Letter Twenty-four | 12/13 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
Was the Argentina/Croatia match an anticlimax? This project is—for me, at least, shockingly—approaching its end. Just two matches left: tomorrow’s semifinal, and then what will surely, surely be an Argentina/France final (although if Morocco pull out a victory this World Cup will suddenly, speaking here strictly about the on-pitch developments, offer a kind of narrative drama I’ve never seen before in world soccer, except maybe, maybe when Leicester won the Premier League—but even then, this is a different order of magnitude).
The last three weeks have zipped by. I’ve been on strike the whole time, and so there’s been organizing work to do, and also a couple of writing projects to finish—one big dense scary deadline and a bunch of little orbiting responsibilities. But those are done. The strike goes on, but the energy has drifted into the cold wind of winter break (not to mention the internal politics, which absorb energy the way concrete resists an electric charge). My mornings have been slow, sluggish: coffee, email, and then the Cup. I’ve only watched two or three matches anywhere but my living room or my desk. While there have been moments of brilliance, little events like jewels, the Cup proper has been a pleasant background hum. For all the political complexity, the violence folded into the Cup like butter into laminated dough, the matches themselves have slid away. Do you feel this? It’s been hugely pleasant, like sitting on a train and letting whatever’s outside proceed past you, the pleasure rooted in the blur. But also: the blur.
Some people say we begin to hold things less tightly as we age, that our attachments take on different shapes, arrange themselves in different ways. In one sense I think this is true, or has been for me: my emotional peaks and valleys have flattened. Maybe part of this is age, maybe part of this is some kind of weird manifestation of self-consciousness, the way an object is irrevocably changed when we learn how to name it, or what its possible functions are. Being eighteen or nineteen and navigating an emotional topography without a map—feeling things without understanding why—adds a kind of terror, an uncanny disorientation, to the first-order feeling. But then, a decade on, being able to name things, to say, oh, yes, I have a diagnosable illness, I walk around with sets of three letters, GAD, OCD—look, I am just as suspicious of contemporary mental healthcare as anyone (including our novelists! There’s a healthy suspicion of talk therapy in David Foster Wallace, in Rooney, in Hanya Yanagihara.). But there is, within that suspicion, a kind of reassurance in the firmness of objects. A problematic answer is better (in one sense) than the answerless wilderness.
But at the same time some of my attachments have only sharpened. Or, if they have flattened, taken on new spatial distributions, then these changes don’t constitute a weakening but merely a change—as if the perimeter of the object is the style of attachment and the area of the object is its intensity. I’ve had preferences during this Cup: I wanted to see the US, Korea, Germany, Japan proceed. But never did I feel precarious in the way I once did, say, tracking a Cardinals game inning-by-inning in high school, over automated text messages because this was a time before smartphones, or now watching Arsenal. In fact, Arsenal are a good example: the men’s team causes me more anxiety, but the women’s team offers me more joy. Similar intensities, but distributed in incongruous ways.
Maybe this comes to mind because we see Messi in his twilight, we’re watching a crepuscular hero, and age registers differently in particular contexts. Messi’s in his late thirties and grizzled; I’m just barely in my late twenties still and in certain ways very young and other ways very old. There’s a line in a Zadie Smith essay: “I find myself radically discontinuous with myself.” I’ve changed; the political context of this Cup absolutely bears on my experience of the matches, which speaks in part to the fact that my own political commitments have changed and that my political commitments as a category, as a type of commitment, occupy a different and more important position in the constellation of my identity. And, concomitantly, the way I enjoy sports has changed, too—I no longer need a strong personal investment. As my attachment to soccer has grown, my disinterest in the literal sense has grown, too: I’ve moved towards a kind of almost Kantian position of aesthetic reflection, an ability to look at the game (not always, but sometimes) formally, immanently. Maybe this sounds paradoxical, even dialectical, to say that soccer is both more political and more, like, autotelically structural. Maybe this is what it means to write about what something means while the meaning of that something is in motion (which, of course, is always).
Does this make sense? I’m trying to write around a feeling, a slight slippage, not a transparency but a translucency, a little buzz around the edges of the thing. Whatever the nature of the change in my attachment to the Cup this time around, it’s linked to all these other changes, too, changes that only become legible when viewed at scale—the scale that a quadrennial event like the World Cup, or this writing project, generates.
This Cup stands in strange relation to the last Cup; I stand in strange relation to myself at twenty-five, four years ago. I feel differently in every sense of both (all three?) of those words. I haven’t lost interest; my interest has metamorphosed. I’m not old, but I am older. It’s not a slipping away but an unspooling.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing you and everyone else in person. There lie attachments that, yes, have changed, but in excellent and noble ways.
Talk soon!
Ryan