Letter Eight | 11/27 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
I love the phrase from the Guardian piece you shared, “ambled vaguely,” because in context it’s obviously not at all a compliment, but in other some other situations—well, one particular situation that I have in mind—the ability to able vaguely is evidence of a kind of genius. I mean Messi, unsurprisingly, whose speed of play, especially as he’s gotten older, is famously slow. Messi plays precisely at an ambulatory pace. Hence the observation, shared again and again online, that Messi spends the first five or ten minutes of a match walking around, figuring out space, getting a sense of the defensive shape—a perambulatory version of Thomas Muller’s Raumdeuter sixth sense. This piece from Lit Hub, of all places, is pretty good on Messi’s walking—maybe no surprise because it’s from Simon Kuper, he of Soccernomics notoriety. And just a few days ago Laura Williamson opened her piece on Messi for The Athletic like this: “His general operating pace is so slow that the fleeting injections of urgency make those decisive moments even more spectacular. Walk, walk, walk, look left, look right, walk, walk, walk, jog… bang. Find the space and then exploit it.”
This is exactly what Messi did in Argentina’s 2-0 win over Mexico. After sixty minutes of just dire soccer—simulation, inelegant roughness, sluggish attack, a general malaise—Messi took possession of the ball at the top of Mexico’s box without, somehow, a defender within five yards. And then he rolled the ball into the corner of the net: exactly in the corner of the net, and without any more pace on the ball than was absolutely necessary to get it beyond Ochoa’s glove. It was casual, seemingly effortless, almost preordained.
Here’s a take for you: Messi’s a gimmick, a gimmicky player. But I mean this as a term of approbation! Is it time for some more literary theory? It is. It is time for more literary theory. In her book Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai—to vastly reduce a complex and intricate argument—ties our feelings about gimmicks in works of art to our feelings about labor and value. It’s because gimmicks feel like shortcuts, in the same way that cliches or sentimental tropes make claims on pathos without, as we say, earning it, that we dislike them—we feel cheated, like we came to this work of art to experience the result of an artist’s long, laborious work, but what we got instead was something easier and cheaper—as if we ordered our art from Wish. (Of course, the notion that art must be the product of protracted, agonizing labor is itself an ideological construction, and it’s pretty clearly related to the favorite phrase of the Worst Guy You Know: How is that art? I could do that. The implication being that artists ought to possess and perform not only genius but tireless work.)
As I laid out in an earlier letter, I have such affinity for players who work hard, whose primarily contribution to the team’s play is fitness and ground covered—the so-called engine-room players. And one way some fans distinguish Messi and Ronaldo, their personal forms of excellence, is along similar lines: Ronaldo is sculpted, machinelike, efficient, relentless—whereas Messi is elegant, aesthetic, unconscious, natural. Like all binary constructions, this one is reductive, but there is some truth in the observation that so much of Messi’s appeal is his apparent effortlessness, his ability to turn a physical sport that demands world-class levels of cardiovascular fitness into something like painting—his ability, in other words, to make the question of the sport not how much can my body handle? but instead what, right now, would be the perfect thing? Flaubert, it’s said, was obsessed with the mot juste, the word that fit a situation exactly. Messi we could call an artist of the mot effet, the perfect action or effect. (I don’t speak French, so please don’t come for me, Francophiles—come for Google translate and the American public school system.) And this is so attractive in part because it fits well into our other dominant cultural narrative about artists: that they’re inhuman cosmic geniuses whose experience of the world sits literally on a different plane.
But there’s also something utopian in Messi’s lack of labor. In fact it’s precisely his lack of labor, his ability to embody, to perform and invoke, a kind of laborless play. Too much is made in popular culture, I think of Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of the flow state, which does identify a real phenomenological experience but which is too often invoked to describe any situation of changed time or mindlessness. In this case, though, maybe there’s something to it, because the sense of being-out-of-time is one thing that, to me, marks the difference between labor and play. Of course there are economic and political differences that, in the grand scheme, are more important. But work doesn’t feel like play, nor play like work, what Messi points to just by walking around the field is the possibility of rigorous, robust, aesthetically gorgeous play that has only the lightest, most tenuous attachment to the exhausting kind of labor we often turn to sports and other kinds of art to escape. That is, Messi suggests what’s possible on the outer edge of things, much in the same way that any really visionary art does, art that exists on the very limit of what the form considers possible. That is, a new way of being, in this case a kind of absolute play, a play of pure immanence, of a relationship to space not captured by phrases like covering ground or tearing across the grass but instead words like floating, spanning, and wandering. To wander when everyone else is running is maybe to find what Michel de Certeau calls a “tactic” of soccer, an everyday method or approach that falls outside the purview of “official” and dominant “strategies.” Of course, one has to be Messi to actually do this, to achieve the realization of the possibility. But we can still move in the direction he points, however slowly.
My letter, too, will be short today—I’m on deadline for a couple of other writing projects. But it’s worth thinking about whether writing is another activity, another space, where this kind of thing is possible. Writing doesn’t always feel labored to me, although it does always feel like labor. Finding a way to split labor from laboriousness—again, not politically, not in its definition re: wages and alienation, but in texture and feeling.
This just in: Germany draws with Spain 1-1 and so is still alive. A great goal from Füllkrug, the possessor of a great story: in the second division last year, now leading the Bundesliga in goals.
Talk soon!
All my best,
Ryan