BURSTBelow are excerpts from the recently released The Craft of Bouldering by American climber and writer Francis Sanzaro. The book is a revised, retitled and updated version of The Boulder: A Philosophy for Bouldering. These short sections are a good sampling of the book, intended to help you improve at climbing, understand movement with more intelligence, and just plain hold it lighter. Sanzaro has been climbing for over 30 years, is the author of The Zen of Climbing and the former editor-in-chief of Rock & Ice magazine.
On Bruce Lee: Bruce Lee’s posthumously published book Tao of Jeet Kune Do, which encapsulated his deepest thoughts on martial arts, begins with a sweeping criticism of the harm that style—what goes under the heading of ‘Organised Despair’—has on one’s training. Style in bouldering is idiosyncratic and hard to define, as it lives inside all of us. It is defined by a way of moving that suits us, feels easy to us, and so we seek out certain problems because we climb hard in this genre, but, of course, the danger is that we only excel in this type of climbing and we develop mental blocks about others.
What Lee is advocating is complete fluidity of the body that attempts to erase all ruts that might have developed during training. What he is saying by default is that it is natural for the body to develop ruts and comfort zones that we inhabit but that such zones are destructive for the body’s ultimate vision for itself.
On the Zone: Mountaineers have long spoken of a primal connection with nature while in the thin air. The birth of mountaineering coincided with Romanticism, which meant that mountaineering literature adopted a Romantic imagination. Such as being overtaken by the ‘majesty’ of nature, the mountains, of ‘indescribable’ feelings, the ‘sublime’, the ineffable, etc. Today, over two centuries after climbers first went up mountains for sport, Romantic imagination is alive and well in literature and culture. Soloists, not to mention the new breed of sponsored climber-extremists, exude similar language of being ‘out of body’ or ‘in the zone.’ Monks, Brahmans, gurus, priests, sages, medicine men—all these figures discuss this mysterious state. Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell have spoken of the athletic concept of ‘flow’ with the notion of the ‘holy’ in religion, arguing for considerable overlap in many areas. However, the problem with such studies remains that this zone, this mental space inhabited by athletes, is understood as a place of unthought.
As climbers, we often hear of the zone, the place of non-thought. It has been compared (at least in language) to mystical states of complete bodily absorption—the completely aware present, the moment when we leave the world, and the ground falls out beneath us, as Klem Loskot and Dean Potter have described. But if you have ever been in a hospital and seen someone without thought, you’ll have seen that it looks nothing like ‘the zone.’ Catatonic is properly thoughtless. I have non-thought experiences all the time, and they are quite boring. ‘The zone’ is not the ground of bodily/mental existence, which is to say, it is not something we come to when we get our minds out of the way.
On Directionality: Directionality is an aspect of each part of our field, and the best climbers can tell from each foothold what position their body will need to assume to use it; it takes time, this hermeneutic skill. Abstract surfaces are dynamic, not static. Of course, the rock does not change shape, but it does when we are sending—sometimes it resists us; at other times, it feels easy. While the alterations are in our body, movement is a third item between the stone and body. The field does not pre-exist the sport per se. Rather, the sport defines the field, just as college fields are used for many different sports.
On Surfing: Any act of surfing has embodied nature itself— the rhythm of the stars, gravity, tides, and sun. Each time you catch a wave, you traverse all these elements, allowing you to inhabit—however we conceive this habitation—the process that made the wave. A wave is never just a wave, but completion of an act of nature and a new beginning—a final act washing ashore only to repeat itself again and again. To say it is just an experience, that is, just in the mind, is to miss the very real and tangible elements that constitute surfing—the feeling of water, the sun, the thrill of sliding down the front of a giant moving waterfall, the rhythm of the sets. The surfer’s body becomes, for those precious seconds, enslaved to inhuman rhythms of nature. A lot of surfers treat the water as just another field and surfing as just another sport, but that’s like walking into the British Museum with dark sunglasses and music playing in your earbuds. Sure, you can do it, but you are missing out.
Boulders are also results of unknowable geological movements—water, ice, wind, gravity, heat, cleaving, splitting, falling, oxidation and so on. Holds may have been crafted thousands of years ago, and we are but meeting them here, in this short window when we find them. But the thing is, this history is never lost to us. Geological time is embedded in the movement itself, however mysteriously. It lives in the friction of the holds, the colour, texture, angles. We too feel this maturity of nature—this completion—in our movement, for when we move across the stone, we are adding to its geological history. We inhabit its life, and our human act is a translation of the rhythms of nature. To boulder is to establish a relationship with an impersonal event of nature. This habitation never leaves one the worse for it either. The lesson of surfing, like bouldering, has no object—no lesson one can quantify or teach or write down—yet it is therapeutic and medicinal for perhaps primitive, psychological reasons: the longing to connect with the earth.
On Fingertips and Nerve Endings: The body parts that contain the most nerve endings are the lips and the fingertips, and so, by exte sion, our hands taste the world. The body part with the fewest nerve endings is the middle of the back. In climbing of all types, the body becomes a hand, speaks through it, feels through it, gains its confidence through the hand’s confidence. The flood sensation from the fingertips masks the rest of the violence done to our body. We partake in a sport of touch. But sensation is knowledge as well. Grab a loose flake on the top of a highball, and one immediately feels the entire body freeze. Non-linguistic data is communicated instantaneously to your brain. Your body responds immediately, almost always bypassing cognitive and reflective thought. You pull on that flake less, adjust your feet, ensure that your other hand can hold if the flake pulls. You look down, contemplating your fate.
There is also substantial scientific evidence linking zones of increased nerve sensitivity to fantasy (one should get my drift here). One could conclude rather unscientifically that the accepted notion that climbers often fantasize about grabbing the holds on their projects is because our skin, at least the zones with a lot of nerve endings, just happen to be built like that organ used for sexual pleasure.
On Unnatural Moves: To be an excellent boulderer, one must work through all the displeasure of moves that feel unnatural (moves that are not one’s style). One must train the body to travel with ease, joy, and efficiency, such that next time the move is encountered, the body greets it like an old friend. Moreover, one cannot deny how much the residue of uncomfortable moves builds up in our bodies during a send. They seem to gel together, and once a threshold is achieved, failure is inevitable, not to mention frustration and mental fatigue. Moves that are not one’s style are like high cards in a gin rummy game—you shouldn’t have too many if you want to do well.
Residents of Canada can purchase The Craft of Bouldering here. For those in the US, use this Amazon link. You can find the author at fsanzaro.com, or below.
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