Brother Sport

Fellow me lads:

I'm going to follow Italian/New Mexican basketball genius Mike D'antoni's Seven Seconds or Less rule on this one, which paraphrased, runs something like: "Don't look at the coach or spend too much time dribbling or worrying about whether you're getting the play right: you're a basketball player, make something happen," and which led to a series of 50+ win seasons for the immortal Phoenix Suns. Part of the fun of explicitly inviting your instinct to enter the conversation is that it allows for creativity, explosion, and multiple-assist games; part of the danger is that you'll be cold and end up looking like an idiot. But then that's the genius of this forum, this endless Kerouac(k)ian "page", which I have already started to imagine as a poorly-painted but deeply-loved stretch of blacktop, a sort of high-low-tech agora/parking-lot/used book store.

In 1928, the French poet/badminton enthusiast Paul Valery published an article entitled "The Future of Literature: Will it Be a Sport?" I am fascinated by this idea, but hate it too - for in my own mind literature and sport have been distinct and unfriendly fields for some time now. Have had to be, actually. As an alternately tubby and rail-thin kid, with "girl-sized" hands and limbs that, even on a good day, seemed to exist in a dimension that was exactly two inches to the left of the one that the other kids were playing in, it was important for me to pick my battles. In basketball, this meant defense (I have tremendous, ape-like arms and the older-brother's natural ability to frustrate); in volleyball, set-up (I liked the satisfying "bump" the ball made hitting my forearm); in swimming, distance. For eight years, through middle and high school, I cobbled together mile after theoretically-swum mile, persisting past the endurance of my peers, encased all the while in a thin but surprisingly invulnerable shield of hunger, sweat and self-punishment. It was grueling work and I threw up often. But I never had to pick my head up and watch my pass or shot sail wide of its target.

Although I think my career as a sportsman taught me valuable lessons about pain, cruelty, endurance and, most of all, failure, I remain deeply ambivalent it. I'll say it again: I never passed to anyone; a lack of bravery that I believe kept me for years from the swirling, dangerous, borderline-ecstatic activity of the other kids around me, and which has left, these many years later, an assist-sized hole in my heart. I mean, sure, endurance running is a sport (it's MY sport, in many ways - or at least the only one I practice regularly). But isn't there another aspect of all physical activity, be it eating (talking to you, Seth), Hockey (Tom-po-po), Squash (Mr. Tilney) that thrives off co-operation and play? Isn't there something you can do where you're not looking at your watch every five minutes, or strategically placing your towel over the treadmill screen so that you don't have to stare at the time ticking off second after agonizing second?

(Apologies here to runners, of which number I am one, for the simplification and demonization here. Certainly running, or any individual sport can mean as much to a writer as croquet, for example: the question I want to ask is not if, but HOW?)

My friends, if you'll allow a brief and perhaps slightly-showy alley-oop in this, the first few minutes of a conversation that I hope will go into multiple overtimes: ambition is one thing, seriousness is one thing, mastery is one thing, but there is a huge aspect of any creative activity that is not just physical but deeply, deeply bodied, and therefore much more a matter of superstition, nerve and joy than it is anything else. Acmeist point guard Osip Mandelstam said that one thing the poet could not live without was a sense of his own "poetic rightness" - and although this may sound simplistic to you, I think it's important to understand the quality he's describing as the same one that allows Dwyane Wade to contort his way to the basket, or Roger Federer to slice that forehand, or Wayne Gretzky to *insert impressive hockey accomplishment here.* In other words - and without minimizing the vital and beautiful work of the conscious, tunneling, exploring MIND - there is a point at which something bigger than you takes over in the best writing, and suddenly you are a ruby-eyed tarantula of language feeling the slightest tremor and moving without hesitation. Is this something that happens to you alone? Or is it something that makes you think more interestingly about where exactly "you" end, and the world begins?

So much literature assumes an image of its project and purpose that I wonder if we don't need, ESPECIALLY at this wide-open point in our lives and the lives of our art, to start re-evaluating what it is we're even doing here - not in the sense of dramatic and weighty plodding, but the way a fern tendril would investigate the shit out of the bars of available sunlight in a dark and moldy room. When you write, what do you do? What do you want to do? And in what ways are your ideas of what other people want you to do - what is expected of you, in other words - helpful or, inversely, as stupid and constricting as the decision that caused a natural 14-year-old who up to that point had excelled at that most elegant, dance-like, strategical and yet painfully slow of strokes, the breaststroke, to tell his new coach that actually, he wanted to switch. Distance freestyle was the event to win, and no amount of raised eyebrows would convince him otherwise. As someone who even now has at least a little insight into that 14 year old's mind, I can tell you that he didn't make his decision capriciously. No: that boy wanted to be absolved. He wanted, in other words, to hurt.

The Old Lady Pipes Up

Hey Everyone,

First off, glad to be up and started on this.

Second, I'm such a novice that it took me about ten minutes to figure out how to create a new post, and I only read the comments two seconds ago. But the perfect is the enemy of the done, right?

But so anyway. Seth, your post got me thinking better about some things that have been milling around in my head. I’ve been reading As I Lay Dying lately, very slowly, and it’s my first Faulkner (I know, slap my wrist with a ruler). I agree that there’s something exhilerating about the mess and the fog, and then passages like this one come out:

“When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal.

“And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get back up and go to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could maybe see a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older.”

Holy shit. I’m sure a good thesis could be written about the water bucket serving as a portal for Darl’s perception to attain a celestial narrative outlook, or something, but I just feel the world up to my gums when he says, ‘Water should never be drunk from metal.’ That’s true—metal cups set your teeth on edge.

Frankly, all the stuff about transporting matriarchs across rivers and having logs rise like Jesus Christ out of the water and smashing wagons and boys burning down barns is great, but give me passages like the above and I am thrilled to the soles of my feet, and also sustained in an important way. This writing is so good but purposefully small, I think.

So I haven’t read All the Sad Young Literary Men, but I know what you mean about flawless frigid writing. It doesn’t make you want to sing your own song, it makes you want to have every clause airtight so no one can criticize your erudition or technique or whatever. And I don’t know whether Gessen is a victim of his own critique or explodes the idea of adversarial (hoo, hah, phew, he’s exhausted me already).

But I want to say that the remedy doesn’t have to be the big smoking crashing (baggy) monsters, but just RISK, no matter where it comes from.

No question, I’m a crashing monster fan. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamozov, Iliad, Infinite Jest; sign me up and call me an ostentatious goober. But these days I need books to help me against blandness and oblivion, and so short, risky, intensely felt stuff feels very important to me.

I know everyone’s tired of the name, but I’m putting Chekhov up there, and Marilynne Robinson, John Cheever, Wells Tower, Amy Hempel, Nicholson Baker, and (insert your favorite lyrical poet’s name here).

This work calls out, ‘pay attention to the details as though your life depends on it, because it does.’ Reading this intensely meditative stuff sharpens up your eyes in a world that gets dangerously bland when your eyes get dull. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about our epic talk in the Saturn, but I know it had something to do with sensing things as keenly as possible.

And then making this kind of work, getting down into the grain of the words and shaving them into shape, creating people out of ladders of molecules, that’s a big deal. And it doesn’t have to be long or messy to get over the walls that separate people’s minds, it just has to be strange.

We can have quiet conversations at dinner parties instead of sword fighting in the streets of Saint Petersburg and still be engaged in the most important and riskiest of tasks. Writing about drinking from a cedar bucket is a big risk. I don’t know if I would take it.

And now it seems like my next book should be some Bolaño. I need some insides turned out, I think.