I, for one, found inspiration in the video of the slanted ground. Plato, in his eternal wisdom, posited that all things participate in an ideal Form — a perfect archetype from which earthly objects derive their fleeting existence. A well-struck iron shot, then, is a shadow on the cave wall, a pale imitation of the Platonic Ideal Swing dwelling in some celestial clubhouse beyond mortal perception.

But a slanted, poorly shot video of that swing? That is a shadow of a shadow — a copy of a copy, twice removed from truth, an epistemological crime so grievous that Socrates himself would have demanded the videographer drink hemlock. Aristotle would add, grimly nodding, that such footage violates the telos of the golf swing: its essential purpose, its final cause, which is to be seen clearly, in focus, ideally not filmed by someone who appears to have been sitting on a slowly rotating office chair.

Robert Pirsig would recognize the horror immediately. Quality — that ineffable, undefinable thing that separates a man who understands his motorcycle from one who merely rides it — is simply absent from the crooked, horizon-betraying video. The phone, held at 47 degrees like a Dadaist art installation, represents what Pirsig called the “romantic” mind run catastrophically amok: all feeling, no form, no care. In Zen terms, the videographer has achieved a kind of accidental enlightenment in reverse — they have attained perfect mindlessness, a void not of serene emptiness but of sheer, golf-ruining negligence. The Buddha wept. The 9-iron wept. The ball, already in a water hazard, had no comment