Variations on violence
What's undermining, shattering, displacing, resplendent.
Violence
noun
an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws
rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment
swift and intense force
There are moments when watching basketball, covering basketball, I step over, giddily skip and blur the line between the realities of my world and the people who are playing it. A big part of what invites you in and what I’ve always loved about it is the accessibility, even only visually. There are no masks, helmets, no obscuring equipment, just a face and a body laid bare and explosive. Off court, now more than ever, the allowances made by players to let fans into their lives directly through their feeds, or the supplementary media dedicated to fits and yeah, feelings.
There are also moments when that line widens to a rift, becomes pronounced as a border.
LeBron James saying he was “confused, frustrated and angry” at having to undergo isolation per league protocols as a result of a positive Covid test, this after he’d been cleared only two days into a 10-day process and after the NBA released a dedicated statement on James’s behalf. The league and the individualized lines it draws around James — a person as close to an autonomous area as they come — aside, his short-lived discomfort in a time where many, many people are still routinely dying of the virus, especially in the U.S., was a good if jarring reminder of where the false familiarities of a marketed accessibility stop.
And maybe you don’t need the reminder, maybe James saying he knew he’d get cleared because he “never, ever felt sick”, as if our collective understanding of a pandemic almost three years in has no chance against our collective ignorance, just caught me on the chin.
I feel for his family, for his children, who were subsequently put into isolation protocols, but I don’t empathize with James’s confusion or anger. Confusion, again, that at this point is a willful skimming of the abundant information available and anger that he was being asked to abide by rules, lenient as they are, and not even for the first time about this same thing.
James has made a diligent career of his accessibility and more than that, his amenability to being a role model. This season and last, when James has come up against rules that attempt to restrict even him, is the first time we’re seeing him at odds with both parts of that public persona. It’s not a question of allowances, James can do whatever he wants. I also think that some of his surprise must be genuine — he’s never been treated by the league or broader public trust as anything other than exceptional. But there’s a moral violence to his playing dumb, playing mad, that’s as deceptive as it is dangerous. It shouldn’t be a big ask, at this point, to expect James to be smart, to act smart. He is smart. Containing multitudes doesn’t have to extend to duplicity.
A woman was assaulted while running the track in Riverdale Park this week. In the still dark of early morning she’d been running laps and a man came down that long slope from Broadview Avenue, alone. He stood in the middle of the track watching her before he walked, slowly, to intercept her, and she stopped, thinking he wanted to talk, thinking that he needed something. He hit her in the face and then, just as calmly, walked away.
I think about her being alone, watching him come first down the hill, cutting a shadow on the browned grass in the grey dawn light. Watching but not watching as he moved from the hill to cross the lanes of the packed clay track, thinking maybe he’d continue on down to the Don Valley beyond, maybe not thinking anything past her pulse and the good rush of blood in her limbs from running.
When she realized he had stopped in the middle, was watching. Feeling a familiar notch in the gut, feeling apprehensive but stopping anyway when he walked over because that’s the impulse, it’s what’s conditioned of women, to be helpful even when your body is shouting with harm. To watch him walk quietly away, to get to walk quietly away, while overriding adrenalin for the next few steps of how to best and quickly get to safety or away from that wide open space of the park, a space I would and have too thought of as safe for how unobstructed, how visible from everywhere. A space that sees hundreds of people gather every evening in summer to watch the sun go down on the city skyline to the west, even dozens still in winter. A space that traffic curls alongside either above, with streetcars, slow moving cars, cyclists, joggers, people walking their dogs or below, with the Don Valley Parkway.
Every space, for some people, most people, is a duality. There’s the surface space, straightforward, and then the second space, convoluted and inverse. How generous it must be, to only need to think on one level.
Can there be a joyful violence? Something without harm, capable of moving to tears. Or a joy so fierce that it overrides its beatific trappings? I won’t say love, because a love described as violent so often manifests on women as harm, or as a justification for it.
And a joy that’s bursting is private, detrimentally so, hence the feeling in your chest like it was about to split as the world goes on oblivious around you.
A shared, surging experience of joy delivered through a physical conduit of such force that it seems to shred time, harmful only to individual ego and reaping shock, awe and a simultaneous, severe sympathy — I can only think of one thing and it’s dunking.
The joy, like the force of a dunk, is beautiful, crushing, complete. Someone is murdered, killed, ended, mourned for a minute and then resurrected by the reaching hands of their teammates. To be posterized — awful — but still means being rendered as a moment frozen in collective memory, the closest thing we have in basketball, maybe beyond, to Roman reliefs. An easy brutality, languid even.
Ja Morant lives up there, Jarrett Allen timeshares. Blake Griffen can suspend himself back in his glory days on a whim when he visits that altitude, a Neverland with less psychological baggage to unpack, at least for him. Russell Westbrook likes to remind us he can moonwalk when he’s lulled us into forgetting. Anthony Edwards seems to do it when he gets bored with everything else.
An accepted workplace hazard and forgiving in how cyclical. To be dunked on one day and to be the one doing the dunking the next, like natural law. You could score them to Tchaikovsky, “Waltz of the Flowers” as much as you could to Sabbath, M.O.P. The only thing generative of more devastation is when a dunk is just as unceremoniously blocked and there, where the dunk was about to happen, a tear in the fabric of time, like a star collapsing. Into that black hole goes the joy, gulped, and gasping around it is awe.
Here were our hopes and there they go down the grinning maw of, most likely, Jarrett Allen, destroyer of worlds.
The 55-foot fir tree in the Distillery wrings like a wet dog in the wind. The giant red and silver glass globes — 600 ornaments, I looked it up — and lights fixed so fast to the branches that they hardly budge, only twist and roil like stubborn fruit. The wind snakes through the narrow lanes and alleys of this place, repurposed as residential though the industrial edges stay sharp in how the elements tear through. Thin strips of rain lash sideways and still the lights on the tree — 60,000, I looked it up — explode with festive violence into the dark.
I drink a mulled wine quick as coffee and feel suddenly furred, padded hazily into myself. Watch Dylan navigate the crowds so that he can catch the eye of his mom and brother, watch him be waved down instead by couples who see his height and ask him to take their pictures with the heaving tree behind them. The tree, lashed down and rippling, even the gold garlands don’t budge.
Was it as impressive, hunkered down in the woods where it came from? In the quiet, easy dark, without “Holly Jolly Christmas” being piped in from everywhere and as the backdrop to so many first dates? If a tree falls in the forest and isn’t strapped to a flatbed and trucked into the city, does it get to come alive with such bedecked, resplendent rage?
This is the first time I’m coming across your work. Amazing. Thanks so much for sharing.