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Zen and the Art of Golf
Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Andromeda. TV Series on Sci-Fi channel What makes a golfer successful? When I was a child—maybe ten years old—my father taught me the game by making me his caddy. Back in those days, there were no motorized carts on the municipal courses that we played all around the San Francisco Bay area. (My favorite was Chabot because of the view.) The high-tech innovation then was the cart for the clubs that you could pull. I pulled and learned to choose clubs. I learned to putt. I did a little chipping and driving. But you know what? I’ve never actually played an entire round. However, I don’t play any other sports, either. Still, golf is my game more than any other. And as with most popular games, I can see the relevance to all life’s lessons, but most especially to the lessons that must be mastered by one who aspires to wield Power. In golf, as much or more than any other sport I know, success or failure lies at the interface between the conscious and subconscious mind. Consider the velocity of the driver’s head when it meets the ball on the tee. Consider the sensitivity of the ball’s trajectory to the precise positioning of that club. From the ball’s point of view, that club head is delivering overwhelming Power—the kind of power that could just as well be magick. Science tells you that ball goes ballistic the moment the club’s head ceases contact with the ball. From that moment on, it is out of the golfer’s control and a victim of the laws of physics. But any golfer worth his greens fees will tell you that’s not true. The whole secret to getting that little white speck into that tiny hole way down yonder lies in what the club head does after it loses contact with the ball. The real secret of golf is follow-through. Now that’s true of a lot of sports, from baseball to ping-pong. People who play games that require the application of physical force to an object to make it do something very precise understand follow-through. It’s what you do after you deliver the power to the object that counts most. And that is very much how magick works. So how do you achieve exacting and precise follow-through? Perhaps what I’ve been doing lately has given me a new perspective on that question. I’ve been watching Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis recently, catching up on nearly eight years of SG-1. Over the last few months of this year, the publisher of Five Seasons of Angel: Science Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Vampire, BenBella Books, required extensive cutting of my contribution, I learned my story, “Vampire’s Friend,” has been recorded, I did another radio interview with Dragon Page (www.dragonpage.com) about Buffy, Angel, & Trekkies2, I taught the use of Tarot in writing to Buffy and Angel fanfic writers at a new convention called WriterCon, I found my name on the “starring” list on the Trekkies2 website, I was invited to do an online chat at startrekfans.net, and I was invited to contribute to a privately published book, For the Love of Angel, which is a tribute to the cast and crew of the TV show Angel. That book will be printed only to be distributed to the cast and crew. Also, at WorldCon in Boston, I was given two “singles,” speeches where I had to write up original material, one on Intimate Adventure, which you’ve all read about in this column, and one on the use of the Occult sciences as background for SF/F novels. Then I came home to do a cover-quote I was requested to do for a Tor book—a review of a large novel in half a sentence. So I’ve spent a few months doing condensations, press releases, summaries, in-briefs, headlines, and sound-bytes, all forcing a look at the “forest” around me rather than the single “tree” I usually analyze cell by cell. Then this morning, I was watching an Enterprise repeat where Archer and crew first encounter Suliban who are not Cabal and not genetically enhanced (you gotta watch this show to get the meaning of that! Even though it’s flawed, Star Trek: Enterprise has a lot of solid content). This episode was about prejudice—pre-judging. Making up your mind before the facts are in. Whereupon I remembered a conversation from WriterCon on the difference between an editor and a beta-reader, which brought up the topic of a panel I was on at WorldCon, “Why we hate our heroes,” asking why is it so hard to be a Hero? The thesis of my contribution to Five Seasons of Angel is that Angel is billed as a Hero—but he’s not. He’s a victim. The reason fans love him is that he’s not a hero, so he’s easier to identify with than a hero. All these thumbnail summaries I’ve been doing recently talk about Star Trek, and the line of development culminating in the 2004 crop of shows, Stargate SG-1, Buffy and Angel—and many others I’ve mentioned in this column. In our everyday lives, we play video games, board games, watch TV series, films, and read books, imagining ourselves to be that other person who is a hero. Or maybe wishing we were. Or perhaps really believing that’s how we’d react in the same pickle the hero gets into. Cool! One of my daughters, in her early teens, once marveled that the people in the book didn’t know, when they decided to risk everything, just how the story would turn out. And that is the Zen of Golf as I see it. On the backswing, you focus on the ball and where you intend it to go. There must be no doubt that it will go there, even though it doesn’t usually. At contact, it’s all about power. And on the follow-through you generate success. All the tiny nerve threads throughout your body must all cooperate smoothly. There must be total relaxation amidst tension—no hint that you don’t know how the story will turn out, no fear that the stakes are too high. (See my prior discussions of the Fool card Reversed. Columns are archived at www.simegen.com.) The hero of a story, like Captain Dylan Hunt of the Andromeda Ascendant (Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda), has hard days, and learns “It’s never easy,” and “Plan A never works, but something will turn up.” The heroes of Stargate SG1 have learned not to accept the unacceptable, and strict adherence to their own highest ethical standards never leads to disaster for themselves. Both shows, like Buffy and Angel, depict a mystical universe where the heroic attitude leads to success. Our everyday world doesn’t always seem that way. Just like in golf, when you really feel that you’ve followed through perfectly, the ball will hook or slice into a hazard. Failures bombard us from every direction and hit with unanticipated force. Why isn’t everyday life like these TV shows when it seems so obvious that these TV shows reveal deep, imponderable truths about life? I think the answer may lie at that interface between the conscious and subconscious mind that I mentioned above. The Hero has mastered the Zen of Golf but we haven’t. The golfer, in order to get the cooperation of all those tiny muscles that guide and power the club-head, must coax the subconscious mind into cooperating with the conscious mind. The Tarot card that represents that kind of cooperation is Strength. In our everyday lives, we learn from our failures. Sometimes failures teach us to expect failure or at least be uncertain of success. Zen teaches us that one major stumbling block to living a peaceful life is Expectations. Live in the “now”—not some imaginary future. The origin of a solid follow-through is in the backswing, every moment in the now. So if, on the backswing, the subconscious is cringing in anticipation of the jeers when the ball goes out of bounds, there’s no way the conscious mind can perform the follow-through and make the ball fly straight down the fairway. With experience of failure, one learns not to try. If I’d learned that lesson from all my failures, I wouldn’t be appearing in Trekkies2 and discussing it on radio shows. I’d never have written Star Trek Lives! or the related Sime~Gen novels. I may owe my success to my stupidity, for somehow my subconscious has never learned to anticipate failure—or success either. I wonder if that’s because my Dad taught me golf at such a young age? To send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. |
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