The Shape of Water: George Greenough, Design, and the Nature of Nature

Minimalism.


When I was in high school it was difficult to hold down a real job, because I was a surfer. Whenever a swell came booming down the coast, I wanted to be in the water. Yet, I needed a little money. A young and golden-limbed Goddess of the Hope Ranch surfing clan took pity on me. The Emperor of Japan had gifted her mother with a tea house or chashitsu (茶室). It had been built according to traditional methods in The Land of the Rising Sun, then disassembled, shipped across the Pacific to Hope Ranch, and reconstructed on the family estate. The young surfing Goddess arranged with her mother for me to care for this neglected incarnation of zen aesthetics -- at my leisure.

The first thing I learned is that even to enter this sacred space, I needed to bow down. The low door, the Golden-Limbed One instructed me, is to help those who enter to remember humility and respect. Once inside, a silent simplicity of bamboo basking in a sun-illumined rice paper glow brought me a sudden feeling of hushed awe: mono no aware, the Japanese would say -- a feeling of the Ah! of things.

In that silent and luminous atmosphere, peppered only sporadically by the call of a bird or the fall of a pine cone, I began to dig in under the floorboards to get at the crabgrass reaching up into that golden light. I respectfully relocated all spiders and ladybugs and other insects outdoors, along with rat droppings and cobwebs and dust. I attended to the numerous small repairs that a tea house sitting idly for years requires. I also took care to leave an impression that the tea house had not received too much care, because it is supposed to look rustic and abandoned.  I realized that the structure was so light that if an earthquake should level every other building in Santa Barbara, the little chashitsu would float feather-like over those seismic waves.

As I lay on my back in that  softly radiant and empty space, I found myself basking idly in the fragrance of tatami mats and losing myself in various recumbent travels.

Mono no aware, however, expresses not only a feeling of sudden awe in the face of beauty, but the realization that beauty is ephemeral. After a few years, the kind owner of the Hope Ranch estate passed away, and the teahouse was gifted to the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens, disassembled once again and then reassembled next to Mission Creek, where these days, after extensive renovations, kimono-clad tea masters exhibit the art of tea to appreciative observers.



Sadō 茶道 is the way of tea, the second Chinese character being the symbol for Tao, which the Japanese pronounce dō, as in jūdō, the "gentle" or "easy" way (of throwing an opponent off balance). We will hear more about Tao as this essay continues. Bowing down upon entering the tea house is only one way to show respect. Another is the kneeling position assumed throughout the ceremony as well as the silent attention given to the merest essentials of stillness and movement.

The great honor of caring for the teahouse engendered my respect for Japanese culture, and after having a book published by a Japanese university press, I suddenly found myself with many Japanese friends. I found I could learn some more lessons from real Japanese people rather than just from their cultural artifacts--although the Japanese sometimes consider cultural artifacts more important that humans. The famous case is the monk who, surrounded by a wall of fire, swallowed, sword-like, a treasured Japanese painting scroll, allowing it to survive the conflagration.

Japanese, I have found, are fascinated with the United States until they actually hang out here for a while. After all, Japanese are traditionally masters of the aesthetics of  the minimal: one pungent haiku can convey more poetic potency than an entire Western epic. So, to their tastes, the first thing they tend to notice is that everything in the US is too big: the country itself, the cars, the houses, and of course our bodies. Which gets us to the second thing they tend to notice: Americans waste stuff.

At first, any Japanese guest will ever so  politely intercede in what she sees as violent transgressions against her deeply ingrained zen sensibilities: (Japanese friend in polite mode: "Oh! Your way of peeling an apple is---so--um------interesting. . ."). Then she will touch my hand, take the apple gently from me, cradle it in the cup of her hand, and patiently tutor me in the art of paring it in such a way that the skin remains nothing but skin.

Observing my inability to generalize this apple lesson to the rest of my activities, her patience will gradually wear a little thinner. I will learn that one tub of water should be used to bathe more than just one body. "You are wasting water!" I am advised. I realize that my American ways are beginning to seem less "interesting." Similarly, I will be admonished to compact my trash (Japanese friend: "You are wasting space!" Me: How can I be wasting space? Space is infinite!").

Apples and space. Consider the ad for the ultra-thin Apple computer above. Anyone in advertising will tell you the Apple execs had in mind the following revolutionary (by American standards) ad campaign:

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 which mimics the Chinese, Tao-inspired, one-corner style of painting:

 

And the VW Bug was not the only minimalist concept of the modernist era. Seeking to liberate architecture from its bulk, German architect Frei Otto studied minimal forms such as tents, tepees, yurts, sailing boats, balloons, kites, birds, plants, crabs, aircraft, seashells, spider's webs, and soap bubbles. Otto observed that given a set of fixed points, soap film will spread naturally between them to offer the minimal achievable surface area. Any child blowing bubbles can, more or less, see how this works. Another thinker inspired by this same über-light aesthetic was Bucky Fuller, who appears in seconds 21 through 23, as one of "the Crazy Ones," in the following Apple ad, featuring a Steve Jobs voiceover:



That structure you see--at first in Bucky's hands, and then surrounding him--is a geodesic dome, the geodesic being the minimal distance between two points, especially on the earth's surface, or more generally, on any sphere.

What does this minimalist design have to do with surfing and the nature of nature?

One answer lies in the way an eccentric Santa Barbara guy related to ocean waves.  He didn't even like surfboards, and therefore rode one he had fashioned in his high school shop class--only very briefly. Yet, he somehow stumbled into being one of the greatest geniuses and most influential catalysts in the evolution of modern surfing -- a cult hero.

His name is George Greenough.

At first George was not really considered one of "the Crazy Ones," but was definitely a free thinker. He tended to cut his own hair by placing a bowl over his head and then just start clipping. As a teen he announced his disdain for shoes and has worn them only three times in his entire adult life. That has been pretty easy for him, because he has spent much of his life either on the beach on in the water, pioneering such things as from-the-tube photography, which most film lovers will probably first have seen in the Peter Weir film, The Last Wave. George often crossed the Santa Barbara Channel in his 12-foot Boston Whaler, the Channel being a swath of sea that has intimidated captains of infinitely more seaworthy craft for centuries.

George has never liked surfing in crowds, and sought out the most isolated waves in the Santa Barbara wave theater, such as Santa Rosa Island's Skunk Point. On good but crowded days at Rights and Lefts, you could find George all alone, surfing a little left just down the coast a few yards from Rights and Lefts. He called it the Kiddie Pool. There, and at far more remote spots, he was pioneering maneuvers on waves that other watermen could only dream of. 

At first none of them really noticed.  Oh, that's just George doing his thing, they would think. They were too busy surfing long boards that looked like the ones in the background of this early shot of Malibu beach, or they were attending to other beach attractions:

These cumbersome surfboards are now called "longboards," or "logs," and were heavy, unmaneuverable, and impeded intimacy with the wave. At their very best, they served as platforms for graceful, statuesque poses reminiscent of classical Greek sculpture.

 

The son of a wealthy Santa Barbara (Montecito) family, George eschewed such surfboards, favoring his own ultra-light homemade surfing vehicles -- knee boards and air mattresses -- for their ability to get him into closer, more intimate contact with the most subtle impulses of the wave, especially the tube.

In the clip below, you will see how, like other geniuses of minimalist design, George drew his inspiration from nature -- in George's instance, from the dynamics of the wave: the ever-changing play of kinetic and potential energies and g-forces. In addition, he was impressed with the abilities of high-speed fish and looked to them for design tips. You will notice that when surfing George assumes the same kneeling position tea masters assume in Japanese tea ceremonies. And George will humble his bodily position even further to get deeper inside the tube. It has to do with his intimacy with the ways of the ocean and of its waves. And like the kneeling tea master, George is equally intolerant of inessentials. He surfs with a marked trajectory towards the minimal.

So, while most surfers of George's era were busy socializing on the beach, George really set his mind on one very significant problem: how to have more fun on a wave. He thought so hard about this, that he was considered a kind of surfing contemplative and hermit.

There were countless less-significant problems that George also set his mind to. For instance, the most efficient way to provide breakfast if he was hanging out at the Hazard's shack at Rights and Lefts on the Hollister Ranch.

George would paddle out on his air mattress into the still bay between Rights and Lefts and Auggies. There, in the clear water, he could spot halibut basking on the sandy bottom, and he would dangle down a baited line right in front of their mouths. Once he got a bite, he let the fish tow him until it tired, and then, there was breakfast--and lunch.

Another problem George applied himself to was yellow jackets. On hot days at the Ranch, they could get fierce and drive everyone into their cars at the Lefts and Rights beach colony.

Then George would drive up, assess the situation, take the Coke he was drinking, spill some on the sand, and leave a small pool at the container's bottom. The hornets would then dive into the syrup and leave the surfers alone.

His solution to the problem of how to have more fun on a wave was equally elegant. He figured that in order to do so, he must remain in a spot where the energy of the wave does all the work---in the tube or the curl. In order to do this, he needed to be able to apply subtle (minimal) variations to his trajectory. Therefore he needed a surfing vehicle more like a thin, flexible membrane than a stiff and bulky longboard incapable of responding to such variations. To dance with the wave in its sweet spot, with minimal effort, George needed a vehicle maximally responsive to his mind and to the wave -- an interface with the same qualities that Steve Jobs sought for surfing electronic waves of data.

Now, in intuiting this need to remain in that energy vortex of the tube by applying the most minute variations to his trajectory, George was doing something universal, something that related his surfing and designs to the most universal principle in nature: the principle of least (minimal) action.

When you cut across a lawn rather than using the sidewalk, you are doing the same. Steve Jobs was cutting along the grain of that same principle in creating lightweight, intuitive computing platforms and interfaces. It was the same vision that had inspired Bucky Fuller to design ultra-light and strong structures. All of nature seeks the shortcut, whether to the restroom or to work. We all shop around for the best deal on a ticket to Hawai'i. And we apply the same principle in optimizing our days and nights to conform to our preferences. It may take us a decade to perfect our crêpe recipe. Politicians design their sound bites according to polling data in order to maximize their political bases while using minimum effort. In almost every area of life, we all attempt to find the most comfortable fit, whether it is in clothing, our or careers.

How do these optimizations take place? We make tiny changes and then evaluate them: little steps of trial and learning. We eventually end up with a crêpe recipe that we don't want to change, a route to work that gets us there most quickly or safely or scenically, depending on which preference we are optimizing around.


Not only in our daily lives do we experiment with tiny variations in order to optimize, but Nature herself in all her activities selects optimal configurations: a soap bubble always minimizes surface area, electricity flows along the path of least resistance, light always takes the shortest distance, water runs along the path of minimal action. . . experts in any field make it look easy.

In each instance, though there are countless possible paths electricity or light or water or Magic Johnson could take, Nature has always already inscribed within them the optimum path of minimal action. You will find it at work wherever you look in Nature.

The same principle underlies theoretical physics: We can describe every system according to a quantity whose value has to be optimized. We locate that optimal value by making incremental changes and then selecting the configuration that would get less optimal under any change. In physics, these small changes are known as variations, which are denoted with a small delta δ. The process is known as the variational principle.

In Nature, when the optimal configuration is realized, the variation has to vanish.

In fact, if you look around you, you will discover that everything in Nature follows the principle of minimum action, that point where other possible variations evaporate into the one that works best.

A video explains the principle:



One finds the principle of minimal action at work anywhere in nature one cares to investigate, for instance, in the structure of trees.

Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci discovered what has come to be known as Leonardo's Rule: that when a tree, which is a fractal system, branches into smaller branches, the daughter branches have a precise mathematical relationship to the mother branch from which they sprang. 

For centuries scientists have wondered why.

A French physicist, Christophe Eloy, who studies aerodynamics, how air flows around objects, found that "When a mother branch branches in two daughter branches, the diameters are such that the surface areas of the two daughter branches, when they sum up, is equal to the area of the mother branch." In other words, the surface areas of the two daughter branches add up to the surface area of the mother branch.

Now, from an engineering point of view, if you want to design a tree that is best able to withstand high winds (or most efficiently distribute water to all its cells), it would branch according to Leonardo's Rule. In other words, trees have evolved so that their architecture distributes stresses, and water, uniformly. Such a structure can support the maximal load and distribute water most efficiently. For instance this design allows the tree structure to withstand the strongest wind velocities. Tree  architecture withstands maximal stress by using minimal tree volume. Trees, "however," do not exist in isolation. "Tree" is only a concept. "Individual trees" form parts of complex, interdependent  ecosystems. Leonardo's Rule and the principle of minimal action may thus also be extended to the structure of forest canopies and even global water flows. This is because river systems, for instance, with all their tributaries, are treelike in design (as is the blood's circulatory system).

In fact, in Chinese thought, the flow of ch'i energy and blood through the body is likened to the flow of water, which flows according to the principle of minimal action.

And the Taoists of ancient China had a name for the principle of minimal action: They called it Wu Wei.

For these Taoists, water was the perfect example of effortless, minimal action. Water always follows the path of minimal resistance as it flows around any objects it encounters. And so for the Taoists, the Tao and life in general are like water. The illumined person, the man or woman of the Tao, flows like water.

Chuang Tzu expressed it like this:

Confucius was seeing the sights at Lu-liang, where the water falls from a height of thirty fathoms and races and boils along for forty li, so swift that no fish or other water creature can swim in it. He saw a man dive into the water and, supposing that the man was in some kind of trouble and intended to end his life, he ordered his disciples to line up on the bank and pull the man out. But after the man had gone a couple of hundred paces, he came out of the water and began strolling along the base of the embankment, his hair streaming down, singing a song. Confucius ran after him and said, "At first I thought you were a ghost, but now I see you're a man. May I ask if you have some special way of staying afloat in the water?"

"I have no way. I began with what I was used to, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That's how I can stay afloat."
Confucius said, "What do you mean by saying that you began with what you were used to, grew up with your nature, and let things come to completion with fate?"
"I was born on the dry land and felt safe on the dry land - that was what I was used to. I grew up with the water and felt safe in the water - that was my nature. I don't know why I do what I do - that's fate."

The Chinese applied this water-like flow to martial arts.




The idea is Tai Chi is to remain centered and flexible at the same time. Although one's actions may branch out from the still center, the "surface area" exposed to stillness, when in activity, should be the same as when completely still.




And to dance, among other things:




Following George Greenough's lead, surfers around the world began using lighter, shorter boards, enabling them to negotiate flows previously considered unsurfable. George was no longer considered an eccentric hermit, one of the "Crazy Ones," but began to be appreciated as a genius who, through simplicity, opened up deeper levels of nature's simplicity.





One logical extension of George's insights: Rob Machado surfing an alaia, an ancient Hawai'ian surfboard design.

Alaia & Machado from 360 To Nowhere on Vimeo.


Another example is some modern J. Bay minimalism:






Minimalist design has changed wave-riding, and thus perceptions of the wave, forever:



As you can see in these clips, the evolution of surfing that George inspired has to do with a surfer's felt understanding of waves. This is important, because everything is made of waves. The universe is nothing but wave energy. Like many great explorers, George discovered how to play within wave energy more intimately. Now, physicists will tell you that when they talk about wave energy, they really do not know what wave energy is. Physicists are one tribe exploring into the nature of waves, which is the nature of Nature. Surfers are another tribe. Both of these tribes have their own stories about waves and what they mean. Surfers feel the same wave of energy that moves the water molecules, moving their bodies. Their stories of the nature of waves are dances.

Imagine, if you will,  an almost infinite number of real or hypothetical storytellers. They are all spinning their favorite yarns about the waves of the universe. These storytellers may be in this universe -- past, present, or future -- or perhaps they are somewhere else. In fact, they may be nothing at all like storytellers as we know them. Some storytellers endlessly tell the same story as others, but maybe with different details, or the stories may start the same but end differently. So many possible storytellers are in your imagination that this is not really a coincidence. Some storytellers will tell stories about waves that are sequels or prequels of other stories. Actually, this will happen among surfers. Sometimes the story of one wave ridden will not be from the point of view of a surfer on the shore, one paddling out, but from the perspective of a shark about to swallow the surfer. Many of the stories we will not even begin to have the ability to make sense of, because we have no context for making meaning of them. As in the famous Borges metaphor, in this entire imaginary collection of storytellers, somewhere any possible story is being told.

And all these stories have chapters, sentences and words, or songs, or chants, or even tones, or just sound waves. And all those smaller elements of the stories might fit together in infinite other ways. So the stories and their constituent elements all fit together to randomly create whole universes.

But not quite randomly. They will all fit together following the grain of the principle of minimum action.

To understand waves, you must imagine that the universe has grown in this way. All the countless possible stories fit together to form many different universes. You and I have a life that is a story somewhere in these universes. Perhaps our futures are not completely determined because the story of our lives up to this point could have many possible endings.


If we return to the human dimension, we know that a story is a cultural thing. Different tribes have different stories. In the end, the nature of waves remains mysterious. We do not yet know the full grammar, vocabulary, and physics of waves.

But we can feel waves moving our bodies, and we can dance endlessly to the pulses of their mysterious energies, and in so doing, feel them resonating in waves of sonorous silence within the ether of the heart.