Letter Six | 11/25 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
The US/England match has just ended, and I’m sitting down to write with the huge satisfaction offered by a 0-0 draw that felt as exciting as any barnburner. If there’s any better evidence for the fact that scoring, or even something as poorly defined as “excitement,” isn’t the same thing as quality or appeal of sports, I haven’t found it yet. There’s nothing like a really good nil-nil.
I’m not unfamiliar with your feelings about the state of mainstream American cinema, but I think you’re right to point out again the way nostalgia operates as a kind of formal and emotional readymade—a shortcut, like stock footage. I think sometimes when there’s Online Discourse about nostalgia and the slew of reboots and revisitations pumped out by Hollywood and Netflix alike (have we collectively decided on the locative noun for streaming services? Hollywood is to the film industry as what is to streaming?) folks confuse nostalgia for history—as if any attempt at historical fiction or the reanimation of an archetype or story or (god) intellectual property counts as nostalgia. But I think we should also keep in mind that nostalgia is a certain orientation towards history. As you say, nostalgia “feeds into the conservative ideology that traditional values and a return to former glory are the answers to societal decay.” And what’s more, it also invents the past even as it appeals to it as a solid, collectively accessible object. Nostalgia doesn’t only frame and shade the past—it creates a certain past for certain purposes. This is the really tricky thing about nostalgia for me: it’s actually obsessed with the future, it’s a project of creating the future, by way of manifesting a past. It’s like alternate history generating itself in real time; it shunts us off into a parallel spacetime. Conservatism is also always utopian, in its own way, even though it disavows its own futurity in pretty insidious ways.
So the question becomes how we can interact with history in politically (and aesthetically!) useful and interesting ways. Chris Bachelder’s novel U.S.! does this, I think, in the way it carries forward the literary-political work it associates with Upton Sinclair by literally translocating Sinclair to the present day. Of course, some critics would say that we can only ever approach history ideologically, with the baggage of our moment and its own political-cultural contradictions. And maybe that’s true, but the goal isn’t to strip away ourselves until only HISTORY as such remains. It’s to recognize that, in a Heisenbergian way, we rearrange and reshape history whenever we dredge it up, and so we can exert at least a little control over what kind of history we want to handle, and towards what ends.
This is true in the context of soccer, too. What parts of the sport and our particular allegiances do we carry forward? There are all kinds of stories we can tell, and in our cases, because we are relatively young and came of age in a context of globalization, of sportwashing and Branding™, our stories were never going to be unadulterated or “authentic,” a word I despise. My attachment to Arsenal began, yes, with you and Nate in familiar adolescent ways, but it also began with FIFA, the videogame, the marketed object produced even then I’m sure under conditions of exploitative crunch. On one hand, what could be more postmodern, more mediated, more despicable, than an attachment to a club that began with an ersatz electronic simulation? I didn’t grow up in North London; I didn’t watch Arsenal in the days of Liam Brady or Ian Wright or Rocky Rocastle or even Henry and Bergkamp. On the other hand, does the displacement of authenticity as the vouchsafing of proper, worthwhile attachment mark a good thing, the end of the Benjaminian aura of locality? It doesn’t feel any different to me, watching Arsenal play, because I began with a virtual goal scored by Robin van Persie rather than a day at Highbury of the kind Nick Hornby describes in Fever Pitch. But, of course, there’s no way I could know—I have nothing, no alternative to compare it to. And we do, after all, feel something like the loss of (or a nostalgia for!) local authenticity when we see the Timbers explode into mainstream relevance, when sitting in the Timbers Army no longer feels like a subculture but instead, like a Blazers game or college football Saturday, something for bros to do while they drink. I don’t know.
A different kind of negative nostalgia appears for me sometimes when I think about my history playing the sport. Here I really want to address the very good questions you asked me in the last letter. What I mean by negative nostalgia is the complex feeling of longing and regret when I think about, for example, the first couple of seasons I played with you and Nate and everyone else on Bad Lads. When I first joined, I’d been playing soccer for five or six years—four spent in casual weekly games as an undergrad, and then two more during my MA when I played three or four times a week. I was still so raw, as they say: underdeveloped technically and tactically, and already cognizant of concrete ceiling on my ability that forms whenever you don’t play a particular sport growing up. You can improve, but you can’t ever really make up for lost time. The liquidity that’s possible when you grow into your body and your mind, and also into the sport, at the same time—its window is small and unidirectional.
And so looking back on that time now, there’re two competing but coeval feelings. I remember the literal act of playing with y’all so fondly, and I recognize too that I couldn’t be even the player I am now—which is to say, still a player of severe limitations—without that experience. At the same time, I think about how I played then (in a literal sense, the style and rhythm and ergonomics of it) with something like shame, the complex kind of shame that isn’t regret, really, but a recognition of the strange, alien distance between who you were and who you are. It’s hard not to ask, what could I do then if I were the person I am now? But of course this is a nonsensical question, paradoxical, without real meaning—but that’s in part why it’s also a question with so much appeal.
The internet loves to talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the pop-psych concept whereby someone really ignorant of a skill or topic might be too ignorant to realize how ignorant they are. I think when I first began playing on Bad Lads with you all, on a team for the first time, I was just crossing that threshold, just learning to limn my own limitations. I was thrilled to blend in, to look like I belonged—I went out to play fullback with the idea that, out of possession, I would defend by running, and in possession I would spend as little time as possible with the ball. I made it a kind of joke, my limitations, sometimes by literalizing them, by pointing out that when I had the ball I pretty much just ran the touchline, vertical up and downs. But of course also I loved the sport, and loved playing with you all, and also so much of my identity had become wrapped up in it—I had already become a diehard, the kind of fan who would stream a second-division Bundesliga match in the morning if nothing else was on—that it felt embarrassing if I made a mistake, because it feels embarrassing when your passion for something and your ability to do it are misaligned, asymmetrical.
This is the negative nostalgia I’m trying to describe: not negative in the sense of detriment or injury, but negative in the sense of negation, of complex paradox, of Keats’s negative capability, the juxtaposition of two antipodal positions or feelings or concepts in your mind at once. It feels like my relationship to playing is still significantly self-contradictory: I play so much these days, four or five or six times a week, and although I feel tackles and collisions in ways I once did not, I’m still mobile. I think, really, I’m probably in the best shape of my life. And something has changed for me, playing. Moving from fullback into the midfield for Bad Lads, as insignificant as that seems in pretty much any context bigger than my own head, felt like an affirmation for me. I can, at the men’s-recreational level here in the Bay, control the ball and turn and play a pass and occasionally wriggle out of tight spaces. I can still run the channels. I take corners and free kicks now.
But I know two things. One, I’m twenty-nine, and even though I’ve bought myself a few more years, things have to peak and decline eventually, and probably soon. Two, I still feel that emotional tug, tied somewhere deep inside me at the convergence of my attachment to the sport and my self-identity and the particular matrix of hopes and anxieties I’ve cultivated over my life, that reminds me that my mood is still often significantly dependent on how I play. I’m not sure if I’ll ever have a casual relationship with soccer, with playing the game. I am, for better and worse, someone who forms strong and intense attachments, and it’s very easy for me to mingle my sense of self with external objects and activities. Part of really getting older, I think, isn’t the blunting or erasing of these intensities—it’s recognizing these intensities as somehow intrinsic to me, occasionally sharp or painful but also useful and important as the form and material of the relationships I form with the world and the people in it.
And so—maybe it’s silly, even slightly sad, to be twenty-nine and feel a little dim glow of joy when, for example, I have to miss a game and teammates say, well, that’s not good, we need you. But recognizing your own silliness is probably a decent and healthy thing to do, and it could be worse.
I could’ve purchased Twitter.
Looking forward to talking about the USA game. I hope you’re enjoying East London!
All my best,
Ryan