Finning
Feminine Wave
Hokusai
William Finnegan's Barbarian Days is not about moonlight on the bayou. It's about structured water. Water, and other media, muscled with vortices.
Think whirlpools: knots of energy patterns structuring aquatic, psychic, social, and cultural flows.
Finnegan's narrative navigates the fluidities of all these structures, at times lazily adrift in idyllic latitudes, at times determined, at times tubed and godlike, at others submerged and gasping for life: as if searching for the invisible forces, the deep grammars determining the flows of these currents.
The molecules in a wave are never the same, but the energy molding the waters endures--like an ageless aquatic being gathering into itself an ever-changing array of molecules (or psyches), which it arranges in ever-constant patterns.
You can slide a knot along the entire length of any kind of rope: cotton or cultural. That "knot" can be wave energy generated by Aleutian wind energy--or the neglected emotional energies that make some dreams recur, or traditional ways of doing things.
Whole societies of rope pass through centuries-long knots, passing down expected behaviors from father to son, mother to daughter, lover to lover.
As Gary Snyder, echoing an ancient line of writers observed: when using an axe to hew a new axe handle, the pattern is always close at hand.
Some ocean-current-propelled vortices stretch hundreds of miles across, spinning for decades. Smaller ones, in streams and rivers, whirls and eddies spinning off mid-current boulders, form what physicists call vortex streets.
Trout use these pathways to slalom effortlessly upstream.
A slight inflection of trout head to one side, and the trout's scales splay out, catching a propelling galaxy arm of vortex pushing upstream. The fish then inflects its neck to the other side, catching a vortex push from the other side of the "street." Tao-hip biologists call such noodling a wu-wei way of swimming. The closest English equivalent is that trout don't swim upstream, they are swum.
Surfers surrender to something similar on waves, and Finnegan's prose finesses the physics of waveforms into fine literature. He learns, wave by wave, what the cub pilot Samuel Clemens wondered at in Old Times on the Mississippi: that structured water can be powerful, alluring, and that its body language can be sensed, read, studied, courted---and romanced.
Finnegan's courtship lures him more and more deeply into blue-latitude wave vortices until, in one moment at a point-reef break in Indonesia, his dancing so loosens that it becomes an expression of the wave. Transcendence.
As does Old Times on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, Finnegan's narrative constantly flirts with an intriguing subtheme. He gets sucked into the social structures interweaving and interpenetrating structured waters: wave competition pecking orders, bikini-clad beach allures, Hawai'ian inner-city-like gang rivalries--all against a backdrop of those given to literati, hippie drop-out, and neo-Naturmensch pretensions. After all, what fun is social life if we fail to apply to it our own status systems? Finnegan is no exception. Not realizing that he's a culture vulture caught up and circling in the currents of the same widening cultural gyre as hippies, he somewhat snootily disesteems their spirituality while appropriating their chemicals, lingo, and mind-set to describe the surfing highs that motivate and define his soul-surfer quest.
The question is, what lows do these highs define themselves against? The answer makes up much of the book.
Finnegan's addiction to organized, coherent fields of surfable waves seems an inverse function of his immersion in subliminally simmering conflicts providing undertow in many of his social interactions and later even his career path. He punches his way through walls of incoming whitewater the same way he punched his way through boyhood as a haole surrounded by Hawai'i's kill-a-haole culture. Finnegan, though, does not shy away from his Shadow. He knows, in a Wordsworth kind of way, that the child is father of the man, that he is drawn to and displays a constructive affinity for some types of conflict. Thus, we find him flirting most closely with his own demons when obsessively reporting on war zones, he finds himself compulsively taking too many chances, stepping in too close to the bull's eyes, or when describing a group of men on San Francisco's Ocean Beach who are punching pillows as a form of therapy: their primal screams, ventriloquizing the author's own angst, drowned in the thunderous walls of whitewater he must punch through to get to the juicy tubes. Fortunately for Finnegan's readers, and not only in his surfing writings, his descriptions of conflict propel page turning.
Not only does Finnegan seek transcendence of these lows with the incomparable high surfing provides, but he makes of this high something of a religion, insofar as religions are both reflections of and escapes from social structures. In the end, just as the Mississippi provided for Huck Finn and Jim an escape from the oppressive symbolic codes (such as slavery laws) holding sway on land (what Lacan called the Law of the Father, which includes linguistic mastery), so do Finnegan's ocean-centered life trajectory and surf zone highs serve as escapes from threatening lows and laws: the constant bullying and fist fights in Hawai'i, the intra-familial conflict over his father's career aspirations for him, and, of course, the Mother of All Conflicts, the Primordial Chaos and Prime Mover impelling the lion's share of all sixties youth culture: the killing fields of Vietnam. Like a world-scale boulder positioned midstream within the roiling current of Vietnam Era events, many were the vortices spinning off it.
On the opposite pole of the linguistic continuum from linguistic mastery and those cold, threatening Law(s) of the Father, Huck and Jim, on their little raft, are at times enveloped in union with the immense maternal body of the river, where they are reduced to silence and babbling (Kristeva's "semiotic") when surrounded by and safely resting upon the river's serenely undulant form: where signs, as in the babbling stage, are estranged from their signifiers, as when, looking across the river in the still dawn, far in the distance Finn sees an axe bite into a log, and only after a long pause hears the signifying sound. Similarly Finnegan, when wired up for a promotional video and directed to paddle out and narrate the waves he is surfing, is surprised to discover that he, the Pulitzer Prize winner, when surfing, is rendered speechless, somehow suddenly bereft of signifiers, of linguistic mastery, reduced to mouthing monosyllables.
Dude.
Think whirlpools: knots of energy patterns structuring aquatic, psychic, social, and cultural flows.
Finnegan's narrative navigates the fluidities of all these structures, at times lazily adrift in idyllic latitudes, at times determined, at times tubed and godlike, at others submerged and gasping for life: as if searching for the invisible forces, the deep grammars determining the flows of these currents.
The molecules in a wave are never the same, but the energy molding the waters endures--like an ageless aquatic being gathering into itself an ever-changing array of molecules (or psyches), which it arranges in ever-constant patterns.
You can slide a knot along the entire length of any kind of rope: cotton or cultural. That "knot" can be wave energy generated by Aleutian wind energy--or the neglected emotional energies that make some dreams recur, or traditional ways of doing things.
Whole societies of rope pass through centuries-long knots, passing down expected behaviors from father to son, mother to daughter, lover to lover.
As Gary Snyder, echoing an ancient line of writers observed: when using an axe to hew a new axe handle, the pattern is always close at hand.
Some ocean-current-propelled vortices stretch hundreds of miles across, spinning for decades. Smaller ones, in streams and rivers, whirls and eddies spinning off mid-current boulders, form what physicists call vortex streets.
Trout use these pathways to slalom effortlessly upstream.
A slight inflection of trout head to one side, and the trout's scales splay out, catching a propelling galaxy arm of vortex pushing upstream. The fish then inflects its neck to the other side, catching a vortex push from the other side of the "street." Tao-hip biologists call such noodling a wu-wei way of swimming. The closest English equivalent is that trout don't swim upstream, they are swum.
Surfers surrender to something similar on waves, and Finnegan's prose finesses the physics of waveforms into fine literature. He learns, wave by wave, what the cub pilot Samuel Clemens wondered at in Old Times on the Mississippi: that structured water can be powerful, alluring, and that its body language can be sensed, read, studied, courted---and romanced.
Finnegan's courtship lures him more and more deeply into blue-latitude wave vortices until, in one moment at a point-reef break in Indonesia, his dancing so loosens that it becomes an expression of the wave. Transcendence.
As does Old Times on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, Finnegan's narrative constantly flirts with an intriguing subtheme. He gets sucked into the social structures interweaving and interpenetrating structured waters: wave competition pecking orders, bikini-clad beach allures, Hawai'ian inner-city-like gang rivalries--all against a backdrop of those given to literati, hippie drop-out, and neo-Naturmensch pretensions. After all, what fun is social life if we fail to apply to it our own status systems? Finnegan is no exception. Not realizing that he's a culture vulture caught up and circling in the currents of the same widening cultural gyre as hippies, he somewhat snootily disesteems their spirituality while appropriating their chemicals, lingo, and mind-set to describe the surfing highs that motivate and define his soul-surfer quest.
The question is, what lows do these highs define themselves against? The answer makes up much of the book.
Finnegan's addiction to organized, coherent fields of surfable waves seems an inverse function of his immersion in subliminally simmering conflicts providing undertow in many of his social interactions and later even his career path. He punches his way through walls of incoming whitewater the same way he punched his way through boyhood as a haole surrounded by Hawai'i's kill-a-haole culture. Finnegan, though, does not shy away from his Shadow. He knows, in a Wordsworth kind of way, that the child is father of the man, that he is drawn to and displays a constructive affinity for some types of conflict. Thus, we find him flirting most closely with his own demons when obsessively reporting on war zones, he finds himself compulsively taking too many chances, stepping in too close to the bull's eyes, or when describing a group of men on San Francisco's Ocean Beach who are punching pillows as a form of therapy: their primal screams, ventriloquizing the author's own angst, drowned in the thunderous walls of whitewater he must punch through to get to the juicy tubes. Fortunately for Finnegan's readers, and not only in his surfing writings, his descriptions of conflict propel page turning.
Not only does Finnegan seek transcendence of these lows with the incomparable high surfing provides, but he makes of this high something of a religion, insofar as religions are both reflections of and escapes from social structures. In the end, just as the Mississippi provided for Huck Finn and Jim an escape from the oppressive symbolic codes (such as slavery laws) holding sway on land (what Lacan called the Law of the Father, which includes linguistic mastery), so do Finnegan's ocean-centered life trajectory and surf zone highs serve as escapes from threatening lows and laws: the constant bullying and fist fights in Hawai'i, the intra-familial conflict over his father's career aspirations for him, and, of course, the Mother of All Conflicts, the Primordial Chaos and Prime Mover impelling the lion's share of all sixties youth culture: the killing fields of Vietnam. Like a world-scale boulder positioned midstream within the roiling current of Vietnam Era events, many were the vortices spinning off it.
On the opposite pole of the linguistic continuum from linguistic mastery and those cold, threatening Law(s) of the Father, Huck and Jim, on their little raft, are at times enveloped in union with the immense maternal body of the river, where they are reduced to silence and babbling (Kristeva's "semiotic") when surrounded by and safely resting upon the river's serenely undulant form: where signs, as in the babbling stage, are estranged from their signifiers, as when, looking across the river in the still dawn, far in the distance Finn sees an axe bite into a log, and only after a long pause hears the signifying sound. Similarly Finnegan, when wired up for a promotional video and directed to paddle out and narrate the waves he is surfing, is surprised to discover that he, the Pulitzer Prize winner, when surfing, is rendered speechless, somehow suddenly bereft of signifiers, of linguistic mastery, reduced to mouthing monosyllables.
Dude.
In the end, just as the Mississippi becomes for Jim and Huck Finn a liberating maternal space free from slavery, when surfing, Finnegan transcends land-based legal, linguistic, and social structures. Though ripe for being drafted into the military, by the time he had disappeared and then re-emerged from South Pacific allures, the conflict was over.
After all, clean, organized, long-period swells are coherent wave fields similar to other coherent systems such as symphonies (as opposed to orchestras warming up) and the coherent brain wave synchrony of babbling infants breast-feeding while tenderly cradled by and in full-body, skin-to-skin contact with Mother. Such coherence is rare in brain-wave literature, but found also in yogis and yoginis deep in Samadhi while enfolded within the immense luminous seas of consciousness. In fact, infants spend much of their first few months of life not only in full-body union with Mommy, but babbling hours-long arias consisting of sounds such as Aaaaaaaaaaaah, while closing and opening their mouths. If you experiment with this yourself, you will discover that doing so produces the sound of Aum, spontaneously. Infants next explore vowel-consonant combinations, with consonants such as the labial "m" predominating: producing, for instance, "ma" and "mama." And when Mother responds, infants learn to equate "ma" and "mama" with deep longings for the presence of the maternal form — in the same way that, for thousands of years, Tantric yogis and yoginis intoning their mantras have yearned for, envisioned, and merged in radiant, union with their envisioned Mother Goddess.
Every thing is wave in an ocean of waves.
The universe is nothing but wave energy.
Surfers discover how to play within wave energy intimately. In meditation, some discover that they, themselves, are a more fundamental, waveless wave .
Physicists will tell you that when they talk about wave energy, they really do not know what wave energy is, that they know not even what energy really is. Physicists are one tribe exploring into the nature of waves, which is the nature of Nature.
Surfers are another tribe. Both 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. As they discover their own wave natures, their stories of the nature of waves become dances, increasingly one with the wave. Inter-wave interweavings.
Imagine, if you will, an almost infinite number of real or hypothetical storytellers. They are all spinning their favourite 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, like waves themselves, may start out the same but end differently. Some thousand-year-long-epics may differ by only one syllable.
There exist so many possible storytellers 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. This will happen among surfers. Sometimes the story of one wave ridden will not be from the point of view of the sufer on the shore, or one 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 just tones--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 spin off, spawn, whole other universes.
But not quite randomly. They will all fit together along 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 stories of our lives up to this point could have had many possible endings.
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 swellings, and in so doing, feel them resonating in waves of sonorous silence within the aether of the heart.
We are all waves.
Wu wei is the nearest Chinese translation of the Sanskrit word naishkarmyam, which expresses a specific quality of the doer, a quality of non-attachment whereby the actor enjoys freedom from the bondage of action, even during activity.
It expresses a natural and permanent state of the doer. Whether one is engaged in the activity of the waking or dreaming state, or in the inactivity of deep sleep, one retains inner awareness. It is a state of life where awareness is not overshadowed by any of the three relative states of consciousness -- waking, dreaming, or sleeping. In this state of naishkarmyam, the doer has risen to the fourth state of consciousness, turiya. This, is self-referral awareness, awareness absorbed within awareness. The waveless origin of all thought and dream waves.
Two bodies face to face
Are at times one wave
And night is ocean.
William Blake: "Energy is eternal delight."
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