Full post hosted on Hudson River Blue.
Ninety-Plus of Blue combines aesthetic football with literary aesthetics. Every week, one match is discussed in terms of one literary quotation. This week: Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow."
"But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one cando. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...."
When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don't automatically assume that it's cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment....
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don't automatically assume that it's cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment....
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
It’s tempting to just punt and say, "Well, nobody can do anything, really; cause-and-effect is a myth, that’s why NYCFC is losing"—tempting, but that’s not what I’m up to. Pointing to the limits of control is too convenient a way to set aside responsibility for the way things are going. What Pynchon’s causation skeptic says here, that "No one can do," is kind of like Nietzsche’s idea from The Genealogy of Morals that "‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed," which I also mentioned as an aside to last week’s post. Is control over these results merely an "illusion"? Were Jason Kreis’s "modest experiment" with formation and personnel over these three games ultimately futile attempts to divine the "mechanism" of an irreducible tendency toward collapse? And how much should we be worried about the "awful regularity" of what’s looking more and more like a late-game point donation drive? Check out the full article....
