The best instrumental surf music conveys more and delivers it deeper than vocal surf music. Vocal surf music is often obvious and trite. Great surf instrumentals have one monolithic ally, the sea. The sea is so wide and deep and long that it determines our weather. Words are trivialized by the sea's vastness.
We are drawn to the sea like moths to the flame. Why? Our bodies are 97% salt water so there is some level of identification. But there is more. The sea is mother and the sea is death. The sea is our subconscious, the great collective "I" where identities and realities flow through and around each other, yielding at every crux but collectively unstoppable. By moonlight the sea speaks to us through the relentless thrust and retraction of its fluid flesh.
Just behind the wavery crest of the next wave, a flash of light trails a wavering path back to the moon, who oversees the operation of the seas and makes imperceptible adjustments with unseen levers, generating a mountain of water or a surface of glass.
Beneath the dappled and predictably irregular surface of the sea lie atmospheres as large as our airy own, but with gently forgving gravity. You can't fall in water, you just go in another direction. Neither a feather nor a cannonball falls straight down in a watery environment because each is carried within the blunt fingers of the currents, the sea's atmospheres.
The sea's fluid fingers reach out to their greatest extention and flirt with the stalwart land. Though the sea's caress is winsome, poignant and lulling like the poppy sleep in The Wizard of Oz, we cannot obey our love because we cannot ventilate our sodden bodies with more water, only with air. We can never become all water.
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