Posted on by Stoddard Martin

Last flowers of Bloom

Harold Bloom
STODDARD MARTIN remembers a dedicated litterateur’s late works

One can hardly think but with affection of Harold Bloom, addict of the Word, historic lover of literature, and coiner of the phrase “anxiety of influence” among other more recondite tags.

It would be invidious not to feel that affection when considering his final books, compendious and repetitive though they may be, composed or compiled as they were during bouts of convalescence between the illnesses that led to his corporeal silence in 2019, aged eighty-nine. It is likely that more words from the indefatigable commentator may be stored up yet to come, editing angels and publishing deities willing. The prospect is daunting, to some perhaps dismaying, for after seven decades of pronouncements, more Bloom may seem less.

Of the supreme enunciator of literary rankings in recent times – “probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world” of his day – posterity might require for a tidy canon. But tidy Bloom is not. In his 2019 book Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, the idealiser of Falstaff and his perceived form of “heroic vitalism”[1] tacitly put faith in excess. Bloom’s object, insofar as it ever went beyond an exuberant autodidact’s self-revelations, was to provoke more than to instruct (Possessed, p12 – all subsequent page numbers refer to this book). “I am a Nietzschean,” he declares in the last of his provisional last words (p79) after a lifetime of enthusiasm for the philosopher’s kindred spirits, such as W. B. Yeats. Thus at the end, like the author of Ecce Homo when approaching fatal dispersion into madness, Bloom eerily claims: “Something in me speaks for multitudes around the globe.” (p11)

“Oh my brothers!” is Zarathustra’s refrain, and Bloom never tired of projecting that he was carrying on a dialogue with colleagues and students, whether at Cornell, Yale or Cambridge where a boy from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family earned degrees, or at the same or similarly distinguished institutions where a publicity-loving adult would ultimately profess. First person plural is the mode. Bloom’s method as critic was conversational, sometimes ingratiating, especially in books where he might indulge in a lifetime’s penchant for having the last word. Why argue with him? Listen. Admire. Reflect. Then, perhaps, carry on a silent conversation of one’s own in the watches of night – those insomniac hours in which, as he tells us, Bloom had his most fertile ideas and, when not idealizing, lay awake reciting favourite works to the shades – incanting, as if a religious at prayer.

This is the milieu. And it determines content. Bloom’s canon finally includes, from the beginning, what he considers to be the great literary passages of “the Hebrew Bible” (Old Testament), for as he says, beyond having become Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, etc., he is “a literary and religious critic” (emphasis mine), whose “tradition is dying” and whose dying wish is “to rally a saving remnant”(p11). Again, a note of Nietzschean messianism, if perhaps with a hint of the disingenuous tendency of that other heroic vitalist (“the Fat Knight”) to humour and guff, “nimble believing and disbelieving”.

The lifelong lover of Shakespeare ascribes these qualities to Hamlet, whom he sees as “his own Falstaff… a consciousness so enormous that it contains all of human self-otherseeing” (p112). It might be a description of what Bloom aspired to be himself; it is also what he finds lacking in the Hebrew God – Yahweh, a dislikable presence for him at almost every turn, despite his Jewish roots. Here the old Bloom, whose early literary critical self started with Shelley, returns to youthful insurgency. Something is wrong in the heavens, as it was for the renegade Romantic: Prometheus punished by Jupiter is dealing with a false God or at least a faulty one – there is better beyond, in the pleroma. Gnosticism is in the air, and Bloom inhales it, lauding the work of his late “mentor” Gershom Scholem and concentrating passing attention on Scholem’s special study, the Kabbalah. “I have spent part of a lifetime,” Bloom states, “trying to work out a pragmatic relationship between Kabbalah and literary criticism” (p20). The provisionality implied here is matched by an achievement that is opaque and fragmentary. Bloom links Kabbalah and poetry both to “heretical subversions of orthodoxy”, “salvation by transgression”, “the frontier between the sacred and the profane” and no requirement to complete the Great Work but no freedom to desist in the attempt (pps23-5).

A Christian attempt to unravel Kabbalism, by the 16th/17th century thinker Heinrich Khunrath

From here it is small distance to Blake, Whitman and others of Bloom’s un-Leavisite “great tradition”, grounded in English literature fundamentally not only on Shakespeare but more portentously on Milton’s Satan. However – and here is an essential, perhaps under-recognised element in Bloom – heresy is only a pretext for a new/old orthodoxy and God. For Bloom’s ultimate standard is breadth and depth of vision, a vastness of sensibility and inclusion, reminding one perhaps of what a critic once complained of in the French symboliste Mallarmé: a sense that anything less than the all-embracing might be presumptuous[2].

Bloom, in short, disliking the Yahweh of tradition, sets out in effect to descry a truer God – humane, non-vindictive, invisible but glimpsed beyond Demogorgon up in starrier heavens. Like Shelley’s Prometheus being liberated from his bonds, the tireless yet mortally ill individual must rely on a bevy of maidens to help him complete the job – seven female assistants are named at the start of Possessed by Memory. This could be interpreted as Kabbalistic in the sense of Bloom’s contention that the proper mystical Yahweh can only function with aid from the Moon Queen or female spirit that resides in Malkuth, foundational pod of the Sefiroth [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Sefiroth are ten attributes of emotion, intellect or will in Kabbalistic esotericism]; it might also bring to mind accusations of “inappropriate” attention to female students that marked the professor’s later years.

Be that as it may, the inclusions in his excursion towards a summatory roundup of values betray composition by many hands: sketches, bits of lectures, notes from seminars are the basis, even in one case a funeral address. The authorial scholar gives way to the genial teacher, whose mission is foremost to enthuse. Possessed is designed to tell us why a dying man has recalled this passage or that poem and what is outstanding about it. It is a trawl, a last judgement on the canonical, as per a decent God’s instincts. And why not? Many an ailing scholar would love to engage in such a pastime, and Bloom’s range is such that he is almost always engaging at it – almost being the lively interlocutor’s operative word. In difference lies interest, in qualifications glided over or simply not made, in enthusiasms too grandly stated.

The Fat Knight Falstaff, for Bloom an exemplar of ‘heroic vitalism’

Falstaff, for instance, is not for this reader the exemplar that he is for Bloom, nor do the plays in which he appears seem the Bard’s best. Bloom has little time for the Marlovian in Shakespeare, speaks dismissively of Hotspur, and ignores the coruscating soliloquies of that supreme Machiavel, Richard. He is intriguing about the bastard Faulconbridge in the oft-neglected King John, but says little of comedies which now may strike the ear as warm-ups for Blackadder. As to Milton, he admits with Dr Johnson that few read him with pleasure (p176); re Johnson himself, he forgives eccentric pomposities. Bloom is of a generation of American Jewish scholars who began in awe of English literary tradition. He does not rate the deviations of Pound and Eliot towards Europe, attention to Dante excepted. The superior art of Baudelaire earns from him no more than an aside in a discussion of Swinburne (p301).

Walt Whitman, whom Bloom considered the greatest American poet

Much else is missing. Where for instance is Wilde, save in apt citation of a quote from ‘The Critic as Artist’ as the book’s epigraph? As for Wilde’s countryman Yeats: is he quite understood? In these summatory pages, how much space does old Bloom accord to a signal figure of his youth? His trajectory now, whatever it was in journeyman days and however much he may remain haunted by Shakespeare and Shelley, is towards fellow Americans – those who, unlike Eliot and Pound, did not “beat out [their] exile” but stayed home to “make [their] pact”, to borrow from the latter, Whitman-as-internationalist, as Bloom resolutely won’t. The god who stands at the head of American poetic tradition is for Bloom the seminal incantor – psalmic “transumptor” – of Leaves of Grass. Whitman the untidy, the vastly inclusive proto-Zarathustran – in him the professor finds a lodestone more congenial than in an Irishman whose attention to craft moved George Moore to depict him coming down to lunch at Coole Park to report to Lady Gregory that his morning’s work had consisted of removing a comma which he later restored[3]. Whitman’s incontinence, like Falstaff’s, if wilder, exposes another facet of “heroic vitalist” genius chez dying Bloom. Might we conclude that, in the light of his disintegration, a coherence strained for in youth seems no longer essential – analogous to how for the late Turner a glimmer of sun through vague clouds became preferable as subject to the detail of ship and sail? One suspects it to be partly the case. Bloom alludes en passant to Yeats’ “Byzantium poems”, but the exactitude of “hammered gold and gold enamelling” is hardly seen as a destiny. Bloom may live on as critic or at least enthuser: penning fifty-odd books suggests aspiration to transcendence beyond mere bodily existence. But if he lives on, Bloom is liable to do so as the critic permissive rather than the critic precise.

Again, why not? The third of four parts of Possessed by Memory begins to judder and creak as it extends Anglo tradition to snippets from the canonical Browning and Meredith; but the fourth part, commencing with its long devotion to Whitman, moves to some eye-opening appreciations, not only of the predictable Stevens, Williams and Crane, but more appealingly of the less obvious Edward Arlington Robinson and Conrad Aiken among others. With Aiken, comparison to his Harvard classmate Eliot leads to a fuller understanding of why Bloom felt antipathy for the most celebrated Anglo-American voice of the past century. That said, Bloom’s account of Aiken’s work falls short of full praise, and his explanation for why Aikens failed to reach “the eminence” of “Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Hart Crane” seems partly to tell against itself – “Associative rhetoric was both Aiken’s mode and, sadly, his weakness. He did not try to make it new but to augment the foundations by relying upon the major poets of the Romantic tradition.” (p393)

Might this not be a description of Bloom’s own approach as critic? Might one even go so far as to see it as either a veil drawn over a latent, counter-canonical preference for poets of Aikens’ pitch or a subconscious admission of Bloom’s own less than supreme rank as critic? These are not idle questions. Somerset Maugham once famously quipped that his status as writer was in the first rank of the second rate. The false modesty hardly strained to disguise a popular novelist’s healthy antipathy for experimental modernists whom a cognoscenti lionized, but the common reader found unreadable: Woolf, Joyce and so on. Bloom, when set alongside the Derrida-ists, Deconstructionists, Structuralists and such fashionable ‘critics’ of his epoch, might strike one analogously as among the first rank of the middle-brow.

John Ashbery, by David Shankbone. Wikimedia Commons

Like Maugham in The Summing Up, Bloom laces his learned observations with recollection. His remarks on one of two women included in a 500-page book, May Swenson, pivot on their meetings at a café in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. His discussion of the original and vitalist ex-soldier Richard Eberhardt stems from a lecture tour at the University of Florida, where Eberhardt frightened him with the campus alligator. Bloom’s account of the master of negation, Weldon Kees, begins with an encounter at a jazz club in Harlem. Longer pieces on lesser-knowns such as Archie Randolph Ammons or Alvin Feinman are founded on yet closer association, as is the inclusion on John Ashbery, with whom Bloom’s “friendship has been continuous these sixty years… I have just phoned him at the Whittier Rehabilitation Center where he is recovering rather slowly from double pneumonia” (p431). Illness and age are constant companions in these last works, not notably cheerful ones, rather ones with whom Bloom struggles manfully to come to terms, never quite achieving reconciliation with, let alone joy in, observation of their processes – intrinsic to life, after all, thus a subset of the “heroic vital”. Bloom resists falling back into angry, non-accepting “rage, rage against the dying of the light”; rather he strives to win from these ultimate confrontations a revitalised urgency and heightened appreciation. He can still read, or be read to, and hear. He can still idealize and recite in the watches of night. Most of all he can remember. Which brings us to the ‘coda’ of the book, Proustianly entitled “In Search of Lost Time”.

Before one arrives there, one must be reconciled with Bloom’s subjectivity. One has to accept that his judgments have often to do with where he could most comfortably locate himself; that his “we” posits a community both transitory and presumptuous; that his lordly opinions, such as that Hart Crane is the great American poet after Whitman and Dickinson, may pass as gospel without being convincingly preached; that he gives himself grace to make errors and to speculate beyond what accords with known facts; that he settles scores on occasion – against Saul Bellow,  for instance (p416) – and will not always refrain from resorting to guff.

What, say, is the sense of a sentence such as “His consciousness was a plenum that could have created a heterocosm, where space and sun might have made another world” (p430)? From here it is not far to complain of Bloom’s cherished inventions such as “self-othering” or “transumptive”. But let it pass. Bloom is a character in his literary universe. He is too Shakespearean not to put a high, perhaps excessive, value on personality. That he has a big one has been part of his “body of fate”, to use a Yeats term; Bloom has embraced and cultivated it, and created a space for it to exist in and flourish and suffer. Irritating this may be, but one can also be glad for it. Bloom himself becomes a standard, not just what he says: a brand, an embodiment of forces to reckon with, if not revere – something of a god. Apotheosis may not be a fate he has worked for entirely nakedly, but he has certainly flirted with it often, notwithstanding the trademark baggy garb of being “human, all-too-human”.

God incarnate in Bloom? Will He live on as Holy Ghost? Close to his physical end, Bloom muses: “When we die, our own survival will be the extent to which we have changed the lives of those who come after us… I have to consider how little I know of time to come. Doubtless it is better that way. Foretelling can be destructive.” (p507) His coda to Possessed begins in this way to evince a becoming humility. Before sojourning with Proust, he recalls Saint Augustine’s conversations with his mother about God’s eternal light. The aptness is to what Bloom characterises as Proust’s “sublime lucidity”, which transcends Jewish and Christian roots to be “closer to Hindu philosophy”. While admitting that Proust probably never read the Bhagavad-Gita, Bloom invokes it.

Marcel Proust, for Bloom a kind of Gnostic seeker

Shortly afterwards, he qualifies a roving meditation by confessing, “I have the realisation or fantasy that simultaneously I know everything and nothing” (p481). This precedes recollection of moments of “sudden radiance” in early childhood, which “seem now to be heretical intimations of a lost gnosis” (p487). Proust’s similar epiphanies, Bloom muses, may stem from “worship of an unknown God who is yet knowable” (p492); in any case, the novelist’s truth “is compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of aesthetic mysticism” (p497). Is this not Bloom’s “truth” in a mirror? The presiding return of “childlike vision” is for him, as for Proust, “allied to phantasmagoria and to the world of dreams… modified delirium” (p501). Here one might end, or with association of “the survival of the inner self with a world founded upon benignity” (p503), or with a largeness that “could be at once atheist and mystic” (p505). But Bloom actually concludes by reverting to Dr Johnson, whose wisdom allows for ebb as well as a flow that chez Proust is continuous. Bloom has indeed already undercut his paean to In Search of Lost Time by stating that he would choose Richardson’s Clarissa in preference to it. Why? Because the heroine and her rapist lover are “more vital”.

One trusts this no more than one might accept Mozart’s sympathy to be with the survivors rather than with the deposed libertine at the end of Don Giovanni. Bloom’s coda, brave as it is in conveying what remains at the approach of his earthly dissolution, conveys one back towards his penultimate book, which occupies a more preliminary stage in the process and thus may constitute a more reliable summing-up of a career of concentrated literary contemplation.

W B Years in 1908

The book is less given to reminiscence and enthusiasm, though some is ever present. There are no chapters devoted to lesser talents such as John Wheelwright, James Merrill, Jay Macpherson or Amy Clampit, with whom Bloom ends his pre-coda trawl in Possessed. Among those, notably Merrill, Bloom remains ready to deviate back to consideration of his traditional greats: he cites phone calls “in which we explored W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, the Gnostic religion, and the relation of Yeats to Shelley and to Blake” (p449). Reader, take note. Bloom subsumes the Irish poet here to two English Romantics whom he has consistently ranked as the foremost. He glides from A Vision to Scholem’s topic as if Yeats’s mystico-historic text were self-evidently Gnostic. He considers the matter no further except to say “I suspect that Yeats would not have taken to James Merrill’s poetry” (p453), then somewhat conversely he postulates that in Merrrill’s poetry “the Byzantium of William Butler Yeats hovers and is deftly evaded” (p456). Deftly seems a loaded adverb, not least in a context where the Irish poet’s full name is iterated, as it is in most other scattered allusions to him throughout this book. Why? Shelley almost never requires “Percy Bysshe”. Is there some other Yeats that Bloom fears we may think of, or is there some more telling nuance at play??

Looking at this penultimate work, so boldly entitled Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: the Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death, and among chapters Bloom devotes to the usual titans – Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, Crane, Freud (eccentrically) and Dante (again, lone continental) – we find “William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence: Start with the Shadow”. The title seems tricksy – it matters little: tags chez Bloom and others of his generation of academics often do. What does matter is the shadow of doubt that pervades. Bloom invokes an American favourite to contrast “three modes of mastery. In Lawrence it is chthonic. In Yeats it is occult. In Stevens it is massive acceptance of things as they are.” (p474) Proceeding to quote from one of the American’s poems, Bloom wonders if it is not “a critique by Stevens of the endless series of questing wanderers in Yeats” (p476). Endless series? “William Butler Yeats,” we are told (entire name again) “had the good fortune and the vital temperament to refuse any despair of his own quest” (p479). Are we to infer that a less “occult” sensibility should have despaired? Later, in parsing “All Souls” Night”, Bloom informs us that “the magnificence of gesture, metric, diction overcomes what could be judged sheer silliness” (p483); later still, in relation to Yeats’s alleged “pagan purpose”, we are told that “The force of his diction and metric brushes argument aside” (p485). “Devoted readers of Yeats learn that for him God and Death are one,” Bloom states, “a Gnostic formulation” (p486). This is of course arguable and reflects what Bloom is finally obliged to confess: “More than ever I have a mixed response.” (p490). He lauds “Adam’s Curse” in part to question the quality of what comes after; and when he reaches “Under Ben Bulben”, he decries a “farrago… much of it of a badness not to believed” (p497).

Old Bloom clearly had a problem with old Yeats. From a concluding phrase one might take it that he continued to rate or anyway grapple with the Irish master mainly out of an older loyalty: “The daemon in Yeats, as he acknowledged, was Shelley” (p499). This is arguable too and, at best, partial. But then, as I have indicated, partiality is characteristic of critic Bloom, in age as in youth. He is, to repeat his claim, a Nietzschean, as he fancies it: a “provoker”. A windbag like his beloved “Fat Knight”, he is more than a touch averse to fine concision. He is also no dedicated traveller in realms of magic and dream, however insomniac his nights may have been. Baudelaire comments somewhere that it would be impossible for a poet not to contain a critic but it would be prodigious for a critic to contain a poet. Harold Bloom adored poetry: of that there is no doubt. What may be lacking in him – one leaves it to weigh up – is a thoroughgoing sense of the poetic.

Harold Bloom bibliography (partial)

  • Shelley’s Mythmaking, 1959
  • The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, 1961
  • Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument, 1963
  • Yeats, 1970
  • The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, 1971
  • The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 1997
  • A Map of Misreading, 1975
  • Kabbalah and Criticism. 1975
  • Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, 1976
  • Figures of Capable Imagination, 1976
  • Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate, 1977
  • Deconstruction and Criticism, 1980
  • The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy, 1980
  • Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, 1982
  • The Breaking of the Vessels, 1982
  • The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism, 1988
  • Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, 1989
  • The Book of J: Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg; Interpreted by Harold Bloom, 1990
  • The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, 1992
  • The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, 1994
  • Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
  • Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998
  • How to Read and Why, 2000
  • Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, 2001
  • El futur de la imaginació (The Future of the Imagination), 2002
  • Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, 2003
  • Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, 2003
  • The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, 2004
  • Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 2004
  • Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, 2005
  • American Religious Poems: An Anthology By Harold Bloom, 2006
  • Fallen Angels, 2007
  • Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, 2010
  • The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, 2011
  • The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible, 2011
  • The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015
  • Falstaff: Give Me Life, 2017
  • Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air, 2017
  • Lear: The Great Image of Authority, 2018
  • Iago: The Strategies of Evil, 2018
  • Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind, 2019
  • Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, 2019 
  • Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death, 2020
  • The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Re-read, 2020

[1] Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (Vintage, 2019), p. 101. Further references by page number.

[2] See my Wagner to the Waste Land (Macmillan, 1982), 122.

[3] Moore notoriously settled a number of old scores in his memoir, Hail and Farewell.

Posted on by Brendan McNamee

“A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”: the mystic heart of sport

Rembrandt, “The Golf Player”, 1654
BRENDAN MCNAMEE finds uplift in athleticism

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Arthur Dent makes the startling discovery that white mice, rather than being the objects of experiments carried out by humans, were in fact carrying out an experiment on humans. I wonder if a similar principle might be applied to sport.

Take premiership football as an example. Passions run high. The passion, on the parts of both players and spectators, is primarily for victory. The players receive a huge ego (and cash) boost, and from the fans’ point of view, a win for their team is, by some mysterious process of osmosis, a win for themselves. This lust for victory is so intense that the other source of sporting joy, the quality of the game itself, is often relegated to a secondary position – acknowledged, of course, but seen essentially as a means to an end. This, I would contend, is topsy-turvy. The lust for victory should serve the game, and not the other way around – and this order of things reflects a wider truth about life itself.

“Eternity,” wrote William Blake, “is in love with the productions of time” (eternity here being understood as a state of timelessness, rather than an endless expanse of time). A game of football is a production of time, painstakingly worked out and evolved. But for what purpose?

Two teams are pitched in combat. Naturally, each wants to best the other. This ego-based desire is an intense drive, the need to control which necessitates strict rules which the participants, in their lust for conquest, forever strain against. But from the tension created by this drive and this straining (provided the leash is not broken) can come something that transcends the desires of individuals to achieve personal glory, and this something is what inspires that small and secret part of the sports fan which doesn’t really care who comes out on top. These are moments that justify sport, at its best, being called ‘poetry in motion’ – moments of sheer grace that stop the breath and remain forever etched in the memory, long after the identity of the victor has been forgotten.

These moments are the white mice in the equation, Blake’s glimpses of eternity. The participants imagine that they hone their skills and put in punishing hours of practice and follow rigidly prescribed dietary regimes in order to emerge victorious from the contest. They imagine that those sublime moments of grace (which come, if they come at all, only after such gruelling preparation) are simply a means to victory. And seen from their own personal points of view, they are. Their dreams, we may be sure, are of the glory and adulation that will follow victory. Avid young fans may be enthralled by the skills their heroes display, but they too dream of one day holding aloft the Cup at the end of the contest.  

But there is one crucial difference between the dreams of glory that spur on a team and its fans, and those so memorable moments of grace. It is a difference that, I hope, justifies the use of such a lofty and ethereal term as ‘eternity’ in such a down-to-earth context.

The difference is this: the dreams of glory can be trained for, planned for, worked towards; the moments of grace are spontaneous eruptions, deaf and blind to the plans and schemes of ordinary mortals. To employ the mystical phraseology of Meister Eckhart, it is the difference between attachment and detachment. Eckhart establishes a link between attachment and temporality: “A man attached to things is stretched between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, or between past and future. He lives in duration, while detachment dwells in ‘this present now.’ A detached man lives in the instant” (Schürmann).

George Best in 1976. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A footballer lives mostly in duration, in the world of plans and projects. The scheme is: project, realise, possess: train for the game, play the game, win the game. If this plan is adhered to, all the way to the end, few tears will be shed if it is achieved without poetry.

But some will. Despite our saturation in the egoism of winning, there is still a quiet voice that longs for what Wallace Stevens calls in ‘The Blue Guitar,’ “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.” For magic, in effect. We imagine that we invent these conflicts in order to win at them and so stroke our egos, but perhaps they are really invented to allow that magic into the world. Pragmatism is of course vital. In a football match, a player has to be fit and ready for the contest. Such readiness is no guarantee that a sublime moment of genius will emerge, but it more than likely won’t if he is not. And the ego is equally important. Both teams must desperately want to win, otherwise you end up with, at best, a high-class kickabout.

So why refer to these moments as detachment when they so clearly cannot be detached from the time-bound structures through which they come into being? Are they not serving the ultimate purpose of winning the match in the same way as all the other elements of the game such as training, tactics, effort, will, etc? True, they can end up serving it, but seen from the true sports lover’s point of view, this is merely accidental, a by-product. Winning in sport is one kind of joy that needs the corresponding sorrow of losing simply to exist. You can’t have winners without losers; they are two sides of the same coin. Heraclitus’s intriguing aphorism, “Gods and mortals, dying each other’s life, living each other’s death” (Yeats) can find some traction here. The conflict on one level, the time-bound level, is between two teams, but on another, the detached level, it is between gods and mortals. And this conflict is both necessary and creative because the two levels are inextricably intertwined. The gods need the mortals because it is only through media – the game – constructed by mortals that their magic can take form. When that magic occurs, there is a sense in which mortals, as time-bound ego-driven creatures, momentarily cease to exist. Mortals need the gods because without them, they would die of tedium. And indeed, it may be said that, when immersed in our time-bound ego-driven selves, the gods are dead. The gods within us are dead.

In today’s world this vital balance between soul and ego is in danger of collapse, and modern professional football provides a stark demonstration of this. A telling instance of this disruption can be seen in the changing perceptions of the Premiership versus the FA Cup. There was a time when the FA Cup Final was the sporting highlight of the year. Now, it is generally accepted that the Premiership is paramount. This is a significant shift. In the FA Cup, everything rode on one game. There were no second chances (I hear echoes of Robert De Niro’s character in The Deer Hunter with his rather mystic insistence that, in hunting deer, you get only “one shot”). Such an arrangement facilitates a level of concentration and will needed to bring out the best in players, and thus possibly bring about that eclipsing of time that extreme heights of tension can facilitate. In the Premiership, by contrast, a team could conceivably crawl through the season playing pretty dismal football, ‘parking the bus’ at every opportunity (as indeed, one recent Premiership manager was frequently accused of doing), and still come out on top. (For non-fans, ‘parking the bus’ means scoring a goal and immediately throwing everything back into defence, effectively putting up a wall in front of your own goal.)

Imagine a situation where, say, Chelsea and Manchester City reach the final game in the Premiership and Chelsea are one point ahead of City at the top of the table. On the final day, they are playing on different grounds. Being a point ahead, Chelsea can afford to lose their match, but only provided City also lose theirs. Let’s say they have an off-day and play a rubbish game, and lose. Naturally, the fans are devastated. But wait! News come through on their phones that City have also lost, thereby granting Chelsea the title. The fans immediately erupt in joy – having just watched their team play a rubbish game and lose. Are they football fans or accountants?

Roger Federer. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Accountancy appears also to be playing a part in the debate currently raging in the tennis world about who is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time): Roger Federer, Raphael Nadal or Novak Djokovic. Nadal has streaked ahead in the numbers game with twenty-two Grand Slam titles, as opposed to a mere (mere?) twenty to Federer and twenty-one to Djokovic. Djokovic, being the youngest of the three, will no doubt catch up (Federer has just retired from professional tennis), but for the view of sport that I’m putting forward here, such numbers are irrelevant (although not to the players themselves, I’m sure). From that angle Federer is the clear winner in this contest, as anyone who has seen him in his glory days would surely agree. Even this writer, with only a spectator’s interest in actual sport (as opposed to philosophically musing about it), could sense something unearthly about his play. David Foster Wallace once wrote an essay called ‘Roger Federer as a Religious Experience.’ I doubt you’ll ever find essays like that being written about Nadal or Djokovic, well-oiled and highly efficient tennis machines that they are.

Mention of The Deer Hunter above calls to mind some other echoes of this idea in the field of the Hollywood movie. Robert Rossen’s 1962 film, The Hustler, features a pool shark called “Fast” Eddie Felson. At one point in the film he tries to explain to his girlfriend the true nature of his passion. It has nothing to do with the money, or with being seen to be the best. These are quantifiable objectives, un-transformable phenomena of the everyday world. What really inspires him, he says, are those rare moments when the pool cue seems to become an extension of his arm, when he can do no wrong, when everything – himself, the game, the world – simply become one, indivisible process, a living work of art.

Bringing religious terminology to the matter, there is the 1981 film about Olympic runners, Chariots of Fire. One of the athletes is a devout Christian who postpones a trip to the Far East, where he is to work as a missionary, in order to take part in the games. When his equally devout wife chides him for this selfish, unchristian attitude, he replies, “God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure”.  Eternity opens a chink in the armour of time, and Blake’s “love” is made manifest. Or, to put it in more down-to-earth terms, skill and spontaneity join hands and, momentarily, dancer and dance are one.

But these are ‘mere’ fictional examples, you might say. (I put ‘mere’ in quotation marks to highlight an idea best expressed by Alan Watts and directly relevant to this essay: “There is no more telling symptom of the confusion of modern thought than the very suggestion that poetry or mythology can be ‘mere’”.)  Do real athletes feel anything similar? Actually, if a googling of inspirational quotes from top athletes is any yardstick, they mostly don’t. A trawl of over a hundred such quotes threw up less than half a dozen that gave any hint at all of an awareness that something in sport might possibly be more valuable than winning. The vast bulk are on the theme of never giving up, striving, first is everything, second is nowhere, etc, etc. Even when they extol losing it’s only to harden you up for future successes. And I recall a televised interview with Andy Murray some years ago when he was asked if he enjoyed his tennis. After some hesitation, he replied: “I enjoy winning.” (I’ve since heard him say that he does enjoy his tennis but I suspect the PR people have got to him: “Never be negative, Andy! Never be negative!”)  

But not all athletes share this acquisitive mania. The racing driver, Mario Andretti, has a comment that echoes to some extent the line from Chariots of Fire quoted above, though shorn of any religious connotations: “If you have everything under control, you’re not moving fast enough.” The tennis player, Arthur Ashe, is hovering around the heart of the matter with this comment: “You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, your own highest standards, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.” And the American gymnast, Mary Lou Retton, has gifted us this pithy comment: “A trophy carries dust. Memories last forever.” (Incidentally, the fact that such remarks are so rare only bolsters my argument that this way of looking at sport is sadly, and increasingly, undervalued.)

It’s intriguing, I think, that the quote approaching closest to a sense of the mystic heart of sport should come from a gymnast. Gymnastics shares with my two fictional examples of pool and running the distinction of being one of the rare sports that one effectively plays alone. There are competitions, of course, but that horizontal element of the game is thoroughly earthbound – egos competing with one another (as Arthur Ashe recognises). The other, vertical, element is where the player’s mind, the player’s body and the sport itself come together like three notes forming a chord. It’s as if the gods had a committee meeting one day and said, “This rough-and-tumble of contact sports allows the ego too much dominance. Our voices are rarely heard. We need to finesse the idea.” And so they came up with pool and running and gymnastics – all sports requiring deep levels of silence, deep enough for, now and then, the music of the spheres to be heard. And, in a moment of true inspiration, they also came up with golf.

Golf! do I hear you say? That symbol of suburban complacency and silly jumpers? But that’s to see it only from the outside. In a wonderful essay on golf, ‘Tips on a Trip,’ John Updike, having run through and dismissed all the secondary definitions and purposes of golf – a hobby, a profession, a pleasure, a walk in the country – finally reveals it to be “a trip”:

 A non-chemical hallucinogen, golf breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria – golf so transforms one’s somatic sense, in short, that truth itself seems about to break through the exacerbated and as it were debunked fabric of mundane reality.

That final phrase – “truth itself seems about to break through the exacerbated and as it were debunked fabric of mundane reality” – catches the essence of what I’m calling here the mystic heart of sport. And it’s by no means confined to professionals.

Updike tells two intriguing golf stories in his essay. The first is of how he went to a professional coach one time in order to improve his play. The coach gave him some simple advice about the placing of his feet. “That’s all?” Updike asks. “That’s all,” the coach says. Sceptical, but determined to try it out, Updike follows the coach’s instruction – and finds that his game improves immensely. But here’s the intriguing part: he feels thoroughly dissatisfied. The game seems now to be confined to his feet and it’s as if the rest of his body has been anaesthetised: “I couldn’t internalise it . . . All richness had fled the game”. And so he returns to his old losing ways, but feels better for it. I would have found this story baffling had it not reminded me of a poker player I once knew who told me that he could spend a night playing poker and come out with a loss, but still feel better than on many another night when he’d emerge a winner. The result is not the point. The point is what happens within.

Updike’s second story is of how he once accidentally hit a perfect shot. He goes on to explain: “In this mystical experience, some deep golf revelation was doubtless offered me, but I have never been able to grasp it, or to duplicate the shot”. And that’s the point: such magical moments cannot be replicated. They cannot be quantified and put into manuals. They happen. They are gifts, moments when “the tyranny of causality is suspended, and men are free”. “If I knew where poems come from” the Irish poet Michael Longley once said, “I’d go there.” Sports people must often feel much the same.

The scientifically-minded might be inclined to dismiss any such airy talk of mystical experience by pointing to the correlations of such phenomena with various activities going on within the brain. It’s all got to do with jumping neurons and synapses, they’ll say. But this kind of “nothing buttery,” as the philosopher Mary Midgely calls it, in which we declare emergent realities to be “nothing but” the things in which we perceive them (a painting is “nothing but” smears of pigment on a canvas; music is “nothing but” differently pitched vibrations in the air), can be just as easily turned on its head so that instead of saying, “nothing but,” we can say, “not only but also.” A painting is not only smears of pigment on a canvas, but also a deeply enriching and mysterious experience. The experience may correlate with certain neural activities which can be quantified, but that fact alone does nothing to give you any sense of the experience itself.

This “dipsomania for the factual,” as Robert Musil calls it, echoes the conflict being discussed in this essay. You can’t blame science, of course, for devoting itself to the factual – that’s its job – but scientism, the conviction that only the factual can give us any real truth, is the malignant growth of a useful tool into a dogma. When it comes to permeate society, as it does today, something valuable is lost. In sport, this loss is disguised by the fact that such overwhelming concentration on winning – fuelled by ego and greed, both quantifiable entities – improve sporting standards immeasurably, but what becomes ever rarer in this over-heated atmosphere is the “eerie effortlessness of a good shot” (Updike), to put it at its simplest. Roger Federer making top class opponents appear lead-footed, David Gower hitting a boundary with the careless grace of a man brushing off a fly, George Best weaving through five defenders as if he was bodiless – there’s a hint of immortality in such moments. “There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time,” Milan Kundera’s narrator says in his novel, Immortality (4), when he is startled by the sight of a timeless girlish gesture emerging from the body of a timeworn elderly woman. It is that part, I believe, that is reflected back to us in moments of sporting genius, and sounds a deep resonant bell within.

Robert Musil tried to knit together these two elements of the phenomenon – the ethereal and the down-to-earth, the mystical and the scientific. Ulrich, the hero of The Man Without Qualities, gets set upon by three thugs in the street one night. As an ex-solder himself, he responds vigorously, but they get the better of him in the end. As he picks himself up, he is rescued by a woman in a passing coach, to whom he proceeds to expound upon the experience in his usual forensic fashion.

Of course he now launched into a lively defence of his experience, which was not, as he explained to the motherly beauty, to be judged solely by its outcome. The fascination of such a fight, he said, was the rare chance it offered in civilian life to perform so many varied, vigorous, yet precisely coordinated movements in response to barely perceptible signals at a speed that made conscious control quite impossible. Which is why, as every athlete knows, training must stop several days before a contest, for no other reason than that the muscles and nerves must be given time to work out the final coordination among themselves, leaving the will, purpose and consciousness out of it and without any say in the matter. . . If by some unlucky chance the merest ray of reflection hits this darkness, the whole effort is invariably doomed.

So far, so rational, you might say, and nothing there that any sports psychologist would find fault with. They call it being ‘in the zone.’ But Ulrich, as much a mystic as he is a scientist, goes on:

Basically, he now maintained, this experience of almost total ecstasy or transcendence of the conscious mind is akin to experiences now lost but known in the past to the mystics of all religions, which makes it a kind of contemporary substitution for an eternal human need. Even if it is not a very good substitute it is better than nothing, and boxing or similar kinds of sport that organise this principle into a rational system are therefore a species of theology. . .

Broadening the idea out to include spectators as well as participants, it may be no accident that the words ‘happen’ and ‘happy’ have the same root: ‘hap’. A great sporting event is a happening, an event, because of its anticipated elements of spontaneity, its vibrant potentiality, the anticipated, longed-for lifting of the soul out of the mundane treadmill of linear time. For many, these are moments of the greatest, most intense happiness, when life is lived – if only by proxy – on the edge. It’s why people climb mountains and skydive. But the exhilaration that follows success comes at the price of risking the hollow emptiness of defeat, and winners and losers alike might do well to heed Ulrich’s words in the passage quoted above: the experience is “not to be judged solely by its outcome.” The Yorkshire writer John Braine once compared success to strawberries: enjoy them while they’re in season, he said, but don’t imagine you can live on them (trophies carry dust).

What you can live on (what all sports fans live on, in fact) is the anticipation of success, the hope. Whether it’s anticipation of the outcome of a single game or a broader anticipation stretching over a whole season (and containing a host of smaller anticipations along the way), that tension is like a taut string creating a music all its own. But unless you’re some kind of Zen master, the problem is that you can’t really separate wanting to win from actually winning. Or losing. The pleasure of all that anticipation hinges on the actual outcome, though the outcome is really not the point; the real point (from the gods’ point of view) is the anticipation itself, the tension, the thrill of following all those “varied, vigorous and precisely coordinated movements in response to barely perceptible signals.” The gods don’t care a whit about us as individuals. We’re expendable, mere channels for what Yeats called “the passions,” and sports are what he called “forms created by passion to unite us to ourselves”. It’s an irresolvable paradox (except perhaps in fiction): in order for the passions to reach their height, the carriers of the passion have to remain unaware of their true source, and be conned into believing that the momentary egoistic thrill of winning is what it’s really all about.

Richard Attenborough, playing the commander who organises the mass break-out in The Great Escape, intuits a similar truth at the end of the film, after being captured by the Germans. Talking to his friend (minutes before they are both machined-gunned to death), and not sounding at all downbeat about the capture, he says, “D’you know, Andy, all this, Tom, Dick, Harry [the three tunnels they’d spent months secretly digging], it’s kept me alive.” He realises that getting re-captured (and hence failing to win the match, as it were) matters less than the steady throb of hope and anticipation that filled up all the time leading to the escape. And if the escape had been successful, or if the Germans had not been so unsporting as to kill him, and he’d lived to tell the story to his grandchildren, it would surely be the planning, the tactics, the secrecy, the tension of the escape preparations that would fill his memory, rather than the fact the attempt itself resulted in either success or failure, those “two imposters,” as Rudyard Kipling has famously called them.

Hermann Broch’s complex modernist novel, The Death of Virgil, dealing with a poet from two thousand years ago, is about as far from modern sport as you could hope to get. Yet Virgil’s central dilemma echoes the tension I’ve been speaking of here between the timebound (quantifiable results) and the eternal (spontaneous happenings, potentiality), or between the professional and the inspired amateur.

On the eve of his death, Virgil wants to burn his greatest work, The Aeneid, because he believes he has betrayed the essence of his gift, which was not so much the actual manuscript of the work as the dynamic creativity that brought it into being. He calls the actual work, an artefact that belongs to the world of time, “un-art”: “Oh, in his own life, in his own work, he had known the seduction of un-art, the seduction of all substitution which put the thing created in the place of that which creates, the game in the place of communion, the fixed thing in the place of the ever-vital principle, beauty in the place of truth” (italics added).

Virgil’s “un-art” is the statistics-obsessed nature of modern professional sport where winning is all, and this attitude is, I would contend, a betrayal of the soul of sport, even though, paradoxically, that very betrayal is largely responsible for the incredibly high standard that much modern sport exhibits. But the high standards themselves can be something of a red herring, from the participants’ point of view, if not the spectators. Spontaneity is too unpredictable and there is too much money at stake. A certain minimum standard is, of course, necessary, but magic was as likely to appear on a mud-caked football field of the seventies, when players happily juxtaposed professional games with copious amounts of beer and burgers, as on today’s pristine green carpets, when they are all slaves to strict dietary regimes. George Best was no ascetic! And to return for a moment to the tennis world, any future contenders for the number of Grand Slams won by Nadal and Djokovic will have to follow similarly rigid training and finely-tuned technical regimes, most likely at the cost of any natural spontaneity that they may have had to begin with. Future Federers will have no hope of competing, though I’m guessing that they would be the spectators’ favourites.

Echoes of this inner conflict can be found even beyond the confines of sport and art. If we call the necessary treadmill of linear time ‘order’ (in sport, tactics, set pieces, rigid team formations etc) and sublime moments of rapture ‘chaos’ (sport’s unpredictable ‘poetry in motion’), then the essential creative tension between the two might be summed up in an elegant formula: order minus chaos equals death; chaos minus order equals madness. Imagine a high-stakes football match with no rules! And if Virgil had got his way about burning The Aeneid, no echo of that creative genius would ever inspire another soul. The physicist David Bohm put the idea like this: “If you had absolute creativity – absolute novelty with no past – then nothing would ever exist because it would all vanish at the very moment of creation” (Weber). Modern science sees this creative tension, or something vaguely similar to it, as constituting the very source of the universe’s existence. Richard Holloway provides a succinct encapsulation of the idea:

It is the precise balance of two great forces that creates the right conditions for life to exist. The expansive force of the Big Bang spreads the universe out, while the contractive force of gravity pulls it back together. If the gravitational force [order] were too high, the universe would appear, but in a microsecond gravity would pull everything back into a Big Crunch. If the expansion rate were too high [chaos], then the universe would stretch at such a rate that gravity would be unable to form the stars and galaxies from whose dust carbon-based life evolved. [. . .] These delicate adjustments do not only refer to the earliest instance, but to the continuing history of the world and its detailed processes.

One of those detailed processes is the phenomenon of sport.

The philosopher E.M. Cioran has written, “History divides itself in two: a former time when people felt pulled towards the vibrant nothingness of divinity and now, when the nothingness of the world is empty of divine spirit”. It may be that in our ultra-secular, numbers-obsessed Western world, whose oppressive nothingness the advertisers keep us distracted from, sport occasionally affords one opportunity to touch, or to witness, the sublime heights that were once the province of religion. But it appears to be a losing battle. The white mice may have to think up another concept.

References

Blake, William. Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: OUP, 1966.

Broch, Hermann. The Death of Virgil. Trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer. 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Cioran, E. M. Tears and Saints. Trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Holloway, Richard. Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004.

Hudson, Hugh. Chariots of Fire. Screenplay by Colin Welland. 20th Century Fox, 2004.

Kundera, Milan. Immortality. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. London: Picador, 1997.

Schürmann, Reiner. Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2001.

Stevens, Wallace. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1953.

Sturges, John. The Great Escape. Screenplay by James Clavell and W. R. Burnett. The Mirisch Company, 1963.

Updike, John. Picked Up Pieces. 1977. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.

Watts, Alan. Myth and Ritual in Christianity. 1954. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Weber, Renee. Dialogues With Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

Yeats, W. B. A Vision. 1937. Rev. ed. 1962. London: Macmillan, 1962.