be so serious right now homie

symbol collapse of a failed regime

Hello friends—

First: I am starting a new section on Sweater Weather called drill&play. It is where I will store all of my tennis thoughts and tennis diary, really. I’ll write about my racquets and courts and all that stuff over there. I write about it in the welcome which you can read.

You can sign up for drill&play section by going here.

Second, I would like to remind you to pre-order Thomas Morris’s Open Up if you haven’t already. These stories surreal and strange and perfect companions for these strange, surreal times. Plus, it has the best story about a seahorse family that you will EVER read.

---

I have been fixating on my forehand. On a rainy, cold night I went downtown to Court 16—a “fun” tennis operation that is really a pickleball front—to hit on the ball machine for an hour. I did this because Court 16 has cameras that record your session, and I wanted some footage of my strokes so that I can work on technique. There’s only so much you can do to improve without being able to see yourself, the actual mechanics of your swing. The footage was largely unusable because they film at an insane angle, but from the few in-frame shots that were captured, what I noticed is that I have tendency to overdo the takeback so that the racquet goes behind my back. This makes sense. I taught myself the forehand from watching YouTube videos of Serena Williams, so, the WTA-style takeback tracks. But the issue is that my shoulders are broader than my hips, and so I am drawing power from the wrong source, biomechanically speaking.

So I went down another YouTube rabbit hole to try to figure out my stroke. What I found is…that there are too many metaphors. The YouTube coaches told me to pat the dog, to tuck my racquet in my pocket, to point the laser beam of my belly button in that direction, to look in the mirror of my strings, etc. What I wanted to be told was when to take the racquet back relative to the bounce. At what angle should I point my chest, where should the racquet be and when. I wanted facts. Dry. Arid. Sauceless facts. No juice. No pulp. Nothing dressed up for my understanding. Just the numbers, please.

After that session, I went to an hour clinic. The coach there kept speaking in metaphors. I thought, well, it’s no wonder my stroke hasn’t improved. These people are not teaching. They are trying to be poets. Understanding is not the objective. Is there any field that loves a metaphor more than sports people? No, I know the answer to that. Science people. Now they love some figurative language. Everything is a story. Everything is like something else. At least in science, it makes a kind of sense. They are trying to explain ineffable mysteries of creation and existence, trying to draw the unknown into the realm of the comprehensible. They must do this work with the crude materials of what is known.

I wish I could say that this is the extension of my figurative language fatigue, but that would be untrue. Yesterday afternoon, I saw three flattened pigeons in the road. At first, I thought it was one pigeon streaked over the asphalt, but then I could discern three distinct sets of wings. You could almost imagine how they’d been sitting there on the road before they were crushed, just hanging out. Actually, their proximity to each other was remarkable to me because usually, you might see one dead pigeon, but they scatter so readily that it’s rare enough to see two or three. Especially at a busy intersection like that. It's rare that they hang out in the middle of the street. It must have been something going very fast or moving very suddenly in a way they hadn’t expected. Or perhaps, they’d already died and had been run over. I don’t know. But there they were.

Why do I bring this up? Because at that moment, I was listening to an audiobook about the dissolution of the monasteries in Tudor England, in particular a part about the kinds of young women who ended up cloistered as a kind of savings account until the daughter could be used and was then extracted from the cloister to be married off. But the part of the book I was listening to at just that moment was about how sometimes family members would cloister their younger siblings in order to bolster their own inheritance and how this was achieved by paying off the religious house in question to take on the younger person. And then there was this line about how a large number of people living in religious houses were very young and possibly there for financially-motivated reasons.

And then, I looked up, and there were three flattened pigeons in the street.

Another example, I was walking to Roosevelt Island Racquet club from the F Train stop. I was listening to Paramore’s “Misery Business,” a song about delighting in the misery of your boyfriend’s inferior ex and enjoying the thought of them seeing you two together. I really love that song—it’s kind of slut shamey, but honestly, like, I don’t know man, a bop is a bop—and I listen to it before I play tennis to get in a cruel and competitive mindset. As I was walking, I looked down and there was a dead rat. It wasn’t just dead either. Its brains had been squeezed out of the top of its head and they extended in a pink little stream, culminating in a little thought bubble of brain matter. Now that seemed a potent metaphor for something. For what, I don’t know. Even in trying to depict it just now, I resorted to figurative language. In part, I guess, to convey the viscerality of the image, and some of how it made me feel. But also, to concretize it while also shrinking away from the extremity of it.

What I tell my students about figurative language and about the lyric is that it constitutes a phase change. That is, when language is put under the pressure or extremity of experience or emotion, it shifts register from reality as it appears into reality as it is experienced. The language itself attains a shimmer of that which it seeks to contain and the contents of the language are briefly made manifest. For a long time, I thought of figurative language as an attempt to make sense of something larger and stranger than all of us. But what I’ve come to believe (I think, I hope) is that figurative language is an attempt to convey something larger and stranger than all of us. Or maybe that’s just one of the goals of the lyric.

That is a very comforting thought—or at least, I should say that I take comfort in it.

However, lately, I am getting tired of metaphor and symbol. They feel a little…threadbare at the moment. There are planes falling from the sky as the president and his tiny-headed Rasputin conspire and scheme and cut and hoard wealth. Preventable infectious diseases are roaring back even as Bird Flu spreads and deepens, while the president and his croaky Rasputin “make American healthy again.” The current administration is quite literally taking the Trans out of LGBTQ+ and unraveling strides (small though they were) on civil rights even as people die in childbirth and are deprived lifesaving medical care. Then, this morning I read that the president and his tiny-headed Rasputin have gone to the Fort Knox to inspect the gold.

They have gone to Fort Knox to inspect the gold. I repeat it because it has the ring of something a child might think or do. “We are trying to get the economy back on track, so let’s go to where all the gold is kept.”

As a millennial, my experience with American politics has been as a kind of republic of gestures. Everything the political apparatus has ever done in my lifetime has felt like a system of superficial gestures that signal social values on one level while all the while contributing to a system of disenfranchisement of working people on every other level. I’ve never taken anything these people say seriously. I just assume always that they’re lining their pockets and stealing from the American people at all times in ways large and small. The political class is a class of traitors and crooks, evil down to their very core. No one who seeks power in the American system can be anything other than a villain in the waiting. That was my presupposition.

That’s still how I feel. All politicians are my enemy. It is my job to oppose them, to extract from them compromises that make the world a little more equitable for all involved, etc, etc, very boring.

This tendency has led me to see symbols everywhere—partly to make sense of their actions and partly because their actions are…symbolic. But in the case of this new regime (what other word is there for it?), I find myself tired of metaphors. They are insufficient. And increasingly, it feels like what they want is for us to think in abstraction and metaphor, to immediately turn what they do into a comparison with some other thing so that we might not notice the extremity of what it is they are actually doing.

I think so many of us got burned out in the Trump is a Fascist wars of the last decade—so many metaphors and allusions to fascism—that now the fascism, the actual, factual, here, boots on the ground, one step from declaring that he is the State (he might have actually said that he is the State), seems a little…I don’t know. Not anticlimactic, because in truth, it is very scary. I think to me it feels as if we’ve already expended the charge contained within that word, within the idea of the fascist president, that now we need another word, another phrase, something else to capture the extremity of what is actually happening.

And this need for a more extreme word is because, I think, many people failed to appreciate the extremity of what the word actually meant then, how serious a charge was being levelled. They assumed, when people called the Alt-Right Neo Nazis, that people were using the word Nazi ironically rather than, you know, definitionally.

I suppose cliché is what happens a language has expended its charge of mystery or surprise. Cliché seems to me to always refer to relations. It’s always a cliché to call a thing another thing in a way that’s been said or done before. A little too familiar. We’ve been down that road before. That’s a cliché, for example. But what I feel now is that a whole reservoir of language is dying out under the extremity of this new regime. Whole kinds of expression are just being totally deaded in our very mouths and minds and at our fingertips simply because nothing can keep pace with the strange world we find ourselves in.

Not to engage in hyperbole…or maybe to engage in a little bit of hyperbole, but there are times when I feel like the whole affective and experiential world order that I came of age with is rapidly disassembling around me. Like, in five years, I won’t even know how to write anymore because the language I have for experience and existence is so radically unsuited for a world this potent with metaphor and symbol, and yet, all of the symbols and metaphors are so dead the minute they arise?

It's like we live in a children’s storybook or a parable, but because it’s life and not a book, there isn’t the coherence one expects from a parable. There again, another metaphor to attempt to try to express this strange feeling I have.

Maybe, to put it more simply: we are living in symbol collapse, in which everything is both literal and symbolic, in equal measure. The planes falling from the sky are symbols of a failed regime, but also…they are literal planes falling from the sky. It is endlessly recursive.

I am in a state of symbolic overwhelm. Can you tell? So I have been playing tennis, trying to escape the metaphor. Trying to become a little more grounded. The issue? The coaches want to talk about frying pan grips and hammer grips and tucking the racquet in my fucking pocket. Like, be so serious right now, homie.

b