Today is better. I stopped writing for a little bit because that last post just seemed way too over-the-top. It reminded me of why I stopped writing altogether, when I was in college and “studying” creative writing. It was too self-indulgent – or too revealing – or too subjective. It’s funny what can happen if you have no audience, and what can happen if you’re not sure you have audience.
I want to make this quick because I really want to call Eddie today. It’s been a comedy of errors getting things working so that I can record a phone conversation on my cell phone. Seems like it shouldn’t be that hard, but it is … I think I’m just going to solder up a contact mic and use that – I’ve heard that works. We’ll see. I’m ready, though. I really want to start talking. I think I’m learning a little from S and other journalists I have known – there’s a sense of entitlement or “end justifies the means” or just plain boldness that allows them to pursue an interview. I don’t have it, but I’m trying to fake it a little.
I loved the ride out here today. I almost always do. And I’m noticing how many of the wonderful things in my life right now involve crossing bodies of water, or just water in general. I regularly run from my house, across the hood, and across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, and back. I love this run – I did it last night and it was sooo dark. There’s something so freeing about crossing the river and then returning. It gives perspective, makes me love New York from the outside again, and also lets me feel like I can escape. It makes me realize how close a different world is. It also keeps me running, because I can’t really just wimp out and stop in the middle of the bridge or in another state. Also, baths. I love taking baths.
And then I was watching the water through a hole in the boards along the dock as we were docking. It moves though and around – the fences and boards don’t really contain it at all. It reminded me of the way sound moves – though and around walls – and about my thoughts about how the medium, in that respect, is sort of naturally in the public realm. Water, similarly, is impossible to own.
I’m still obsessed with this Foucault. He is talking now about hysteria and hypochondria. In the 18th century, he says, hysteria was attributed to having an overly fluid body, a body in which the parts could move around, that was not “solid” enough. Eventually this was transmuted into the idea that the body was overly sympathetic, that the vibrations of the nervous system created sympathetic vibrations throughout the body, causing the person (woman) to feel things more extremely:
“Simon-Andre Tissot conceived this double function of one and the same fiber as the combination of an undulatory movement for voluntary stimulus (“this is the movement of a fluid enclosed in a malleable container, in a bladder, for example, that when I press it would eject liquid through a tube”) and a corpuscular movement for sensation (“this is the movement of a succession of ivory balls”). Thus sensation and movement can be produced at the same time in the same nerve: any tension and any relation in the fiber will alter both movements and sensations, as we can observe in all nervous diseases.”
S and I were walking in Riverside Park on that path along the Hudson River yesterday morning and there was a big huddling of police cars along the riverbank. They had found a dead body floating downstream. The ME was slow to come. That night, the body still hadn’t been identified. S says a body in the water usually means a suicide or a mob hit. The water carries, removes, displaces, decontexualizes, and washes away a lot of information.
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