…and…

Sally Field took up surfing simply to land the title role of Gigget.

“That’s it, that’s all I know.”
– Penny / “The Big Bang Theory”

Cheers.

When you have mastered an activity so totally, so completely, that you no longer expend any mental effort at carrying it out, and you can use it as a medium to carry out some other goal or intention.

It can be riding a horse, driving a sports car, playing an instrument, or boxing a worthy opponent. You can’t write good poetry until you have first mastered the language; vocabulary, grammar and syntax, of the language the poem is written in. If you have to think about what you’re saying, and how, you will be distracted from what you want to say.

Maurits Escher, the Dutch artist, described it (and I paraphrase)
as

“Mastering one’s craft so totally, so completely, that one need no longer give it any thought; leaving the artist free to use his art and his craft directly, so that his soul is free to work unencumbered and free of effort.”

My theme is that we create our own universe, and it is as real as any other.

Except, perhaps, for golf.

They can ski, surf, play football, baseball, do obstacle courses, swim, climb, anything they may want and seem to learn it effortlessly and in no time. I regard them as geniuses in their own way.

May be dumb as boards, crude, coarse, but damn, they are good. High school may have been too much for them, but they will be on a Black Diamond ski run two hours after putting on skis for the first time.

There is a block, called a neck, between learning something and doing it. Most people can sort of trickle things down, slowly, with practice, but like a great jazz pianist the work has all been done before the performance and there is no thought. Surfing, I don’t think, can’t be done well if it has to be thought about. Just as typing this, I don’t have to think about what key to hit, and when I did I couldn’t type well. And understanding how the keyboard works, why each key is where it is, what happens to the impulse when I hit a key, has nothing to do my typing.

The hull grips the sea, the rig penetrates the atmosphere, and it all comes together at the interface of the two, rudder and sheet, at the hands and brains of a man who stands at the very dead center of this very personal view of the universe, mediating between the cosmos and his own soul through the medium of the skills and experiences of his long-dead predecessors.

There are the rigid laws of nature, the fractal chaos of the local changing conditions, and of course, the human dimension of thousands of years of mariners and shipbuilders coming together at one single point in space and moment in time. The human mind deals directly with the infinitely complex and random universe, through the finite but nonetheless remarkable properties of the boat.

It is, simultaneously, an intensely spiritual, intellectual, and physical activity. When you come back from a sail you know you have dealt with the universe directly, on its terms, and you have acquitted yourself with dignity and grace.

I’d say that there are basically two kinds of surfers: Outsiders who jump in and try it, usually with less-than-stellar results; and people who were brought up in the culture and who were trained by older surfers who passed on the lore. This gets into your thoughts about the use of language to communicate about surf and surfing. I don’t think there’s as clean a dividing line as you portray: Rather, the old-timers use of the language instills that instinctive sense of the waves in those in whom it’s weak, and sharpens any innate abilities by providing a concrete focus in the form of a word. Language and skill aren’t separate, they’re intimately entangled and synergistic.

I’m not a surfer myself, but I thought “Chasing Mavericks” was a beautiful film, both for the portrayal of an obscure subculture and the poignant storyline of the young novice (a true story, by the way), and for the sheer beauty of the photography of surfers riding the waves. Plus, behind the closing credits is a beautiful aerial sequence of the California coast flying north from Santa Cruz.

(According to Can I Stream It?, the film currently isn’t available anywhere for free or even “free”. It might cost you a dozen bucks to see it, but I don’t think you’ll feel it was wasted.)

But since I’m not a surfer myself, I could be miles off base…