Relentless

An elite band of wealthy men and women control the planet’s resources. From their meeting rooms and workstations they manipulate the desires of the rest of the world. They shimmy up the greasy pole of corporate achievement, tortured by an insane desire for status, the sort of status that can be endorsed only by the Corporation. Dosed to the eyeballs in distilled grain, processed coca and antidepressant derivatives, this army of automatons can only feel at one with their selfhood once the loans on their sports wagons and their mortgages are paid off. In an attempt to save their corporeal selves, they bought their gym membership but quickly became bored. Uncomfortable with the constant static simulation of ardour, they decided to look out there into the environment for release. They found it at the weekend, down at the beach. How they admired the surf school jocks with their clear skin and sculpted Latissimus dorsi! How they envied the core local crew who sat there on the beach, gazing for hours into the surf with a faraway look in their eyes! They made a few trips and caught their first wave. They went back to work and began to think of themselves as wave riders. Soon the infinitesimal moments of truth they experienced in the water began to anchor their existences into the natural world. Eventually, that image radiated outward from their offices, via account managers and creatives (many of whom had had a similar tongue-tip taster in the surf). Soon, that experience was sold back to the rest of us. Now it is encoded forever in our dreams.

This process has happened in at least three distinct waves over the last 100 years. At the turn of the 19th century the privileged classes of America discovered the joys of Waikiki. Writers like Jack London proselytized the natural wonders of the surf and the mahogany-skinned beach boys who rented boards to them. Soon the American imagination had placed Hawaii as epitome of the tropical picturesque. The process was repeated at Malibu at the end of the fifties for the rock‘n’roll generation, the dark and the light of which was represented by Miki Dora and Gidget respectively – the yin and the yang of cheesecake surf culture as we know it. In the early nineties ‘Extreme Sports’ took surfing’s essence and racked up a line, applying to its creed a panoply of stupid pursuits and the pierced and tattooed primitivism of its protagonists, thereby creating a billion-dollar industry rooted in exploiting 
the image of people that slide sideways. Thanks to these 
full-blooded assaults upon our popular culture, The Surfer is now perhaps the most potent aspirational archetype out there.
 In a world without genuine belief in the ability to go beyond the seen realm, it is only The Surfer who can transcend the flesh. Riding just ahead of the curl, tapping deep into the power of the planet, he holds the key to something of which we know not.

Timothy Leary saw that the transcendent Dance, the beautifully meaningless yet profoundly life-affirming celebration of the present, should be placed higher than all else. The group of people who had dedicated themselves to the Dance most radically were the tribe known as surfers.

But why this need for authenticity in the first place? Why do we need access to the hidden realms guided by The Surfer? Look at it this way. Ever since he’s been removed from living in extended clans and tribal groupings, tending the land and fishing the seas with his brothers and sisters; ever since he was forced away from his spiritual and aesthetic connectedness to the planet, modern man has moved further and further away from his very being. Human commerce evolved more quickly than the human soul. The feudal system, the workhouse and the railroad begat in man a spiritual decline that was replaced by a Messianic stick and the carrot of the Promised Land. Hawaii thus represented for the Victorians a return to an Eden-like naturalness, and 50 years later the scene at Malibu turned on all those bereted existentialists listening to bebop to surfing as answer to the question of being and nothingness, and the valley kooks and brylcreamed jocks to a dream of girls girls girls and fun fun fun. Long gone were the shamanistic structures that underpinned pre-modern societies. In the absence of visceral belief, we made up subcults. And the way of The Surfer became the subcult to end them all.

In a world without genuine belief in the ability to go beyond the seen realm, it is only The Surfer who can transcend the flesh. Riding just ahead of the curl, tapping deep into the power of the planet, he holds the key to something of which we know not.

Before mankind was drawn into the slavery of trade, it was the unseen world that defined worth. Shamans were the communicators, mediators between the seen and the unseen world. They were the medicine men and the soothsayers, the sangomas and the spirit-guardians, protectors of warrior creeds and cults of initiation that separated the raw from the cooked, the seen and the hidden, the now and the forever. To achieve status, men and women would take part in various cults of initiation that tested the qualities of individuals. Only through communicating with an unseen realm, transcending the base realities of their own flesh, could status and ‘success’ be achieved. Surfers of the latest wave have their own reality very much informed by the concerns of the 21st century. They have woken up to environmental concerns and are communicating through the Internet with one another in a way previously unimaginable. Thus The Surfer of the 21st century is now a ubiquitous ideal. He sees the world through a lens of his own creation. To become a surfer is to ascribe to a set of rituals and practices that are passed on largely aurally, from surfer to surfer, and via cultish magazines, films and art and through the arcane language of dudish. To become a surfer one must move from the raw to the cooked, and in the process must dig deep into one’s physical and spiritual being to conquer some of the most severe and practical problems that man can face. Not only must the surfer learn how to paddle out the back in even the most extreme conditions and to ride a seething crystallisation of energy wrought in 
liquid. But he must also organise his life around the rhythmic, natural oscillations of the moon, the stars and the ocean. 
The surfer’s whole existence is governed not by commerce, but by waves themselves.

And it is this foregrounding of the rhythmic ebb of moon, tide, wind and swell that ultimately empowers the cult of The Surfer. In a sense, Timothy Leary put it best over 30 years ago. The LSD-popping professor of Psychedelia came out with some tangential theories in his time, but what he said about surfers made complete sense, and resonates to this day. When the kids at Harvard started communing with their shamanistic selves via psilocybin, Leary went along for the ride and began to peel back the layers that had been stacked on the culture. At some point in the sixties, when the first surf boom of the modern era was in full swing, the Professor started noticing the kids at the beach and the decadence they appeared to cherish as the centre of their lives. In an interview with Steve Pezman, publisher-editor of Surfer magazine in the mid-sixties and early seventies, he spoke at length about surfers as being at the leading edge of human evolution. Leary thought that humankind was evolving toward a state of purely aesthetic being, and that surfers were closest to that purely aesthetic way of being than any other group of people. The thinking went thus: man had evolved around city-states dedicated to storing more food and symbols of wealth than he needed for daily reproduction. Riddled with fear and loathing of what lay immediately in the future, he began to assume that the more stuff he could store, the more successful he was as a person.

For Leary, that was an entirely faulty consciousness. He saw that really, the transcendent Dance, the beautifully meaningless yet profoundly life-affirming celebration of the present, should be placed higher than all else. He regarded the group of people in this modern age who had dedicated themselves to the Dance most radically were the tribe known as surfers. What’s more, the truly dedicated surfer designed his entire life around the moment of the ridden wave and thereby had transcended the base, ancient necessities of feeding, clothing and housing himself. Therefore, the surfer was the very definition of the evolved human being. Without status, without outward displays of achievement, the surfer lived with the past exploding behind him, and the future walling up and twisting, begging to be created before him. No better metaphor for surfing as modern primitive, and no better validation for surfing as a noble way to live.

So next time you see The Surfer, look beyond the product he is selling. Ask yourself what it is he represents.

Words: Michael Fordham