The World Cup and Its Pomps, Umberto Eco

Many malignant readers, seeing how I discuss here the noble sport of soccer with detachment, irritation, and (oh, all right) malevolence, will harbor the vulgar suspicion that I don’t love soccer because soccer has never loved me, for from my earliest childhood I belonged to that category of infants or adolescents who, the moment they kick the ball — assuming that they manage to kick it - promptly send it into their own goal or, at best, pass it to the opponent, unless with stubborn tenacity they send it off the field, beyond hedges and fences, to become lost in a basement or a stream or to plunge among the flavors of the ice—cream cart. And so his playmates reject him and banish him from the happiest of competitive events. And no suspicion will ever be more patently true.

I will say more. In an attempt to feel like the others (just as a terrified young homosexual may obstinately repeat to himself that he "has" to like girls), I often begged my father, a sober but loyal fan, to take me with him to the game. And one day, as I was observing with detachment the senseless movements down there on the field, I felt how the high noonday sun seemed to enfold men and things in a chilling light, and how before my eyes a cosmic, meaningless performance was proceeding. Later, on reading Ottiero Ottieri, I would discover that this is the sense of the “everyday unreality,” but at that time I was thirteen and I translated the experience in my own way; for the first time I doubted the existence of God and decided that the world was a pointless fiction.

Frightened, as soon as I had left the stadium, I went to confession to a wise Capuchin, who told me that I certainly had an odd idea, because reliable people like Dante, Newton. Manzoni, T.S. Eliot, and Pat Boone had believed in God without the slightest difficulty. Bewildered by this consensus, I postponed my religious crisis for about another decade — but I have been telling all this to indicate how, as far back as I can remember, soccer for me has been linked with the absence of purpose and the vanity of all things, and with the fact that the Supreme Being may be (or may not be) simply a hole. And perhaps for this reason I (alone, I think, among living creatures) have always associated the game of soccer with negative philosophies.

This having been said, the question could arise as to why I, of all people, should now discuss the World Cup. The answer is soon given: The editors of L’Esspresso, in an excess of metaphysical vertigo, insist that the event be discussed from an absolutely alien point of view. And so they have turned to me. They couldn’t have made a better or shrewder choice.

Now, however, I must say that I am not against the passion for soccer. On the contrary, I approve of it and consider it providendal. Those crowds of fans, cut down by heart attacks in the grandstands, those referees who pay for a Sunday of fame by personal exposure to grievous bodily harm, those excursionists who climb, bloodstained, from the buses, wounded by shattered glass from windows smashed by stones, those celebrating young men who speed drunkenly through the streets in the evening, their banner poking from the overloaded Fiat Cinquecento, until they crash into a juggernaut truck, those athletes physically mined by piercing sexual abstinences, those families financially destroyed after succumbing to insane scalpers, those enthusiasts whose cannon-crackers explode and blind them: They fill my heart with joy. I am in favor of soccer passion as I am in favor of drag racing, of competition between motorcycles on the edge of a cliff, and of wild parachute jumping, mystical mountain climbing, crossing oceans in rubber dinghies, Russian roulette, and the use of narcotics. Races improve the race, and all these games lead fortunately to the death of the best, allowing mankind to continue its existence serenely with normal protagonists, of average achievement. In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it. Unfortunately war also involves the reluctant, and therefore it is morally inferior to spectator sports.

For I am speaking of spectator sports, mind you, not of sport. Sport, in the sense of a situation in which one person, with no financial incentive, and employing his own body directly, performs physical exercises in which he exerts his muscles, causes his blood to circulate and his lungs to work to their fullest capacity: Sport, as I was saying, is something very beautiful, at least as beautiful as sex, philosophical reflection, and pitching pennies.

But soccer has nothing to do with sport in this sense. Not for the players, who are professionals subjected to tensions not unlike those of an assembly-line worker (except for questionable differences in pay), not for the spectators — the majority, that is — who, in fact, behave like hordes of sex maniacs regularly going to see (not once in their lifetime in Amsterdam but every Sunday, and instead of) couples making love, or pretending to (something like the very poor children of my childhood, who were promised they would be taken to watch the rich eating ice cream).

Now that I have posited these premises, it is clear why these weeks I have been feeling very relaxed. Rendered neurotic, like everyone else, by recent tragic events during a three month period* when we had to devour newspapers and stay glued to the TV, awaiting the latest message from the Red Brigades, or the promise of a new escalation of terror, I can now skip reading the papers, avoid TV, at most looking on page eight for news of the Turin trial, the Lockheed scandal, the referendum. For the rest, the papers and the TV talk about the thing I want to hear nothing about — and the terrorists, who have a keen sense of the mass media, know this very well and don't attempt anything interesting, because they'd end up in the local news or on the food page.

There's no need to ask ourselves why the World Cup has so morbidly polarized the attention of the public and the devotion of the mass media: From the famous story of how a comedy by Terence played to an empty house because there was a trained bear show elsewhere, and the acute observation of Roman emperors about the usefulness of circenses, to the shrewd use that dictatorships (including the Argentinian) have always made of great competitive events, it is so clear, so evident that the majority prefers soccer or bicycle racing to abortion, that it isn't even worth reflecting about. But since external pressure impels me to reflect, I might as well say that public opinion, especially in Italy, has never needed a nice international championship more than it does now.

In fact, as I have remarked in the preceding essay, sports debate (I mean the sports shows, the talk about it, the talk about the journalists who talk about it) is the easiest substitute for political debate. Instead of judging the job done by the minister of finance (for which you have to know about economics, among other things), you discuss the job done by the coach; instead of criticising the record of Parliament you criticise the record of the athletes; instead of asking (difficult and obscure questions) if such-and-such a minister signed some shady agreements with such-and-such a'foreign power, you ask if the final or decisive game will be decided by chance, by athletic prowess, or by diplomatic alchemy. Talk about soccer requires, to be sure, a more than vague expertise, but, all in all, it is limited, well-focused; it allows you to take positions, express opinions, suggest solutions, without exposing yourself to arrest, to loyalty oaths, or, in any case, to suspicion. It doesn’t oblige you to intervene personally, because you are talking about something played beyond the area of the speakers power. In short, it allows you to play at the direction of the government without all the sufferings, the duties, the imponderables of political debate. For the male adult it’s like little girls playing ladies: a pedagogical game, which teaches you how to occupy your proper place.

And at a moment like this, concentrating oneself with the running of the government (the real one) is traumatic. So faced with such a choice, we are all Argentines, and that handful of Argentine nuisances who are still reminding us that, down there, people are “disappeared” from time to time, should be more careful not to mar our pleasure in this sacred mystery play. We listened to them before, and quite politely, so now what do they want? In other words, this World Cup has arrived like Santa Claus. Finally some news that has nothing to do with the Red Brigades.

But while we're on that subject: The reader who is not completely distracted knows that there are two theses in circulation (naturally I consider only the extreme hypotheses, but reality is always a bit more complicated). According to the first thesis, the Brigades are a group obscurely maneuvered by some Power, perhaps foreign. According to the second, they are “misled comra"es," who behave execrably but, all things considered, for noble motives (a better world). Now if the first thesis is correct, Red Brigades and organisers of World Cups belong to the same articulation of power: The former destabilise at the right moment, the latter restabilize at the right moment. The public is asked to follow Italy-Argentina as if it were Curcio-Andreotti and, if possible, to place bets on the number of kneecaps involved in the next outburst of violence. If, on the contrary, the second thesis is correct, the Red Brigades are comrades who are really very misled indeed — because they insist so readily on assassinating political figures and blowing up assembly lines, but that, alas, is not where power is. It is in society’s capacity for redistributing tension, immediately afterwards, on other poles, far closer to the soul of the crowds. Is the armed struggle possible on World Cup Sunday? Perhaps it would be best to engage in fewer political discussions and in more circenses sociology. Is it possible to have a revolution on a football Sunday?

1978

*Written in 1978, the year of the kidnapping and eventual killing of former. Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigade terrorists.

I was diagnosed with C-PTSD in 2024 and I've been reading more about it. I find that understanding something can help to an extent, but the hardest part is when you're in the midst of a terrible feeling and you have to wonder - how much of this is attributable to my circumstances rather than my mind? I see a psychiatrist on Tuesday to figure things out... Hopefully some solution will come. The paranoia is the absolute worst.

I'm going to set up a microblog soon for all these smaller updates in the time to come. But I am FAR too exhausted to do so currently. My last post was supposed to be a massive essay on Roger Shattuck's "Forbidden Knowledge: Pornography to Prometheus," but I had to give it up and now the fire has died down. As much as I love Neocities and the customizability of a site, I can't help but miss the social aspect of the older internet that was without all the algorithims, rage, and bullshit. I miss making groups on DeviantArt and exchanging comments with people who liked the same things. I miss making friends on Tumblr and whatever. I miss big discord groups where I hung out with people I'd known from little increments of reading about their daily lives. I guess I also miss how each post - mine or someone else's - was an opportunity to take interest in the mundanities of someone else's life, and so very fun.

I think the common factor around all of them was a common passion we all shared, and I fear now there's none of that in my life. As much as I love literature, it's hard to form a community around it becuase of the lack of overlap. And other hobbies like painting and writing get hardly any attention from me. It feels as though balancing basic needs - studying, working, eating, exercising, and recovering from all of those - takes all the time a passion needs to be fostered and paid attention to. The more I grow up, the more I ask myself: Is this really it? There's a lot more depressing questions I've been nurturing lately, and this is the one that feels safest to confess. Is this really it?!?!?

Loneliness... It's been three years since I came to the States, and I got my first job right away going 60 hours a week until 2025. To this day, I don't have any friends in person outside of my job, and job friendships are, by nature, tenuous; I recently watched Clockwatchers (1997) and I've never seen anything sum that up so well. I think the hardest part is how at odds I feel with being American all of a sudden. You know, if there's one thing I've noticed about Americans, it's that they like movies so much it's as if they live in them. Sometimes when you talk to someone, you can tell right away what kind of movie they think they're in and that's what you have to act by to get a role in speaking to them. There's such wide social isolation it often feels like people need to connect through these sorts of things, identifiers, becuse they have nothing else to claim kinship or the right to speak to another person with. I think another part of it is just the culture of Miami-Dade, especially towards the South.

I think I'm going to go journal or make a collage or paint now. Enough complaining and now moving onto doing. Or maybe I'll fall asleep as soon as I hit my futon (Our apartment situation is so complicated and messy right now, damn these Miami rents.)

Question to leave you with: What do you think happens when we die, and how does that make you feel? I've been torn about this. I don't know why death is on my mind so much. Ciao.

"… I had [a] boyfriend. He was an artist. We also wanted to get married. Everything was fine until this one thing happened. I came into his studio and heard him yelling into the phone: "You're lucky! You have no idea how lucky you are!" He's usually so calm, even phlegmatic, not a single exclamation point in his speech. And then this! So what is it?

Turns out his friend lives in a student dormitory and he looked into the next room and there's a girl hanging there. She strung herself up with some panty hose. He takes her down. And my boyfriend was just beside himself shivering: "You have no idea what he's seen! What he's just been through! He carried her in his arms - he touched her face. She had white foam on her lips. Maybe if we hurry we can make it." he didn’t mention the dead girl, and didn't feel sorry for her for a second. He just wanted to see it and remember it so he could draw it later on.

And I started remembering how he used to ask me what color the fire at the station was, and whether I'd seen the cats and dogs that had been shot, were they lying on the street/ were people crying? Did I see how they died? After that… I couldn't be with him anymore. I couldn't answer him…

[After a pause] I don't know if I'd want to meet with you again. I think you look at me the same way he did. Just observing me and remembering. Like there's an experiment going on. I can't rid myself of that feeling. I'll never rid myself of it."

But I remember the first time I had to recite something in there, written from a real memory, how the room went quiet and everyone looked at me with this disgusting pity mixed with awe, a reaction they didn't grant anybody else. I do not doubt the people in that room had lived their own pains, but standing out as the minority I in all immediate identifiers, I felt uncomfortable as if what I had just articulated to them was some exotic misery they delighted to partake in firsthand. I felt dirty.

The next session the topic veered to inspiration, and the workshop leader spoke with such a greed in her eyes, something about how 'exciting' it is to meet tragic people with tragic stories, how her mind mentally catalogues them for writing, how she hopes she doesn't scare them off, and I really did feel like vomiting.

A little later I read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay, Fact And/Or/Plus Fiction, informing me this was a catalogued phenomenon:

"…Writing workshops and programs all over the country now offer courses in “creative nonfiction.” The arts of scientific, historical, and biographical narrative are rarely if ever taught in such programs (or anywhere else). Autobiography, however, has been increasingly popular in the writing programs. It may be taught as journal writing or as therapy through self expression. When it has more literary goals, it is called creative nonfiction, personal essay, and memoir.

The writer of a memoir, like the responsible biographer, ethnographer, or journalist, used to describe what other people did and said, leaving what they may have felt and thought as implications to be drawn by the reader or as authorial speculation identified as such. The autobiographer limited her account to her own memory of how her uncle Fred looked as he ate the grommet, what she heard him say when he’d swallowed it, and what she thought about it. The only sensations and emotions she described were her own.

According to those who defend the use of fictional devices and elements in nonfiction, the memoirist is justified in telling us how, as he swallowed it, Fred vividly recalled the slightly oily taste of the first grommet he ever ate, fifty years ago in Indiana, and how bittersweet the memory was to him.

Many writers and readers of creative nonfiction hold that such ascription of inward thought or feeling, if it’s based on a knowledge of Fred’s character, is legitimate. It does no harm to Fred (who died in 1980 of a surfeit of grommets), and no harm to the reader, who after all will almost certainly know Fred only in and through the story, just as if he were a character in a novel.

But who is to certify the writer’s knowledge of her uncle’s character as accurate, unbiased, reliable? Possibly her aunt, but we’re not likely to have the chance to consult her aunt. The memoirist’s responsibility seems to me to be exactly that of the ethnographer: not to pretend to objectivity, but also not to pretend to be able to speak for anybody but oneself. To assign oneself the power to tell us what another person thought or felt is, to my mind, cooptation of a voice: an act of extreme disrespect. The reader who accepts the tactic colludes in the disrespect."

"…The notion that fictional characters are all portraits of actual people probably arises from natural vanity and paranoia, and is encouraged by the power fantasies of some fiction writers (you’re nothing to me but copy)."

To bring the point back to my job, well, it's exactly this relationship that causes me to fear even articulating to myself the painful parts of it. Every day I read these things and have to draft those facts in first person, then in third. I remember one of the first things my team lead taught me was: "Put yourself in the client's head." Now I feel stuck there even when I don't want to be. I feel like for some time, I went home with them all in my head, or my head back in the word documents.

I have people whose horrible recollections come back to me with every psychogeographical anchor (the beach, Arby's, Wendy's, the city an hour's drive from here). When I'm about to have sex, I have to be wary to banish the voice going 'Don't think about rape, don't think about sexual torture, don't think about how so and so happened to so and so in that document last week.' I don't want to even admit to myself at times that what I may read stays with me. I've tried lots of things: writing a few words about my feelings and ripping them up, saying prayers, taking a walk after every case, and none of these ritualizations really work. I don’t know what the solution to that really is.

I really want nothing more but to respect my clients, and to even acknowledge that what they share stays with me feels like I'm betraying them. So many of them, I stare at their pictures and wish I could meet them and tell them something inane like "You're so strong," inane even though I would mean it when I say it. So old a sentiment in response to pain, I only hear Cassandra's response to it each time I say it: "Only the unfortunate hear such praise."

I think I consider myself quite comfortable admitting all the miseries of the world, and perhaps that's what makes me good at my job. The other day I won my third core value award in a row at our quarterly company wide meeting. I've got three little mugs in a row on my desk, and three floppy certificates in a folder at home now. It's nice to be appreciated. It's nice to think this depressing disposition may aid itself to something good. It's nice to think my moral qualms about even my own thoughts may manifest themselves positively.

I've had to rewrite entire papers because of coworkers that have a reflex to paper over the horrible stuff or discuss it with the same casual attitude you'd describe a bad meal at a restaurant. Do they even know there's people on the other side of this!? Of course, my coworkers are not all like that though. I had one once who told me about how his mom once stood across a "real, honest to god, pedophile" in a court room once during jury duty. That someone just two years younger than me really made some mythic monster out of so common an evil left me a little aghast. I answered him honestly, "Well, they're not that uncommon. You've probably come across more than you know, given how common it is." And he looked at me as if I'd just told him that for the sake of shocking him, dismissing, or even teasing him.

But is it normal, I asked my husband tearfully the other day, to just spend all your time thinking about how down-to-the-bone evil this world is? That everything you touch, everything you see, every person you pass by was most likely touched by that evil? When I say evil I mean violence, not disaster or grief or generic suffering, but violence. It feels like every brick in this world was built with violence and set with malice. This world disgusts me. I feel now like I can't even say what I wanted to say when I set out to write this, because here I am once more caught in the muck of having to bear this disrespectful witness.

I wonder if this is good for me in the long run. I wonder how much more I can handle. I wonder how I can turn off my brain. I wonder how much this is affecting my psyche. I wonder if every story I've heard recollected will stay with me. I wonder how everybody else here copes with it? I wonder if it's OK to ask, or just weird. I wonder.

At night, I recited a message to every year of me before and thanked them all. I rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with my love. I opened the most lovely present, an ink pen that I hope will be my companian for a long long time. I talked to my brother who called right at midnight despite our timezones. I spent the day sleeping, went out for dimsum with my beloved, to pet the cats in the forest at the park near my home while we narrated our games and stories to one another, then out for a few rounds of Overwatch before we end our subscription at the gaming cafe we play at and never do again.

I have many questions in my heart that I hope to answer to myself through this year. I have many wishes that I will strive to fulfill. I have a need to life by my principles, and find out what that means to me. I have a compulsion to speak and make that has finally stirred after lying dormant for three years now in the blur of daily survival. I hope to never lose it again.

And a happy Eid, Nowruz, and spring equinox as well.

September was vivid, slow, and a flurry of change. Work was good, I studied a lot, and I finally got the clear from my doctor that the health issues I've been dealing with are (hopefully) FIXED! The final crown of this journey was moving out with my fiance from his mom's house - we've still got boxes all over, but it feels like the days have gotten longer ever since. To come back to a quiet home, cook and eat in peace, clean at your leisure, keep clutter out of the way, to go out without questions and come home whenever you feel like it.. These are luxuries I had a hard time imagining. I have never judged myself at the pace of other 20-somethings, because all my life I scarcely dares to hope for something like this.

It's going to be a slow process making this neocities, but my goals for it are,

making a longer entry blog so i don't have to resort to tumblr (bc that website is pissing me off lately)

review books and films i read on here

share my art, writing, and projects eventually