So two months ago, to reward Adam for undergoing a visit to
the doctor and shots, I bought him a ball, a blue plastic thing I’d spotted in
a shop window near the pediatrician’s office. When I brought it home and rolled
it to him, however, he let it roll by. He had other business to attend to. Then,
suddenly, last week, he starts getting interested in the ball. He clips after
it when I roll it. He likes to see it go down the stairs. The ball, it has
connected.
The ball.
“Your toddler is starting to have a ball – first by rolling
that curious round thing you’ve handed him or her… and then by attempting to
throw it – or more likely, dropping the ball and watching in delight as it
moves across the floor.”
What to expect the second year: from 12 to 24 months, by
Heidi Murkoff
….
Since we joined the Y, I’ve decided to make a go of living a
healthier lifestyle. The first week that meant swimming – and I’m not a good or
dedicated swimmer – the running machine, the rowing machine, this torture
machine in which you move your thighs to make some weights go up a bit in the
air. However, in the back of my mind I was thinking of the racket court.
Unfortunately, I don’t know anybody in Santa Monica who plays racketball, but I
decided to get some balls and today I just played myself for an hour. Winded
myself. I was surprised by how slow I was. On the other hand, I play racketball
with instincts shaped by tennis, which I played manically between the ages of
11 and 21, and thus there was always this phantom length of racket that the
racket ball would go through, there were these angles and speeds that were
twists on the tennis ball, enough like it to fool me.
There is a tremendous literature about sports in the 20th
and 21st century, but really little about the ball. The ball itself.
Yet the ball is fascinating. The hardness, the compression of the racket ball
balls is satisfying, but I can’t get myself into one of those balls. By
contrast, that is what I spent my time trying to do between 11 and 21, playing
tennis. I was a steady player, but mediocre. I was paired with another such
player on the high school team – not for me the thrill of starting as a single.
On the other hand, I was good enough that I could sometimes defeat our single
player – not the Swedish ringer, but my buddy, W. – in a match. In tennis,
sometimes you have a growth spurt – you play above the level of your play, you
get it in a new way, the ball is your second self. But I could never climb to
that level and stay there. Not enough dedication. Even so, I knew that when I
played well, it was about the ball. The racket, the beautiful racket, followed,
obeyed, it was a part of you, but it wasn’t idiosyncratic, it didn’t have a
free will, it wasn’t a ball.
It is odd that economists don’t consider the ball. All the
activity, the immense labor, that is woven around balls. Because why? Because you
want to win, and to win means doing your thing with the ball, which is the thing
– the object and the symbol – between you and your opponent.
Balls have evidently been around a long time, but they don’t
get the study that, say, coins do. They should, though. Take, for instance, the
American football. That ball is grotesque. It is less ball than projectile. If
Adorno had had a sportif bone in his flabby kritikdrenched body, he would have
recognized the intimacy between the football and Hiroshima. In fact, football
is a tremendously interesting game, but it is interesting the way the war in
the Pacific, circa 1941-1945, is more interesting than the Thirty years war.
On the other hand, you have the baseball, which is all
Renaissance, a thing of beauty that would have been recognized by Alberti or by
da Vinci. The stitching and the whiteness and the generally regal bearing of
that ball, the great materials it is made of, mystically color the entire game.
Yet even so – there is the ball – not the individual balls.
Oddly, all of these balls are inter-substitutable. One doesn’t play a ball game
with the individual ball in mind. There are, of course, balls that are
fetishistically claimed – bowling balls, for instance. But mostly the balls are
disposable in their very essence. You might try to live on the tennis ball
during the game, you might try to clear your mind of everything else, but in
the end, you have no affection for the ball qua that particular ball.
…
Children’s encyclopedia’s retail glorious myths about the
invention of fire, or of the wheel, or the pully, or bronze – but they never
both to imagine the invention of the ball. The ball, in fact, seems part of
nature. A pebble, a nut. Yet the ball is surely the very symbol of culture – it
is the very symbol of the symbol. In itself, it is nothing. But in play, it
becomes more than itself. It starts to mean. It is Victor Turner’s symbolic
object, and as such, it defines spaces and limits. It creates a passage,
traversing a space that is charged with meaning. But unlike those objects –
human beings – who also go through passages, the ball can mean but it can’t
express. This, of course, brings us back to the afore mentioned fact that balls
do not earn our affection, as say a piece of furniture, a house, a car do. A
ball is always being subsumed into the great collective of balls.
…
Enough about balls.
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