Semester's over. The pressure cooker is off! I am trying to enjoy the terrific run of surf in CA right now before I go to the East Coast for a restorative two weeks of seeing friends. Maybe I can get some surf there, if there's a shop renting thick wetsuits...
Surfing is a joy. How many times do I need to say this? It's wonderful alone, it's wonderful with a group, it demands full attention and pushes the body to perform. I have put major stock in surfing as a place to play and feel a sense of progression in myself while my external validation systems have shifted, or been intentionally dismantled, in the past few years. I have realized that, if I want to surf as much as I would like to surf, I need to structurally re-organize my other commitments in life, and be willing to say no. Which is not my natural tendency. As such, surfing is a tool for me to practice focusing, in both short-term and long-term views. Focus is of utmost importance for me, right now, so I'm investing in keeping the hobby around.
I'm also wrapping up another PhD proposal. In some ways, I am writing it as an exercise in articulating some of the things I've written about in this newsletter, and pitching myself as the right person to develop the ideas. This seems valuable regardless of how I feel about PhDs (read: tepid); it's another act of focusing my energy into a particular direction. I'm trying to be very careful not to see the precision necessary in academic work as a limitation, but rather as an opportunity to put a series of carefully chosen words onto paper, with a more poetic sensibility. Logic, in the form espoused by the science community, is the performance of a line of thinking, and there is wide space around this straight line that allows me to bring in a wider scope of the things I care about (community learning spaces, physical fabrication, environmental anthropology, land art, etc).
The details of a surf session are usually either blurry or inarticulable. (I have a pet theory that this is why surfing slang is so loose and silly—it's trying to describe a very strange, particular combination of conditions and feelings; it takes some dedication to articulate it well.) There's something about being in water, too: that immersive, all-body feeling that rinses the obligation of linear thought. I often think of an unassuming piece by Jenny Holzer in the permanent collection of the RISD Museum, a bronze plaque that reads "HIDE UNDERWATER OR ANYWHERE SO UNDISTURBED YOU FEEL THE JERK OF PLEASURE WHEN AN IDEA COMES".
Submerged,
Lukas
Surfing is a joy. How many times do I need to say this? It's wonderful alone, it's wonderful with a group, it demands full attention and pushes the body to perform. I have put major stock in surfing as a place to play and feel a sense of progression in myself while my external validation systems have shifted, or been intentionally dismantled, in the past few years. I have realized that, if I want to surf as much as I would like to surf, I need to structurally re-organize my other commitments in life, and be willing to say no. Which is not my natural tendency. As such, surfing is a tool for me to practice focusing, in both short-term and long-term views. Focus is of utmost importance for me, right now, so I'm investing in keeping the hobby around.
I'm also wrapping up another PhD proposal. In some ways, I am writing it as an exercise in articulating some of the things I've written about in this newsletter, and pitching myself as the right person to develop the ideas. This seems valuable regardless of how I feel about PhDs (read: tepid); it's another act of focusing my energy into a particular direction. I'm trying to be very careful not to see the precision necessary in academic work as a limitation, but rather as an opportunity to put a series of carefully chosen words onto paper, with a more poetic sensibility. Logic, in the form espoused by the science community, is the performance of a line of thinking, and there is wide space around this straight line that allows me to bring in a wider scope of the things I care about (community learning spaces, physical fabrication, environmental anthropology, land art, etc).
The details of a surf session are usually either blurry or inarticulable. (I have a pet theory that this is why surfing slang is so loose and silly—it's trying to describe a very strange, particular combination of conditions and feelings; it takes some dedication to articulate it well.) There's something about being in water, too: that immersive, all-body feeling that rinses the obligation of linear thought. I often think of an unassuming piece by Jenny Holzer in the permanent collection of the RISD Museum, a bronze plaque that reads "HIDE UNDERWATER OR ANYWHERE SO UNDISTURBED YOU FEEL THE JERK OF PLEASURE WHEN AN IDEA COMES".
Submerged,
Lukas