Total presence / self-forgetting — the E.T.A. ideal and its cost

echoes

Early text: "they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one"; the decisive-moment answer "might well be: nothing at all"; "How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act?"; and the inverse, from Wallace's own junior matches — "I’d get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements." [the closing analysis; the junior-match spiral ¶] [e-text]
IJ echo: E.T.A.'s whole pedagogy of self-forgetting — Schtitt's philosophy, Lyle's counsel, the ideal of the player who has annulled self-consciousness to become pure action; and Hal's catastrophe as its dark inversion (a consciousness so verbal and self-observing it cannot switch off, whose interior runs on while the body fails). The essay states, pre-IJ, the exact axis IJ dramatizes: genius requires silencing "the Iago-like voice of the self," and the tragedy is a mind that cannot. The junior-match spiral — recursion about not-thinking-about-it — is Hal-grade interiority performed in Wallace's own voice.
Weight: prefiguration