Recursive self-consciousness as paralysis — the infalling trap, the choking athlete, and the philosopher with the…

echoes

Early text: [scene] Writerly hypervigilance turned on itself gets depressing; self-consciousness is useful up to a point on a continuum, but self-consciousness of self-consciousness of self-consciousness is an infalling trap [00:17:11–00:17:44]; the athlete's version: recursive what-if thinking is literally paralyzing (the bunny in the headlights), great athletes have a muscle that cuts it off, and he didn't — the coach's verdict at 13 was a kid with a bad head, and the choke ran exactly the recursion (don't think about it / how do I not think about it while I'm thinking about it) [00:18:30–00:19:06]; the philosopher's version: philosophy as meta-discipline, stepping up a level and picking apart axioms, is exhilarating up to a point — past it, you sit parked for long stretches, gazing at nothing, lower lip quivering — a bad head for that, too [00:19:45–00:20:27]
IJ echo: the novel's recursion-as-paralysis complex — Hal's hyperreflexive interior against ETA's don't-think pedagogy, and the analysis-paralysis strand the scholarly program (den Dulk's Sartrean hyperreflexivity) reads the book through; Gross herself opens the tennis material by wiring an IJ character to the biography [00:17:44]
Weight: shared-preoccupation