Letter Sixteen | 12/5 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

I cannot recall a beautiful goal scored by the USMNT at the World Cup, which is an embarrassment. I mean that descriptively; another term beloved by online discourse, embarrassment is an aesthetic judgment disguised as a moral judgment. I saw it today, scrolling doomedly through Twitter after the Japan/Croatia match, which ended heartbreakingly with a Croatian victory in penalties. At least two, and maybe all three, of the saved Japanese penalties were relatively tame, especially Minamino’s, the first, which he shunted to the keeper’s left as if he’d seen the keeper leaning right—or maybe he was just gambling.

Regardless, the takes rolled in hot like diner flapjacks. Minamino should be embarrassed! The Japanese side should be embarrassed! Any professional should be embarrassed to lose their nerve like that!

So obviously these takes are bad. Becoming a professional doesn’t mean ceasing to be human, and if it did, professional sports would no longer be sports. And, as I suggested in my last letter, we—sports people—are so, so bad at accounting for luck. Maybe our hesitation in confronting luck as an aesthetic and narrative principle of sports reflects our general dislike for luck, fate, uncertainty. In the US especially, perhaps, where luck cannot be reconciled with the meritocratic Calvinism that is our cultural and political metanarrative—you get what you deserve.

But what I mean about embarrassment being an aesthetic judgment packaged in a moral judgment is that the term usually arrives when someone has made a certain category of error: when a player hasn’t shown sufficient effort, or failed not to pull off the spectacular but the routine, or (especially!) erred while under especial pressure. These kind of failures we attribute to a personal, interior problem or lack—as if the failure, the embarrassment, is a manifestation of some basic way the person ins, their moral orientation or makeup. In an Aristotelian sense, their character. And while in the case of effort maybe this is occasionally true (there are players who have slow days, and players who refuse to do the hard work out of arrogance or spite, although even here I’m assuming I can read their intentions, their deep personalities), usually it is not. Missing a penalty or a sitter is not a moral failure. A goalkeeping blunder is not a moral failure. These are aesthetic failures—failures to assist in bringing about the narrative and spectacle and choreography the way one is expected to. And, absolutely crucially, aesthetic failures are part of aesthetic structures generally.

To call these failures embarrassments, though, suggests that these players ought to feel shame, which is a strange and noteworthy affect. According to the theorists Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, themselves drawing on the work of Sylvan Tompkins, shame is weirdly double-directional: shame is both an interior feeling (everyone is looking at me! my stomach is turning!) and a social feeling (shame cannot happen without the thought of other people; a solipsist is incapable of shame). To me, this suggests that shame sits right at the intersection of our attachments to the world and our interior feelings of inadequacy. Shame is an oscillator; it pivots between what we do and what we love, on one hand, and our anxieties and self-consciousness, on the other.

So here’s the big reveal: I think these failures are embarrassments, in a certain way. They’re embarrassments insofar as they, by returning us to feelings of shame (which, again, aren’t exactly “negative” but something more complicated) remind us of the negativity, the thanatotic, the anxiety that spins around inside anything we do, but especially what we most love. Any attachment of love is always an attachment of vulnerability. Any projection of sincerity is always a wobbly bridge. Any declaration—this is who I am, and this is what I stand for—always invites critique, or worse, patronization (oh, how nice for you).

I feel this embarrassment acutely. As you mention in your last letter, I am a person of strong attachments and (as much as I try to deny it) strong opinions. Because of something, my childhood or my academic arc or my psychospiritual orientation, I am thoroughgoingly sincere. I can be ironic, droll, cutting, all these things, yes—but deep down (even though I do not believe we have deep downs) I am a yes-and man.

What this means is that, when I took to soccer ten years ago after an adolescence spent playing baseball and American football, obsessively, I developed a congruently obsessive attachment to soccer. I love it, and I tend to be a maximalist about these sorts of things—and so I watch matches, I collect shirts, and I play (these days five or six times weekly).

And this is where the embarrassment comes in. I have worked very hard, although work is an inaccurate term in several ways, to become, I think, a useful player. But I will never have the technique or access to the sport’s unconscious that folks who grew up playing do, and here’s the embarrassing rub: it’s a particularly serrated, toothed embarrassment, an unusually nauseating shame, to feel like you’re performing badly at something you care very much about. To try something new, or to do something you possess no real interest in, and do badly—this isn’t just comprehensible, it’s expected, it’s sort of right. But to care about something so much, and then to show the world, or at least the people just around you, that your passion and your ability are misaligned—this feels like a laying-bare of yourself. It feels, indeed, almost like a moral failure, like it reveals something about the arrangement of yourself.

There are other things that complicate this—the hedonic treadmill, for example, by which playing performances that once would’ve been triumphs become failures, as you gain experience and improve. But the real point is that embarrassment and its sister shame illuminate the complexity of all our attachments: the emotional blender spinning always inside them. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Not all negativity is negative. But—and I’m not sure if this is true for you—sometimes my own little emotional engine boils over, and something unhealthy is produced. (Perhaps this is how academics reveal they take things too seriously, which I guess is sort of our jobs?)

In any case, this is what I hope for myself and for The Discourse generally: to be vulnerable but not self-cruel, to hold strong and serious attachments without confusing my attachments with my identity, to feel shame as what connects me to the world rather than something that severs me from it.

A rather reflexive letter, this one. I’ll talk about something outside my little tight affective bubble next time.

Poor Korea! Gone too soon to the beautiful Brazilian steamroller.

Your term is nearly complete—well wishes for the concluding chaos.

All my best,

Ryan