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![Bouldering the ‘move’ and the art of the sublime
My pursuits and documentation of this style of climbing can be found on my web site blocspenwith
The sublime takes place......when the imagination fails to present an object which might if only in principle come to match a concept. We have the idea of the world, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. Imagine yourself in a room full of climbers and non climbers. Try explaining a favourite or recently accomplished boulder problem without resorting to body movement.
We have an idea of the simple (that which cannot be broken down, decomposed), but we cannot illustrate it with a sensible object which would be a 'case' of it. We cannot conceive of the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to make 'visible' this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are ideas of which no (re)presentation is possible. Therefore they impart no knowledge about reality (experience); they also prevent the free union of the faculties which give rise to the sentiment of the beautiful; and they prevent the formation and the stabilisation of taste. They can be said to be unrepresentable.
I was sitting down to write, the room is full. Still hanging onto something else, thinking of the bouldering, how can the rock mean, all that I think. Seamed with cracks, my fingers hold the flat top of the traverse sensing the pace and technicality and the feel of the moves that I have in this vision. The future crystallised in the preoccupation with a dynamic set of movements. The moment becomes the future and the present becomes the past. The hold is left, the body shifting weight, a circle was complete and in total of the other circle, round and round. All then becomes the same as we slide to the horizontal until eventually we lay flat and die or sleep.
I hit a hold, everything comes together. In a second between moves it becomes possible to gain a fraction of rest, respite, the mind and body are suspended in non time, a transcendence of physical time and space. A notion that this move can be the same anywhere there are rocks.. Not simply the dynamics and phsysicality of the movement but the 'feeling' the sense of the sublime. The moment when when climbing and by this I mean bouldering becomes art. When momentarily the boulderer has transcended all the mess, the condition of the post -modern, the condition of the body and become intrinsically linked in movement and time and to that particular space that makes a movement on rock a 'move'.
Bouldering is a style of climbing emphasising power, strength, and dynamics. Its focus is on individual moves or short sequences of moves, unlike traditional climbing or sport climbing, which generally demand more endurance over longer stretches of rock where the difficulty of individual moves is not as great. Boulder routes are commonly referred to as problems (a British appellation) because the nature of the climb is often short, curious, and much like problem solving. Sometimes these problems are eliminates, meaning certain artificial restrictions are imposed.
To reduce the risk of injury from a fall, climbers rarely go higher than 3-5 meters above the ground (anything over 7 meters is generally considered to be free-soloing (or simply 'soloing' in the British), although such climbs might also be termed highball bouldering problems). For further protection, climbers typically put a mouldering mat (crash pad) on the ground to break their fall. Lastly, climbers often have one or more spotters, who work to direct the climber's body toward the crash pad during a fall, while protecting the climber's head from hazards.
As in other types of climbing, bouldering has developed its own grading systems for comparing the difficulty of problems. The most commonly used grading systems are the Fontainebleau system which ranges from 1 to 8c+, and the John Sheridan V-grade system, beginning at V0 and increasing by integers to a current top grade of V16 (The Wheel of Life by Ad Koyamada in the Grampians, Australia[1]). Both scales are open-ended at the top, and thus the upper grade of these systems is always increasing as boulders ascend more difficult problems.](bouldering_files/shapeimage_1.png)
