surf writing is dead long live surf writing

What can one say about surfing without being engaged in thefurther abstraction of an ephemeral endeavor? Is the gliding on the surface of a collapsing wave something that needs to be defined at all? Should it only be represented as it is? Is this why the written word pales in light of the video image? The empirical moving image which needs no wordsmith to frame and control the representation. The surfing on the screen stands pure in its being. The image is king.

Without the music that accompanies these images most surfing films fall quite flat of their lofty aims of merging the art of art and the visceral nowness of actually plowing the wave through. Sex is much the same. We would rather watch it than read it and would rather do it than watch it. This is the dilemma with any type of surf writing. How boring is reading about meditation or any other esoteric eastern mysticism as it spins a web around itself? These metaphysical tropes have been ground into a fine powder in years following the seventies and the circuitous paths of those intrepid psychedelic surf explorers.

I never again need to read another article or essay or whatever about the spiritual nature of the mind body collapsing into itself and transcending the base duality that binds us to the real and on and on. These sentences are why nobody reads about surfing metaphysics. Who gives a fuck is my first answer because I am a child of the nihilism of my time. We are trapped. Why then write at all about surfing? Why then try to transmit anything without a flashing image pulsing with life and vibrancy making an easy transmission of feeling and place? Why the fuck not I guess.

When everybody zigs the individual must zag. Find the mainstreamers and then kill them in the streets. What the fuck am I saying? What I am saying is this, there is no point in any of it. There is no meaning hiding from us other than that which we apply. Surfing is just a way to pass the time and in those moments when we are in the ocean we can let the grip of linear space-time fade away and embrace the next singular happening as an eternity. It is important to do it because it matters not. This is why The Surfers Journal will forever write about the mystical nature of surfing, because it is fundamentally and deeply true. Surfing is an act of mysticism. It is an act of mysterious watery alchemy. 

As one paddles into a pitching frothy wedge it does not matter what came before and what will come. This makes those heads that took the good shit back in the day remember what it was like to see all time compressed into a single moment and feel that moment inside of an endless stream of moments and yet pure and truly singular. Roll that shit, smoke that shit, pass that shit.

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