Bo(u)lder rush II: 'the cup that overfloweth'

The knife wants to slit you
the sea wants to take you
- The Smiths

Could the world of waves be clarified? In her 'precisions sur les vagues', French writer Marie Darrieussecq investigates into the crests, eddies, and whirlpools of the Atlantic ocean, by which she lives and breathes. Her little treatise is a classic among surfers.

Being a 'follower and deliverer of difference', the surfer is a renowned conceptual athlete in contin(g)ental philosophy (cf Deleuze, Serres, Zizek). Karl Palmås means that what Bergson understood as intuitive thinking -- to merge with, dissolve in, and melt into whatever you are researching -- is motorically and cognitively duplicated in the performance of the surfer.

Running on breakwaters has in a former post been seen as surfing the conceptual (and physical) border between nature and culture. Surfing is always coastal, whether on land or on sea. The bo(u)lder runner is the sibling and symmetrical counterpart of the surfer: both ride noise and both 'eat next to' which is the etymological root of the word parasite.

Instead of waves, I run on coastal cliffs and boulders, the crumbled solidity of which almost appears as a shattered, fragmented statue depicting erosion and man's fear of flux: the froth of the land in its desperate attempt to keep the waters at bay.

Flood. The world is being overflooded right now. People suffer from the rushing waters that nourish them, or as Serres says: the parasited parasites the parasite. Whether or not it is global warming -- in turn an alleged effect of the proliferation of naturalcultural hybrids -- that causes extreme weather phenomena, the blending of the two poles is an old taboo.

HC Andersen's 'The little mermaid' is a tale on that theme, this time with a maritime creature crossing the sacred border (instead of an initial human transgression as in for instance Godzilla). A contemporary version of that story is to be found in Hayao Miyasaki's motion picture 'Ponyo on the cliff by the sea'.

Ponyo is the daughter of Miyamoto, a magician in a submarine -- think captain Nemo cum David Bowie. Once a human, Miyamoto now schemes to desintegrate the destructive and earth-abusing humanity by unleashing the pristine and infathomable powers of the ur-ocean. However, one tiny detail ruins his calculations: the (human?) curiousity of his daughter Brunhilde.

Brunhilde repeatedly tries to escape the sub to reach the surface, and finally succeeds in doing so. Once entering the earthly realm, she encounters a boy, Sosuke, who lives on a house on a steep cliff by the ocean. His father is a captain and his mother works with elderly people. Sosuke adopts the funny little fish as his pet and gives her the name Ponyo.

During the film Ponyo moves to and fro in two aspects: firstly, between anthropomorphic and piscine form (due to licking the blood from, i.e. eating next to, Sosuke's scratch-wound, and thereby healing him), and, secondly, between sea and land. The culmination of her constant metamorphosis is taking place when she accidentally, after being held against her will in her piscine form and in her father's submarine, opens the door to the chamber where her father keeps his magic potions, and where the well of the ur-water happens to be.

The force that begins to flow freely after this incident alters the structure of the universe, and the cataclysmic current of ancient creatures and waters that bursts up against the surface bears Ponyo like a herald of the apocalypse. Her first aim is to find Sosuke, who (in a car driven by his mother) has a hard time trying to get home in the approaching storm (1.00-1.19).



The way Ponyo moves (on) the waves is the exact kind of momentum the bo(u)lder runner tries to catch: swiftly prancing with light feet in order to parry the slight topographical (or in this case, topological) deviations of the surface.

Not only does she run like a bo(u)lder runner, she does it on the surfer's turf, why we in this extraordinary demonstration, for the first time, see a merging between the two.

The art of tracing part IV: the AlphaBeta of tracing

Being somewhat of a mythical Atlantis of mathematical and logistical thought, Point A continues to direct us, away from itself, toward the by now immensely crowded Point B. We can't stay at A, the water is rushing in. All the roads lead to B (46 million results on Google cannot be wrong). B is where the party's at; where the noise is; B is for Babylon, or Babel; the point that will break.

In this Hegelian blueprint, this rise-and-fall-of-empires for dummies, the kernel of the western concept of progression is discernible. A and B are molar essences, thesis and anti-thesis; beings that will be purged in the disturbing fire -- or drowned in the tsunami -- of becoming, and merged into synthesis (at the cost of destroying everything behind, as when the bridge crumbles apart behind you in given Nintendo-game). This, according to Serres, is how the diagram of history proceeds; via sacrifice, expulsion, and scapegoating.

That's not time, only a simple line. It's not even a line, but a trajectory of the race for first place - in school, in the Olympic Games, for the Nobel Prize. This isn't time but a simple competition - once again war. The first to arrive, the winner of the battle, obtains as his prize the right to reinvent history to his own advantage (Serres & Latour, Conversations, p. 49).

How does Serres handle this "generalized athleticism" (as Deleuze & Guattari call it), since he does not want to contribute to the relentless arrow of linear time? Simply, by starting that little time-machine of his, that he calls general comparitivism. Instead of strolling down the one-way street of history, he ties his shoes, grabs a fire-ladder, and ascends to the fractal skyline of the city's rooftops, 'an area strangely void of explorers'. Tracing begins.

One common notion of Parkour is that it is 'aiming to get from A to B the fastest' (wikipedia). Other related definitions might formulate something about moving forward in the most corporeally economic way. I have reasons to suggest that there is more to this seemingly simple scheme; if this coarse definition, fastest and most economical, really captured what tracing is about, Parkour would be nothing more than just another lifestyle commodity in the service of neoliberal freedom, only more ascetic and servile (buddhist-capitalism as Slavoj Zizek would have it).

Why would a traceur aim to get from point A to point B the fastest? Silly demonstrations of prowess between friends? Escape? That may be so, but, according to Oli Mould, Parkour should be understood 'fundamentally as a process of movement'. Speed, most certainly, is central to tracing, but not as a means to select a victor. Instead speed is necessary for the traceur to establish the relation between A and B; 'He is a and not only a; he is b as well; he can be the inverse, the opposite, the contradictory. A is b, Q.E.D. This is the very logic of denouement. It was not possible; well look it is possible' (Serres, The Parasite, p. 207 ).

To trace is to be the relation between A and B; to trace is to, by a swift displacement between allegedly incommensurable positions, confirm the beauty of a dichotomy (and concomitantly dedichotomize it without necessarily de(con)structing it). To trace is to '[a]rrive at the magic formula we all seek -- PLURALISM=MONISM -- via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging' (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20-21).

I am [t]racing towards synthesis. [...] this synthesis will no doubt be made more through comparitivism than by sequential linking, more through Hermes's swift travels than by deduction and solid construction. [...] The synthesis will be made, more probably, among fluids (Serres & Latour, Conversations, p. 73).

Such a synthesis-in-flux implies that the philosopher-traceur will be able and willing to reclaim the flooded Atlantis.