Surfing Badly For The Win

On Learning to Love Cthulhu

As I write this, I’m watching for the bear.¹

The spot I’m looking at the moment I type this (whoever invented touch-typing was a genius! Probably a piano player, too)² is a break in the perimeter foliage where the neighborhood terrorist occasionally pokes his head through in the hopes of finding the dogs gone for the day.

This is normal.

On my mountain, we have bald eagles, coyotes, cougars, and black bears, while wolves the size of dire wolves and grizzly bears have been sighted only a couple mountain-tops away.

Out here, humans and livestock are called “bait.”

The Abyss Stares Into You

The German aphorist Friedrich Nietszche once said:

There is a false saying: "How can someone who can't save himself save others?" Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?³

Howard was a nervous guy. His entire life was wrapped up in fear. Terribly abused, sickly, and plagued with personal losses as a child, he was virtually a shut-in his entire life. His interest in physics and biology brought him to a terrible realization:

The natural world cared even less for him—or anybody else—than the callous people in his personal world did.

Life was built on a violent struggle, where every being, no matter how sentient and kind-hearted, was subject to violent death. The universe was vaster than the mind could conceive. Where you or I might look into the night sky and see the dazzling glitter of the universe, he looked up and saw the infinite, silent void; a hungry predatory maw devoid of life and swimming in chaos.

Like Emily Dickinson, Howard dealt with his neurosis by writing prolifically.

But while Emily Dickinson hid the products of her genius, Howard sent his screams forth into the void. In the early twentieth century, Howard gave his terror a name after the Greek gods of the underworld:⁴

Cthulhu.

In so doing, Howard Philips Lovecraft invented the genre of cosmic horror and changed the face of art in the Western World. He gave voice to the deep anxiety that plagues the bulk of humanity in the developed world: We look out into the pitiless void and do not easily see the face of a benevolent God.⁵ We are surrounded by corporations and governments that treat us like cattle (or worse). And, until Lovecraft, we had no mythic paradigm that allowed us to understand the nature of our terror.

Lovecraft never escaped his terror. He died young, the picture of the man described in Nietzsche’s aphorism. He would never know the extent of the legacy he created.

The Shark and the Sea

I grew up not too far from the California coast, but I’d never been surfing. Growing up poor, I could never afford the equipment or the training. The best I could do was watch surfing movies with my friends, and dream.

On my sixteenth birthday, my two best friends kidnapped me and took me to a little surf shop in Santa Cruz where you could rent a board and wet suit for twenty bucks. We got boards, suited up, and hit the beach.

It was a flat day. We spent a lot of time sitting on the water waiting for the waves to roll in. We sat on our boards and talked about whatever came to mind. For over an hour, the waves didn’t come.

But the sharks did.

A pair of six-foot blue-tipped sharks found us in that empty bay and started bumping our legs, sizing us up for dinner. We were too far out to paddle to safety. All we could do was pull our legs up onto the board, surf-ski style, and pray for waves.

The sharks didn’t leave.

They circled.

For the longest ten minutes of my life, they circled.

Then, before the sharks decided to grab a snack, a set rolled in. We rode the waves in—badly—and pulled stakes to look for less predator-infested waters.

I surfed as much as I could for the next two summers. I never got very good at it, but that didn’t matter. Working my ass off to catch waves in waters swimming with predators (that wasn’t the last time I caught sight of one) was bracing enough. But that thrill didn’t compare with the soul-destroying terror of catching a wave, and riding it, and being pitched onto a rock reef when I wiped out.

The key to surfing, it turns out, isn’t skill—though skill is indispensable and the well of skill is as bottomless as in any other art—it’s attitude. When you stand on the wave, you’re not in control. You didn’t make the wave. You don’t get to decide how fast it’s moving, or how it curls, or how big it gets—the best you can do is learn to predict what the wave is likely to do.

You stand up on your board, and you ride the forces of the cosmos. Tides generated by the moon, amplified by the weather caused by convection driven by the heat of the sun. You’re at the mercy of Cthulhu, and in the face of Cthulhu there is no victory unless you submit to Its will. Then, and only then, can you move, and cut, and live the glory of the ridden wave.

To surf, one must face overwhelming violence, accept it, and make beauty from it.

A Dude of Outrageous Fortune

Surfing did something to my consciousness. As I walked through dangerous and risky corners of the world in the years after, as I faced tragedy and difficulty, I found myself continually returning to the well of my experience surfing. Everything, it seemed, came back to surfing.

Fall in love, and you’re carried off on waves of primal drive and emotion that you can barely understand. You have only three choices: ride the wave, cut out of the wave, or die trying to oppose it.

Get into business, and you enter a vast sea of economic powers and principalities. To catch a wave well enough to ride it, you have to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas and resources. To survive the wave, you have to stay in touch with the vast forces that drive the chaotic world around you.

Invest in a friend or a family, and you’ve made your life, in some measure, hostage to fortunes you cannot control. You can only control how you react to the forces that lift the people you love high, or lay them low, that batter your bond from all sides, and that shine the sun of delight into your lives.

Invent something or build something, and you don’t create from whole cloth in a vacuum—your agency is constrained by the nature of the materials, and the forces you’re subjecting them to, and the social world that surrounds them.

Whether you know it or not, you live, breathe, hurt, love, and die before the face of chthonic forces in which you have no say.

Fight them, and you’re sealing your own doom. Ride them, and you just might find or achieve something glorious.

When I was in my late thirties, I was asked by an editor to write a cosmic adventure story. My genre was science fiction. I was in the midst of several major transitions in life—a change in careers, a change in locations, a change in long-term direction—so I found myself writing a short story about a small man fighting against the biggest odds in the universe.

Suave Rob Suarez, I fancied, was a surfer who wanted to ride the biggest wave in the universe. All brass and ambition, he decided to surf the blast wave of a supernova, just to show it could be done. An adrenaline junkie by trade, he fancied that his job—like the job of all artists who take their craft seriously—was to show the rest of humanity what could be by facing down the impossible, and accepting it, and making gold out of the leaden weight of fate.

As I wrote about Rob and his friends, I found myself quietly writing to all the young men and women who’d come through my life. To a person, they were lost and alone, unable to find direction. Depressed, bereft, and spiritually empty, they fancied that life should be pleasant, and that misfortune should be controlled. If they didn’t have a life of material plenty, positive mental health, and show-able success by twenty-five, they were failures. They would never amount to anything. They might as well give up.

These are the people who haunted Tumblr and Reddit at the time, and who make up the bulk of the generations younger than me. Their parents shielded them from hardship and challenge, and sometimes those parents did so because they were, themselves, afraid of facing jail or losing their children because they did something as simple as letting the children play outside.

Imagine reaching your twenties without ever knowing someone who died. Without ever having to euthanize a pet. Without ever suffering a major loss. Where all disappointments are small, and all wins are hollow. Where feeling disturbed or angry is a sign of moral failure, and feeling offended is a sign of virtue. Where “adulting” is a major accomplishment, and after you did that, there seems to be nothing more.

I wrote the first of Rob’s adventures a decade ago. Since then, the ennui worsened. The hopelessness thickened. Politics became religion, because religion itself long ago ceased to be anything but moralism.

I wrote Rob for the men and women of that empty world.

I wrote his tales, and so many of my other tales, because there is no life without death, and there is no meaning if one does not stare on the face of the infinite in terror and awe, and to wonder “What might my small, short life mean in all this vastness?” It matters little whether one stares in wonder at the face of a great and terrible god, or stands naked before the infinite void. Our consciousness is but a brief candle that will soon gutter and fade, leaving only memories.

Rob describes his life’s work like this:

So all this shit I do? This is about the thing…The only thing that matters worth a damn. It’s about me, and you, and every chick and dude and ambi and grav monkey and wild-types and even the assholes like George-bleedin’-Swami or Dickless-plonkin’-Dave. It’s about humans, man, and any other life form out there bitchin’ enough to crawl out of the gravity well…

…And it’s about making sure every single goddamn one of us got that chance, and we can make it epic or piss it away the way we like, but we each gotta have that chance, ’cause you never know who the next [hero’s] gonna be.

Could be the kid down the block, or a grav monkey out on her own in the asteroid belt…could be that asshole at work, or his kid, or some dude who communes with the froggies out in the swamps of wherever. Any one of them could be the next [world-beater] that just sends the whole universe sideways for the rest of its life.

If they have the courage.

And if those of us who’ve been around the block have the balls to tell them it can be done.

Terror can be conquered. Hardship can be outlasted. Adversity and hopelessness can be ocercome. Beauty and meaning and glory can be made, and found, and had…

…if you learn to love Cthluhu.

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You can find all of Suave Rob’s adventures here, and wherever fashionable books and audiobooks are sold.

If you’re looking for other tales to transfix your imagination, you can find my novels, short stories, visions, and dreams (along with some how-to books and literary studies) by clicking here.

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1. Note: this essay was written over the summer. At the time of publication, the bear is hibernating.

2. My proofreader informs me that the first person known to use touch typing was a court stenographer,  Frank Edward McGurrin, who won speed typing awards in 1888 and reports using the method starting in ~1878

3. Private Notes 10:4

4. Also called the “chthonic gods.”

5. I know that many of you reading this are religious, but you are the exception in the Western world.