“Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds.”

BARBARIAN DAYS: A SURFING LIFE by WILLIAM FINNEGAN

It is 32 degrees Fahrenheit outside, there is condensation on the corner of every window, and the heating blanket that is tucked under my feet is hardly keeping me warm enough to stop my fingers from chattering. And yet—and yet, my mouth still waters when I read about that perfect wave. I even like that he calls it imperfect. Because imperfections are beautiful and nobody is perfect, but beautiful is perfect so imperfections must be beautiful, right? The wave that Finnegan talks about is not Haitian, it is not Hawaiian, it is not out of Santa Cruz or Shoals. The wave that Finnegan talks about is an amorphous, monstrous masterpiece with a place only in the individual imagination.

Right out of the gate, Finnegan wraps our hands in ribbons of love. He compares waves to ROSES and DIAMONDS. – No, he suggests they are the opposite of ROSES and DIAMONDS, which paradoxically leaves wisps of ROSES of DIAMONDS floating in our cerebral cortex as run our hands across the pages. By juxtaposing waves with roses and diamonds, Finnegan brings sea water into a sphere of thought that is usually reserved for romantic daydreams and white sheets. It does not matter that roses and diamonds are supposed to be different from waves. It only matters that we are now thinking of roses and diamonds when we think of waves. You cannot have white without black.

I love how he separates them. “Waves are not stationery objects”, which of course, by definition, they are not. The implication here is that roses and diamonds are. Diamonds are imperturbable, solid. They are beautiful and they do not change. They are formed in the bowels of the earth and are pressed to the surface to be worked by human hands until the human eye can no longer find a flaw. I can’t help but notice that change is a matter of scope. In the grand scheme of things, a diamond travels with the currents of magma below earth’s crust. Diamonds ride waves to the surface. Roses, on the other hand, are a symbol of passion. Traditional, lovely, short-lived, but just as beautiful in it’s death as in it’s life.

I think Finnegan is proposing that these objects are stationary because, without the hand of man, they would not move. We give meaning to these objects and we want to move them. Coal spends billions of years pounding around Earth’s molten core and then sloshing to the surface of the earth. It is not shiny until we make it so. A rose sprouts from the soil, untrimmed by a blade, and then shrivels in the sun. It is not satin until we make it so. This type of perfection fetish generates symbols of a bond humans seek with a thirst that blinds us to the fact that we are thirsty. We want both diamonds and roses. We want love and we want it forever. But in order to accomplish that gargantuan task, we must also understand that love, too, must be blacksmithed.

On the other hand, waves cannot be altered, they cannot be rotated, they cannot be lifted. In fact, a wave travels miles and miles across open oceans to be witnessed (or not) for the few vital seconds as energy explodes across a reef, sandbar, or shorebreak. It is difficult to give meaning to something that is so ephemeral and unconquerable. Human hands cannot adjust it to their desire and therefore, the definition of the perfect wave cannot even be conceived.

But do we dream about it? Of course we dream about it. But our soiled hands cannot change it, so perfection ceases to exist.