Sydney
I've been in Australia for more than two years now, and each day I feel more American. At other times in life, I've responded to cultural difference with a scrambling desire to learn the local codes, to fit in. Now, I'm more likely to treasure my incomprehension.
Cricket, for example. Not the insect but the bat-and-ball game whose cultural role in most Commonwealth countries roughly aligns with that of baseball in America. Just a few months after moving here in 2006, I was hiking near Berrima in what I thought was wilderness, and came upon this:
A single precise strip of very old pavement, obviously the remains of an ancient airport for centimeter-high aliens.
When my Australian companion explained that this had been a cricket pitch, I decided I never wanted to understand cricket, and I never have. The alienness of this game -- a game you can play for an entire day and still not know who's winning -- was just too rich to surrender in return for mere cultural belonging.
Dan Hill over at City of Sound has a marvelous post about the 1932 telegraphed narrative of an England-Australia match played in Melbourne. Telegraphs required extreme brevity, but a radio broadcaster back in England could read this text and constitute the game for his listeners, rather as one adds water to freeze-dried foods to reconstitute them. Dan observes that the raw telegraph text, with its extreme compression, takes on some of the qualities of poetry, though maybe not quite in our language:
“Fine warm 50000 before toss wicket good larwood voce fastest making ball fly adopted leg theory attack virulent batsmen ultra cautious"
It goes on, rendering hours of play in a few hundred words. Reading, I was reminded of various times that I've read ancient or non-western narratives, translated into English but still barely comprehensible. Narratives designed for oral transmission, such as the Buddhist sutras or the Upanishads, are intensely repetitive, seemingly the opposite of a telegraph cable. But if you take out the repetition, there's a similar half-opacity to them, a sense that to read them in full you'd need to add not just language, but an entire culture. They also seem to lack emotion as they describe momentous events, as though this too could be supplied entirely by the listener.
If I shared the culture of cricket, and could reconstitute the game from this text the way water reconstitutes freeze-dried food, all I'd have would be a cricket game. Without that cultural knowledge, I can rest in the puzzle itself, drawn into interest by glittering shards of the familiar. Reading the text this way, I can savor the cultural vastness of a not-yet-shrunken earth, one that still has room for the heroic.
I like it that way. If I ever figure out cricket, just shoot me.
Yes. Figuring stuff out is overrated. Like the poet says: I don't want you to understand what I wrote so much as appreciate it. I loved this post, Jarrett.
Teresa
Posted by: Teresa | 2009.01.14 at 07:26
Treasuring incomprehension. I'm 51 and I've never tasted beer. I would have never tasted coffee, either, but my wife made me years ago. I'm not a teetotaler, I don't think: I like wine. There's some sort of aura that coffee and beer have for me that I figure might be ruined if I ever tasted it. I do like to shock people with my ignorance. I guess it's part of my long-term goal of becoming outre, or at least old and eccentric.
There are other things of which I'm "willingly ignorant," as the Good Book puts it: popular culture (movies, music, stars, style), cars (styling and mechanics), and (closer to your subject here) ice hockey. When I go out of my way to get across my ignorance of these subjects at school, my ninth graders just think I'm ignorant. I'm not sure why that always surprises me.
The telegraphs remind me of the old baseball broadcasters who, sitting in their studios, would unfold these telegraphs with sound effects (the pop of a bat) and crowd noise on a dial. I love listening to a good baseball radio broadcaster today, but I think the old way of doing it took even more talent. It must have been almost like turning sport into spectacle, a la Roland Barthes.
Posted by: Peter | 2009.01.15 at 04:52
I'm a ~7th generation Australian. I don't watch sports or drink beer. When I went to work in the US and had to break this news, people asked if I'd been deported
Posted by: Mike | 2009.01.15 at 05:39
Hi Jarrett.
I suspect you are in no danger of warranting shooting.
Even for born and bred Aussies, Cricket is something of a mystery. And it is changing very fast, with one-day matches and now the dreaded and noisy 20:20 game.
It is fast becoming a medium for commercialism.
I regret the loss of purity in the game. It is that loss which is the source of poetry for me.
Posted by: Denis Wilson | 2009.01.15 at 05:45
Years ago while I was on tour in England a couple of crew guys tried to explain a cricket match to me that was on the TV in the tech office. But when he said there was something called "silly mid on" and "silly mid off" I decided there was no hope that I would be able to comprehend the game ever. I've always been more of a soccer girl myself...you know lots of heavy drinking and singing and rioting...my kind of fun.
Posted by: Miss Bliss | 2009.01.15 at 13:07
I laughed aloud through all of this.
One of my favorite memories of grad school was getting drunk with an visiting Oxford student who obligingly explained cricket to me for three hours (with many amusing literary & linguistic excursions: it was not dull at all.) I explained American race relations to him. We neither of us had the faintest idea what the other was saying, but we both enjoyed the transaction enormously.
Posted by: dale | 2009.01.18 at 11:26
That last sentence is a good description of sex.
T.
Posted by: Teresa | 2009.01.26 at 07:08
Teresa contacted me later to advise that her last comment refers to the last sentence of the previous comment, not the last sentence of my post.
Thanks, everyone, for the interesting comments. Please keep them coming.
Posted by: Jarrett | 2009.01.27 at 15:02
what a wonderful mystery!
Posted by: Pilgrim/Heretic | 2009.01.29 at 13:26