Mindfulness and Surfing by Sam Bleakley

Author:Sam Bleakley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Ivy Press
Published: 2016-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Sheen of Success

Every generation looks for more advanced ways to protect what is vulnerable, whether this is covering the human skin with the latest sun creams or putting a waterproof coating on a surfboard. But this is also a metaphor for surfing. The best professional performers in any public or audience-based activity both literally and metaphorically ‘coat’ themselves before performance. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–82) described how ‘impression management’ pervades our lives, seeing human interaction as a managed performance. We put on ‘fronts’ and ‘faces’ when ‘frontstage’, while ‘backstage’ we can let our masks slip, and slip out of our costumes. All cultures have staged dramatic activities, whether religious or secular, often using elaborate masks and costumes. Professional surfing too requires slipping into a role, putting on a performance, glassing oneself like a surfboard. There is a learned repertoire of moves – as if slipping into costume – and there must be ways to protect oneself against perceived public humiliation.

Part of the attraction of surfing for me, as for every surfer at the highest level of performance, was then the ‘sheen’ of success – the glassy surface that glows in pride of achievement. Surfers are obsessed with ‘glass’ – the best waves, smooth and perfectly formed, are called ‘glassy’. Indeed, ‘glassy’ and ‘glossy’ in surfboard design are actually what the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818–83) would call ‘surplus’ – unnecessary to production. Consumer society is of course obsessed with such surface gloss. While making the bottom of a surfboard glossy makes sense, to cut down on resistance, glossing the deck of a surfboard is completely unnecessary, in fact has to be compensated for by using wax to gain traction. The board is polished all over purely as an object of beauty, purely for the eye.

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