The History of a Jump — Zack Finch
The year our marriage was breaking up, I went to the contemporary art museum several times a week—during my lunch break, between classes, before picking my son up at pre-school. The artist Taryn Simon had transformed one of the galleries into an ice chamber / performance space that glowed with arctic clarity: the walls were white, the floor was made of mossy layers of accumulated ice, and the three rectangular skylights in the ceiling emitted a brilliant light that suffused the room with ritual connotations. At the center of the space, a hole had been installed in the floor, ten feet deep and five by five feet in circumference, filled with water kept at forty-two degrees. The public was invited to sign up on-line to take a cold-water plunge in front of museum goers who would, from their comfortable positions in the richly carpeted, completely darkened viewing area, watch through a large window of cinemascopic glass. On a typical day, two or three people might take the leap, but since the actions weren’t scheduled, the space was usually inactive, and I would spend my twenty or thirty minutes thinking, zoning, or jotting notes for a paper I was hoping to write for an upcoming conference on the theme of slowness and change.
The clinical whiteness of the room reminded you of a surgical unit, or an execution chamber, or the “page on which nothing is yet written”—Aristotle’s image for pure potentiality. The window, deeply inset, offered a ledge where I would sit with my legs drawn against my chest or spread out in front of me like a child who finds a quiet haven away from the busy traffic patterns of the house. Once a guard told me I couldn’t stay there, but mostly I was ignored and left to consider my life, the paper’s potential structure, its tissue of citations. I could begin with Rilke’s sonnet in which the speaker watches the half-ruined statue of Apollo until its marble finally speaks: “You must change your life.” Or I could open with the notion from William James: change is like getting out of a warm bed on a frigid morning when the fire in the stove has died out. My paper would pair that glacial difficulty against the notion that modern art so often dreams, that a change of state can happen. The tea kettle does whistle, the volcano spews smoke and lava. Suddenly you just get out of bed. Or you find that you’ve already gotten up, and you hardly know how you did it.
I had never expected to get married, but my partner wanted this commitment from me—we were nearing forty—and I liked the idea of a Lucretian clinamen, an evolutionary swerve that makes the sort of difference one always pines for, making your life a little stranger and less legible than it had been previously. So when I was offered a teaching job in another state, she said she would come too, but only if we tied the knot. I thought about it for the following days and weeks, I tortured myself with thinking through its repercussions, I traipsed through a familiar maze of doubts and desires, then I stood at the very ledge of it and looked down, which is when I recalled what Kierkegaard had said about the leap of faith. “A beginning can only occur once reflection stops,” he decided in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “and reflection can be stopped only by something else, and this something else is something altogether different from the logical, since it is a resolution.”
We were happy at first. Grown adults with plenty of experience living independently, we cohabitated peacefully in our new house, convening in the evening over dinner and to talk about our days. But this tidy arrangement collapsed the following year, after the birth of our son, when a host of unforeseen difficulties emerged. It was hard to get the baby to breast feed properly, for instance, which caused great physical pain and emotional duress and a sense of disconnection between mother and child, a gap I rushed in to fill, by bonding all the more deeply with the baby, spending long days playing on the floor or napping with him on the couch, chest to naked chest, bottle feeding him contently, then spending every scrap of non-parenting time in my office, preparing for classes or eking out a phrase or two in my journal. In the sleepless muddle of those early months, a rift opened between us that would never close. Today I’m ashamed by how I grew so identified with the baby that I began judging her, unconsciously, undeniably, for being so different from my own mother, such as I remembered her, and the powerful early bond that, as I would come to learn, formed my primitive assumptions about the necessities of attachment parenting. Naturally, my wife recoiled from me. She grew quiet and ingrown. To dim the pain, she drank a lot of wine, she smoked a lot of pot, she watched the TV in the corner. Eventually we found a therapist, someone to help us understand the histories that were shaping the triangulations dividing us. I was harboring some archaic aggressions and subducted jealousies that the presence of our baby was activating. But she was probably reliving some unremembered childhood trauma of her own, in the intensive care unit where she spent the first few months of her life, touched only by tubes and wires, and how her father left the family soon after. I wanted to repair the rift by talking. I wanted us to share our untold stories. I wanted our symptoms to blossom and unfurl. I wanted, wanted, wanted. So you can imagine how she came to dislike me with a passion, how shuttered she grew to my flippant speculations on the sources of the back pain that had begun to spasm up and down her body whenever I walked into the room, flares that were intensified by the couples therapy and exacerbated by my invitations for her to revisit everything—about our early childhoods; about the disappearance of her father; about her experiences with men before me.
Autobiography is chilling. It involves so many other people. She went out to the hot tub each night, to escape these narrative pressures, while I put the baby down to sleep. She needed to look up at the stars, alone. She liked the water very hot. There she could spend an hour or two among the roiling jets with the wine bottle and the marijuana pipe, to get her back muscles to unrope. After the baby was asleep, I went straight to “work” grading papers or preparing for the next day’s classes.
A couple of years into this pattern, I was teaching a course on travel writing. My idea was that you don’t have to actually “go” anywhere to undergo the changes in perspective that we associate with the displacements of long-distance travel. To this end I assigned a series of texts like A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, Reveries of a Solitary Walker by Rousseau, and Skein by my friend Christen Mattix. The latter text documents three consecutive summers when Christen had spent at least an hour a day on a bench in Bellingham, Washington, knitting “a line to the ocean,” as she explained it to each curious passerby. Over time, the sky-blue fisherman’s cable extended from the bench, across the street, down the hill, and toward the bay over a mile away. In the video taken of the climactic day, surrounded by a group of her friends and supporters, she dropped the end of the line into the chilly water, and then her father jumped in after it and swam the line out toward the setting sun as far as it would go. I had met Christen years before, in my early twenties, when we both worked in a museum café in Seattle. On our days off, we would sometimes walk the loop around Seward Park or head to the International District for a banh mi sandwich. A few times we attended services at St. James Cathedral across the street from the museum. We were both young and there was a peculiar quality of waiting that qualified our lives. Once she gave me Waiting for God, in which Simone Weil describes her separateness from God, and from others, in sentences so clean and mathematical they resemble a monk’s perfect cell, the kind of pristine room I kept in my apartment on First Hill, with just a mattress on the floor and a desk and a chair in the corner. One day during a lull in café traffic, she asked me to join her at a table by the window. Seemingly distraught, she clasped her hands on the table and directed her words to them: she needed to know if I liked her. This formulation took me by surprise. Blood rose to my head and fished in my face. I don’t remember how I replied, I must have grasped for some of Weil’s language about how friendship is a miracle wherein each person consents to meet the other across an unbridgeable distance, etc. I probably said “wherein.” I stared at my own hands, then looked up into her eyes, trying to recall Weil’s geometrical metaphor about the vanishing point of friendship. She seemed relieved when I said “the point at which parallels meet is infinity” and afterward we resumed our routine of walking and talking, albeit in a more tender, more painful manner, until the following summer when I abruptly decided to go back east. She gave me her cell phone in case of emergencies on my cross-country drive. I didn’t need it. I was thrilled to be alone, in motion. I sailed along the Queen’s Highway eager to start my new life. I picked up a series of hitchhikers along the way, chatting with each in turn, or riding silently beside them, enjoying the adventure of their strangeness in the knowledge that I would never see them again. I remember stopping for a young woman on the exit ramp outside of Kamloops—she couldn’t have been more than eighteen and seemed scared of me. We drove in silence for a couple of hours until she got off in Golden, where I picked up someone else, a man with a large black duffle-bag who was moving to Toronto because there were jobs there, excavation for a new subway line had just recently started. Once I made it back to Massachusetts, I stayed at the dharma center for several weeks, where you were prohibited from speaking to anyone or even making eye contact. You just looked down at your feet while walking from the dining hall to the pagoda. I was as happy there as perhaps I’ve ever been. One day, taking a break from the meditation hall to get a sip of water and stretch my legs in the foyer, I noticed another man, doing the same thing. Without looking at each other, we started laughing at the same time. Eventually our bodies were convulsing, and we were crying, we were laughing so hard. One of the assistant teachers came by, tried to decide if we were violating the rules, then smiled and left. I can’t say what we were moved by—for me, it had something to do with the absurdity of sitting motionless in a dark room full of strangers for twelve hours a day. On the final day of the sit, you were allowed to start talking to each other in the cafeteria at lunch. I couldn’t do it. It felt ridiculous, this sudden need to remember my name and come up with a story about myself. At one point, the guy with whom I’d shared the laughing fit introduced himself, but our conversation was short and flat—whatever had been so funny had vanished completely, and we couldn’t remember the nature of our bond.
My wife would sometimes pop her head into my office to interrupt my work and say goodnight. She had just come in from the hot tub, her face pink and flushed. I would stand up from the reading chair and kiss her and say “love you” without the I and sit back down. The end of a relationship is when you feel you know the other person so completely that you foreclose upon their otherness, their secrecy. D. W. Winnicott once wrote that at the center of every person lies “an incommunicado element” which is sacred and worthy of preservation at all costs. But when I would finally come upstairs, I had already decided that the bedroom would smell of wine and tobacco and marijuana and the hot tub chemicals. I had already decided that her snoring would be greatly amplified by her drinking, which relaxed her soft palette and obstructed her breathing passages. According to my closed system of interpretation, her snoring represented a kind of hoarding opacity, an advanced technique of non-communication, some unknown geological activity inaccessible to language. At some point, unable to fall asleep, I would touch her shoulder gently and ask in a whisper if she could “try another position.” Of course, I could move to the couch downstairs, but that would signal the beginning of the end, a possibility I was committed to repressing, so instead I would put in my earbuds and listen to some trance music or a podcast and seethe, waiting for conditions to change.
What appealed to me about the museum’s “A Cold Hole,” and why I visited the exhibition almost daily at this time, was the way it dramatized the prospect of change in such a solitary, ritualistic fashion. It was early June the first time I saw someone take the plunge. I looked up from my notebook, and there she was, walking gingerly across the ice. I watched this stranger pause and exhale at the edge of the hole. Her shoulders dropped. She rubbed her upper arms, then she rubbed her lower arms, then she shifted her weight between the balls of her feet. The color of her bathing suit was black, and the apricot hue of her skin showed up in relief against the white that surrounded her. Five or six minutes later, right when I happened to glance away, she leapt. Then I saw her hands reaching for the ladder; then she was pulling herself up onto the ice, water streaming in translucent sheets off her body onto the icy floor. Now all her former equipoise was gone. She staggered back to the door, struggling to stay upright, her shoulders hunched, her lips blue. Vulnerable and exposed, she seemed to be a different person altogether.
When I say that the experience of watching this stranger jump felt incredibly intimate, my therapist raises an eyebrow and writes something down on her pad, which I take to be a signal to keep talking. I am a professor, I talk for a living, I can do this. With a flourish, I touch on the etymology of the word “intimacy”— the public intimation of something private. No, not private, I correct myself. Secret. Yes, the body discloses a metaphysical secret, I want to say, something akin to the soul. Have you ever read James Joyce’s story “The Dead?” The therapist doesn’t write anything down, and now I know that I am talking nonsense, which perhaps spells progress. That’s what free association is—freest when it’s non-purposive, when the symptoms get shed willy-nilly, in a succession of cascading ideas, thoughts, memories, sentences not linked except neurologically or physiologically—only later do you get to search for the patterns. According to this theory, any predetermined cohesion of ideas is already a defense against chaos and reality. This is a writing problem too—it’s the one I’m negotiating now, trapped between expression and construction. You want to let yourself go, to ramble on uncensured, because the spray of language means everything, because it’s life itself, because its play is the only way one can truly know oneself, know each other. But at the same time you want to control and shape the material. You don’t want to reveal too much about yourself, let alone about those people you have loved or harmed. You’re making these little compositional decisions all the time, like when to pull up short, when to move from rain to snow.
Most people know that the story ends with snow. But it’s in the paragraph just before the snow arrives when Gabriel undergoes a seismic shift. That’s when he, the middle-aged protagonist of “The Dead,” sees, suddenly, his wife as a stranger once again, as she sleeps in the hotel bed. Now he observes Greta with immense love, without resentment, “as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife.” No longer does he feel quite so injured by the fact that she had loved and been loved by the boy named Michael Furey. For now he sees her for what she truly is, a beautiful, resilient, aging woman who has suffered losses and disappointments, including, most painfully, her marriage to him, to Gabriel, this man who has never fully loved her, surely not the way Michael Furey had. “A strange friendly pity for her entered his soul,” Joyce writes. And then the epiphany comes, the tears rising in his eyes like come, as the snow arrives, clicking against the windowpane. Gabriel arrives at a stage of wisdom reserved for those moments when we stand temporarily outside the intricate snares of our own stories. We’re dying, all of us; yes, we’re already dead. No, wait, we’re alive. Yes, we’re still alive!
My wife and I were strangers once. It was early December, it was snowing or it was going to snow, and we had just put up the Christmas tree. This was six months after we’d met. After dinner we smoked a joint in front of the fire in the wood stove. I remember lying on top of her making out on the couch. I remember suddenly seeing her. I was shocked by how there she was, how beautiful. I traced her eccentric features from forehead to nose to chin, her cheeks soft and the skin clear, her eyes hazel, and the lips that would one day inform our son’s lips, and the shape of his mouth. It was then that she asked me to describe the first moment I knew I loved her. The question made me pull away from her like a parachuter reversing course, moving back up into the sky instead of down. How could she have such innocent ideas about love at age thirty-five? It was this innocence that both repelled me and attracted me. On our honeymoon to Mexico, for instance, I bought a “day of the dead” statuette in the airport, knowing it would bother her. It was a skeleton wearing a white bridal gown. I was trying to make a point that marriage isn’t some sentimental genre; it is also a deadly proposition. Marriage isn’t a comforting closure, but a radical change of state, a portal to the arduous unknown. I was trying to destroy the illusion I believed she held about marriage, that married people live happily, statically, forever after. I suppose I wanted her to hate me. We need to be able to hate each other and then to survive each other’s hate, in order to break through to a kind of love that is different from what we’d previously called it. Unsure what to say as we lay there on the couch, unwilling to acknowledge that I didn’t know if I loved her, because I wasn’t sure I knew what love is, I offered instead a citation from Wittgenstein’s book On Certainty. “Love isn’t a feeling. It’s what is put to the test.” She frowned for a long moment, then goosed me hard and we fell into cascades of laughter again. When I woke up the next morning she had already gone to work, and there was a wax paper bag on the kitchen counter containing two pumpkin chocolate chip muffins with a hand-written note taped to the bag that read “leap and the net will appear.”
I proposed on a raw, rainy afternoon in the middle of April. “There is no such thing as a prudent marriage,” wrote Marianne Moore; “marriage is a Crusade; there is always tragedy in it.” I didn’t care. I was forty, I had been hitching and vamping through life, driving wantonly cross-country. Now I was ready for a real discovery, to do something fresh and rash. In this inclement weather, in the hour before it grew dark, we walked up a winding path through a hemlock grove that opened onto a grassy meadow overlooking the Connecticut River Valley separating Vermont from New Hampshire, the past from the future. Upon reaching the lone sugar maple at the middle of the meadow, we stopped and looked dumbly at the horizon. By this point I felt like an actor playing a poorly written character I didn’t believe in. This is a familiar feeling for me; often I feel like I am being cast into roles and sentences. This is why I like writing, where at least I can write my own lines, and “play” myself, as I’m doing now, half-nakedly before you. I had a script with me then, of course— before taking a knee I read aloud “A Blessing in Disguise” by John Ashbery, a poem composed in a voice of such deliberate naiveté, it makes you believe in the beauty of clichés, in the value of words and ideas so well-worn, you no longer know exactly what they mean, only that the romantic interchangeability of “I” and “you” is the very thing you’ve been waiting your whole life to feel:
And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a wayI should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire…
A couple months later, our closest friends and family assembled for the ceremony to witness our vows. Now I was actually sobbing. I cried as I’ve never cried before at the wedding. Like a baby shocked by the blinding cold of a world filled with light, empty space, all those familiar faces smiling up at me from their white folding chairs. After so many years on my own, unattached, unincorporated, now I stood before these people, naked in my light gray supplicant suit with pink striped tie and white carnation in the lapel. I felt like an outlaw who’d been apprehended and was being integrated into a society he had only thought about at some length. I was relieved to be apprehended, to be assumed into the fold. I do, I do. There we stood in our bridal outfits, invoking death’s name as we consigned the rest of our lives to each other. The wedding photographer stood in the back with the garland of black machines around his neck, like death itself, going about this impersonal business of clicking and flashing, one eye squinted shut as he finds you in his viewfinder.
The museum’s insurance company must have required that an EMT be present whenever people jumped into the hole, for there he was, on a little stool in the dark, just inside the door that you open to enter the ice chamber. “Have fun,” he said with a hint of irony in his voice. It unnerved me. It was clear he thought this whole “cold hole” thing was a childish performance, a waste of his time when actual emergencies were taking place in the real world. As I walked across the ice, I saw myself as I imagined he saw me and I flushed with shame. Once I made it to the edge of the hole—square, not round as I’d expected— I planted my feet, looked up and saw the crowd of people, their faces pressed against the glass. Some were holding up their phones. I could sense their collective excitement and impatience. I tried to center myself, to focus on why I was there, what change it was that I wanted to happen in my life. My wife had recently called me a narcissist. A covert malignant narcissist, she said. It had just taken her seven years to discover this. Seven years. I didn’t know what love is. Sure, I was a good father devoted to his son. But that was just because I identified so narcissistically with his needs, seeing him as a reflection of myself. Meanwhile, she was withering and dying; I hadn’t looked her way in months—now, years. I was comfortable only with relative strangers—the therapist, my students, the readers of my supposed work. My lack of affection for her, the very person right beside me, was deeply hurtful. The way I retreated into my office each night, to compose myself for strangers, was tantamount to abuse.
Eyes closed at the edge of the hole, I remembered being eight years old and something I would do during chorus at school. At the start of an especially beautiful song, I would close my eyes and imagine that it was the score for a movie, and this was its opening sequence. The camera would go panning around the room before finally settling on me, its protagonist. Afterward, the camera would follow me through the hallways, to my locker, to the playground. This cinematic imagination never lasted long—only as long as the singing lasted. Once I opened my eyes, it was impossible to think of my life as central or enchanted or in any way noteworthy, and I would return to my normal state, a glum and silent child. I hated myself except when I was acting a role. Then I became animated, entertaining. In my first role in the professional theater, I had played the youngest prince of Siam in The King and I. I had only one line, and it was a good one, during the scene when the English governess is teaching the royal children how lakes freeze in the northern winter, and you can walk across their surface. “Walk on water?” I exclaimed, standing up and falling backwards all in one motion, as if I were slipping on ice. I made a big cartoon pratfall, my arms helicoptering by my sides, and the audience always laughed. I lived for that laugh each night, its universal approbation, the snow general over Ireland. Remembering this, I almost lost my balance on the ice and opened my eyes, stepping back from the Cold Hole for a moment. I could tell that the audience was beginning to doubt if I would jump at all. The term “false self” was coined by D.W. Winnicott in 1956. What did I really want? How could I solve the aporia of our broken marriage? Truth does not consist in being true—thine own self, what is that?—but in moments of real surrender, actual abjection, abandon. Autobiography should be a jettisoning. Think of the graveside scene in Hamlet when the prince reveals himself, no longer just some version of himself. “This is I, Hamlet, the Dane!” he says, and the stage directions—“Leaps into the grave”—are italicized. There’s something negative, something apophatic about the truth of the I, which can only be described in terms of what it’s not. Robert Frost has a poem about this which I’ve read so often I think I have it by heart, about the difference between narcissism and real wisdom:
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
All I wanted was to glimpse that bit of quartz at the bottom of ourselves, to touch that nameless “something,” to break the mirrored surface of the water, with its image of the lurid, stupid “me myself.” If we could do that, if we could see through the cloudy, ferny distortions, then maybe we could save ourselves, and end the marriage. Meanwhile, I could feel the crowd’s excitement mounting again as I inched back up to the edge, and then their cameras went up again, ready for the money shot. I can’t remember the moment of impact beyond its shocking discombobulation. Inside the hole, there I felt safe; there I could not be seen; there I could not hurt anybody. I treaded water for a bit, but I couldn’t stay long. Another few moments and the EMT would be jumping in to save me. So I reached for the sides of the silver ladder and climbed up. That’s when I saw everyone applauding and cheering and waving. Some of the kids were actually wearing red baseball uniforms and jumping up and down like I’d just hit a homerun. People came up to me afterward. That evening, getting ice cream with my son on Spring Street, two older women started whispering, then came up to inquire if I was the man who had jumped that day. One of them had taken a video of me doing it—would I like her to send it to me? I gave her my email address and later that night checked my inbox, but she must have forgotten to send it. Or she had lost my address. For the next several evenings, I kept checking the computer, hoping she had sent it, so I could see myself clearly, but she never did. What I wanted to see was myself as a stranger might see me, my body a silent verticality, my intentions pure, my whole history behind me, its narrative irrelevant.
***
Zack Finch’s essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, New England Review, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. He teaches literature and creative writing at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the Berkshire Mountains.