RSSby Tom McCarthy
At the Still Point… orig pub in Contemporary Magazine, London, 2004
In When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s magnificent 1996 documentary about the great Ali-Foreman boxing match of 1974, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, Mohammed Ali at one point tackles the question of the speed at which he operates. ‘They have cameras,’ he tells us, ‘that can break a second down into one hundred parts. For me, each of those parts is like a second.’ By the twentieth part he’s read his opponent’s move; by the fortieth he’s decided on his counter-move; by the sixtieth he’s ducked, feinted, jabbed and lunged; he still has forty parts left to contemplate the whole thing at his leisure: forty Ali-seconds, lodged within four tenths of one opponent- or spectator-second. This is the secret of his craft - not strength or deftness but a paradox: that speed, for him, is grounded in its opposite, in the ability to slow time and movement down, expand them, fill them up with pockets of inertia.
All top sportsmen and women do this. If you want to run a hundred metres in less than ten seconds you have to make each second wide enough to swallow ten metres of track - or ten-point-zero-one, zero-one-five. You have to turn time into space and make that space stand still. The visual technologies that mediate and relay sport, as Ali knows, also grab blocks of time from their continuum, capture and arrest them, producing isolated chunks that can be held up, expanded and repeated. If you go to watch the cricket at Lords or the Oval you will see the batsmen, in between each ball, re-enact in slow-motion the movements they’ve just made, reading off the replay on the large stadium screen like dancers in a Michael Clark production. That this might help them play a better shot next time, or that the further repetitions played out by the increasingly sophisticated television plug-ins (Hawkeye, snickometers, 3-D modelling and so on) are conducted for the purpose of analysis, are alibis: the real desire behind these endlessly arrested reiterations is simply to hold and occupy the moment, bathe in it, receive it again and again without ever letting it exhaust itself.
This is pretty much how Heidegger describes our relation to Being. For him, Being ‘is considered as the history of the donations in which the advent (Ereignis) holds itself in abeyance.’ Sport opens up this phenomenological mode. It also opens up a tragic one, in the true Greek sense. Aeschylus’s or Sophocles’s heroes, like the batsmen, slowly and ponderously move within a pre-determined space. Take the Agamemnon of the Oresteia: firmly held in the force-field of two events we never see - his past sacrificing of his daughter Iphigenia and his own impending murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra - this most inert of action heroes does no more than slowly step into his house and thus complete the cycle his clairvoyant consort Cassandra has already relayed in broken, reverse-angle snatches. I wrote a two-act version of this play a year ago. In the first, eight-second act, Agamemnon walks through a door-frame, tripping on the threshold. In the second, one-hour act, this same sequence is video-beamed onto the theatre’s back wall in ultra slow-motion, a frame per second, like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. The last fifteen minutes show him lying on the floor, utterly inert.
A theatre in California wants to stage my Agamemnon but I’m not sure that I’d sit through it myself. Besides, I hate theatre; it’s a totally crap medium. After the Revolution, when I’m Minister of Culture, I will turn all theatres into car parks. Car parks are gorgeous places, temples to the inertia that is the truth of speed. Anything could happen in them: murder, rape, seduction, the exchange of vital state secrets: car parks’ stylised artifice, their architecture and geometry of slow repetition simultaneously offer and withhold all these events. The most beautiful place in Paris is the car park underneath the Boulevard St. Germain. It has a luminescent poured-tar floor and yellow bay-lines that glisten wetly even though they’re dry. Artificial birdsong plays out on a constant loop, creating its own, utterly synthetic time, one above which the city and its movement hang suspended - held, as Heidegger would say, in abeyance.
For the seminal early psychologist Pierre Janet, there are two types of time: time-as-change and time-as-duration (Warhol’s Empire could be understood along these axes entirely). In literature you constantly get examples of the second type fighting against the first: Shakespeare ‘all in war with time’ to make the young face of W.H. endure in the Sonnets; Proust using his madeleine as a replay-mechanism for an experience-fragment in A la Recherche; Nabokov in Speak, Memory acceding through a recovered childhood object to a state ‘of security, of well-being, of summer warmth’ in which ‘everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.’ In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which is quite simply the best book ever written, Quentin longs for ‘an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh’; he spends his section holding a broken watch, wading through a dusk that has ‘that quality of light as if time really had stopped for a while’ and contemplating a river scene in which a rower and a gull mount ‘into a drowsy infinity… the one terrifically motionless, the other in a steady and measured pull and recover that partook of inertia itself.’ Vaughan, psychotic hero of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, wrings this apotheosis out of culture, using the car crash as a technology of repetition and preservation for generic moments, histories, desires. If Kronenberg’s film adaptation fell flat, this was because he failed to appreciate how static, how inert, the book is: Ballard’s crashes are shown in their aftermath, with bodies frozen in ambulance light or fossilised via their impact-patterns on surfaces of metal and glass. Vaughan collects still images of these; he also plays and replays films of crash-tests, slowing them down more and more, urging them through repetition towards a state of motionlessness, duration without end.
Janet describes a unique type of mental image, the only one immune to any change: this type, he tells us, is the traumatic image. Inertia, resistance to change, repeated arrest: these are traumatic tendencies. And writing - real, literary writing - is the field of trauma. For Maurice Blanchot, writing is always the writing of the disaster - a limitless, unnameable event ‘always already past’ and at the same time ‘that which is yet to come’. Within writing, time becomes ‘noncontemporaneous’, ‘a passage already passed over’, subject to ‘the passive which, outside time, disarranges time as pure and empty form wherein all would order and distribute itself.’ Writing is about inertia and it produces inertia; in the words of Auden, it ‘makes nothing happen.’ This is what writing and sport have in common: both are predicated on the production and repetition of pockets of intense, stylised stasis. Sport reveals its essence to us only when we rethink it as a non-event along the lines of trauma and of literature. Ali was always already there: as Cassius Clay, during the run-up to his fight with Sonny Liston, he compared his left jab to a line of poetry. He even, like Cassandra, prophesised the fight’s outcome in verse form, using loose anapaestic metre to describe the knock-out as a moment of weightless suspension, of arrest, of timelessness:
Liston’s still rising
And the ref wears a frown
For he can’t start counting
Till Sonny comes down.