(Swim Journal, August 15, 2021)
Tobey Pond, warm water, to the end of the pond with freestyle, backstroke for the return. Late afternoon sunlight casts the shadow of my body behind me, as though my shadow is working to keep up. The water mirrors the labor of my effort, my movement through space. The water anticipates and translates this reflexivity, the metamorphosis of seeing and being seen. Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls this merging the “transperceptual,” which breaks down oppositional binaries. Here the alignment or position of the self is caught in a circle of confusion.
In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens that does not come to perfect focus when imaging a point source. It is also known as disk of confusion, circle of indistinctness, or blur spot.
Tobey Pond, warm water, to the end of the pond with freestyle, backstroke for the return. Late afternoon sunlight casts the shadow of my body behind me, as though my shadow is working to keep up. The water mirrors the labor of my effort, my movement through space. The water anticipates and translates this reflexivity, the metamorphosis of seeing and being seen. Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls this merging the “transperceptual,” which breaks down oppositional binaries. Here the alignment or position of the self is caught in a circle of confusion.
In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens that does not come to perfect focus when imaging a point source. It is also known as disk of confusion, circle of indistinctness, or blur spot.