eduardo galeano, mirrors, the world cup

it being world cup time it seems appropriate to be thinking that either i’m going to be reading something from each of the countries taking part (not quite as easy as it might first appear) or thinking along the lines of reading some sports literature.

so it’s easy to find myself reading eduardo galeano’s soccer in sun and shadow. It would be easy to describe this as a history of football except for the fact that it really isn’t. galeano himself says he isn’t a historian but is about the act of remembering. and this really is what this is about. and much more. i can’t help reading the intro to sun and shadow without thinking about the world of writing

The history of soccer is a sad voyage from duty to beauty. When the sport became an industry the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin-de-siecle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable. Nobody earns a thing from that crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing wiht a balloon, like a cat wiht a ball of yarn; a ballet dancers who romps with a ball as light as a balloon or a ball of yarn, playing wihtout even knowing he’s playing, wiht no purpose or clock or referee.

Play has become spectacle, with few protagonists and many spectators, soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not for play but rather to impede it. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.

from Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano (trans Mark Fried)

Luckily, on the field you can still see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the  forbidden adventure of freedom.

i read mirrors in the front room of my friend’s flat in oban. this is the same room in which i wrote oban wakening in stoneandsea and reading mirrors feels like something of the same process. it’s not history, it’s (very) not eurocentric, not quite journalism, not quite polemic. i read it out loud, kept doing so. listen to this, i would say or, if i was reading alone, would find myself laughing or making a note on some point or other that i would need to check later. reading galeano in a sun filled room in oban is like having an old friend right there in the room with you, opinionated, demanding, questioning at your certainties, (almost) always bringing a smile to your face.

so we get back to the world cup where in the first week, with the possible exception of the two koreas, it seems there’s being played an anti-football where the object is not to win so much as not to lose, something that may sound tautological but in fact embodies an entirely different philosophy. something that’s embodied in david foster wallace’s comment that beauty in sport occupies the same territory as courage in war.

now, in the second week, the goals are finally starting to come (despite the ball!), portugal hammer north korea 7-0 this evening. who can watch this without remembering the strange and wonderful odyssey of the north koreans in 1966, eusbio then and now as an old man in the stands. terry eagleton may get all curmudgeonly on the subject but he lacks either the erudition or the passion of galeano. galeano understands the game as cultural history in a way the ivory towered (in the kindest sense) eagleton cannot.

it seems to me there‘s not much difference between sport and writing (this week i’m thinking of the dreary shenanigans associated with the oxford professorship of poetry). different sports can be thought of as different genres and in the same way that sport becomes occupied by commercial interests, wearying nationalisms and prejudices, the dull hum of commentary, so does writing until it seems there nothing left of the activity in itself, that joy that lifts us up and out of the world just for an instant into that adventure of freedom.

i got asked only today what it’s like to write, to paint. like catching a wave i said, like losing all thought in the rhythm of the road bike, or the sinuous non-space of the mountain bike in the forest, the relentless grouping in an archery tournament, like the moment in team sports when everything clicks into place like the tumblers in a lock and everything, everything that has led to this moment makes, just for an instant, exact sense.

the best football i ever played? was in the street with my daughter. it was all about the ball control, head, chest knees, it was positively brazilian. do it again she said, do it again. i smiled. that was it, i said, that’s the best i’ve got. a moment of magic.

sport, like writing, exists in these moments.

*in the strange world of wordpress this post seems to have been published on 16/06. in fact it was posted on 21/06.

in the library

so, the sharper eyed may have noticed the ‘in the library’ page. if not, there’s a new ‘in the library’ page!

i’m not entirely sure why i’ve done such a thing, other than the mulling over a list of favourite books. i didn’t take much time over it, just browsed the shelves a bit. there was a line in a film i was watching recently about a collection reflecting the spiritual education of the collector. i think a favourite book list has to do this to some extent. certainly most people i know will make some sort of decision based upon the shelves or professed likes or dislikes of their compatriots. i wanted also to do something along the lines of giving some sort of reason as to why these books appear. not criticism. reflection maybe? i don’t know. anyway, manguel.

on my shelf the dictionary of imaginary places sits in between brewers dictionary of phrase and fable and the scots dialect dictionary. i think i bought all of these at the same time, which was somewhere at the start of my big dictionary buying odyssey. looking back now it seems apt. the place i was living in then seems entirely comprised of the imaginary, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. a hard dose of reality sorted that out but no such reality can touch the dictionary of imaginary places. i think i imagined that i’d read the entries out loud, maybe i even did from time to time. what it is not is calvino’s invisible cities but it’s not dissimilar. the country of the story is where one can always escape and the dictionary of imagined places is like one big door for that, there is a beginning on every page. which more or less is or should be the way of all dictionaries.

the notion of a big fat dictionary, heavy in the hand, old or new – (i have some number of old dictionaries!) is one that informs manguel’s the libraries of night. it is true that an electronic database has its (very convenient) function but to pretend that the two forms are congruent is a pretense indeed. not quite a dictionary but near enough, the oldest book i ever held in my (white gloved) hands was an old herbal some five or six hundred years old. i could still read some latin then and the electricity i felt at being able to read it to my colleagues was like that sophocles fragment from the love of achilles – love is like ice in the hands of children.

my place for being intertextual is on my front step. it’s the only place i’m really comfortable reading manguel. ideally i can make it through a chapter or two before drifting off then finding myself dozing and sunburnt. i have a swathe of flowering chives in front of me. they are mesmeric as dandelions but in their violet, more beautiful. i miss the bees this year. like the bats, the recent winter hasn’t treated them kindly. i’d love to tell you what they were but my categorisation of bees depends on size and the colour of their backsides. often the sight of the females, busy in the blooms, legs heavy with pollen will be the last thing i see as my eyelids become heavy.

the notion of an observer creeps into manguel in the form of benjamin delessert’s proposal for a library that radiated out in spokes from a central area where the librarian could watch the browsers. it puts me in mind of the panopticon and the notion of a place that is both a prison and a library that needs furthwer exploration and in turn reminds me of a library in glasgow, the university library maybe (?) that seems reminiscent.

i could go on and on but the sunshine and the step are calling. why libraries? i discovered this week that i could no longer speak french. it was like looking for a book, knowing exactly where it should be, but finding only an empty space. of course i could pick it up again but it would be a different edition, that other book permanently vanished, turned into as manguel puts it, into ‘illiterate ash’.