The Water Hole

I don’t want to make it sound like I spend an unusual amount of my time in the hot tub at the YMCA.

I mean, I’ll admit that I spend more time in there than most people do. I have a membership there, and I swim pretty often, which puts me in close proximity to the tubbe de l’hotte. To get in the thing is a simple matter of stepping ten feet in a certain direction and climbing into the pool of body sludge with all the other creeps and mutants who are looking for relief in a country that has so little of it to offer that we have to find it in a pot of hot water that has other people’s skin cells floating in it.

I don’t get out much. I stay inside my house nearly all the time. The hot tub is where I encounter other people. It’s like my Roman forum, except no one in there is wearing much and everyone looks like shit.

So yes, I don’t go in there all the time, just some of the time, and a minute ago I remembered something a guy said the other day.

At that moment, people were filing into the YMCA. One after another they came. And we men in the tubby-tub-tub could see them coming; at our YMCA, you can see the front desk from the pool room, through a glass wall, and we were all watching the stream of people as they came into the place. It was not long after five o’clock, which meant we could safely assume they had just gotten off work. They were hitting the gym before they journeyed home.

One of the older studs who sat with me in that hot bath, living the good life, said, “Man, they get off work they come straight here. Every time! It’s Pavlovian.”

I didn’t say anything, because I say as little as possible when I’m outside my house. When I’m inside it, I mostly speak to cats.

But there was nothing Pavlovian about that situation! People were entering the gym because it was the time of day when they could be at the gym. Their workdays were over, and now they could do something else. This was what they were doing. It’s very simple. You don’t have to reach into your intellectual storage bag and pull out the work of a Soviet neurologist to explain the phenomenon of people entering a building in order to exercise.

Pavlov didn’t give a bunch of dogs rigid work schedules, to see how they plan their recreation and exercise around those work schedules. His dogs didn’t work full-time in suburban offices. They didn’t have gym memberships, they had instruments driven into their bodies that would measure how much stomach enzyme they produced when they listened to Mike Oldfield’s 1973 album Tubular Bells.

This hot tub encounter happened some time ago, but I remember that, after I heard the man say this thing about how Pavlovian it was that people were going to the gym, I wondered what it would be like if instead of Freud’s theories of the unconscious, and his writings on mourning and other things, being the basis of a whole subdiscipline of literary and cultural studies, it was Pavlov’s work that had so inspired critics. It was Pavlov, not Freud, whose work made such a mark on the humanities in the twentieth century. And so rather than investigate the ways in which the poetic form of the elegy acts out the process of mourning as it is lain out in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” critics would write about how an elegy is simply a fulfillment of the Pavolvian Imperative, in which the death of a loved one is the stimulus to which poets respond with elegies. There would be papers about how Gabriel Conroy has an epiphany as snow begins to fall at the end of “The Dead” simply because he has a conditioned response to the sight of snow falling and he can’t help having epiphanies whenever it snows. It has nothing to do with his new participation in his wife’s melancholia that’s brought on by her failure to mourn her bygone lover who died in the cold, or because he got too cold and grew sick afterward, or whatever, and should have spent more time with me in the hot tub. I can’t remember.

It’s been a while since I read that story. And I don’t think anyone really writes about mourning or the failure to mourn as it pertains to “The Dead;” I’m just using it as an example of how you could impose a Pavlovian reading on literature. I could have chosen literally any text.

You could reread Pride and Prejudice as a bunch of people doing the things they do because they’re hearing different kinds of bells. You could unearth an early draft of the novel in which Jane Austen includes, throughout the narrative, a great number of chiming bells. On every page different bells are going off, left and right. In draft after draft it is a cacophony—until, in a stroke of genius, near the end of her revision process, Austen simply removes all of the bells. She thereby obscures the stimuli that provoke such odd behaviors in her characters, resulting in a literary masterpiece. This could completely change the way we read and study literature.