First, skis and boots. You put on ski boots and you instantly feel (and look) like some kind of anime monster: feet are suddenly huge, encased, like the boot of an exoskeleton. And walking in ski boots (all 300 yards to the lift, insert cat who ate the canary look here) you move in an uncanny, monstrous fashion, like a cyborg martinet, heel clicking, toes snapping down, walking become mechanical. The boot makes regular walking harder; in fact you need to learn to walk again, like some very tall baby. But then you get to the lift, throw the skis down, click in, and voila! You have become a man-machine system ideally designed for sliding, turning on snow, throwing snow crystals into the sun while slamming a hockey stop halfway down the hill.
Now a word or three about the boot/ski interface. Modern ski boots are cyborgian, no doubt; they add a prosthetic foot that links to another prosthetic "foot" (in my case a pair of parabolic K2's in orange and yellow flames that say Burnin' Love and are a handmedown from my wife, which I proudly mention to lift operators who give me grief and/or admire my sweet K2's). But the real issue is the nature of the interface. That is, up here there is a human/machine, with a brain (encased in a helmet that looks like a bowling ball; more of this later) that now reads messages from the body as it extends all the way to the tips of the skis. My body has a different proprioception; it wants to lean forward, it learns to "read" slopes and the quality of snow (from corduroy and chatter to icy Cascade cement to fluffy soft powder to warm/cold Spring skiing soft snow), and this "reading" is partly visual, but also partly a felt sense of the ski/boot/ankle/knee/hip system. The mind learns to hear the feedback from the legs and skis and adjust (now pointing down the hill, gaining speed, carving tighter turns; now traversing or paralleling the hill to slow or stop; now flashing red lights as the skis try and fail to gain purchase on an icy morning run).
This is in part obvious. And in another way it is astounding. You stand on the top of a ledge and look down and instantly perceive the landscape as though you had long thin parabolic feet. The brain is able (usually!) to be cyborg, and then to adjust when you take off your boots. (And there is a moment when you are in your stocking feet back at the ski place, and you have a funny feeling in your body and realize you are "seeing" the mountain again, feeling what it would be like to shove off and start carving below lift 4).
The interface is in this case an "inter" between one face (the face of the mountain covered with snow) and another face (the set of inches that define the places the skis hit the ground). The interface changes constantly, is complex, massively so. You are screaming down the mountain and considering the next turn, and the next...but it turns out that there are Other People skiing, and you need to take them into account, and the possibility that the snow over there may be significantly different than what you are successfully skiing on now.
I'm imagining: this is your brain. This is your brain on skis.
Now, there is another cyborg element: a kind of pleasure you can have as a human (sliding down hills of snow as a kid, sliding down a waterfall in Vermont with your brother, sliding down a hill of mud into leaves) but ramped up, adrenalized, made into an entirely new field of possibilities. The cyborg pleasure is the pleasure of the (new, entrancing, difficult, intoxicating) interface. It is a new space to play in, with new pleasures and pains, new skill sets and patterns. And while there are some utilitarian reasons for being able to ski (you live in Sweden and want to ski over to the neighbor's house for lunch; you are fighting Nazis in Finland during the war), mostly the ski borg is a cyborg of the nonutilitarian, the Arcadian.
Next skiborg topics:
1. Helmets are really sound systems.
2. Chair lifts are big metal arms for lifting humans as if they were children; that is, they do what amusement park rides do. And chair lifts are the slowing down of the pace of the day, forcing even the adrenaline junkies to do nothing, stare out at the mountains, feel the change of weather from low to high.
3. The organic part of the equation sometimes is not up to the cybernetic one. So snow boarders' wrists get broken and damaged; skiers don't break their legs as much but damage their knees and acl's.
4. As with other cyborgs, skiing is embedded in a complex set of relations, including corporate ones, environmental ones, gender, class, race. These are not innocent, or without negative impacts.
5. Finally, put a bunch of people with prosthetics onto a big mountain with lots of changes to intersect, interact, interfere, and you have an interesting temporary society. Like burning man in the snow, someone said.
Does it tell us anything to see skiers as cyborgs?
No comments:
Post a Comment