it in terms of this guy that I’ve been reading for the past few months – this French guy, Paul Virilio, who has very interesting ideas about speed and time and the importance of movements in contemporary society. He has a very simplistic notion about our aesthetic, for example. He says there is the period before cinema and the period after cinema. And cinema actually created the perception that we are pictoleptic, that we are seeing everything like we are watching the cinema. This has changed our values in the sense that we no longer value more things that have substance or material base, but we value things more that are actually disappearing, things that are only momentarily present and then they are absent. This is based on the notion that we have 24 frames per second on the film strip, and each and every image is a still image. And this movement of my head or of my arm is actually on the film strip – if you film me and I move my head or my arm, the value of this movement is based on the disappearance of the next frame – another frame comes and another frame comes, and the frames that we are seeing and disappearing actually creates this value of movement. So he is dealing with this value system that changes the way that we are perceiving, and he also argues that there is this change in time where we want things to speed up; everything has to be speeded up, because we have multiple roles in our lives (you are a student, a mother, a daughter, a football fan, whatever) and everything has its own slot in life and we have to do every role as fast as we can, and in order to do that we create these devices, like computers or cars or whatever, in order to reduce the distance between the fulfillment of our roles. It’s cutting the middle time. That has created this notion about intensity, where we want to experience everything intensively. So that intensive time is how we spend our time as opposed to extensive time, as it was before cinema, where you actually had to spend much more time doing the things you were doing – it took longer. And I think to some extent – one of the things I experienced going below water is that time perception was altered in that sense. Although that intensive time is… well, much of the things that we are learning in the course is to maximize the amount of time that we can be below water. And much of the things that scuba diving teaches us is that we have certain dive tables, that we can go to the Cayman Islands and relying on these diving tables we can actually maximize the amount of dives during those five days that we are diving in order to use the time intensively for diving.
C: What is the dive table?
Z: I have a certain amount of air in a tank, and if I go 33 feet under water, I can spend x amount of minutes. And the ratio changes between the depths. If you go further down, you actually need less. So time is very important in really thinking about it. It’s even more, you really have to be conscious about the time when you go down, it’s a vital life-supporting device or thought that you have when doing this. And you also have to think about it while you are preparing the dive. So this notion about the change of time perception – I think it’s really part of the whole conception of going under water. It’s not just a technical thing, which is based on your survival or not – but this is definitely a recreational thing, and while we are doing it as recreational or sport divers, we are really shifting gears from our daily lives and going into this environment where we know we are going to have a really intense experience. Because this is a radical alteration of our daily lives. But this is also, I also saw it – this also alters the perception of how I actually saw things. You’re sitting here, and everything is at this order and at this level, but if I was in a tank I could actually flip myself and I could actually create this version of my perception which is very obscure. And I think that obscurity or reversal of angles is another strong point that I found interesting. Where you can actually play with this in the computer softwares that we have like Final Cut Pro and Acrobat and Photoshop, but you don’t change your position – you’re just sitting in the position you’re in and playing with this world. But there you can actually, you change your position and you really feel there’s an experiential feel to it when you really turn yourself and you watch the world upside down. And in that sense, this really goes hand in hand with people who have been writing about our senses in anthropology, you know how important it is not only to rely on knowledge that you get through the eyes, but that you let the other senses really pour in – touch smell, and the other 2 senses. Also, this really challenges this epistemology that is so heavily embedded in our approach to things. Taking this parallel where you can flip the world on the computer screen – you can have it horizontally or reverse, on the side or vertical – you are actually outside that world, you’re not part of it. It’s almost like this Albectian, or this Descartian perspectalism. Do you know this Albechtian grid? This 14th century notion about, where as a painter you have a frame and then you have grids in the frame, and I draw you based on this grid, so it’s a very mathematical approach to you and to your image. And this has been attached to Descartian dualism between the mind and body, where the scientist is not attached to whatever he’s actually watching. Like Descartes talked about how he shuts down all his senses and only relies on his intellect, and his intellect is not part of what he’s actually observing. But the sensual paradigm in anthropology is the total opposite of that, where you actually can’t step out of a situation, you are part of it. Like Jean Rouch’s cinetrans – you have influence on it, and you should take your senses into consideration of creating the knowledge that you’re constructing.
C: Can you talk about your sensorial experience underwater?
Z: I think the weirdest sensory experience was this exercise that he had us do. We were all (20 students) at the edge of the pool with our tanks and masks on, and he said “okay, go down into the middle, take off your masks and leave them there, and go the same way back.” And we all did that – we left them in one pile at the bottom of the pool, and then we went back. And then he said “okay, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to go down and find your mask, and you can’t come back until you have your mask.” So I went down, I just held the side of the pool and then the bottom of the pool and then I felt a foot and then an ass and then a head and all of a sudden I just grabbed a mask and I put it on. I cleaned it, I took the water out of it, and then I saw that it wasn’t my mask. And then I was looking around and I saw someone who had it, and then I just pointed, you know “this is my mask,” and that person took off the mask and I handed the person his mask. For me that was a sensual experience through touch where I was really in the dark. And I really sensed how limited my observation of space was. It was actually pretty scarey. The only range I had – it wasn’t beyond my fingers – it was precisely where I had my fingers. So that was pretty scary.
And another sensory experience is of course through the taste of water, because we did our training in the Temple swimming pool. And many people were grossed out because we took our masks and our snorkel and left them into a room, and then a few days later we came to the same room and someone had used it in between and it evidently hadn’t been washed, it was just lying there. Because in my experience, Iceland is very – there’s a heavy policy regarding when you go to a public swimming pool, you really have to wash yourself with soap before you go into a swimming pool, but here on the other hand in the U.S. there is no such policy, and that is why they use heavy chloride in the water in order to kill all the bacteria that are pouring out of your holes. And every time I went in I could really taste it. I really tasted this sanitation or hygienic product. But it’s not only a taste of chloride, but also the water tastes differently than in Iceland in the swimming pool there – the ratio of chemicals in it are slightly different, I think. That was another sensory experience. Although I haven’t taken that thought further – what it actually does or mean or whatever. But I think another interesting thing is talking about these big movements that we have in the water. This world really slows everything down. The only rapid things underwater are actually the bubbles going up, and they always seemed to me like they were in a hurry to go up. But everything else is pretty slow.
C: Do you swim a lot?
Z: Yeah, I do.
C: One of the things that Lisa Hardy said was comparing diving to sleepwalking, dreaming…
Z: I think that it really is an experience – it’s almost like you’re watching a dead person, a
corpse, as if you were watching a dead person experiencing that close relationship, or watching a photograph or a film of it. It hits me like, you somehow become reflexive about, that this isn’t given, you know I could actually drop dead right now. And I was watching tv the other night, and there was some Eastern European football player who was playing and just dropped down dead like that, in the middle of a game, he just died. And that happens, but for some reason… and thinking about how you actually breathe, it’s so vital in sustaining your life, that you’re really playing with the core of life in that sense. Maybe this thought gives these DNA experts and these physical anthropologists the finger, because life isn’t there to be found. Is the life maybe – you know, where is breath in all these DNA grids? So breath is this life-supporting system that really makes you conscious of your life and your body. It’s almost like you feel yourself, you’re breathing down your own neck, so to speak, but it’s somehow internalized.
I find it interesting that she’s paralleling it to sleepwalking, because one of the things that I’m interested in that goes back to when I was writing my Master’s thesis is that I was writing about 19th century travel books, and it was mainly British travelers who went to Iceland who had these elaborate descriptions of landscapes. This is what Mary Pratt has written about in her book about travelers as well – this is that the 19th century travelers were describing the landscape in Iceland, which is rather depleted of any high trees like you are accustomed to here and in England – and how do you describe something that you haven’t experienced before? How can you really describe something that you know the person you’re describing it too hasn’t experienced? And there is another, an American historian who has argued that the Europeans were so startled by the vast landscape of the American plains – you go there and you can see over vast distances, because it’s so flat. This is something that really altered their perspective of nature, so it was a significant contribution of how Westerners think about nature and it actually altered the paradigms of how they saw the possibilities of nature. But I think that all… maybe this is pretty close to this argument that we actually can’t see beyond, our observations are always theory-laden. We have certain filters that are always in between us and the things that we are observing. So the question is how can we discover new things and really see new things – if we always have to jump into the trench of, we are being confronted by apparently new things, and the only way we can describe it is to refer back. So when the British travelers in Iceland referred to the lava fields and the forms in the landscape they described it as the black chimneys in Sheffield or in Birmingham. That was the only description they could think of to make it really intelligible for the readers.
I don’t think that – I see the parallel with sleeping, but it’s more like with dreaming really. But then I think that the dream world is much more elaborated, there are more options or things going on there than down below. But one of the things parallel to my dream world is that one of the ecstatic dreams that I have is the dreams where I am flying, and I always wake up like “wow, this was great.” And that’s the only parallel that I can see with being down below, diving, is that weight, your weight disappears, you become weightless, but you are considerably constrained by the water. You can’t move fast, but you can fly, but you are flying on different terms than when you are in the air, or when you are doing it in your dreams.
C: You were talking about weightlessness underwater – is it empowering, or disempowering? Do you feel out of control or is it an enjoyable experience?
Z: Yeah I think it’s disempowering. You’re really, I’m really an intruder so to speak. I’m actually not supposed to be there. I’m intruding into this environment, and I think that all the gear that we have, all the technology, like the fins. It seems to me that the way they are developing them very gradually is to empower the scuba divers more and more, make you move faster through this obstacle – which the water is, for your movements – and the same goes for the buoyancy vest and the tanks as well. I read in some magazine that they are now doing experiments with the goggles that they are going to put information into the goggles, computer information about the state of the oxygen tank.
C: How do you monitor that?
Z: There is a meter that goes from the tank that you can actually just watch it or observe it like that (holds hand up). But the Navy is now experimenting with putting it in the goggles, just like the pilots in the fighter jets – they have these black helmets and they see everything around them and more, on the screen, on the black thing.
C: Can you also talk briefly about…
Z: One thought – there is this German filmmaker Wim Wenders, and he made this film where you see occasionally fish swimming over the screen, giving you the feeling that you’re actually watching an aquarium, which is parallel to the description of this painter – that maybe this is only a change of levels. Maybe we are just in this aquarium.
C: Was it difficult to learn how to regulate your breathing…
Z: Yeah, this was really, probably one of the things that really surprised me was that I’ve always been really comfortable in the water. I used the swimming pool a lot when I was younger and I practiced with a team, and it really surprised me that when we did certain technical things as an exam, I was often freaking out because I was losing my breath and I wasn’t staying underwater as long as I thought I could. So for example, a very simple exercise with your snorkel and your fins, going down to bottom of the deeper end of the pool, taking off your fins, taking off your goggles, going up, taking a breath, going back down and putting the fins on, putting your mask on, clearing the mask and going back up. It takes about a minute to do it. And I had to make several attempts, but the attempt where I could actually do it, I was really freaking out and I was thinking “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.” And I want to do it, because I don’t like this, otherwise I have to do it until I did it. So I was really pushing it, and at the same time I felt – it was a déjà vu for me to an accident I had when I was 19 years old on a trawler in Iceland. I worked on trawlers every summer and every school vacation that I had, and the accident was pretty severe. I was working in the middle of the ship where the fish come in, and I had to put ice over the fish. And they had hundreds of tons of ice in the middle of the ship and it goes into the little boxes with the fish. And one morning when I was doing this there was a sort of avalanche of the ice, and there were about 3-4 tons of ice that crushed me, and I just disappeared and I was crushed. And my back broke, my nose was cut into two halves, I had two noses, ribs were broken – I was a total mess, but I didn’t lose consciousness. So there I was like that (gestures being crushed), and the only thing that could move were my fingers, like that (slightly moves fingers). And I had a déjà vu of this claustrophobic feeling while I was doing this exercise while I was actually losing my breath. And this is the second or third time that I’ve gotten this very strong, very scary feeling ever since I’ve gotten into this accident. The other time was when I had a huge hangover in London and I had to take the metro at peak hour, and everyone was like that in the train (gestures being crushed), and I was freaking out.
C: How do you feel before you – did it get better?
Z: Oh yeah, it got better.
C: How do you feel before a dive?
Z: I think it’s more like, I imagine it’s very close to performance. It’s not only an intellectual performance where you have to have your head clear – or at least in my case, I really have to fine tune myself, if I’m going to talk, I really have to somehow be in the mood, intellectually. I have to have maybe five or ten minutes before in order to know how to start and in what direction I want to go. But in terms of this, I imagine that if you’re a dancer or a scuba diver or an actor or whatever, you not only have to articulate your mind, but you also have to feel the articulation in every muscle of your body. So, it’s in that sense, a sensual or sensory articulation that I felt. But it’s not only that, also you have to check your gear, because the gear becomes part of you - I imagine like costumes. When that is okay, then you have this confidence of doing it.
-----
Þetta viðtal var tekið í tengslum við danssýningu sem Carolyn Merrit danshöfundur var að búa til og frumsýnd var í apríl 2004 í Fíladelfíu í Bandaríkjunum. Dansverkið hlaut nafnið Neutral Buoyancy og fjallaði um reynsluna af því að kafa. Ég hafði tekið námskeið í köfun við Temple háskóla haustið 2003, sem var liður í undirbúningi fyrir doktorsverkefni mitt. Carolyn tók nokkur viðtöl við kafara og byggði verkið upp á þeim viðtölum. Hún fékk síðan mig og fleiri kafara til þess að taka þátt í verkinu með því að sitja á sviðinu og endurtaka sumt af því sem við sögðum í viðtölunum. Ég slapp því við að hlúnkast um sviðið í níðþröngum sokkabuxum.
posted by Sigurjon at 8:36 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home