Waves come in many forms. And usually, that form isn’t too keen on revealing itself… until it does. Whether you’re floating in the currents or watching from ashore, for the duration of an afternoon or in the telephoto’s microsecond snapshot, you’re never getting a full picture. Superstition is practically inevitable.
Even the sharpest of spectators too often take the surface-level fluctuations to be the objects of study; like studying a tree but ignoring the roots. But waves don’t exist in isolation. Each ebb and flow arises from an ongoing fusion of forces and factors that can’t easily be seen — the shape of the sea floor, global wind patterns, heat convection, and Earth’s gravity propelling it all.
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Understanding any one of these components requires years of study; so to fathom the system in its entirety and predict it’s output? Good luck. What precisely emerges from this planetary wave machine is impossible to predict. Unless, of course, you simply expect noise and chaos. Then you’ll be right most of the time.
But maybe (and this is a big maybe) if the conditions are just right, the chaos might briefly coalesce into something more than rogue splashes of sea foam; something coherent; an actual… dare I say, shape. And this rare form, if it so chooses to reveal itself, may actually accept you along for the ride. That is, if you’ve armed yourself with the right device and enough practice maneuvering it (a little luck won’t hurt either). So when that one comes along — that righteous, glorious one — you better damn well be ready for it.
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Hold up. Before we go any further, let me break it to you (no pun intended): this isn’t actually about waves. Maybe you guessed it already, given my history of compulsively talking in metaphors.
Anyway, the real topic at hand is ideas — the mysterious forces that produce them, and the inexplicable euphoria we find in riding them out. You can imagine, waves are much easier to write about. But the oceanic system turned out to be a surprisingly fluid (another accidental pun) proxy for our mental processes.
They’re both just flows of energy, after all — whether through a web of neurons or good-old H2O. And both systems, impelled by the all-reaching hand of entropy, generally tend toward disorder. Especially when you zoom waaaay out to imagine these energy flows on cosmological scales of time and space, the incredible serendipity of a coherent form becomes impossible to ignore. Waves and ideas (forget that, planet Earth and life itself!) represent local, momentary reversals of the natural flow toward chaos.
So what does that mean for us puny rock-dwellers, who occasionally want to harness our own little sliver of these spectacular forces? In this comic, Nick Sousanis puts it better than I ever could:
Each of us, during our brief time in the stream, has the opportunity to reflect on the forces that set this in motion, and reach in to send up something uniquely our own against the flow.
As the latest crop of a 4.6-billion-years-and-running unfoldment, we’re lucky enough just to be here. So given the even rarer chance to coast atop a wave or an idea, it’s probably bad karma to be overly greedy about it.
Remember what I said about waves being shy to reveal themselves? Yeah, same with ideas. No amount of skill, experience, or mysticism will coax out the perfect ride. Sure, there’s an intuition to being in the right place to catch one, and a privilege in being in that water in the first place. But when it all comes down to it, we’re all at the mercy of forces out (WAY out) of our control.
Best buckle up, because that ball of energy will do exactly what it wants to do. And by the time you realize what that is, you’re probably already inside it. So your job as a participant in this grand system — governed either by geological or neurological laws — is simply to remember: I have less control than I think.
The essay series I’ve been working on, Black Squares, Black Boxes, and Black Holes, has been a merciless reminder of this fact.
I dove in thinking it’d be a mellow solo post. Easy. But pretty quickly into the paddle (yep, back into surf speak), it swelled into a shoulder-high 3-part series. Okay... not what I set out for, but I can do this! Somehow, all of a sudden I'm staring down a beefy 10-parter, and I’m not sure I’m up to the task. Do I turn back to the shore? But the current’s pulling me in, so there’s no going back now! The crest rises and closes out over my head. Welp, looks like I'm doing down…
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Under the cumulative force of this planetary system, I’m plunged into the washing machine. Grasping for breath, I sift through my notes to maintain a sense of direction. Yet somehow down here in such a raucous spin cycle, I still find interesting the subjects that lured me into the water in the first place — which I’ll take as a good sign.
My post earlier this week, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, was the latest in this heavy set. At present, I’m deep on the black box concept — the voids that fill so much of our lives, and the dangerous implications they can have. So on the topic of black boxes and danger, I can’t help but consider how the series’ relentless expansion is itself driven the mechanics of yet another black box — my subconscious.
If the Titanic provides any lesson here, it’s the importance of directing attention below the surface. So being thrust underwater may offer my best chance to explore the rest of the iceberg of my creative subconscious. But deeper means darker; as it’s only down there beyond the reach of any light, in territory uncharted even to the experts, where strange thoughts lurk, ideological tides turn, and organic fragments freely associate. Because somewhere in that abyss, heat spills through seams in the ocean floor, to be swallowed by a sprawling system that might, just might, produce a wave.
Filter Bubble Friday (on a Saturday) #3
Only one link today. In part, because that write-up turned out to be longer than I had planned for (maybe you sense a theme here…). But also, this piece is so outstanding I really think it belongs on its own.
Invisible Man
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In researching for this essay series, I knew I had to pick up Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of it, or maybe even read it. But if you haven’t, take a look.
For something published nearly seven decades ago, its relevance today is astounding. In future installments of the series, I hope to capture the precisely why.
Just a few pages into the introduction, I already struck gold — just not in the way I expected. Ellison, in 1981, recounts writing what later became American literary canon:
“I had floundered in a state of hyperreceptivity; a desperate condition in which a fiction writer finds it difficult to ignore even the most nebulous idea-emotion that might arise in the process of creation. For he soon learns that such amorphous projections might well be unexpected gifts from his daydreaming muse that might, when properly received, provide exactly the materials needed to keep afloat in the turbulent tides of composition. On the other hand, they might wreck him, drown him in the quicksands of indecision.”
The struggle is real. But it’s a worthy task:
“ . . . a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vascillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal."
I don’t think I need to underscore the connection to my waves/ideas babble. This book speaks for itself. And as I’m finding, it speaks for so, so much more than itself, doing so in a delicate grace I can only admire.
I’ve only just started the book, but I’m thoroughly excited to read the rest. If anyone’s looking for some quarantine summer reading and wants to start a little VU JA DE book club, hit me up.
Bonus: The Hold Downs
You really thought I was going to write an entire post in surf speak and not include a surf video?
Four friends, one groovy song, and lots of waves. If there’s anything that’ll make you want to hop in the water with some friends, this is surely it. And given the analogy between waves and ideas, maybe it’ll stoke collaboration? Yeah, the word stoke wasn’t a mistake.
