Karma yoga: Art and sport

Susan Sontag made her case against interpretation in her titular essay in a 1965 book on art.

Billy Collins has this to say about interpretation in poetry.

Gulzar, talking of love, so similar to art, urges us not to name it.

Kabir goes further to say that it simply cannot be talked about.

- Akath kahani prem ki, kuch kahi na jaaye
Goonga keri sarkara, baithe muskaye

Wittgenstein said as much and foreclosed philosophy.

But we cannot resist it, can we? We will try and hold that moonbeam in our hand. It is a pathological urge with humankind, especially so of our age, to try and demystify the sublime. In the forty odd years since Sontag wrote her piece we have only learnt to talk more; dissect, evaluate, codify. A sportsman can no longer aspire to the “zone” without the cacophony of flashbulbs blinding him out of it. An artist lumbered with weight of prospective interpretations can hardly ever manage to keep his inspiration unsullied by second-guessing. Pure thought has to battle pure ambition.

But like all good paradoxes the solutions are not simple. While it is somewhat easy to be introverted and silent about love and god, because they are inherently personal tools of transcendence, Sport, Art, Thought, on the other hand face a tricky dilemma. Each of these is an instrument of transcendence that engages with the world. They are by their nature, social; they deal at the very foundation, with ‘the other’.

An artist job, or a thinker’s job, or a sportsman’s job is tougher by far than a lover’s job or the believer’s job. The former set has to maintain eye-contact with the world while simultaneously attempting to break free of its limitations. Resist the attempts that the very same world makes, to lump you with identity via opinion, classification and interpretation.

Resisting identity is the fundamental problem of transcendence. It seems a particularly tall order in a postmodern world of splintered identities, a world whose workings are characterised by a near-constant evaluation of status and identity. The artist who second-guesses his critics, the sportperson who internalises the post-mortem, the scientist who scopes out trends - these are people deserving of our pity and our guilt, not our contempt.

It makes me infinitely more grateful now than ever before for the kind of genius that strives and wins this battle against our adulation, our contempt, our gross codifications, our interpretation. The kind of genius that soars free of articulation and identity, even as it ungrudgingly turns back to the world that attempted to bind it down and generously shares with it moments of real art, real spirit and real inspiration.

The We of sport

Written after the first flush of victory had dissolved into a dazed dense inward high. Hence the slightly drunk quality.

To be a pixel in a picture, stardust in a galaxy, synapse in a body, one of a billion cricket fans!

Not the banding arms of jingoists scavenging the ephemeral dust of human joy and despair, seeking to raise the spectre of a forced national identity, propped against a manufactured enemy – No, not that! Nor even material for the heart-high fences raised by the parasitic media in a bid to create more consumable identities. It is not to establish, or know, but to sense through the ether of sublimated emotion, that for the space of some moments there is more out there being exactly like me.

These individual lives we live, each of us born to life in an apparently unique point in a time-space, forging our way through a million milestones of resistance straining for independence from the blackhole of universality, for an identity, for a voice, for separation – to me always a little puzzling; on days like these, unfathomable.

Too much drama about a trivial thing, do you think? Should I be saving the rhetoric for a large tragedy or a private one? For societal revolution?

But only the most sublime artistic temperament can find in great grief the detachment required to truly find the quivering life of it. The lesser people need a device of distance, the obvious ploy of playacting to help be both within and without a moment. To us – the ordinary people – give us sport. In sport, through the ardency, the anguish, the allurement, the elation, there is always a subliminal cognition of its fantastical nature, of its being removed from the real and the core. This luxury of distance affords us the opportunity to vibrate at a comfortable pitch. Sport can make a world resonate in fine-tuned orchestra of a million minds; it is altogether breathtaking music.

Whew! That wasn’t so bad!

This morning before the start of play, in the lead-up session, Harsha Bhogle was taking us down for the pitch report when he said, “Is it a pitch? Is it a trampoline? Will the keeper have to stand near the ropes?” Something queer happened to me just then. I think I tried to laugh but it came out like a shudder. Ten days of nervous anticipation had left my system somewhat battered.

Really, there has been so much said about the Perth pitch, I had begun to supplant it in my fevered dreams with the moon’s surface. The darned pitch was more talked about than Gopal’s hilsa. Plays, concerts, readings, home, hearth and Hyderabad... no place was safe from assault. You could be talking of Jazz, infants, modernism or aurekaal sambar the conversation would veer in the most eerie fashion to the pitch. And move forward in almost choreographed lines:

First somebody would express regret that Sydney was our one real chance.

Then the group would sigh.

Then somebody (quite often me) would open and close their mouth in a frustrated show of naïve optimism.

At which somebody would waggle their eyebrows and say ‘Perth’ in wan tones of wisdom.

This would be the cue for the most statistically inclined of the lot to tell us in traumatizing detail why a score of 78 for 8 would be cause to cheer.

There would then be a moment of silence.

Followed by a half hopeful half petulant, “yes, but on a good day… “

Embarrassed laughter by all concerned would put paid to that particular segment of the conversation.

As a result, such horrific visions had I drawn up of whizzing missiles and bouncing bludgeons that I woke up in a cold sweat one night wondering if they made the helmets sturdy enough and if increment tonics could possibly work on thirty four year old men; this, despite the fact that I had been assiduously practicing my hooks and cuts with nightly regularity before dropping off to sleep.

So I can’t express to you what a relief it is to find that the Perth pitch is not in fact a missile launcher but a nice regular, if somewhat bouncy, cricket pitch. 297 for 6 may not be the best first day score in test cricket, but stap me if I complain.

Blowed over

I was one of those silly people who turn their noses up at 20-20 cricket. I mean you know those usually gripes. Too bachha, all flash no technique, just a cynical little commercial idea and all that. Well then yesterday happened. And I don’t know if all the same arguments still hold good - right now I don’t care. Last night was kutthe ke maze.

The campaigners of 20-20 could not have had it better if they had staged it! Hell, what fun it was. Imagine an India-Pakistan match in the first major international tournament ending in a tie and then going on to be decided in the crazily football-like bowl-out. Like they once famously asked- who writes these scripts?

I don’t know if I was giggling so much because of the relief of India’s making it to the next round, or because it was late and I was possibly in some yet undiscovered sleep zone, or because Sehwag’s giggles were infectious.

We were watching (I think) the first ever bowl-out in the history of the game and nobody quite knew what to do. Both teams were transformed into sets of silly school boys both embarrassed and excited at the same time. But this bowl-out thing is really the silliest thing you ever saw and terribly fun.

All round too this tournament is turning out to be hugely exciting, spectacular fielding, fabulous batting, and desperate bowler-batsman clashes. Aha! Fun, fun, fun!

I don’t think that 20-20 is going to wipe out or even diminish the other forms or anything dismal like that. I reckon its going to spill a flood of options and we’ll have it all the better for that.

Whatever, I am game!

Reasons Roger Federer will win today

• He’s due. The crystal ball at the edge of my desk is fairly shimmering with it.
• He has been playing his first gear/second gear act all through the lead up to the tournament and lately, all the better to bamboozle us, my dear! Today! He’s going to do his thing!
• That boy Nadal is quite quite brilliant, but all that aggression is just a little off-putting. Today is the day for subtlety.
• I’ve ploughed through the innards of the internet* and would you believe it? Not a single close-up of that incredibly sexy thing that is the neck of Roger Federer. So I’ve pulled out all the stops and the photographers of Roland Garros have been Imperiused to concentrate all their attention on that neck. And of course the perfect photo-op would be when he lifts that glorious set of sinews to place un baiser parfait on his first French Open cup

*for some reason the net threw up quite a few pictures of Marat Safin’s neck. I’m really not complaining…nope!