Subject: Frames of Reference 4 of 5 - Freedom is not a Body Position
Posted Wed 1998-10-21
----

Freedom is not a body position.

It is not a maneuver either.

Freedom - discovery, play, exploration, innovation, fantasy
  and
Body Position - sit, stand, face down, head down
are two orthogonal discussions.

Expressing freedom through the mechanism of new body position
or new maneuver has been tried several times before.

And it works for a while.

But then the forces of ego and competition step in and go through
a very predictable process.

    First strip out all the interesting and meaningful but non
    measurable stuff.

    Then create a standard set of compulsory moves.

    Then start promoting these events called meets, where the
    competition is more important than the skydiving, and the
    skydivers perform these compulsory moves for people on the
    ground called judges.

This is an historical pattern:

    Freedom / Exploration          Competition
    ---------------------          -----------
    People got stable              Hold a heading
    People did loops and rolls     Turn turn loop turn turn loop
    People learned stars           Speed stars
    People made bigger stuff       Biggest stuff
    People made other shapes       4 way 8 way 16 way
    People did freestyle           Compulsory moves
    People did boards              Compulsory moves

The artists and explorers invent new stuff which gets turned into
the new Grim Reality that the next generation tries to escape from.

Why do people start jumping in the first place?

--------

One thing that has always puzzled me is that once a new competitive
form takes hold, all the interesting stuff that got stripped out,
which is actually most of it, sort of falls by the wayside, and
the artists turn to a completely new area to explore.

I mean just because the competitors have restricted themselves to
one narrow cross section of an activity doesn't mean that we have
to too, does it?

But historically that is what happens. The recreational skydiving
scene begins to imitate the new competitive event.

That fact was part of my motivation for making up the 4 way event
in 1969.

    (There was also that Southern California kept threatening to
    (secede from the union, and relative work was a popular ground
    (swell bigger than PCA/USPA, and PCA/USPA wanted to bring the
    (relative workers back into the fold and so on.

I hate to admit it but I once thought freedom was a body position too.

In the mid 60's we learned how to make stars. In 1967 the first 10
man star meet happened at Taft. Things got weird out - people changed
personalities, politics, back stabbing, cliques, anger, blame ...

At the time I thought it was the stars that were making people act
so strange. I didn't know much about being a person back then :-) :-)
In fact I'm coming up on six decades and I'm just starting to catch
on, but that's another post.

So I thought
    make up an event with lots of different maneuvers in it,
    and then everybody will imitate the new event,
    and we will do all these new maneuvers,
    and we will all be free.

Right.

Well, as G'Kar said - "Narn, Human, Centauri .. We all do things for
the same reason. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

But that's where I learned that you have to strip out all the good
stuff in order to come up with something measurable and therefore
judgable.

--------

In the early 70's the Gulch (Casa Grande near Eloy) started happening.
By 1975 this amazing creative burst was in full bloom. So amazing
in fact that driving a 1,000 mile round trip every weekend from Los
Angeles seemed like a reasonable thing to do. Who wouldn't drive that
far to take part in something so amazing? Many famous names, and worth
a book in its own right. In fact I wrote a Parachutist article called
"Airgasm" but Norm wouldn't call it that in the magazine :-) :-)

BJ pulled the USFET together (United States Freefall Exhibition Team).
We did demo jumps and showed the movies at the Nationals in Tahlequah
and the World Meet in Germany, jumped with the Russians in Yugoslavia,
spread the word around the world ...

It is still one of the most amazing journeys I was ever on.

As a result of that Eilif Ness arranged that I spend the summer of
1976 in Norway, Sweden, Denmark.

I'm not sure what he thought I was going to do, but I was clear.

    Transmit the Spirit of the Gulch.
    That was my Mission.

    Transmit the creativity, exploration, playfulness, feeling of
    Special Times that had been the Gulch in 1975.

I arrived with The Great Mission(tm) and a head full of Hot Dives(tm)
in a land of Cessnas, speed star burnouts and students.

That summer is where I really became conscious of the emotional content
of a skydive.

It's not the maneuvers, but how people feel about them. The hottest
dive in the world is worthless if the people don't like it or can't
do it. The simplest maneuvers can be a fantastic skydive if the people
feel that way.

And how people feel is really the whole point. That's why we jump
in the first place.

Returning to Pope Valley I tried to combine the emotional content
with the idea of building dives out of moves instead of hookups.
"All the good stuff is in the flying between the hookups."

Dance was the metaphor. If you took what people were doing in the
sky and translated it to the dance floor, it would look like either
a small number of people dancing as fast as they could, or a large
number of people getting into some pattern and then standing there
holding it.

If you go the other way, translate dance, moves, vibes, attitude
into the sky then you have a sky full of endless possibility.

--------

In early 1977 the question of competition came up again. Competition
is like the Borg. It assimilates creations and turns people into drones,
at least from an artist's point of view.

For me it was an agonizing choice because the people who wanted to
compete were some of my best friends from the USFET and I really
wanted to jump with them some more.

But I took the other fork in the road.

The next post (Analyze, The Skydance Approach, That Skydiving Wind)
is about that fork.

Basically the idea was to combine the freedom of dance with the
emotional content of a dive in a way that was free of measurement,
time, numbers, comparison, judgement in order to escape the
Competition Borg assimilation trap.

--------

People have asked me what I think about Sit Flying and Headdown.

Good ideas. Expand the frontiers.

Expressions of Freedom and Art are a Good Thing.

I also believe that when the Competition Borg shows up with Compulsory
Moves that their use for that expression will fade into history along
with the other efforts.

Perhaps not. One can always hope.

That's one thing about Skydance. It's not a maneuver. It's a viewpoint.
An attitude. Each jump, each experience is what it is in its own right.
If you measure or compare then it's not Skydance.

Sit Flying in particular seems promising because you're upright and
that changes the whole visual component of skydiving for the better.

I will probably do a fair amount of it. Right now my goggles blow
off whenever I get vertical, but I'm thinking about a full face
helmet for winter time jumping anyway.

Headdown on the other hand does not appeal to me. I think about why
that is from time to time because I get invited from time to time.
I believe it is a reluctance to become too divorced from the ground
while in freefall, but that is another post. So for now it's just a
fact sitting there with no explanation.

Same for CRW. I've never had the urge to do that either.

So that's it for freedom as a body position.

Onward ...

Skratch

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