On Human Excellence

I. One particularly interesting feature of human reality that exemplifies our dynamism and creativity is the limits and boundaries to which people push their bodies or their craft. Spurred initially by watching the Olympics, I have begun reflecting on the kind of craft involved with being the best in the world at something. There is something enthralling and beautiful to me about watching someone at the very top of their game performing in ways no other human ever has or ever will, in the foreseeable future. This has led me to think about human excellence more generally.


II. Human excellence isn't merely about being good or talented at something, nor about winning some competition, or even about being the best in the world. Human excellence, as I will be using it, is something more than that. It is when craft becomes art. What do I mean by this? Ordinarily, we seem to make a distinction between craft and art, where craft is some skill or practice and art is a product, imbued with the aesthetic imprint of an artist. Thus, what I take to be human excellence is when some craft itself becomes art. Rather than being merely the process that produces something, acting out the craft becomes itself its own aesthetic product. Human excellence is the peculiar aesthetic quality some skill takes on when it is performed at such a high level, to the point that it seems effortless, and utterly one-of-a-kind.

III. Two things to say about this before we continue. Firstly, this does not mean that human excellence can only happen outside of art, or only in non-artistic domains. It just means that I am differentiating brilliant art, from brilliant craft. For example, John Coltrane qua artist has produced many great albums and thus many great works of art. But John Coltrane qua craftsman or technician (I use these interchangeably) plays the saxophone in such a way that the playing itself is constitutive of some aesthetic quality. This is human excellence:

Here it is not only the artfulness of the entire jazz band and the music they create together that makes this performance great but also the fact that we have one of the greatest saxophonists in history flexing his craft in a way that is itself constitutive of a further product.

Secondly, and on the other hand, this means that many artists are excluded from human excellence in this way. This is mostly on the basis that some mediums are not equipped to make this distinction in such an obvious way, such as in film and painting, where the craft really just is the product. For example, I love David Lynch and his works of art but what makes him great is not so much the process of creation and the techniques (even though they are great in Lynch) but the product of those processes. I am not that interested in the craft of how Lynch makes his movies, and to the extent that I am, my interest in how a John Coltrane or Miles Davis performs their music far outshines it. (However, you'll see later on that I try to make the case that we can include mediums peculiar to this distinction, in special cases.) In one case you have human excellence as I define it, on the other, you do not.

IV. Thus far defined, even though art is where I'm more at home discussing the notion, the paradigmatic case of human excellence, the transcendence of craft to art, is in sports. One of my favourite ever sporting moments has to be Jonathan Edward's longest triple jump. He is most well known for holding the world record for jumping 18.29m (the 10th longest standing track and field world record), but he had jumped 18.43m before he got that record, with a wind behind him only slightly too strong to render the distance legal. (The windspeed reading was +2.4m/s when it has to be at or below +2.0m/s.) For those that do not know, triple jump is like long jump but has three phases, instead of one. You have a hop, a step, and a jump. It is incredibly hard to maintain one's momentum throughout each of these phases so much of the technique involved is about optimising that momentum throughout the jump. Take the second-best legal triple jump ever, performed by Christian Taylor:

Now, Christian Taylor is an incredible athlete and this is the second greatest triple jump ever performed, so I can't take away too much from such an impressive feat, but Jonathan Edwards is simply on another level. Compare Taylor's jump to Edwards' world record:

Edwards flies with a grace and simplicity that is, quite simply, mind-blowing. The way he carries his momentum through the hop and step perfectly, seemingly without loss, is a sight to behold. Compared to Taylor, who almost seems clunky and strained in comparison, Edward flies through his jump with a style that embodies a deep familiarity with an entire event and how one's own body constitutes itself in space. For reference, Edwards' jump phase (the final phase) is 60cm longer than Taylor's. That's how good he is. It does not end here though, as I mentioned earlier, he has jumped further:

Edwards is a technician of the event, he truly mastered it in this jump. Even if someone like Taylor comes along and beats his world record, or his 18.43m, it would not necessarily be human excellence in the way Edwards achieves it in these jumps. Human excellence is not about being the best, necessarily (though it often helps). Someone that is naturally stronger and faster will no doubt eventually brute force their way past the record (as we would expect History to produce), but human excellence would require the masterful kinetic grasp on his craft that Edwards held. These jumps are works of art.

Another moment of human excellence in sport took place in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Here, 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci achieved the first perfect 10 in an event, ever (the best score achievable in gymnastics with the old scoring system). She did this, not only for the first time, but a total of seven times over the same competition. Here is a montage of her performance across the competition (though I recommend watching all of her perfect 10s here):

Now I know much less about gymnastics than I do triple jump (not that I know that much about that either!) so perhaps she deserves less credit than I am giving her. But watching her command her craft with such delicate and graceful precision is exactly the kind of thing I have in mind with human excellence. She never falters, she never second-guesses herself. She crafts something, in taking all her performances together, more like a ballet than a gymnastics routine. I understand a lot of the moves she performs, especially on the uneven bars, have been banned for being too dangerous, so unfortunately we cannot see this style anymore and perhaps we would have seen better by now had they stuck around. Nevertheless, her performance has an altogether aesthetic quality to it. For these moments she was perfect. Her craft became art.


V. Hopefully I have given a sense of what I mean by human excellence. Now I want to extend the notion to further domains to see how much play we can get out of it. In going through a slew of examples, letting them do some explanatory work, and opening up some opportunities for further explication, I aim to let the notion precisify and crystallise around a cluster of themes and associations.


    In Sport

Like I said earlier, sport is the paradigmatic case of what I have in mind. Thus, I will go through some more examples. It would be remiss not to include Usain Bolt who, for all the hype, really does deserve the credit he gets. He is the greatest sprinter ever. He was literally untouchable from 2008-2016, where he failed to lose a single individual world champion race for that entire duration. However, his moment of human excellence was not when he got his world record in the 100m of 9.58 seconds, nor when he got the record for the 200m. His craft became art when, in countless races, he literally jogged or celebrated before he even crossed the finish line. You can watch a compilation of moments like that here.

Returning to the theme of jumping, in 1982, well before Mike Powell had earned the current long jump world record of 8.95m (which is not looking to be beaten anytime soon), Carl Lewis allegedly jumped ~9.15m, which would be both the first-ever long jump over 9m and a world record by a country mile (then and now). However, the officials at the pit wrongly called it a foul. The story is both (unfortunately) relatively unknown, and something of a mystery (perhaps it was not so far a jump). You can watch a dodgy video of it here, and read a nice write up on him here, that talks about the historic jump and of him being a kind of technician in the way Edwards was. For me, it is not merely the excellence in his best moments, but the consistency in which he was excellent and his incorrigible form, that constitutes Lewis' human excellence. 10 Olympic medals, 9 gold. Unreal.

The new shotput world record holder, Ryan Crouser, throws beautifully and like Lewis, is, to this day consistently dominating his event. You can watch a nice video documenting his rise here. Note the commentary making the remark that "his smooth, elegant, and expertly executed rhythm makes his tall but pristine throwing a true work of art." Human excellence.

While I don't know much about skating, a friend of mine pointed out to me Rodney Mullen. Rodney Mullen basically invented a large majority of the tricks people do today including the ollie and kickflip, but also insane ones (see: here and here). Watching some of his stuff, it is literally inconceivable how he does it to a non-skater like me. It is nothing other than human excellence, an art. He is one with his craft, the thing he's riding is less of an accessory and more of an extra appendage. Here is a nice compilation of his stuff.

Michael Phelps is another obvious one. He has the most Olympic gold medals of anyone in total (23). The most for individual events (13). And also the most earned at a single games (8). With his ridiculous body shape and enormous arms, Phelps swims as fish, not as human. Watch these turns if you are unconvinced.

In cricket, Don Bradman, while there is no proper footage of him playing, I imagine fit the bill for human excellence. He has a completely ridiculous batting average in test matches of 99.94 runs over 80 innings. For reference, the next best is 61.87 runs (and that itself is insane). No other person in any other sport I can think of could ever be given so many chances to drop the ball, and almost never do so, scoring a ridiculously high average to boot. Sick stuff.

The three big tennis giants, but especially for me, Federer. While not particularly exciting for us anymore who have adjusted to his brilliance after watching him (Nadal, and Djokovic) for years, it has to be admitted that he has honed and perfected his craft. Tennis is more like watching surgery than sport these days (for better or worse) and the effect is an aesthetic one. Deceptively effortless grace has been a theme I have been repeating that could not be more on show than in tennis and especially in Federer. Craft as artistry once again. One can read David Foster Wallace's classic essay on the topic here titled "Roger Federer as Religious Experience." He argues, similarly to myself, that while "beauty is not the goal of competitive sports...high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war." I think this is probably right, and that's why sport is the paradigmatic case of human excellence, rather than art, which already itself purports to be beautiful. The transcendence from craft to art is the necessary step, and it is to step into human excellence.

    In Music

I think musicians are particularly amenable to my view of human excellence. While music is primarily an art form, supposed to produce works of art, there is an ineliminable aspect of performance to it that is separable from its product. Or, as I have been calling it, craft. One can appreciate an artist that knows their instrument inside and out, without particularly even liking their music. In fact, you might think a musician's corpus does not even contain many truly great pieces of art while thinking that they are an agent of human excellence. I've already mentioned Miles Davis on the trumpet, and Coltrane on the saxophone who are technicians in their own right. Here are some other examples.

Listening to MF DOOM rhyme is otherworldly. At his most complex, he is running like three of four internal rhyme schemes between lines, and just when you think he couldn't possibly rhyme anymore, he does. He is a perfect example of human excellence in music because you can listen to his music in two ways. The first is to take his work in as a gestalt piece of art, great rhymes over great beats peppered with great skits (which is somewhat abnormal for rap), which is to appreciate DOOM as an artist delivering a product. The second is to listen to him as a rap technician, as appreciating his craft. This is the point that all belated fans come to when they search for his lyrics, try to pick out his rhymes, or just listen to the way his verses come together. You can't think anything else but that he is running circles around the English language, it is utterly inhuman the things he can string together. It is the same elegance, grace, and ease characteristic of everyone else mentioned thus far. You hear such things as:

Top bleeding, maybe fellow took the loaded rod gears

Stop feeding babies colored, sugar coated lard squares

Or

His life is like a folklore legend
Why you so stiff? You need to smoke more, bredrin
Instead of trying to riff with the broke war veteran
Spliff made him swore he saw heaven he was seven
Yup, you know it, growin' up too fast
Showin' up to class with Moet in a flask
He ask the teacher, if he leave, will he pass?
His girl is home alone, he tryin' to get the

In which, following a blistering set of rhymes, DOOM leaves it to the listener to finish the last one for him. However, the verse that most exemplifies DOOM's human excellence in this technical sense (rather than the artistic sense, which I think other songs do much better) is his song That's That. Here is the moment in DOOM's career where, like Bolt who finished his races jogging or celebrating just to prove that he could run circles around his competitors, DOOM indulges in some rhymes. A lot of rhymes. This song is not his best, but it is a victory lap, a symbol of the mastery he had over his craft. Take a look at this:

Already woke, spared a joke, barely spoke, rarely smoke
Stared at folks when properly provoked, mirror broke
Here, share strawberry mornin', gone an more important spawnin'
Torn in, poor men sworn in
Cornish hens switchin positions, auditionin' mortitions saw it in a vision, ignorin prison
Ignoramuses enlist and sound dumb
Found em drowned in cows dung, crowds flung
Rings a tinkerbell, sing for things that's frail as a fingernail
Bring a scale, stale ginger lingers
Seven figures invigor
Nigga, fresh from out the jail, alpha male
Sickest ninja injury this century, enter plea
Lend sympathy to limper Simple Simon rhyming emcees
Trees is free, please leave a key
These meager fleas, he's the breeze
And she's the bees knees for sheez
G's of G's
Seize property, shopper sprees, chop the cheese
Drop the bris to stop diseases, gee wiz pa!
Doom rock grandma like the kumbaya!

Trying to read over this does not even do the song justice, it must just be listened to. Great art, but craft great enough to be art itself. One of my favourite videos ever is of rapper Mos Def talking about how much he loves DOOM in the studio, belting out rhymes of his that he's memorised and pored over. One artist gushing, not primarily over the aesthetic quality of the product, but over the transcended aesthetic craft of another technician working in the same field as him. You can watch it here. You can also watch great videos that highlight the rhymes of his songs here.

Another example of human excellence in music is Zach Hill. He is perhaps most well known for being the drummer for Death Grips. And there he is, of course, fantastic. (A great rehearsal video of him drumming for them can be found here.) However, it is not what I would like to focus on here. Rather, I would like to talk about the two-piece math rock band Hella, featuring Hill on drums and Spencer Seim on guitar. (At least, they were a two-piece on their magnum opus Hold Your Horse Is.) Math rock is a genre of rock music that uses non-standard time signatures, strange rhythms, and mostly dissonant chords. At its most experimental it has ties to free jazz, such as with (a personal favourite) Storm and Stress or Don Caballero. Conversely, at its tamest, it is a pretty accurate descriptor of (or just an influence on) the midwest emo band American Football who also use abnormal time signatures and moody arpeggios. Somehow Hella manages a synthesis between the typical features of complex and incredibly precise math-rock alongside a furiously paced punk spirit and playstyle, with a dash of free jazz dissonance for good measure. 

Hella is pretty great, but not in the traditional sense in which great art is. They are great not (only) in the sense that they make great art and thus produce great aesthetic products. Rather, they make art that forces you to reckon with its craft more than with its sound. (I think the same thing is true for Don Cherry's great free jazz album Eternal Rhythm.)  Don't get me wrong, I love listening to Hella, but their sound is not something you come back to all the time. It is so clinical, complex, and intense all at once that I listen not so much to enjoy its sound but to shake my head in disbelief at the bizarre command these two guys have over their instruments. In other words, the music, before it sounds good (and it does sound good), demands that you appreciate the human excellence that goes into performing it. Watching this video will do more justice to them than I could ever do trying to explain it:

One of the commenters on the video puts it better than I could: "this video has been fucking me up for a decade." The sick thing is, this is not a one-time improvisation, they write it this way. Every last beat accounted for, and played again, every time they performed their songs. Once again it seems like the only explanation is that these people are fusing themselves with their tools. Here's another great video of them performing the same song (and another):

In David Foster Wallace's essay I mentioned earlier, he offers a (tongue-in-cheek) 'metaphysical' explanation for Roger Federer's peculiar ascendancy in tennis. "The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws...a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to." What this really is, is a 'kinesthetic sense.' This kinesthetic sense is an extremely tightly conditioned and deeply embedded set of rote abilities, produced by the concatenation of an ungodly number of hours spent moulding one's body to their domain of practice, and an ungodly amount of inbuilt talent, attuning one to their environment of craft. It seems to me that Zach Hill has something of this metaphysical advantage when you put him in front of a drum kit. The window to stay in time with the music for Hill persists slightly longer than it ought to, slightly longer than it does for anyone else. The primary aesthetic value of Hella comes from the purposely apparent craft, itself elevated to the level of art: human excellence. (I would remiss not to recommend at this point They Mean Us by The Ladies, another great Zach Hill joint.)

    In Poetry

As I noted earlier, the distinction between product and process in poetry does not seem so clear as it does in other domains, especially sports. However, I was able to draw out a sense in music in which we can make a distinction. That moment seems to be when the craftsman consistently and gracefully flexes their ability in some way made immediately apparent when you pay attention to them in the right way (and not merely their art). 

I think poetry is similarly amenable to this treatment because in reading poetry you often read (or at least I often read) many poems from the same author, where each piece individually contributes to the conception I have of that poet's work. Things like films, albums, or books stand alone quite easily as products in a way that individual poems do not hold up as well for me (though I have counterexamples for all of these domains). Instead, poets seem to posit a kind of lifeworld you are invited to share with them, which they inhabit and design. This lifts my appreciation out of the kind I would have for an individual film or album, and towards the kind of appreciation I have for a woodcarver or glassblower, each new poem filling out some of the details, and put up on display. That is, in reading enough poetry from the same person, you can pick out not only the great artfulness of the poet and their poems, but their great craft of worldbuilding within their corpus, too. It is those crafty 'isms' of your favourite poet. Human excellence will be reserved for poets that create spaces such as these where their craft becomes art. Here I advance an example.

William Carlos Williams is my favourite poet, and he is a technician of the image. When you read enough of his works, you notice he has this uncanny ability to produce a kind of 'turn' or 'revelation' at the end of his poems. It's hard to describe what I mean by this, but this turn whips the rest of the poem up into itself; perfectly tying its individual elements together into a composite image of experience. In these moments, not only do I feel a kind of awe at the product, because he ties it up so nicely, but also a kind of awe that says: "how does he keep getting away with it? How is he doing this, over and over again?" That is, I appreciate what he does, not merely for the product of his creation, but for the craft in which he can bring about this feeling with such ease and with such seemingly effortless grace. I'll try to give an example. The first is his poem Pastoral:

The little sparrows

Hop ingenuously

About the pavement

Quarreling

With sharp voices

Over those things

That interest them.

But we who are wiser

Shut ourselves in

On either hand

And no one knows

Whether we think good

Or evil.

                  Then again,

The old man who goes about

Gathering dog lime

Walks in the gutter

Without looking up

And his tread

Is more majestic than

That of the Episcopal minister

Approaching the pulpit

Of a Sunday.

                 These things

Astonish me beyond words

"These things astonish me beyond words" is a better description of my incredulity at reading such a wonderful flourish - how does he do it? So simple and confident, but so impossible if you were to try it yourself. David Foster Wallace's words echo once again: "he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces." See again, in his poem The Proletarian Portrait:

A big young bareheaded woman

in an apron

Her hair slicked back standing

on the street

One stockinged foot toeing

the sidewalk

Her shoe in her hand. Looking

intently into it

She pulls out the paper insole

to find the nail

That has been hurting her

Incredible stuff. What astonishes me beyond words is not only how good these lines are but how consistently and ably he is able to make this same move across his poetry. He does it again, notably, in The Sparrow, This is Just to Say, and The Rewaking.  It is not merely this or that product that is great. It is the constant reminder of his skill, in so few words, that his craft, itself, becomes art. Reading Williams is like watching Nadia Comaneci do gymnastics, so delicate and graceful, effortless and in control. But, impossible to replicate. This is once again, human excellence.

VI. It is worth a small excursion here to clarify my position on those agents of human excellence I have been discussing. It hopefully will have been noticed that I try to distance myself from any moralising about this excellence. What I mean by this is that I'm not so much interested, especially here, in the causes of how each person got to the point they did. That is, whether it was through hard work, inborn talent, or some other quality. In the case of Usain Bolt and sprinting, for example, I would not seriously believe some kitschy story about how 'sticking around for an extra 15 minutes after every training to help clean up' got him over the line in first place every time he raced. That's not how these things work. 

The reality is, especially in athletics, that he probably trained just as hard as everyone else who was consistently making those finals. They all had an ungodly amount of talent that got them there in the first place, but Bolt had just that little bit more. It was that bit more, almost entirely borne of luck (or less plausibly being lucky enough to be born being able to work harder than everyone else), that elevated him to the level of human excellence. Every single person that makes the Olympics is competing at the absolute limit of human ability, are at the leading edge of human athleticism, and inhabit the space at the very highest percentile of biological performance. How they got there does not much concern me, especially since these sports are so refined now that the stories told will basically always be the same: scouted at a young age, and worked like a horse.

Nor am I particularly interested in whether they deserve the praise they receive, specifically in anything like a substantive moral way. So often, and as always, we stand on the shoulders of giants. And so often it would not be possible to do what these people have done without their respective community's research and refinement efforts. In some sporting cases, all of the foundations had been laid in all technical aspects; the path to immortality already carved out in advance, ready for its messiah to show up and tread down it comfortably and without instrumental obstruction (as seemed to be the case with Napoleon and Europe, where I am in agreement with Tolstoy). In these cases, a wealth of communal knowledge through coaches, theorists, or past greats, had accumulated in such a way to be the conditions for the possibility of human excellence. Thus, in cases such as these, there is an at least partial, if not substantial erosion of the individual's responsibility for such excellence. What I am advocating is a kind of desert that is entirely aesthetic: instances of human excellence do deserve substantive aesthetic praise.

On the other hand, and this excursion is worth it if only to bring out this interesting subspecies of human excellence, sometimes it is the act of some individual cracking their domain wide open almost single-handedly and in spite of the unrefined meta existing at the time that constitutes human excellence. In these cases, you often look back and note that they are not as good as the modern players are now, but relative to their time they were doing things in all respects ahead of, and well above, the game. Examples like this seem to include the aforementioned Rodney Mullen or perhaps footballer Diego Maradona (I know nothing about football). And an outside, but worthy, pick, demonstrating the scope of this concept: this video, showing a Japanese speedrunner of PS2 game Ratchet and Clank. You see this all the time in art, where a trailblazer of some new style or form comes forth, only for it to be followed by hordes of imitators in the years to come (such as My Bloody Valentine's Loveless or Tarantino's Pulp Fiction).

Putting these questions aside, I have hopefully dispelled illusions of any artificially inflated veneration of Great Men. What I'm really interested in, and what this essay is ultimately a thinly veiled allusion to, is art. I am simply interested in works of art, and the way these people work on their craft is, I have been arguing, itself a work of art. The questions of cause, desert, and responsibility ultimately do not concern me. I am interested purely in the formal presentation of something beautiful. I am interested in an aesthetic product independent of the creator of that product, and independent of their capacity as a moral agent.

VII. As a closing note, I would like to make a remark about a peculiarity of this essay. I have linked to other pages and to youtube videos more than I ever have, and more than I likely ever will in an essay such as this. I usually prefer not to link or even refer to things external to the point being made at all, often even when about that thing. This is because then my point is reliant on other things and people being in place, rather than the collection of my thoughts. However, this time I am talking about others, and offshoring some of my work in this way provides some special utility. 

Every single video or page linked provides extra evidence for my points via the comment sections. Each and every one of these sections is the same: they are filled with countless hordes of people praising the athletes and artists as the technicians that they are (and not as pieces of art). They are filled with people, no matter what kind of activity the person is engaged in, praising the person in question as having a command over their craft that entails a kind of artfulness. Just look, and you will find my thesis everywhere. I am tapping into something universal that we all already know: that pushing the absolute limits of human craft is not merely hard work, perseverance, and good form, but the creation of something utterly novel and without prior expression, giving it a transcendent and often inhuman aesthetic quality. Part of the mystique around people like this is just this: that they create or actualise relations or patterns that were hitherto impossible, inconceivable, or hidden. Percy Bysshe Shelley said that the poet "marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension". Thus, we might even say that human excellence—is poetry.

Postscript

I leave this space for other instances of human excellence that I come across.

• Shakespeare: I have only just gotten into him (6/22) and think that he perfectly fits the bill. Sometimes I have no idea what his characters even mean to say, and I am still astonished by his use of, and mastery over, language.
• The temporal construction of Catch-22. How the hell(er) was this possible?
• Ronnie O'Sullivan playing snooker