THE (HE)ART OF FIGURE SKATING
(Intro Post)
“In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Figure skating is beyond sport and competition, beyond quantitative judging and criticism, and beyond mere sensual excitation. It is an experience born of inspiration. It is a representation of something higher. Like literature, music, and visual arts, it is a quarry for seekers. For those who hunger to find something pure, something organic, and something beautiful, in the midst of the deceptive, amnesiac, mechanical world they have been immersed into.
If the whole of life is a series of pictures, drawn by higher consciousness, then we live among signs and symbols. Every frame and every small element in it offers a chance for us to inquire, to contemplate, and then acquire wisdom for understanding its entirety.
This blog then, would take figure skating as one frame out of many, a sort of microcosm, and make use of it as a metaphor to life, its aspects, and lessons we could take from it.
You could ask, of all things to use, why FS in particular? For this 3 Cs.
- Completeness. It has the narrative and characterization of films and theater, the hypnotic emotional pull of music and dance, the commonly abstracted representation of ideas in painting and poetry.
- Concentration. It’s a niche basically. Unlike all others mentioned above which encompasses a huge timeline in history, and scattered with examples from everywhere, this is a global discipline that is relatively young and easy to follow (the fact that there’s a sports side to it).
- Curiosity. It is curious not in the sense that it is weird, but because it is comparatively unusually tackled in such a way. So it would be fascinating to come from this quite unique viewpoint.
As a first project, I’d like to make a personal tribute, in appreciation of the beauty of Figure Skating. It would be organized in an A-Z series of posts, that would include some musings, feature some favorite skaters, and videos or pictures to showcase the ideas as presented. As a feel-good blog, it would focus primarily on things that make the sport transcend itself, and so there would not be much technical inclusions such as the judging system and how federations work. It would be a homage, not a critique.
This is made not only for current skating fans, but for those who may have remote interest in the discipline. Here in the hope to provide some insights and encourage them to see it in a more positive light and stay as spectators of this wonderful art. As early as now, I give notice that this might turn time and again into fan-dom writing, but I would try to stay close to my original idea and purpose. ☺
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***This is a positive space, so I encourage friendly interaction, as long as it stays within the context of what’s presented. I’m a new blogger, and would gladly take some feedback, and content suggestions. Humor is welcome of course ;)
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