In the 1980s, all my heroes wore briefs.

Some wore briefs over pants. Others wore them bare legged. A high percentage could, in some form, fly. One or two had a sword. All of them were men: Superman, He-Man, Hulk Hogan, Greg Louganis.

Around the time I graduated from wearing patterned underpants over sweatpants to school, I became a diver. I’d played other sports, but none of these had the same rituals. Go to the pool. Change from street clothes to a swimming costume. Wet the chamois. Warm up with a few tucks off the deck. Sometimes practice on the trampoline — always most fun with the specialized harness made for spins. Then I’d get on the board, either 1-meter or 3-meter, quickly run the chamois across the legs and toss it, as I’d seen older divers do, down to the deck or water. Three-step hurdle, then whatever dive assigned. 103c was my favorite. That’s a forward 1 ½ somersault in the tuck position.

Divers wear briefs. Divers must become familiar and comfortable with their bodies in movement and on display. Divers overcome fear, and embarrassment, and thus become superheroes.

Louganis was my ultimate hero. He won pretty much everything for a decade. In Seoul, in 1988, he was defending his two golds from LA ’84, and I was just old enough to grasp the drama of the event. I recorded it on Betamax. I watched the competition everyday after school through my next season. I coveted the Air Mail service Speedo Louganis wore. I wanted to be my hero, in skill and in dress.

What most people remember about Louganis is that he struck his head during the meet and bled into the pool. They remember that he came back and won. They remember that, sometime later, he learned he was HIV-positive. In the 1980s and early 90s, that diagnosis, and Louganis’ sexuality, was enough for some folks to totally dismiss his achievements. And then, because of this dismissal, I learned more about my hero and his challenges: dyslexia, taunting, sexual abuse. I’d learned about courage watching him fly. I learned more about courage watching his vulnerability; watching him bare his soul, slowly sharing his full being. I learned then what it really was to be a superhero. It is one thing to fly from a springboard or platform. It is another to fly against the turbulence of public opinion. My challenges differ from Louganis’ challenges. Nevertheless, I found, and still find, inspiration in my superhero’s strength.

Entering high school, the elusive Air Mail Speedo never surfaced, but I did find a black and silver ’96 Atlanta design in a discount bin at a swim store in Newington, Connecticut. That was the suit I wore my senior season. The season I hyperextended my back on a 203c, a back 1 ½ somersault in the tuck position, during the first meet and basically missed the whole competitive schedule.

I thought of Louganis when I was allowed, by some grace, to compete at the New England championships. He bounced back from injury, and so could I. (Note: I did not however perform to Louganis’ standards). I thought of Louganis when I grappled with alcoholism in 2006, choosing to become sober and facing ridicule from friends for it. He’d been vulnerable, and so could I. I thought of Louganis when I accepted a bipolar diagnosis. He’d overcome mental health difficulties, and so could I.

Something I’ve considered is healing over time. I was born 20 years after Louganis, but still lived in a time of similar prejudices. Shedding stereotypes and pushing strongly against the status quo takes time. Healing oneself takes discipline and dedication. Diving in, paradoxically, wasn’t Louganis’ approach. Instead, he taught patience where emergence arrives when one is prepared for it.

Superheroes are always more than they appear. Superheroes inspire widely. Superheroes inspire individual growth. Superheroes inspire us to reach for the stars. Superheroes inspire societal change.

I tell whoever will listen that to watch the British champion Tom Daley knit by the pool deck is to know that he stands on the shoulders of Greg Louganis. I see his legacy when I watch athletes in the WNBA and on football pitches across the world now openly celebrate their partners. And when I watch NBA players paint their fingernails without fear of rebuke. I’ll now tell whoever will listen that to watch Keely Hodgkinson return from injury and smash world records is to know that she stands on the shoulders of Greg Louganis.

In the 2020s, all my heroes still wear briefs.

Nick Schonberger lives in Philadelphia.

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I stare at the grey walker in front of me, the silver metallic finish dulled from years of daily use by my ninety-year old grandmother. And, by me. She uses it far more than I do—I spend most of the day in a muted black electric wheelchair. But I walk with the walker and someone spotting me from behind, hands gripping my waist, each day for twenty minutes for exercise. And maybe for the sliver of hope I can’t seem to let go of that, one day, my body will come back to me. My neurons will remember walking like they used to remember a single-handed backhand slice or free throw or ballet pirouette; when my body moved freely.

Newton’s First Law of Motion states that all objects in motion remain so, unless acted upon by an external force. For the first twenty-three years of my life, I had been in constant motion. Sprinting, and sometimes stumbling, through midnight serenades and garden party dinners, hustling through physics exams and chemistry experiments, and meandering through tennis tournaments and Bhangra dance competitions. But in every life, no matter how swiftly you run or how deviously you hide, an unimaginable force can always find you. And it stops you. It stops you.

In my case, the force came in the form of a spontaneous brainstem stroke during medical school that stopped everything in my world and body except for eyes blinking and heart beating. I was forced to pivot from an active life of a future doctor to a sedentary, unemployable one. My body was entirely and inescapably still. But somehow, my mind still spiraled. Thoughts ricocheted off the sides of my cerebrum. Feelings and memories and wonderings leapt from the amygdala to hippocampus and back again. Neurotransmitters sashayed between synapses, stimulating changes throughout my brain.

In medical school, I had learned about the process of neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to heal itself. My body couldn’t move anymore, but my brain clearly could. It could pump out new neurons to replace the ones that died from my stroke. It could revolutionize the way it once communicated with my muscles and forge new pathways.

I threw myself into rehabilitation. I believed if I worked hard enough, I could harness my brain’s movement and plasticity to help my body move again. I could regain all I had lost with intensive workouts and my brain’s potential. Day after day, week after week, I focused on that singular goal. Therapists dragged my limbs through the entire range of motion at the hip and shoulder joints. Hard, plastic splints flexed my wrists and ankles. Electrical stimulation triggered every muscle from within my forehead to my baby toe. Dry needling pinpricks up and down both arms massaged the muscles. I even watched an old video of my favorite dance performance from college every afternoon, mimicking the familiar movements in my mind, hoping to unlock some muscle memory. Every shoulder shake, every hip hike, every ordinary smile.

Slowly, movements began to poke through the stillness. A contraction of my left tricep here. A quiver of my right quad there. A syllable escaping from my pressed lips. An almost imperceptible shake of the head. They were barely noticeable, but they proved that messages from my brain were finally reaching my muscles. I redoubled my efforts, hoping to strengthen those new connections into actual movements. I could feel an epic comeback brewing like I could feel the imminence of Austin Rivers’ buzzer-beater in the ‘12 Duke vs. Carolina game. You just knew the ball was going to swish through the net, for the infamy, the lore, the story that had already been written.

But weeks turned into months, and then years.

My progress jumped and slipped and tripped and tumbled and strutted and wavered and stalled. My doctors and therapists had no answers. Medications offered only drowsiness. Pushing my body to its limits daily served only to underscore how limited it was. For the first time in my productive life, practice wasn’t proportional to progress. Not at all. In fact, more practice often yielded more setbacks—fatigued muscles, overstretched ligaments, hyperextended joints.

Some contractions did eventually turn into functional movements, and syllables turned into slurred words and fragmented breathy sentences. But most muscles wouldn’t contract without an entire choreography of muscles contracting with it. To engage my left hamstring, for example, I have to contort my facial muscles, squeeze my jaw, twist my head to the extreme right, tighten my already fisted left hand, relax the opposing muscle and engage my left bicep. Every movement is a battle within my own body.

I excitedly watched a video of myself standing and marching from that day’s therapy, an exercise I thought I had finally mastered, and I stared at my strained face. My painstakingly sluggish movements. My chest rising and falling too quickly. Hope seeped from me at the inhuman sight. There would be no epic comeback. The new neurons taking over for their fallen teammates were just backups for a reason. They would never execute as a precise, elite team again. Rage and frustration and fear charged through my mind. But I couldn’t stop trying. Couldn’t stop believing. What would my life be like if I let such a still life play out?

It’s taken me years to learn to live within my limits instead of incessantly pushing against them. To live in my body of today and not for some mythical, future body that may never appear. A wheelchair, instead of a body, helps me navigate the world. Other’s hands do for me what mine can’t anymore. I once relied on my body to not only sustain my life but to also participate in it. Now, I have had to create new ways to be a part of the living.

My body stopped moving but my mind never did. It thrums constantly with emotions and questions and insights and fears. But it needs an outlet. So with it, I dance on the page. I’ve decided to become a writer and allow my mind to spin freely; perhaps causing other minds to spin too. I twirl metaphors to explain my experience and twist sentences to discuss disability and ableism. I rely on my body to move enough to keep my heart healthy, figure palatable, and mind safe.

But more than an outlet, my mind needs input to fuel its movement. I fill it with books and movies and art and culture and experiences and friendships and travel. It’s forced me to push play on my life. And I discovered there was still movement, not the kind I imagined, but one that might be just as freeing.

Harshada Rajani is a writer, nonprofit cofounder and disability advocate based in Charlotte, NC.

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There are squares of tile in blue. A black line down the middle that is too often, unnervingly, not in the middle, but slightly to the left, or to the right. There is the general flotsam discharged from people in motion, like snot and plasters and hair and nails. The taste of chlorine that miraculously, like Starbucks, tastes the same wherever I go. There are the tiles at the end that require touching before turning.

But other than those things, there’s not much else. I should add that my goggles tend to leak in water. I am not sure what to do about this. I tried replacing them but each new one keeps on leaking. And I’ve tried adjusting them between lengths, but I don’t really know how best to do this and, in fact—as this essay slips into the confessional—I do not find the ends of lanes very hospitable, or at least not as hospitable as the water itself, so I tend to not break between laps when I swim, which I do in the summertime at the outdoor pool close to my flat. I swim, sometimes with water in my eyes, sometimes without, not for very long, a few times a week.

I used to be quite sporty. That distilled in me a competitive streak that requires years of unlearning, a journey which I am still on, but it means, for instance, that in this household Strava is banned, and if there’s an opportunity to finish early or just do a few less laps than usual and have a latte instead, my inner life coach supports it. There is an interesting thread to this. My body, of course, is changing. My lung capacity is shrinking and my arms are not what they used to be. But the mind, which is bitter and jealous and mean, has not caught up. It still considers the body that it rattles inside to be that of a 16 year-old bound by promise and hope. This results, despite the anti-competitive training regime, in me being regularly frustrated when overtaken. I tell myself there is a beauty in this, duh—in being ultimately the same child-self with adult-body. Like, life is immense, but ultimately I am the same person who placed first in year 6 regional breastroke.

There are videos on YouTube that are really helpful to correct swimming techniques. I stumbled upon them after looking for a video that I remembered from my childhood, which is of athletes in high school practicing swimming fast by being chased by small alligators. This is a real video and a fascinating insight into the competitive mind and absolutely insane behaviour of high school coaches. But that video led me to better videos. And those videos taught me a new way to kick with my legs. I used to think that I needed to kick with my legs all the time, non-stop, like a car engine, but in fact this is not very à la mode in swimming. I now practice what is called a 2-beat leg stroke, which involves one kick per arm stroke, kicking with the opposite leg to the arm, like scissors. It is difficult to get the action right and, like rubbing your tummy and patting your head, it works best when I don’t think too much about it. There are also different theories about the action of arms. When I grew up, I used a high arcing elbow. This makes for a smooth entry of the arm into the water. I now prefer a longer, straighter arm that reaches forward, like it is trying to grasp at the water in front of me or scoop it up as if catching a goldfish. A fellow swimmer once told me between laps that I was doing great but that my left arm did not finish its stroke in the same manner as my right arm, and that this resulted in my technique being unbalanced. Lacking a mirror, I have never checked this, but I have also never managed to shrug the thought that he was correct. It worries me.

I focus on my breathing too. I practice, lap after lap, holding my breath for longer and feeling the strain on my lungs increase. I normally start with breathing every four strokes of front crawl. And then this becomes every six strokes. And sometimes every eight. This is partly meditative—like holding your breath in yoga, and partly pop-CBT—like holding your breath at work. But it is also some third thing to do with death, and life, and breathing in between; something—I’m not sure—about the thinness of life that I can feel when absorbed by concentrating and swimming without air. It is very peaceful.

In A Rushed Account of the Dew, Alice Oswald writes:

I who can hear the last three seconds in my head

but the present is beyond me

listen

I mentioned to my mum, who sings and likes to swim too, my theory about swimming: that the focus on a physical act—arms and legs and breath—creates an inner stillness. Perhaps, I suggested, the same could be said of playing music. I remember practising scales and focusing on the sound and resonance of the application of hand and bow to string, feeling drawn away in that action from everything outside of my life, from anything that wasn’t to do with the sound of the cello. It matches the concentration I need in swimming. And there is a closeness too between breathing in water and the playing of music: both outbursts of energy from a body or instrument. Mum was less convinced. She said maybe but she has now taught herself to think and sing at the same time. So what I am saying may not have a general application. It may apply only to swimmers who are not that good.

It is so hard, now, in the attention-slop economy, to be absorbed by anything, particularly something that I am doing myself, rather than something that is being done to me. I like swimming because it offers me that. A solitude in breathing and kicking and pulling with my arms. Occasionally, (I am not perfect) I will look at the people who swim past me and think about what they are doing with their body, which is different to my body, and why they are rolling their shoulders like that or what it says about them to be someone who kicks like that (so anxious, so needy). But most of the time, I look at the tiles on the floor. I have the taste of chlorine in my mouth. There is nothing like it.

Thea McLachlan is a writer living in London.

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People are always asking me what I do for a living and I am not sure what to say. I find it unbelievable that people would ask such a question in LA. I have no answer, even though I feel that I do many things throughout the day: car, walk, farmer’s market, walk, office, car, office, Larchmont, car, Barnsdall, walk, car, farmer’s market, office, walk, car, home. I do not know why I go to these places, only that I feel as though I must and that if I do not, then something bad and altogether severe will happen to me.

Obsessively circling these places and neighborhoods is my own form of exercise, which in LA is mandatory in order to break up the near never-ending moments of non-activity that take up hours of the day.

Most of the time that I am in my car I feel OK. When I lived in New York I walked everywhere to the point that my toes became swollen with blood, which thankfully does not happen in my car even though I am certain that driving burns calories in a similar way to walking. In LA I drive my car for the same amount of time that I used to walk. When I am not inside of my car, I am forcing myself to eat potions that have indeterminate effects on my body. I am often imitating what it would be like in a city where I am able to actually exercise without having to segment my day around it.

I barely interact with anyone throughout the day. I have one friend who is mentally unwell, or at least has a penchant for saying outlandish things. Yesterday he said that this is going to be a good year because it is an even number, and last year was not because it was an odd number. He does not know how to dress himself. He is always wearing clothes that are too small or do not fit right one way or the other. About once a day I will look at him and realize that the entire bottom half of his torso is showing. He is not aware of this. His eyes are half closed. His hair is wet and slicked down over his forehead. He can not see in front of him. He is not aware of his own presence, he is like a child—only without the magic that children have.

In LA that is exactly what people are trying to maintain with their striving for youth and the immaturity that is a byproduct of such striving: magic. They think that if they look young and act young and think young, then they will be able to maintain some sort of wonder that they had when they were children. But the reality is that children are delayed, and therefore it is not possible to be able to maintain this childlike wonder, or rather that, if you did, you would actually be a handicapped adult, and that no amount of children’s aesthetics are able to maintain that sense of wonder. When a child looks at the world they see it like it is made of paper mâche or like a drawing that they did in crayon; a smear of colors. They are half blind in the sense that their vision has not yet been sanctioned into a formal and known arrangement of shapes and ideas.

I do have an office in the city, but I do not trust that the building has my best intentions at heart. The building is decades old and was abandoned for many of those years. The air quality is abhorrent. I have complained to management many times about this issue, but they have never done anything about it. The office is filled with a number of other people of indeterminate origin, film producers, etc. I do not trust them and although we may share the same office, I choose not to communicate with them.

I go to the office a number of times over the course of a given day, and ascend to my office upstairs, passing many of these so-called producers on the way, and yet, I am unable to bring myself to interact with them because I do not trust them and their thoughts because they have taken place within the building that was abandoned for years and years and all of the thoughts from the building’s previous tenants simply sat inside of this awful abandoned barn for a decade without even an open window to clear them out, and all of these sentiments and negative emotions that sat in the building are inside of the walls, haunting it. It is these thoughts that in part propel me to leave the office quickly onto my next place, which is often the farmer’s market down the street, where I do not purchase anything, but rather use the market as a sort of track that I can walk around repeatedly to fill my quota of activity for the day.

But really, there is no place. You are never in a place here. The heat and space put everything on a pedestal that is then only viewable while driving, causing a complete dissociation between time and place. All of these things, Erewhon, the farmer’s market, pilates, exist suspended in somewhere beyond time. They are phantoms of other ideas that exist temporarily in a place that is agreed upon to be Los Angeles. But it is nowhere really, a ghost of an idea. It is whatever object, person, idea you happen to have or be at any given time. Infinitely manipulatable and interchangeable. It is no place, no mind. Every person here knows this, I am sure of it.

Patrick McGraw is a writer based in LA, and editor of Heavy Traffic.

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“What are our lungs supposed to do?” Kafka asks. “If they breathe too fast, they poison themselves; too slow, they suffocate; if they search for their own rhythm, they perish from the search.”

As a childhood asthmatic, I had to find my own rhythm for breathing again as an adult. It was first SCUBA diving that did this for me. Descending into the deep, using my breath for buoyancy and movement more than my body. Second, it was yoga. A way of remembering to breathe, and to co-ordinate movement and breath: create a picture of the body. In a sense, with diving my body disappeared. With yoga, it finally appeared again. If asthma is a constriction of breath that refuses to let go, exhale, then maybe diving was a first exhalation and yoga a new inspiration.

Athletes often turn breath into a practice of mastery. Breath is a training of breathing. After we are born we spend a lifetime modulating air—taken in, expelled, held, strained, lost, found again. We are told that breathing is automatic beneath consciousness, but anyone who has run hard enough knows that this is only half true. Breath is both involuntary and trainable, a function that becomes an art precisely at the point where it begins to fail.

There are different genres of breath in sport. The chaotic breath of the sprint, where the body outruns its own oxygen. The rhythmic breath of distance running, matched to stride and ground. The ecstatic breath of endurance, when something opens and the body seems to move beyond itself. And then there is anxious breath—the most intimate and the most humiliating—like when serving in a tennis game for match point. In psychoanalysis, we might say that breath is what we are meant to forget. Like sexuality, it recedes into the background, allowing life to proceed without constant awareness. We are meant to forget that we are breathing and yet breath can tip into obsession, even madness. Athletes undo this forgetting perhaps in order to better forget. That’s a thesis. I have no proof.

Consider the sprinter and activist Lee Evans, trained in part by choral director, Carl Stough, who understood breath not simply as physiology but as a whole body cure, a diaphragmatic expulsion. He cured veterans “by accident” using his choral techniques. Patients whose emphysema had left them bedridden instead were up and walking in weeks. Emphysema is still listed as an incurable disease. Singing, like running, is the organization of breath across time, a shaping of air into endurance. When he raised his fist at the 1968 Olympics, it was not only a political gesture but a respiratory one: a resistance to the easy breath of national pride, an interruption in the smooth circulation of spectacle. It was also a reminder that breath is social. We breathe with others in air that is shared, often contaminated even, when celebrated.

Free divers, not scuba divers, are perhaps the most uncanny figures here. They descend into depths without breathing, training themselves to override what feels like the most absolute command of the body: to inhale. The urge to breathe is not triggered by lack of oxygen but by the buildup of carbon dioxide: a signal that can be manipulated, extended, resisted. Divers learn to sit inside this signal, and resist, open themselves into an eerie silence and emptiness. Meanwhile they desaturate oxygen in their blood, redirecting it toward vital organs. They slow the heart. They enter a death driven trance, bolster their lungs against pressure, and survive as we once did under water. They also, like many extreme sports, die at a very high percentage. The same techniques that allow a diver to descend further can also lead to “shallow water blackout,” a loss of consciousness without warning. Breath, pushed too far, disappears.

The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi once speculated that our life on land is a kind of catastrophe, a forced departure from a blissful, wet, and supportive oceanic existence where breathing air as we know it did not exist. The diver returns, temporarily, to this lost environment. There is ecstasy in this. But also, extreme danger. Ferenczi says that such bliss ignores the reality that we live on land, breathe, and must live a life of friction, making it a kind of death driven pursuit of nirvana.

In the 2023 movie The Deepest Breath is a tragic love story as much as it is a documentary about free diving. Its main protagonist, Italian prodigy Alessia Zecchini, in the opening scene plunges one hundred meters into the dark and back in one breath. She meets her match in a safety diver (someone who waits 30 feet below the surface in case of an emergency) who coaxes her towards medals and world records while acting as her ballast underwater. It is he who dies trying to rescue her.

This oscillation between control and loss is present across sports. High-altitude climbers speak of breath as something that must be rationed, each step coordinated with an inhale, each movement dependent on a fragile intake of thin air. The body begins to break down; cognition falters; hallucinations are not uncommon. Climbers describe a strange intimacy with breath at altitude, as if each inhalation were a gift, each exhalation a risk.

Wim Hof and others have popularized breath techniques that promise transcendence of extreme temperatures, pain, even illness. Hyperventilation followed by breath retention produces altered states, tingling extremities, and a sense of expansion or dissociation. These practices border on the ecstatic, but also on the pathological and contagious. The line between training and symptom is not always clear. While the image is often of the liberated and free, deep and authentic breath; most of us know that the more sports-induced manner of breathwork courts chaos and strange rhythms to do impossible feats.

Indeed, many of the earliest patients in psychoanalysis presented with disturbances of breathing: choking, coughing, feelings of suffocation. Freud gives the example of a woman who asks, “Why must I breathe? Suppose I didn’t want to?” The question sounds absurd, but in sport it becomes a method. Suppose I didn’t want to—yet. Suppose I could wait. Suppose I could hold. Athletes learn to inhabit a threshold beyond their own egos, even as the whole act is in the service of ego. They triumph over life and human limits and impossibilities—risk themselves in order to be one of the elites.

But there is something less triumphant here that should be remembered.

Breath is also the site of dependency. It ties us to others and to our environment. The infant’s first breath is both an assertion of independence and a sign of absolute vulnerability: to breathe is to need. Breath reminds us that control is partial, that the body is not fully ours. To lose control of breath is to confront the possibility of not-being, of slipping out of life. Ferenczi suggests that children, especially, are vulnerable to this slipping away, and includes asthma as a feeling that one was unwelcome in life, not loved into being and bound to an environment.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and writer in New York City.

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David Tully’s image “Landwork 15” registers in my body first. Those good chills ripple chicken skin along my arms, back of my neck, base of my skull, top of my messy-bunned head. Then what I call the Spirit Surge, a zap-jolt response to art firing in my core, radiating up and out until I’m incandescent. Then a smile. More of a smirk, really. Then the thoughts, rapid fire: now this is some public art street art graffiti art protest art business. This is a prayer. This is some sacrilege. This is divine.

Next the future-tripping: I’m carrying my old bald ball, losing my footing, making it to the top, dribbling on the asphalt base of this cross, the reverb holier than church bells. I’m trying to put up a few j’s on this iron hoop drilled into stone, I’m missing and damn, can a girl get a rebounder up here? I’m sweating and windswept, bun messier by the moment, I’m making a shot, missing another, making again, making a few. I’m sitting with my back against the graffitied base, arms on my knees, ball under them, breathing hard, looking out on the mountains, thinking about my family, thinking about pilgrimage, thinking about belief, about things that seem incongruent – about basketball and poetry and open doors and Ross Gay and Dr. J.

In 2012, Tully climbed to Bray Head, part of the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, and drilled a basketball hoop into the standing cross. Online, I find two short wordless videos of the hoop’s chain net blowing in the breeze. When Tully pans out, we see rocks and scattered wildflowers in the foreground. The chain net reminds me of our public park court and of Christ’s crown of thorns. The rocks and flowers echo the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus mourned his inevitable death, and Golgotha, the place of the skull and the site of his crucifixion. I know all of these stories because I learned them at church, the place we went to with almost as much devotion as we did the basketball court.

Delight expert Ross Gay delivered the keynote session for LitFest Youngstown in 2023 on a Saturday night in the sanctuary of the local Episcopal church. It had been years since I’d entered a church, but Aimee, Nora, and I settled in a couple rows back from the lectern. My family had always been left-pew sitters. Tonight, I had unconsciously chosen the right side.

The place was packed, far more crowded than the Presbyterian churches of my youth. After his introduction, Ross thanked us for being there, and then, smiling, asked if it would be okay if he did a longer reading from his 2020 work Be Holding: A Poem. We all nodded yes as I held my underlined, dog-eared copy, memorized like scripture.

The pews creaked and cracked like old bleacher rows do. Dust motes danced in the gleam of century-old olive green pendant lights. Behind the pulpit, 6’4” Ross moved silk-like and smooth, a ball player poet, bouncing slightly at the knees, and with his good book in one hand, scooped the air with his other—his right like Dr. J’s bringing the ball low before he defies gravity, flicks the ball up and in—and while Ross’ voice bounced off the walls of the sanctuary he

has begun his extended course of study
on gravity and grace…

…Erving simply decided in the air
to knock on other doors

And I am thinking about
the simple decision
to knock on other doors

and Ross is in the zone, as we say about players having a good night, torso leaning forward, picking up the pace like you do on a fast break and you’ve got two perfectly-spaced outlets streaming in front of you, leading us like a good passer does

while a draft leaks through the lead pane of the blue and crimson stained glass to my right and I know I am holding my breath

and the Spirit Surges jab and retreat, jab and retreat because this art is the way, the truth, the life

It is finished.
For a beat, two, maybe three: uncommon quiet. Sacred silence.

And then applause. In a church!
The Presbyterians would never.
Waves of robust applause, just shy of thunderous.
Ross’ words and cadence and spirit hung in the air, dripping like a baptism.

This is the reading of Ross Gay. And all the people said “Amen.”

I’m sure there were others before him, but Ross Gay was the first literary writer I knew of to write so compellingly, so tenderly, about basketball—a sport I loved with my whole heart despite being painfully average at it. His June 2020 publication in The Sun, “The Ramshackle Garden of Affection,” a series of letters about basketball and poetry with his MFA student and friend Noah Davis, reflected the intimacy I felt with the game and the others who love it, even in my mediocrity. His September 2020 essay “Have I Even Told You About the Courts I’ve Loved: On the Tenderness and Care of a Good Pick-Up Basketball Game” was essential to my understanding that a literary writer—a poet!—and educator could write about sports and still be taken seriously as an artist and intellectual. My whole life, I had thought of sports and art as separate endeavors. I never considered what might happen if I let my passion for both rip.

As a happily single, child-free woman and educator who loves spending her time reading (idolatry of worldly ideas: of the Gospel according to Ross Gay), making art and watching basketball (idolatry of objects: of the miracles of Dr. J and his disciples), and writing personal essays (idolatry of the self: of lady navel-gazing myopia), traditional evangelicals find my very existence offensive. And this is why I might erect a David Tully-style cross with a basketball hoop attached on the front lawn of my childhood church.

Until then, here I sit on a Sunday morning at my altar, the inherited oak kitchen table of my youth, scuffed like a gym floor, thinking about acts of devotion as the pilgrimage I’ll make today. Turn to a vignette from Gay’s The Book of Delights. Get some thoughts down to meet my daily word count goals. Make time for a workout, maybe even walk down to the abandoned hoop on Antioch’s campus a few blocks over—the one just to the right of the chapel. Take my old bald ball and put up a few jumpers, a few layups, a few reverse layups if I’m really feeling myself, finish with some free throws, a distance from the hoop I can sense whether there’s a marked lane or not. Faith in how far away I am and the force I need to reach the goal.

Two dribbles, index finger on the valve, breathe, release, follow through, the ball bouncing on asphalt like the metronome of my youth, like the knocking on a door, all of it a religion.

Erin Hill is a writer and hoops enthusiast in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

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Sometimes you have to ask the obvious question. Must there always be fruits of our labor? Do we hate our failing bodies? It’s the relentless superego. The always-advocate for productivity and the often-enemy of creativity. I tend to think about this drive in two ways: with romantic relationships, and with movement. In my world, they are intimately related. Right now, I’m dating someone who shows up reliably and punctually, though some would say I see him infrequently. Two to four times a month. To me, to both of us, this is a sustainable relationship. This is a compatible frequency, a collaborative consistency. Those are not typically romantic phrases, but I find the whole thing enchanting. What we have is a mutual acknowledgement of our inevitable failure—that we will not be here always and forever. Disability studies, non-monogamy, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis have taught me as much—that the act of being together cannot be predicated on being “enough.”

It all hinges on being, full stop. My lover and I see other people and do other things. We take our respective time, with ourselves and with each other. We talk about it. We agree and disagree. There is no destination. It’s not always easy for me—sometimes it’s tempting to listen to the voices that say constant contact, reassurance, a perpetually open door, are the premium signs of love. Absence and yearning are in plenty of novels and films, but they are harbingers of doom. The idea is to find a way to be together always and to never change so much that your union can be undone. Your story has now merged with another’s story and you’ll never part. It’s a kind of identity—if you find this kind of love you can now label yourself and your Other: partner, spouse, boyfriend, fiancé. You never have to stand alone again.

I was once in a relationship where we lived together, bought a car together, adopted a dog together, and mixed our finances. There was an intensity between us. It took only a few months of knowing each other to establish exactly where we were headed. We chose to identify, and thus release ourselves from not knowing. But it took me years after the breakup to realize that the desire for this kind of closeness was not because I needed to identify and be identified by my then-girlfriend, but because I wanted to luxuriate in the harmony of companionship. I’ve learned, in these post-relationship years of regeneration, that people can be “with you” in ways that are not constantly proximate or heightened. That this kind of wading in and out was its own luxury, the way that taking your time is sweet and expensive. It’s as codependent as any binary: absence relies on presence as some more desirable north star, but presence in turn depends on absence to hold its superior place. Companionship then, is a way to hold both in equal regard—that you will never possess another person and, as such, you will never lose them. Now, I live with friends in a house. I have a job that allows me to work from anywhere, so I see my best friend, who lives across the country, several times a year. I spend weeks at a time with my sisters and their babies in other states. I’m in a relationship where either of us can wade in and out. Even if it changes, even if one thing ends so another can begin.

I’ve found a similar way of moving that mirrors my experience of identification. For years, I was a runner—obsessively—building up to nearly 50 miles a week on roads and trails. I needed the reassurance, the constancy, the results. I got faster and stronger and thinner. I needed to be productive and to prove something to everybody through the body I produced—I wanted to show how I could be useful and that I wouldn’t be a burden. I wanted the work I put in to mean something. I wanted to do a job and be rewarded by the boss, who wasn’t me. I wanted so desperately for someone else to take the reins. I wanted my girlfriend to admire me and not feel smothered by me. I had a minimal sense of my autonomy or what it might do for me; it stood naked, ashamed. What I did was all for someone else. This was what I wanted and for a while it felt good. I was praised for my discipline, for my smaller body, for my devotion to keeping time and pace. And it wasn’t just running. Before that, it had been Ashtanga yoga six days a week. Previously, it had been daily walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and long morning sessions at the spin studio near the lower Manhattan office where I worked as an editorial assistant. The not-me that was now running everything was this invisible hand that, unlike me, could be noble and divine, guiding me to pure and beautiful acts. It was not needy or desperate or controlling. I began to understand what other people saw in religion.

Recently, I told my best friend that I’m realizing the smaller size I maintained from being constantly active through those years was reassuring not because my body was thinner, but because my breasts were smaller from the weight loss. Now, I like most of my body—my rounder tummy and thicker thighs, but I still think about that smaller chest. Tiny titties. No overhang. I wonder if it might make sense to separate these things in my heart and my mind. I think some more.

It was through a winding and terrifying road that I found my way out of my relentless movement and back into my bigger body. First, I started to feel sick, lost, and separate from myself. Then, my relationship suddenly ended. I was unborn again, and forced to start thinking about what I wanted. I started therapy after a 4 year hiatus. I moved back across the country. I ran less. Then more then less again. I took up piano lessons for the first time since childhood. I dated people who were lovely but, I eventually learned, not so good for me. I talked a lot about those people to my friends and to my therapist as a way of talking about myself. I started moving more slowly and with more acceptance. Now, I luxuriate in the time it takes to get from here to there and back again. I don’t have to know where I’m going or what kind of person the going makes me.

Still, today, it’s easy to get drawn back into the relentless old routine: all or nothing. I see influencers on social media build their identities around physical productivity as a sign of morality. They are committed to themselves. They don’t just show up two or four times a week, but every day. This means they truly love themselves. And reader, if you wanted to, you would. I see other people, perhaps people more like me, comment that they watch these peppy workout videos not for instruction, but passive satiation. They’re not going to do the workout. I get it—it’s all too much. We become avoidant partners to our own bodies. Low commitment, long distance part-time boyfriends of movement. Does that make us bad people? Should we leave the real lovers and movers alone?

I look at my new routine. Is it productive? Do I need it to be? If I want both a smaller chest and my bigger body, there are other strategies. If I want both companionship and autonomy, I’ll have to talk to the people I love and make plans with them. I’ll have to accept that when these people are not around it’s because they’ve decided to be somewhere else and with someone else; and they’ll have to accept the same about me. We’ll celebrate that we are different people with different hearts and minds, and when we see each other, it will be with pleasure. If I want to move with pleasure, I cannot see myself as a machine or an employee. I might have to accept the paradoxes of what moving means. I recently rejoined the YMCA at the encouragement of one of my older, postpartum sisters (I have two older sisters, both of whom are postpartum). Neither of us believes we can or should try to attain the bodies we once had. Movement is no longer in pursuit of some kind of physical transformation that will redeem us, that will make us less ashamed. But moving itself is the pleasure. It will probably physically transform us somehow but, without the rigid control of relentless discipline and guaranteed results, we entertain greater imaginations about what might happen. I have some fantasies about slowly climbing on the stairmaster to improve my endurance with less impact, using the cable machines in complex ways to bolster my aching shoulders, and, once my nose piercings have healed more, completing a few continuous laps in the pool. I’ll think about all the people who have held me through these years. I’ll try to remember that movement does not have to be intense, constant, or eternal for it to be loving.

Cass da Costa is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY.

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There is an I in team. Spelling isn’t everything, instead it’s what’s in the meat. In meeting the preface of the noun, I am team. I’m in many. I am One.

“But the One is harmonic; it is full of itself, and like a god it is enough to nourish its dreams. The unity of the world is, on the contrary, burdensome, its thickness in contrast to the drive of the Vow.”

This capitalised One of Glissant’s framing is a team for me. One/Team is a rich god in sync to weave the narrative of the goal of dreams. A team can also be burdensome, like the unity of the world he speaks of, yet to be burdened by those who show up for you, with you, is the name of the game I learned I most wanted to play.

I always make mistakes.

We all make mistakes.

Immediately, the weight of the plurality of mistakes on the singular “I” casts a ton of bricks onto the soul, smothering the ability to reconcile for reemergence. In contrast, “we all” doubles the muscle, thus balancing plural mistakes with the weight of a split singular: fractions in comparison to sum.

Gymnastics, diving, track, high jump, netball, hockey, football, swimming, archery, surfing, fencing and rounders all under ten forced a listening into me. I don’t remember month nor year, but I do remember feeling a sudden shift in my desire to show up for myself. To show up just for myself became harder. Harder to breathe through the idea of me versus you. It’s quite a direct channel that the solo competitor has to think through: me versus you. You all are here, but I am la reina. (One of my coaches was Spanish, so the diction of the crown remains.)

Researching ‘the psychology of “we” versus “I”’ reveals the shift of the individual, autonomous, and personal agency towards inclusion, shared identity, and mutual support that are employed in the transition between these two pronouns. This linguistic distinction taps into fundamental aspects of human psychology related to self-concept and social bonding. My first social bond was sport. Not a player, not a crush, not the game: sport. Sport: showing up, endurance—[end]. The third in that list should be the cool down, but I didn’t cool down enough in my youth. This makes sense as to why the tongue analysis of last week stated my insides are too hot. Fire. I have cracks on my tongue and scars in my veins. The sweat bloomed me, then evaporated my first step onto this path; my first true breath, so I thought. And thus, first idea of relief. Defined by Oxford Languages, sport /spôrt/ noun, 1. an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment. Sport sublation is single goal diffused to shared arrival at the finish line. As an only child there is such a focus on soloism that to dialectically sublate “goal” into the “finish line” (where the latter has more literal space in my visual mind for others to cross beside me) allows for the clearing to return as concept and homestead. Sport is how I knew my body to be alive to my mind. Once felt, I could transform to desire. In the waxing came the waning, and a system of process creates product (practice makes perfect) solidified as fundamental foundational footing.

Then, of course, there’s the tool, implement, device, appliance, apparatus, instrument that makes a game: the small rounded object we are trying to contain in space. The instrument in a game is passed around to be moulded by many into a space. It is wind, strings, drums: the full orchestra is required for the beat of the turf. If you don’t show up in the empty space of the missing player, the whole sound will be off. Things can be composed for a duo, trio, quartet, sextet… you just have to know, to know. A work to be done but a swift understanding is thus kept. That is how my brain works. It’s clear now that a joy for team sports wired it this way. We ensemble: a team, practice: a practice, to score: a score. I like to see who I know and know who I see. I don’t need much but the clarity of that crew; ensemble; team; family; home.

Stretching your limbs to meet the starting place, the inside of a door frame for example, One is the circle as well as the crossed body. “Out of Many, One People” rings the national motto of Jamaica, and perhaps an ancestral awakening of this in my mind’s eye. Bearer of souls. One feels better, together. One has a wholeness to match the enlarged O of its opening. A completion via the circle. In this ring, I birthed more than just lean limbs to whip a schoolground nemesis; more than thick hairs down my thighs against the chafing of a rogue hand; more than wide shoulders cut through five metres of landing waves in pools of tears, and came to understand that if I couldn’t see others along my shoreline I would start to regress, and eventually I give up.

I was never a lonely child when I had a team. “Mum’s Taxi” adorned the back car window since I was always being ferried to a club, court, pool, pitch in a town, county, hall, village. Through practice I played and through playing I won (and lost, though rare). It was revealed to my third eye that the winning didn’t feel as good without the wide hug of all my teammates to create said ring. The ring aligned with the One—I stood stronger within it. This ring made the trials of youth to adult – trials equalling the losses of growing against the winning of balling – all the more bearable because there was a clarity on who was for you and who wasn’t. The reality of team clarity persists as a desire for me today, and proves itself as anomaly in many a crowded space.

I know I am the I in team. I highlight myself training in the face of resistance of an other. I place one foot in front of the other. I make ties with those who tire of other. And we vow to complete this life as One.

A short bibliography:
Poetic Intention by Édouard Glissant, 1969 (Page 9)
Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987
https://languagehat.com/sublate/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer and poet based in London and NY.

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Which felt, back then, like it could have been older than all of us. Laid atop some makeshift stage, or bowed floor, in a warehouse or basement from a time before we knew how to speak or move. Made anew by some boot stomping down on wood, or some back pushed up against the wall and now, hanging vulnerable in a beam of moonlight, small stars from another age. Back then, I most loved thinking about the dance as a kind of game. A clearing of the air. Kicking up a tornado of dust and then letting it fall somewhere else. There’s a choreography to it all. My pal Chris insisted that there needed to be something the dancer is acting in opposition to—even if the opposition is only in their head. There has to be something they want gone, or something they want to keep away. Dodge the crowdkillers if you can, unless you and your pals decide to crowdkill each other, which, in a small enough room, is a type of intimacy: I am throwing myself into you because I know we will both survive it. Amidst all of the two-stepping and windmilling, there is a moment in time where I want to confirm that you will throw yourself towards me as I throw myself towards you, and then, through our collision, we make new and momentary dust. I remember, at some show in someone’s family barn on the outskirts of Ohio, it was 3am when the sixth band of the night was just getting into a groove and, at that hour, all I was capable of doing was half-heartedly picking up pennies, sweeping at the ground in time with the drums. But someone, with far more energy than I had and far less spatial awareness, caught me with a spin kick, unintentionally, and I remember, in a moment, on the ground, looking up and seeing the dust that had flown up upon my body’s falling. How it floated. Almost seeking an escape into the night air, and I am sure I did not actually think or say this then, but for the sake of this story, I will say that I did, I did in fact think, for a moment, with a mouth full of blood at least there is evidence of my being here.

Yesterday, I swung my arms in a room with no one else. There was no music. I was first trying to capture a fly, and then, having given up on that, I was trying to remove it from my direct vicinity. And I found myself laughing at the motion, as I caught the reflection of it in a distant mirror. Me, windmilling one arm, and then two, and then laughing on the couch while the fly still zipped around my head, relentlessly. I understand it. You all show up even when I have told myself you are gone forever. We will find a way to keep dancing together.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.

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Sports rely on many things, but first they rely on space. In few other facets of modern life has this reliance persisted as stubbornly. Foundationally, sports consist of dynamic relationships between objects and bodies in space. Rules that prioritize and discriminate space give these relationships meaning. The space within the hoop denotes points. Ten yards is the space you must cover to continue to be on offense. Serves can land here, but not there. Collective knowledge of these rules imbue tiny differentiations of space with incredible significance so that an outstretched hand does not just miss the ball by an inch, but gives up a goal, murders a dream.

An initial empty space is required for these stylizations. Children easily intuit the relationship between space and the games it can support. The adult version of this is looking at the parking lot on the waterfront and saying “they could put a ballpark there.” Ballparks can be very large. The American Family Field in Milwaukee is 1.2 million square feet. Dodger Stadium commands 300 acres. To the attentive child, such massive spatial consumption communicates a set of values. I grew up going to Seattle Mariners games every summer, and that stadium’s grandeur confirmed what I already believed: sports are crucially important, and the people who play them are heroes.

The spaces I was playing in at the time communicated different things. There was nothing grand about these Little League fields behind decrepit middle schools, no importance in the fenceless dogshit-littered outfields, only a minor heroism to leaving behind a husk of skin on the hardground basepaths anytime you slid. This was space that didn’t take you seriously. Space that insulted the adolescent aspiration.

And I had aspirations. They manifested primarily as daydreams, and these daydreams formed a narrative set in a progression of spaces. My imagined ascension of baseball’s ranks was mapped through greener grass, softening dirt, the lights getting brighter and the bleachers growing; a linear perfection of space terminating in an MLB stadium.

So it was affirming when, at the age of ten, by no accomplishment of my own, the space I played in spontaneously improved. My neighborhood league absorbed an adjacent one, a small league with a dwindling playership and one beautiful baseball field. Formally known as James Combs Field, colloquially as Riverside (itself a misnomer; the field was half a mile from a slough, pinned between two trucking warehouses), the field sat on a 2.2 acre lot, single-use and pristine. Yellow tubing on a permanent outfield fence, dugouts with real walls, dirt that didn’t flay. A proper ballpark. A space of singular purpose.

Or so it seemed to me then. Beyond the fenceline, Riverside was a space of different significance. On the bleachers nonelective groupings of adults gradually came to know a bit too much about one another. Against the proximal warehouses’s massive concrete side, younger siblings who were hyperglycemic from pilfered snack shack goods played invented ball games. In the parking lot last game’s players untied cleats and talked school gossip.

Repeat this for a week, a season, a year, and something more mysterious than space begins to emerge. Riverside became a place. And it is place, not space, that holds memory.

This is what I remember.

Two years after the merger was Riverside’s 30th anniversary, and my team was playing on the day of its celebration. The potluck and raffle had drawn the biggest crowd I had ever played in front of. The bleachers were full. People lined the baselines and leaned over the outfield fence. Many of them I knew. Some of them, thrillingly, I didn’t.

I was only in center field when it happened because our usual center fielder, a speedy kid who got under anything, had just thrown his helmet after striking out.

At the Little League level, 46 feet separate batter from pitcher, and another hundred or so: pitcher from centerfielder. Being directly behind the pitcher obscures the batters box, and because the batter was a righty I had stepped to my right to get an angle. Our pitcher, also right-handed, wound up, threw. The ball hurtled over dirt and grass, an object whose motion in space is the birth of every baseball play. The batter brought his aluminum bat into its path, rerouted force, and initiated the sport’s secondary spatial reorientation: a ball in the air, launched opposite-field, to my left, in a line drive with a moderate arc.

For the prepared fielder, the airborne ball commences a brief primal hunt. Space crystallizes into the distance between you and the projectile. Attention goes taut and the body takes independent action. The single animal question: Can I get there? The moments stretch. After, you remember only flashes.

I was moving, racing laterally across the field into the right-center gap. Sometimes you need to run a bit to know if you have a chance. The ball was hanging and I was running and I didn’t know. In the absence of knowledge, belief fills in. You only need a sliver to keep running.

The first few seconds in the air are ages, but the last few are blinks. Thirty feet, twenty feet, falling, the space slamming shut and I can see it’s spinning now, see I’m still not there, leaning forward, ten feet, push off the grass, enter the air, empty space.

When a professional makes a full stretch diving grab, the viewer thinks first of their skill. But these players’ faces betray no such self-satisfaction. The smaller the margins get, the more the player is aware of space’s dominion. They exert themselves to the extent, and whether that’s enough is a question space will answer.

Space, and circumstance. Such as: it’s the wrong kid in center, and he picked the wrong side of the pitcher, and the ball’s gone opposite field with backspin, and the bleachers are filled, and only now can you consider that the ball is just a few feet from the ground and I’m off the ground too, completely horizontally elongated, reaching my glove’s webbing for the ball’s arc. Is it enough? Space knows.

But space is not the reason these people are here. It’s not the reason a woman I’ve never met has my mom’s sleeve in white knuckle vise-grip, nor why the benched centerfielder (who at our first practice declared his desire to make a diving catch this season) looks like he’s seen a ghost. The spatial relationship between my suspended body and the round falling object could be arbitrary, but instead it is meaningful. Meaningful because the rules of baseball say so. Meaningful because we all know these rules. Meaningful because although space mediates the play, place mediates what comes after. And the play is ending now. I’m thudding back to the ground, whooshing across thousands of blades of green grass. The bleachers groan as everyone stands up at once.

Noah Jordan is a writer based in Portland, OR.

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Why is it called the steeple chase? I always imagined it was because there was something hot on the runners’ heels that they were fleeing. Maybe self-doubt. In any race, as much as we’re barrelling forward in pursuit of a win, we’re running away from being a loser. Trying to outrun each other is the objective and yet besides the point. The competitors are incidental to the ego. That’s really what Focus on your own race, or Beat the clock, not the runners, means. A personal best without a gold is still a win. Whether we beat others or ourselves, victory is sublimated into who we see ourselves to be.

I wish I didn’t see myself as my achievements. If I wasn’t competitive, though, I’m not sure I’d have any discipline. Is ego the carrot I use to trick myself into getting out of bed in the morning? Because I’m certainly getting out for less than $10,000, even failing to adjust for inflation.

I see writing a lot like running. You keep a consistent routine, three miles a day or however many morning pages, even when you don’t feel like it. That’s how you stay in shape. It’s how you develop so your best is better when the pressure’s on and it’s time to perform.

The best advice I got for keeping a regular running practice wasn’t about running at all. It was from the book How To Write A Novel in 90 Days (the Ottessa Moshfegh lore put me on). I never wrote a novel or even finished the hacky guide, but the way they talked about building a habit got me lacing up my sneakers on the daily. You have to melt your resistance over time like you melt a block of ice. Day by day, you break down the friction between wanting to do something and doing it. You become who you want to be in an accumulation of these small actions. A novelist, a runner, a person who can goblet-squat 60 pounds.

Ack! This essay is veering into self-help. So middlebrow, like my Crunch membership. Long ago, my ego might’ve curdled at the idea of committing to something as unremarkable as going to a mid-market chain, not gainzmaxxing, just steady maintenance like dental flossing your teeth. Clocking into a session in faded leggings and an oversized band tee. Showing up on an accumulation of days to lift, while watching CSI on the overhead screens. Slowly upping my weights, sometimes slipping back after weeks or months away, and having to rebuild to the same number again. It’s humbling.

Someone’s always saying the problem with sOciEtY is we’re the participation-trophy generation. I personally can’t recall any relief in my early years from the constant brutal measurement of rank and standing. I hate to admit I’m a late bloomer (it reads as losing) but it was only recently, well into my 30s, that I realized scoring in the top percentiles and running the fastest splits didn’t win me any foundation for self-esteem. I learned, from a self-help book I’ll concede, self-esteem is an internal sense of worth, not conditional on any outcome.

Athletic records dating back to at least the 1920s logged a runner’s fastest times, but it was several decades later that “personal best” entered common usage — first in track & field, and later in other individual sports like weightlifting, swimming, and cycling. In 1982, Personal Best brought the phrase into wider mainstream awareness as the title of a Warner Brothers film: Mariel Hemingway plays a pentathlete entangled psychosexually with her teammate who’s choking up and not achieving her potential. By the end of the decade, child psychologists were cautioning against high-pressure parenting and a win-at-all-costs mentality. Andre Agassi’s father became a cautionary figure. The tennis star took to the talk show circuit processing the harm of the relentless admonitions he got as a kid: “If you lose, I’ll kill you.”

This softening around high-stakes pressure had taken hold by the time I was growing up in the 1990s. Results still mattered, but competition was reframed, made healthier, a focus on wellbeing balanced out the merit of a challenge. The wisdom of focusing on your own race is that it’s the only race entirely in your control. Tracking progress against your own benchmarks is the motivation for effort and discipline. Still, I never got the sense anyone around me had actually stopped caring about winning. It was rather that the paragon of virtue was to be focused only on yourself and then that could help you win. Not only does it show class but you perform better as an athlete when you’re not distracted by outside noise or psyched out by your competition.

Last summer on TV I watched Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone break her own world record in 400m hurdles. There’s no one close to touching her. She’s broken her own world record a total of six times. This is when people really see the virtue in competing against yourself. When you’re already so much better than everyone, and you are truly your only competition. When the field isn’t at your neck, and you still give it everything you’ve got to put up a PB. It’s effort that smells like integrity. You become who you want to be in an accumulation of small actions. You become someone who refuses to betray their own potential.

I’ve always taken for granted that this you-versus-yourself ethos is constructive, but I’ve wondered lately whether the same trap still lurks: even when the competition is only with yourself, it’s easy to confuse performance with worth. Measuring yourself by any outcome is not real self-esteem. But then how do you stay motivated if you step away from any and all outcome-driven thinking?

Buddhist practice offers one approach. Effort remains virtuous, but right effort is less about achieving a specific result and endeavoring in a way that’s mindful, measured, neither frantic striving nor idle inaction. The discipline lies in attention to the present moment, quieting the suffering that comes from clinging to an image of who you’ve been or who you’re supposed to be. A fixed self is illustory.

Even when I chase the sensation of dissolution, I wonder if I’m seeking the moment of leaving it all on the mat or the sense after when I’ve become the person who has left it all there. Emptying everything out, by obliterating the self and feeling completely spent, can still build up a sense of who you are swollen with pride. The ego rears its head.

I almost didn’t make it to the gym today. The whole body hardens in winter, but my piriformis chills with a scream. Late afternoon, I finally walk through the Crunch doors, laundry and disinfectant overwhelming the sweat smell in the air. A dopamine hit with the beep of the scanner reading the barcode on my keyring. Everywhere, beautiful, focused bodies. I don’t look but find my sync, moving through a private ritual of machines. Not exactly zen: I’m stimming with a book tape, in between two subtitled overhead TVs, and playing Solitaire on the StairMaster’s display screen. A bad techno remix bleeds through my headphones following me wherever I go in the room. At the free weights, I watch myself in the mirror, remembering to breathe as I count. The person who showed up today stares back. The moment eclipses whoever else they are or want to be.

Whitney Mallett is a writer based in New York and the founding editor of The Whitney Review of New Writing.

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Programme notes

This archive-ballet takes its name, of course, from the film Looking for Langston which historically reupholsters the romantic substance of a queer Black poet in the thirties. When first looking into Pasuka about seven years ago, an online search did not dredge up all too much. Since then, his story has been in relative circulation. Still, from entry to entry one finds the same recycled details, some spurious, and it becomes frustrating trying to look between the biographical fenceposts and make out, however hazily, the thing that really interests me: the off-stage life. The life of the in-between – his ballet training in London, his social life in thirties and forties bohemian London, his touring Europe, etc. This libretto grasps for a backdrop, for scenery. Possibilities rise up and dissolve here in a series of tableaux – a feature of 19^th century ballet libretti that entailed not just the static living pictures the word conjures today, but also in-motion pictorial scenes.

Overture

A reviewer for Stage and Screen announced in the Summer of 1947, “Berto Pasuka is the most colourful dance-personality since Isadora Duncan. Glamor-starved Europe greeted his continental tour with wild enthusiasm.” The reviewer, it seems, could not get glamour out of his head and photographs of Pasuka throughout his lifetime help elucidate. In some we see a soignée figure smoking in suits that might be expensively tailored or just dandified by Pasuka’s mere donning of them, in others the consummate maître de ballet behind the scenes. In others yet, we see him in the unearthly outsider roles he wrote for himself – a prophet set on flying to paradise, a philosopher-pianist trying to marshal living keys into harmony, a mystic priest in a blood rite. Never the romantic lead or everyman protagonist. Take note: the foundations of this Black British art were surrealist, phantasmagorical, fabulous in the traditional sense of the word—less so kitchen-sink.

Act 1

In Pasuka’s Market Day, which gives a day in the life of a community of vendors, a gaggle of white tourists disembark from their cruise ship and pass through an island market scene. This wasn’t unfamiliar territory for Pasuka and his dance company co-founder, Richie Riley. Their interest in classical ballet was in part born from the excitement of Marcus Garvey’s Edelweiss Amusement Park, which was set to include a dance company. Whilst that company ended, Pasuka and Riley started their own corps through performing for tourists in hotels. Frustrated by a lack of prospects however, Pasuka decided to further his training and enrol in a ballet class in London.

Act 2

Pasuka arrived in London as early as 1938. Most sources report him as fine-tuning his classical training at the Astafeiva School in Chelsea. This was located at the Pheasantry on Kings Road. Students included Margot Fontyn and Anton Dolin. Founded by Tolstoy-descended princess, Serafina Astafeiva, who danced with the Ballet Russes, it was visited frequently by her mentor Sergei Diaghilev who came to scout for his company.

How did it strike Pasuka, this building, entering its caryatid-flanked triumphal arch, passing through its quadrangle to meet more caryatids amid the “flamboyant Louis XV façade” and “the odd, extremely heavy display of Grecian enthusiasm”? Or did he even attend school at this site after all? Similar sources also say Riley trained here too, but Astafieva was dead by the time either were in London. The Pheasantry still stands today, now home to a Pizza Express. On the floor of the old dance studio remain the mirrors and bars put in by Astafieva and so it is not impossible that a school continued under her name for a period. It is worth noting that such schooling was prestigious but non-institutional, much like Pasuka’s other training in England. It is unlikely he would have been admitted to train at Sadlers Wells or the Royal Ballet who only took its first Black student, Brenda Garratt-Glassman, in the ‘70s.

Act 3

Gemma Romaine tells us,

“George Bernard Shaw was among those who supported Les Ballets Nègres which were financed in part by Pasuka’s lover. Support for their endeavours came from the capital’s African diaspora: from London-born dancer John Lagey, who became well-known as wrestler Johnny Kwango, to wardrobe mistress Vi Thompson, the first African girl to attend Roedean and a member of the Yoruba elite.”

In Les Ballet Nègres there was to be no entrechats, no pointe work, in fact, Pasuka devised that the company was the “complete antithesis” of Ballet Russes, which was he felt an “irrelevant dance idiom” for his conception of modern Black dance forms.

They debuted in April of 1946 at the Twentieth Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove. The four ballets written and devised by Pasuka, like all the company’s repertoire, drew on folklore and Black, (specifically diaspora) stories. One called Aggrey takes its title from the name of Ghanaian-born philosopher and Pan-Africanist ‘James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey’. Another, De Prophet, based in part on real-life incidents in 1920s Jamaica, centres on a miracle healer and prophet whose promises to ascend to heaven end up with his arrest by a British officer and ensuing imprisonment.

Despite a transcontinental outpouring of critical and public support they did not win a single Arts Council bid or secure sufficient private funding. Though it was described in 1999, forty decades after its closure, as “the ballet that went to sleep” (invoking Richie Riley’s own words), its influence has been recognised as foundational to Black dance in Britain, but it is less credited for shaping the very contours of modern dance in Europe.

Riley says of Pasuka in the documentary Black Ballet, “... if he felt the audience with him, you knew the ballet would go on.” The audience, the critics, even amid all the racism and bafflement at avant garde Black dance, were with him. It was not lack of ticket sales but ultimately bureaucratic parochialism that led to the closure of Les Ballet Nègres.

The ballet disbanded in 1952 with its members dispersing into other companies or careers entirely. Pasuka relocated to Paris and also retrained as an artist (exhibiting a solo show at the Grand Palais as well as in London) and working as an artist model. However, he did continue to dance, returning to London for the Royal Court Theatre in 1959. Various sources mention Pasuka’s “mysterious” death in 1963, namely that he was found in his apartment in Paris and transported to Wimbledon hospital in London where he died. Some accounts mention sickness, others allude to a violent incident with his lover…

Apotheosis

‘Apotheosis’, traditionally used at the end of ballet libretti, also describes a divine state, often depicted by showing the assumption of saints into heaven, much like Pasuka’s own character disastrously sought. This tableau-finale takes place in the infamous Café Royal. Known as a bohemian “labour exchange” for artists’ models, it is also identified as a site around which Black queer people constellated at the time: socialising, romancing, securing work (or not) beneath its peeling gilt stucco and tarnished gold scrollwork ceilings.

           Image Sources: 
1. Photo from the National Portrait Gallery, Photographs Collection
2. Making Queer History
3. From the Smith Archive (Alamy)
4. Photo from the National Portrait Gallery, Photographs Collection

Shola von Reinhold is a writer and artist from Scotland.

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I’ve always had big emotions. The safest way for me to express them has been on the field or in the stands. The first time I said “fuck” in front of my strict ass parents was when I got the wind knocked out of me playing soccer. I was 10. I didn’t get in trouble.

That’s why I love sports. It’s the only place where I can boo in a grown man’s face. Or hug a stranger because another stranger put a ball in a net. Or cry because they didn’t. Most nights, for most of my life, I’m watching the game. The boys (gender-neutral) show up for me, so I show up for them. I’m best known as an artist and director, but my favorite job is being a professional supporter. Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to get flewed out to scream.

There’s a uniform, obviously—kits, jerseys, game giveaways, merch—the rarer the better. I collect them. Everyone dresses this way now, but I swear I did it when it meant you were a dyke. I mean… tomboy.

Three Quick Kit Shots aka My Faves, LA Edition

2017/18 SYMS #99 Los Angeles Clippers Association Jersey

You don’t pick your team, your team picks you. I was born into the Clippers Nation. I chose them during the LOB CITY era. The tickets were cheap and the crowd was rowdy. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen DJ Quik perform at a Clippers half-time show. That might be the most LA thing I’ve ever said. I was browsing jerseys for a playoff game, couldn’t decide whose to get and asked my touch buddy at the time. They said they would “never wear a man’s name” on their back. Fair point. I decided to go custom and get my lucky number instead.

2007/08 BECKHAM #23 Los Angeles Galaxy Home Kit

I loved watching my brother play soccer and I loved watching him watch soccer even more. He was a Man U supporter. I could never sleep and he’d be up at odd hours watching international broadcasts. It’s how I got into the game. HE LOVED DAVID BECKHAM. I mean, who wouldn’t? What a stunning kick… and man. My brother played right midfield, like Beckham. I’m goofy, so I played left midfield when I started. All this to say it was significant when Beckham came to Los Angeles. Growing up, the LA Galaxy used to play at a stadium near our house and we went to as many games as possible. By the time Beckham arrived, both of us had long moved away from LA, but it closed a loop.

When the Beckham doc was released I swallowed it in one gulp. I immediately ordered his debut kit. I was having a spiritual emergency and David became my angel. He reminded me what I really cared about: footy, fashion, romance, and Britpop. The kit arrived and I wore it the next day. It was an important day. I had a 9am pitch for a Nike commercial, psychotherapy, and then a bufo ceremony in Malibu. During the ceremony I puked all over myself while screaming “THE GAGGGGG!” While it seems like you can’t do both of those things at the same time, I promise, you can! When I got home I threw my top in the wash without thinking. The shirt was ruined, but I was healed.

1968/1998 SIMPSON #32 USC Jersey

It’s 1995. I’m in third grade and I go to a cult school. I skipped a grade and am one of the youngest students, but I seem to be the only one that doesn’t trust Dr. John. Dr. John runs the school, and the cult. On many days we all watch the O.J. Simpson trial. It’s always playing on TV somewhere, everywhere. During neverending breaks, we—children and adult(s) alike—discuss the particulars. Dr. John has a bet with Kenya, my classmate, about whether or not O.J. is guilty. Their relationship bothers me, but Dr. John will give Kenya $50 if her not guilty prediction is correct, so we are all invested.

Thus began my fascination. You like an underdog. I like a fall from grace. Lucifer. Is this how Rome treats its heroes? I’m not a fan of O.J. Simpson per se, but I collect his memorabilia at auction, on eBay, from death. My cousin Dorrice bequeathed me this jersey. It’s one of my prized possessions. I wore it when I introduced Slave Play at the Mark Taper Forum because O.J. and Nicole are the most famous interracial couple.

Martine Syms is an artist and director living in New York.

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Salah, you know, he was good. Framed and entrapped by the feds, untaxed cigarettes, and crack. The plug was an ATF informant who took $700,000 and told Salah he wouldn’t get it all back in cigarettes. It was supposed to be a terrorism case, but when Salah wasn’t a terrorist they, in essence, planted crack on him so they could give him a lot of time. The crack law was still in effect: 100 to one on the weight, per the cocaine guidelines, which entered into the sentence calculation. The feds gave him 20 years.

But they were too late. He was a star already. He jumped out the window when they sent the goons to arrest him, and he’d have maybe gotten away except he broke his legs on the landing. He fully recovered. He was low-key a tough guy, though diminutive in stature, and he could ball a little into the bargain. His shot wasn’t as strong as, say, that of a Bustos or a Carranza or a Godoy, but he was accurate. He could kick it strong enough to kick a corner, and he would put it on the money. He could score from the corner. He could put spin on the ball. He could move with the ball, too; trap, chop, hook, pass, whatever. He had technique. He played all the time, every weekend—even during Ramadan he played while fasting. The crack law was repealed in 2010. Salah got time back. He still had more than ten to go. Which was why he was at a low instead of a minimum. When he got below ten, he could go to the minimum: ‘the camp’, it was called. At the camp there was no fence. But it was far from home.

Home was in Yemen. Salah Mohammed was a naturalized U.S. citizen, but he was born in Yemen. His family was in Yemen. His family owned the only five-star hotel in Sanaa. Salah had owned and operated a convenience store in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Money went back and forth sometimes. That didn’t make anybody a terrorist. The informant had kept asking about guns and explosives. Salah said he didn’t know anything about them or about how to get them. He said his family was only in the hotel business.

While he was down, his brother took care of him from the outside. Salah didn’t want money. He didn’t have to work. He could pay for a no-show job. He chilled. He went to the commissary once a month, to Jumu’ah once a week. Saturdays and Sundays were soccer days, weather permitting. He went, in part out of a sense of responsibility. You had to hold the field down. The soccer pitch was the left field and the center field of the outfield of the softball field. You had the frisbee football guys out in right field and they were always trying to expand. If enough guys didn’t show up for a game enough times then pretty soon you lost control of centerfield, and you might never get it back.

And then it didn’t matter anymore. It took a while, but Salah finally got his two point reduction when they agreed to that in the second Obama administration. The two point reduction was across the board for non-violent drug offenders. It put Salah under ten years from the door. All of a sudden he was camp eligible, and his transfer was a foregone conclusion. Salah, on paper, was a model inmate. He had been down the better part of a decade, in which time he had zero incident reports. He was quickly designated to the camp at Fort Lee, Virginia, where he had a decision to make.

Salah had a wife. Salah had two wives, to be exact. He had children. None of them resided in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Not since Salah went away. They were living in Yemen. Yemen was in a state of war. Yemen was being bombed and starved by Saudis and Americans, whilst being occupied by Emiratis. Salah’s family was sleeping outdoors in the hillsides on the outskirts of Sanaa, to be far from any targets. They didn’t want a roof over their heads; not a roof to crush them in their sleep. Salah wasn’t at the camp long before he walked away. He had met people in the prison system. Those people knew people, who, in turn, knew yet more people. Money, remember, wasn’t an issue. He walked away from the camp and proceeded directly to a private jet and flew to Mexico. Take from that what you will.

He made the news and everything. Back at our low-security prison, everybody was talking about it at the weight pile by lunch time. Roy was out there talking about it. Roy used to lift with Salah before Salah went to the camp. Roy was an English guy, kind of a legend truth be told, who’d gotten busted with a metric ton of cocaine on a private jet whilst dressed as a flight attendant. He had actually tried to hit them with a “I’m just the flight attendant”. The feds had really fucked Roy, as a matter of fact. Roy hadn’t had anything to do with the United States to avoid exactly these kinds of situations. But an informant in the DR had set him up, switched the aircraft on him, put him in one with a US tail number for jurisdiction, they’d said, and suddenly Roy was doing 17 years. Roy had done a lot of business with jets on the outside. Naturally Special Investigations wanted a word with him. They’d called him up to the lieutenant’s office. They wanted to know about an email he had sent that morning, four words: yippee ki yi yay. It was sent to an address Salah had left for him for the purposes of keeping in touch. But the email was sent after the news had already broken, Roy pointed out. And then, he said, he told them what he knew, which was nothing.

We didn’t know it yet, but Salah’s plan got a little shaky once he got to Mexico. For whatever reason, he ended up staying two days before boarding an international flight to Canada, where he was to take a connecting flight across the Atlantic. He made it as far as the plane, then the law came for him and arrested him on it. And so he made the news again. We learned of his arrest on Univision. There were mugshot pictures on the Spanish TV in the housing unit. Word of Salah’s apprehension spread across the compound. Everybody felt like somebody had died. But it was nice to have believed he’d gotten away for a day or two.

Now and then came word of Salah’s situation. Salah was being held here. Salah was being held there. Salah got another six years.

Six years for walking away from a camp… It may come as no surprise that this wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon, prisoners walking away from a camp, seeing as the camps had no fences and nobody sentenced to the camp wanted to be there. The guidelines for “escape” maxed out at six years, but when a prisoner “escaped” from a camp (i.e. walked away) the penalty was often somewhere around 18 months. The judge said he maxed Salah out because Salah had crossed international borders. It was the usual racist shit, though. When people walk away from camps they usually go home. Salah just got sentenced to an extra four and a half years because his home was in Sanaa, instead of, say, Baltimore. Or maybe he got the six years because he never told the feds who’d given him a private jet to run on.

Either way, instead of having less than ten years to go, Salah had fifteen left. Which was a terrible thing to think about. He’d had freedom for less than three days at the cost of another six years. But on the bright side, being over ten years again put Salah back at the low with all his friends. We were sad he wasn’t in Yemen, but we were glad to see him anyway, because the league needed him. The year he was gone had been a bad year for soccer on the compound. It was during the first Trump administration and the Trump DOJ was relocating all non-citizens in BOP custody to a prison in Tompkins, Illinois. That year we lost eighty percent of our good players. It was devastating. Salah was now the second best player on the compound. He still played every weekend. That first month he was back, I saw him score on a bicycle kick. It was springtime, the sky overcast, a light rain falling, long-sleeve weather. He had his head wrapped, as always, with a cut up T shirt. He was laughing. That was how easy it came to him, to be like that.

Nico Walker is a formerly incarcerated author.

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When it comes to surfing, I’m a creature of twilight. I rouse in the night. In the thirty minutes it takes to get to the ocean from my house, something shifts imperceptibly as the sun works its way through astronomical twilight to nautical dawn, twelve degrees below the horizon. The dark hangs on even as I arrive, when nautical twilight begins.

At the beach, I pull up alongside my friend’s VW bus with its cheerful lemon-yellow finish briefly aglow before I kill the headlights. I join Z at the top of the dunes and we discern what we can of shape from the barely perceptible whitewater. Let’s go north, he says. It’s an act of faith to follow, and I do.

Ten minutes later, surfboards tucked under our arms, we hit the sand and make our way toward the rocky cliffs, chatting about holidays, kid slumber parties, work dramas. As we approach the waves, our conversation takes a hard turn to surf logistics: sizing up the sets, pinpointing the ideal peak, locating the channel in which to paddle out and avoid taking five-foot whitewater on the head. I have my doubts and voice them. But we go.

Each morning is different. Some days, as I crest the hill overlooking the beach, the fog is rolled out thick and flat before me like a carpet. I hear the crash of the surf before I get close enough to see it, and it’s a battle to get out. Every once in a while, a full moon hangs in a clear sky, illuminating the seascape and giving us an early pre-dawn start. Other mornings, the clarity of the air and burgeoning light is so sharp that it’s almost painful to behold. The paddle out feels effortless, the sky pinking and warming the glassy surface of a liquid-mercury sea. I love this time: the in-betweenness of civil twilight, during which the sun hasn’t yet broken the horizon and the earth is neither completely illuminated nor completely dark.

Not long ago, it had been a season laced with worry with me hopscotching between coasts to visit my mother in the hospital. At the end of a particularly hectic flight pattern between New York and California, I emerged again at the beach at civil twilight. In the darkness of the parking lot, my friend Jeff gave me a hug and asked how my mom was doing.

That morning in the water, it wasn’t a surprise that I felt off-kilter, off-balance… just off, in body and mind. Jeff watched me struggle for a bit. Then he offered up his surfboard, to help me reset. Want to try this? I think you’ll like it. An attempt to switch up my muscle memory, to kick out of bad habits with something new. We undid our leashes and swapped boards. I was resistant at first, but once I gave in, I had fun just noticing the differences of how my body reacted subtly to this new plank at sea.

Then a good one came, a sizable left that took me away. I felt off-balance again, but in a different way—now I was in the driver’s seat and could maneuver the board up and down the wave as it took me all the way to shore. It swept the slate clean.

I returned the board to Jeff with gratitude. A feeling of I can do this. It extended to my mind and heart.

I told this story while on the phone with another friend later that day, and she got quiet. It’s just such a simple and generous thing to do, she said. It’s so humane. And it got me thinking about all the quiet, invisible ways that this early morning ritual of mine washes over the rest of my life. The liquid dark of twilight has room to hold all that we might bring to it.

Another morning at the local, my friend David pulls a balance board he made himself out of the trunk of his car, and hands it to me to practice cross-stepping at home. Try it for as long as you want, he told me. And have fun with it.

I’ve ridden countless waves in many places since I began surfing more than fifteen years ago. But my home break is the daily and the regular, the reliable grounding center—the hub around which I have built the spokes of a true surf practice. All year round, I make my way in the dark to be there at first light—to avoid the worst of traffic and crowds, yes, but also to be with the kind of people who show up then.

We wax poetic, but we’re also all business. We shove ourselves into five-millimeter wetsuits in the sharp bite of a winter morning. Sometimes it’s raining. Sometimes there’s frost on the car and enough chill that our breath hangs in the air.

It is absolutely a faith-based act to show up in the dark, when your eyes can’t yet tell you what you’ll find. The dark gets a bad rap. But in its shapeless mystery is potential. Grit and discomfort, humility and humanity—and the moments of glory that come in the mix.

This is what I love: the granular day-in, day-out ordinariness of it, the commitment to show up no matter what. And the meditative transcendence to be found in that practice.

On a recent dawn patrol, my friend Sue and I sat in the lineup, chatting about nothing special. We looked at the water, so clear and glassy, with a slight surface chop from the wind. It’s like chopped glass, she said, the water running through her fingers. Clean waves came through, cut through with low-angled light. As we got dressed in the parking lot afterward, warmed by the sun, we giggled and sang a refrain about chopped glass.

These are the shards of beauty we look for, the reward when dawn arrives.

Bonnie Tsui is a writer who lives in California.

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Never Find Another Like You

I should have asked you
How you felt about me
Before I let you leave

You were in the car
And away so fast
Like a vision

Remember when I
Played you that tune
One time

I thought about it again
When we were talking at the party
Half-way to a dance

Are we smiling now?
Are we laughing now?
Are we touching now?

In full view of the great British public
What a wow
We’ll never live this down

I’ll type as I go
Came all the way from south
Doing the exact same

Messaging several people
Seeing how the road stay
How the ting set

Did I almost lick the back of something
You bet your top dollar
I almost did so

But I’m focussed now
Riding with both hands
On the handlebars

Both eyes on the road
And my mind
On you

Dread In The Mountain

Broke down on
Towed Bridge
Eyewater river
I was pumping
Had to park up
Would never stop
For a single tear
This was a flood
Need a taxi
After road rage
Cancer diagnosis
Love’s demise
Thames out your eyes
Racing
Few bikes
Ahead
Of the pace
Ghost ride
I won’t forget this one
Feels like it should be raining
It’s been snowing
Going
Too far
Too fast
Fast ting
Up myself
In your business
Her Majesty’s Pleasure
For beating on the bonnet of a car
I was just trying to get there
In peace
One piece
How many nights
Have I had to fix the chain
A video call
On the roadside
I don’t think we can be together
Life has a habit of getting in the way
Death gets away with murder
I going to listen to some music
A little dub for the journey
A little sleeve for my eye
A little kiss goodbye
And a bly

Hill and Gully Rider

I miss my special one
Left it outside the house
In Shepherd’s Bush
That one night
And one day I woke up
And my special one garn
Special one gone
Matte black with the red trim
“Yeah that’s him”
That was me
Riding over the westside
To see my baby
Always will be
Trust me
I don’t forget these things
I’ve had five special ones
Maybe it’s six now
Maybe it’s seven actually
I should be sure
But we’re riding now
I lost too much money
Going from hill side
To gully side
And my side
To your side
The speed side
To the weed side
To the cat’s eye
To the red light
To the crosses
Crosses
!
My special one garn
My special one garn

James Massiah is a London poet and musician known for his work exploring identity, intimacy, and contemporary culture.

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Once upon a time I could summon my homies all the way to Frankford with an incredibly lurid promise: I knew where we could get the best runs, right around the corner from my house. We were in high school, and on a daily basis we’d all gotten a teaser toward real pleasure at the gym, or during lunch, or cutting some class and running a few games of full court at peak intensity (till coach Taylor strolled out of his office with that damn whistle like, what the fuck are y’all even doing in my gym?). Ervin, Tasia, and Clarence—the latter who kept calling Frankford “the gutter” even though he was from North Philly—would come over from Mastbaum. Jonathan would meet us from wherever, because not only were niggas really running up where I’d said they were, they also had new nets and fresh paint on the court; sometimes even glass backboards and breakaway rims. Of course I was talking about Mayfair, that corridor between Frankford and the greater northeast.

“Nigga this ain’t round no dang corner,” Ervin would say, a half hour into our walk.

But it felt around the corner, how I remembered it, how the situation meant something for its lack of production and the way it stretched out leisure time till we all learned to love it.

We already had Whitehall nearby, with its notorious bucket rims, but from the now burned down 5120 Glencloch where I used to live, you could, with nothing but your own two to ten feet, hit up Wissanoming or Moss, Devreaux or Roosevelt, Vogt or—if y’all were feeling really spicy—Russo just past Cottman on Torresdale where Terrell lived. Now, did all white boys enjoy the encroachment upon said territory as it bled and bled into a more, how to say this… multicultural affair? Absolutely not. But did it teach you who the real ones were, and who was not? Most definitely.

If we showed up two, three, four of us at a time to Moss, with Gatorades and dollar hoagies, we might fill out the half court of strangers playing three-on-three; we were just what they needed, and they were exactly what we were looking for. From such a point forward, we’d know each other at least a little beyond the terms of pigment: whose daddy worked where, whose uncle and them were on crack or pills or, who had suffered the greatest loss. “Contact” is what Samuel R. Delany calls such moments, from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, those vital contexts where people of different classes collide, those damn near extinct punctums toward the promise of a social life.

But this could all be misleading though, about Philadelphia, which I’ll describe as a city of neighborhoods. We are not New York or L.A., Miami or Atlanta, nor have we ever pretended to be. Hell, we hardly had public transportation or the money for it, let alone forward reflections on the latest SEPTA budget cuts. These hikes we took were more along the outskirts of anything like a city, which was already then, and for us dedicated mostly to, transport to and from some form of service work.

Outside of basketball, connections were primarily through such work, or the high school you went to, maybe whose sister or friend you were too shyly crushing on. On the court though, you’d meet Bob Muscrove from Northeast High with the handle; Carlos with the fine older cousin in college who we all hoped would drive him to the park, and stay to watch (always, where ya cousin and her friends at?); or Lorenzo from Swenson that half of us, upon seeing him play for the first time, swore up and down was going to the NBA. Over time, if any of the aforementioned characters were not at a given court where runs could be had, we’d just send out the bat signal and poof—twenty minutes later you’d have a whole extra squad waiting on the bench arguing over who got next. But you had to be careful, of course, because a quick jaunt out to play a game or two could turn into an all night affair where thirty or so mismatched characters of questionable origin would end up walking another half hour to the next court with the best lighting after dark, too many hours after y’all should have been home.

And even if you ended up two hours away, that was around the corner too. It had less to do with actual proximity, and more to do with the feeling of being surrounded by others who were not you and who, through tacit agreement, would do no harm to the shared institution. Yet just as important, nobody would forget when you got dunked on, or let you lie on your game, and if you sprained your ankle (again) no one would let you limp home alone. A fondest of memories I can’t help but recall was Erv and Clarence carrying me home from Roosevelt all the way to Glenloch Street without a second thought after I tore the ligaments in my right ankle, which we all understood, I think, as a sort of permanent ending.

There’s precious little “we” walking anywhere at this point in my life, with everybody working overtime or three more jobs. Still, I sometimes dunk on the youth out front of my house who can’t imagine my real name and have dubbed me so-and-so’s dad, or inaugurated me into the more classical nomenclature “old head.” But it remains true that in the aftermath of this era, whenever somebody’s “buy here pay here” Nissan Maxima broke down, you could call another somebody from around the corner to help you fix it. When my bank account (overdrawn by umpteen dollars) has seen better days, I’ve called somebody from around the corner who never hesitated to help me get right, nor did they feel the need to wallow in shame for half a lifetime when asking me in return. Sometimes I wished these niggas would not need help moving, but there we all were, old ass backs lifting the overwrought sectional somebody bought on credit because they swore they wanted to be cute. And with no walk to whine about they’d be like, “Why you got all these motherfuckin books!?” as people swear up and down they’ll never help me move again. But they always did.

To this very day, what I think separates one mode of desperation from those further down in my own asocial past is simple. Should any of us fall yet again on hard times, let’s say you had the unspeakable occur at home or you were out on your ass entirely, we could, and would, beyond the pieties of comfort or protecting one’s peace, commandeer a couch or transform space into place in that holy grail of squatting locales—the finished basement—without a drop of shame, and help you make it around the corner.

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford, Philadelphia.

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                                  They took away my weapons before they’d even picked the teams

and the girl and her mother had me over at least three nights a week, 

                              and I, and these limbs that I was: 

                                                                                                             a dinner and a show.

So little, so little to eat! 

               so the girl’s mother with her fingers clasped around my wrist swinging my arm back and forth. 

                                                                                                                            Consumed

She says as much as she eats! More words! More meat!

                            by her laughter upon which I so very much wished she would choke

but the girl and I, 

the girl and I were a zero-sum game, which is to say: 

                                    I saw immediately that my losses were to be her gains. 

                                                                                                              My vice her versa.

And what I left on my plate, she ate.

This, hardly a back and forth, but a unilateral movement away from my mouth into
hers,

                         defined my most primitive notion of friendship as a state of more than
alone and less than 1

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. Friendship built upon Identification conceives the Other as one’s negative counterpart; the affair is underwritten by a circuitous self-commentary: YOU ARE ME AND I AM YOU ARE ME AND I AM YOU ARE etc. You see your self as an object animated by the Other, and internalise the Other as little more than a figment of your own imagination. Such friendships subsist on the binary: Zero / Sum; Loser / Winner; You / Me. There can be no stable relation but only a drive to (mutual) destruction: Neither Can Live While The Other Survives

in her house I was in her house because it was a house and she was a girl and I was supposed to like girls but not too much and I did like that girl but not too much. 

                       As a matter of fact I did not like girls at all but one or two of them I liked very much

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. I played sports because if I hadn’t played sports they’d have eaten me up. I ran and I jumped and I kicked and I fought and I won. But they took my stick away from me on the first day of training. They said I couldn’t be trusted with that temper. What temper? The stick had yet to become even slightly animated. And upon its rousing I would have liked to become acquainted, but I didn’t make the team hence I never met that temper. So

knowing full well my castigation my pariah status my sticklessness, 

                      the girl and the girl’s mother insisted still

                                                                                                          that we go to the golf club. 

Golf sticks are also called golf clubs but they might as well have been called sticks since I didn’t have any of those either.

Their games were defined by a wilful symmetry: 

the girl in her golfing V-neck and weird trousers and spikey shoes had her golf stick with which to hack away at PAR, 

                               and I in my trackies and trainers was to ape her movements sans stick 

(this I did even better than she did and so well that I even won the game, whatever that might have been)

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. I was one of those animals that commentators liked to sacrifice to the humans. No grace to our movements they said nothing of finesse or artistry just gnashing gnawing grit and ferocity and brutality and we were not playing but fighting not for victory but to the death. I, for 1, was not a bad sport but I did resent the monkey calls from the side-lines and the raspberries blown down my neck. I made it my business to vanquish and by business I mean my subsistence my livelihood my raison d’être ou peut-être tout simplement la seule possibilité de survivre.

One day a racquet appeared in my hand where no stick had been and its name was Punisher (THIS IS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TRUE FACT). That this was a racquet and not a stick made little proverbial sense to me but at the very least, which was plenty, physical sporting dreams were finally coming true. Now it was not just I, and these limbs, that were all alone and less than 1, depleted by an Other that would not play with me unless stickless while she was with stick. But as an appendage to our vital struggle, Punisher would not only yield the possibility of SELF-DEFENCE but enact justice upon all who had done us wrong to-date. 

                      And the very same day she and her mother finally spat out my four limbs ONCE AND FOR ALL 

and I thought I might have just gone and lost my connection to the Earth 

                        since the grounds for my expulsion were not given but taken 

                                    from me and my arms and legs and a racquet called Punisher. 

Perhaps they knew the reckoning was coming, 

                                              perhaps they knew what a girl with a racquet could do. 

Unbound from their geometries I was carted out to the outskirts of town to a prefab corrugated iron temple and inside were not plinths or pedestals or podiums but rather inside

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I was caught and trapped and boxed (though benevolently like a dying breed) in four walls, new geometries, the kind made for angry little humans like me (the dying breed), not a cage not a prison per se but an observation cell of rage. Not on trial, not in court but on it. Walls painted white and slashed with red lines. Black skid marks on the white walls. I figured eventually these must be from the black balls (nothing more than an indexical-empirical supposition, I suppose I never had seen a black ball  s m  e   a    r itself against a wall before) but they read like the toilet graffiti of society’s most depraved characters (this dead breed that is me). 

In the wake of my unpicking from the Ladies Triangle (the girl, the girl’s mother, and that I that was me),

I realised by then all I was was a comically deep pinprick of searing rage

                                                   . The very shape of their game the salient issue,

                          symmetrical as it strained to be,                   

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since conflict requires a worthy adversary and a worthy adversary cannot be one’s self but only an Adequate Other or an “opponent” – SPORT is a confrontation of forms without mirroring, the possibility of approach and retreat remains ever present to the extent of: “You overlap me,” and “Yes, you too.”

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The marvellous, truly marvellous thing about an Adequate Other is that from where they are standing over there, not here, they will see you, too, and hence their challenge will be sincere, fair and open-ended: square. This is where the loop of Identification is broken. Recognition is initiated by the acknowledgment of one’s own plurality and the essential unknowability of the Other (which may well, at some certain moments, be a mutually encompassing entity): I ARE ME AND YOU AM WHO?

Opponents are the truest friends one can ever dream of having 

                                                    (and oh, I have dreamed)

                          of balls bouncing off the walls. Ricochet back into my face. 

Is it strange that for the longest time I only played alone? That in playing alone I was finally acquainted with that temper of mine to which I was barred access so long ago: Mama, Is That You? 

All these projections on the big white wall in front of me, refracted on the sides and turned against me from the back: 

the girl became Girl and I lost my identification with her willlessness, 

                                                                                                    her flexibility to her mother’s, 

the Mother’s iron whims, 

       and I played against their party with the cunning of an animal I had at once          chosen to be and could not but become. Prowling along the centre line I pounced        on balls seeking to nestle into corners and caught the meekest dropshots right in        my gaping jaws

       and now and then again not a keeper but another animal would enter my domain        and at first I was nervous not knowing their prowess, their power. But by bisecting        the square in infinite portions we would learn the shape of our relation in dynamic        formation, the other animal not mirroring nor mimicking my movements but        countering them to keep the ball in play. With me. And in play we learned to stand        upright and see the court for what it was: not a square but in fact a fractured        cuboid with sloping sides, headless and mindless, we learned to move the ball        through three dimensions past one another in a dance of deception knowing the        other did not know when or where the 1 was going next

                  until we were no longer stray and constrained animals boxed in together but                   rightful opponents standing side by side and imagine my pride not winning                   per se but winning over my opponent to stand by my side and standing by                   my side become mine

                                     as a matter not of fact but perhaps of speaking, on court I could                                      not square the ball but only with my racquet, flat ovaloid                                      Punisher and mediator of our mutual sins and insults find a form                                      to speak of. Other Animal, Adequate Other, the asymmetry                                      between us and themselves to be more or less generative

                                     of words more eloquent than those  s m  e   a    r    e      d upon the                                      walls. I still seek a peculiar sentence, interpolated and expunged                                      from the establishment. But I know my place on the outskirts and                                      I hold my dear Punisher to deliver a corrective not justice but                                      justification to myself as myself, to some 1 an Adequate Other, at                                      once on a level playing field, squared for the first time in my                                      whole entire life with what might well become,

                                                                                                          a Friend, untried & me.

Miriam Stoney is a writer, translator and visual artist based in Vienna, Austria.

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I like to listen to podcasts at the gym.

I walk in, take a sip of water at the fountain, and then make my way to the elliptical for a warmup at resistance seven. I always use the same machine — one that gives me a view of everything.

On the far right near the entrance is the deadlift station. Testosterone levels are high over there. Muscley dudes take turns pacing in circles between sets. The amount they sweat surprises me considering the exercise doesn’t entail much movement. Then again, I know nothing about deadlifting. I’m always impressed by the singular powerful femme who keeps a spot in the rotation. Her movements are sharp and tight. She makes eye contact with herself in the mirror and no one else. She seems intense; I imagine her as a lesbian in tech.

Then, there’s the free weight section in front of me, around which there’s always a group of four or five guys of varying sizes who all know each other. They take turns doing bench presses, but mostly they stand around and make jokes. I wonder about their pack dynamic, and what it would feel like to be part of it.

How exhilarating it is around 6:30pm when every treadmill is occupied. Everyone’s feet pound on the swooshing rubber in a rhythm that makes me feel like we’re all really going somewhere. Except maybe — the girl on the stair master. Is she bored? She looks bored, or maybe just unimpressed. She wears a perfect, slicked back pony tail, matching spandex bra and leggings, and over-ear headphones. She never sweats, and she climbs the machine for what seems like an eternity… Each step just as blasé as the last.

Then finally, the maze of weight machines to my left that lead to the mats—the deepest alcove in the gym where I spend the majority of my time.

Today, I’m listening to an interview with Harvard scientist, Dr. Ellen Langer. She describes a study she conducted about the body-mind connection.

To start, they put people in a room by themselves with a computer and a clock. Then, they inflict a wound. It’s a minor wound, she says — no one was stabbed — but with this minor wound, participants are asked to sit and play computer games with the instruction to switch games every fifteen minutes. They can use the clock on the wall to keep track of time. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged.

For a third of the people, the clock ticks twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock ticks half as fast as real time. And for the final third, the clock is “real” time.

After the experiment, she and her team run a series of tests, and the results show that the wounds heal at the rate of perceived time. As in, for those who are in a room with a clock ticking twice as fast as “real” time, their bodies respond by creating the necessary proteins, blood vessels, and skin cells at a faster rate than those in a room with a clock ticking at the pace of “real” time.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I increase my resistance to ten. I push hard against the machine and it feels good. I feel liberated by this information, intoxicated even. I have a pretty gnarly burn on my hand. I look at it. I imagine the skin cells gathering around my wound’s edge, then migrating and multiplying inwards, forming themselves anew. I imagine my skin proliferating along the surface of me at my own subjective measure of time…

My own subjective measure. How trans.

I land back in the present and realize I’ve been on the elliptical for twenty minutes, longer than my usual twelve — just enough time to break a sweat. I get off, wipe the machine down, and head to the mats. Dr. Langer has moved on to a study about Alzheimer’s, but my mind is still on rigged clocks.

I pause the interview and switch to a Bearcat DJ set while I stretch.

People often use the word “warped” when describing a subjective experience of time. Time warps in moments of crisis by slowing down. It speeds up when we’re dining with old friends. It falls away completely as we discover a new love. But the idea that “perceived time” or “subjective time” can have a measurable impact on automatic processes our bodies perform suggests that all time is warped. There is no “objective” time.

As a trans person, my orientation towards “objectivity” is already a bit… limber. On testosterone, I am constantly amazed at how a liquid hormone I inject once a week can have such a dramatic impact on what I thought were the “solid” structures of my body. In the past year, I have watched the bones in my face shift, my shoulders broaden, and my hips become more narrow somehow. It feels like my skeleton is reassembling itself in preparation for flight.

And this new body of mine soars. I swing my arms in front of me with a twenty-pound kettle bell, and I feel more alive than ever. When I was first transitioning, I felt my true gender to be that of a middle school boy. In retrospect, it makes sense. I wanted to begin my gender journey from the time at which it starts to matter: puberty. My transition allowed me to embody my own kind of adolescence, an experience I feel I missed out on the first time. Maybe this is why trans people are often perceived as much younger than they are. Many of us have had to reconstruct our past to retrieve ourselves, and in the process, we warp time.

Bearcat introduces a beat I recognize, and when the chorus drops, I am transported to the dance floor.

The Dolls scream the loudest. If only everyone knew…

I watch my biceps bulge in the mirror as I lift fifteen-pound dumbbells in time with the beat. I always feel super manly when I do bicep curls. Our bodies respond to what we believe is true, if only everyone knew. My mind swirls around the relationship between subjective/objective time and the subjective/objective body. I can’t make complete sense of it. I look to my left and see an elderly man using the “chest fly machine.” He wears jeans and work boots, and reminds me of my uncle. I avert my eyes out of courtesy and am transported again.

I finish my set and drop the dumbbells on the ground. I catch my breath. Does gender start in the mind or in the body? Another swirling, shimmering question. I look around as I pace, just like the guys who deadlift.

Everyone here is exercising to support their objective health, of course, but also as a way to maintain or modify a subjective presentation of their body that affirms who they want to be in the world. The dance between objective action and subjective effect/subjective action and objective effect makes my brain vibrate in a way that’s pleasurable. It makes me feel more connected to everyone here. The mat area is flanked by two walls that face each other with floor to ceiling mirrors, creating an infinity effect. In each reflected reality, I can feel people becoming themselves over and over…

I look back at my own reflection – my arms are swollen from lifting and I like how big they look. My t-shirt is tight enough that you can see the outline of my pec muscles and my sweat soaking through increases the effect. Like all the boys in gym class growing up, I lift my shirt and use it to wipe my face, not caring how much of me is seen.

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It was something I immediately noticed. Upon returning for the first time in a decade to the neighborhood I spent my first years in. In Tokyo.

Shohei on every block:

Eating a snack on the front of every Lawson’s convenience store.

In a field of green tea leaves, holding a bottle of green tea, on the side of a bus stop.

On every vending machine, subway car, billboard. Advertising skin care, clothing, drinks. Every TV playing a seemingly 24/7 loop of Shohei highlights.

Part of the reason for this was that it was early April when I arrived, and we were a week into the Major League Baseball season. Shohei was the first player since baseball was black and white to attempt both pitching and hitting—and to excel at both, a feat thought impossible; who, at age 29, signed a ridiculous 10-year $700 million contract with the Dodgers, the largest ever at the time; and who’d follow this up with an MVP award and World Series victory his first season. He was the pride of Japanese baseball. And the Japanese love their baseball.

Even my mom, who could care less about baseball, speaks about Shohei with a moral reverence: “Did you know he deferred the majority of that $700 million, lowering his annual salary to about $2 million, so that the Dodgers could continue to sign players without exceeding the salary cap?” Even off the field, Shohei stands as an emblem of selflessness, team first, and unmaterialistic dedication to his craft that everyone can get behind (if blunted slightly by the knowledge that the money he’ll make from these ads draping Tokyo far exceeds even his highest-ever-to-date contract).

I mean, my man got $17 million stolen from him by his interpreter last year, and it took him months before he even noticed.

Shohei is making emperor money, and figures so prominently and unanimously in the Japanese psyche on Japanese storefronts and infrastructure. I can’t help but keep recursively thinking while walking around all month, “It’s like he’s a living emperor!”.

THE KOJIKI

The Japanese creation myth, The Kojiki, was written in the early 700s. It’s not unlike the Western creation myth. It starts with an Adam and Eve corollary, Izanami and Izanagi. Izanami and Izanagi are “the male who invites” and “the female who invites,” in Basil Hall Chamberlain’s 1883 translation.

One has “too much of one part,” whereas the other has “not enough of one part,” so they put their parts together and make the islands and a baby.

Izanagi then makes the sun and moon out of his eyes, and the sea out of his nose.

And here we have the most crucial detail: Japan’s first Emperor, Emperor Jimmu, we learn descended directly from Ameratsu the sun god. His birth is mythically dated as February 11, 660 BC, which officially coincides with the birth of Japan.

Of course, this incorporation of the State Leader into the creation myth with a propagandist bent is a factor in many empires, from Ovid’s in Metamorphoses, to Virgil’s in The Aeneid, to for that matter Dante’s continuation of the Pax Romana Caesar worship into the early 1300s. One recalls the points in Ovid where he’s describing the first god of thunder and lightning, Jove, and quickly compares him to the current emperor, Caesar Augustus—“Just as your people’s loyal devotion is welcome to you, Augustus, so was his subjects’ to Jove…”

But to make your first emperor descend directly from the first god, and for this national mythology to persist as late as it did, is something different.

WORK IN JAPAN

I stayed at my uncle’s for some of my trip. Since I left Japan in 1994, at age 3, I’ve only been back three times—in 2005, 2015, and 2025. He’s never been to the States. Besides not seeming to have any particular desire to, the main obstacle is his work. He works as a tax man: he helps his clients, and never takes off work. He doesn’t seem to want to. He gets up at the same time every morning and comes back at the same time every night. He’s lived in this rhythm his entire adult life more or less, living in the same apartment.

Everyone in Japan seems to do their job with diligence and honor, no matter what it is. It’s something I noticed while walking around with my little sister that first week. On the walk from the Kasai station to my uncle’s, at a bigger intersection beneath the Tozai line, a crossing guard stands sentry beneath the freeway column like he’s about to go to war. Equipped with whistle, some type of baton, and a full-on outfit replete with lapels and patches.

Just doing his job so diligently and seriously.

“My man really takes this shit serious,” I say to my sister, with genuine awe.

My sister proposes that in Japan there’s a different relationship to social status and fame, which gets me wondering whether these things are connected: the Shohei worship, the serving of the divine Emperor, and the fidelity to one’s work. In Japan there’s less of a desire to climb some imaginary social ladder; instead, people are content to do the job they are assigned, and to do it well. With honor.

“It’s not like America where the leaders aren’t clearly defined, and anyone in a position of leadership is there arbitrarily, and everyone who isn’t in that position will be one day! Once the tables turn and they ‘make it’.”

Shohei is embraced because he represents everyone in the nation. When he wins, everyone wins.

HAGAKURE

This outlook of service to a lord being honorable and self-sacrifice for something larger not being anything to be insulted by, is of course connected to the thinking behind bushido: the way of the samurai and a line of thinking that ended in the Meiji period in 1868. The emperor is divine, and the lords are extensions of the emperor, and you serve your lord to the death. You will be remembered by how honorably you served your lord.

It’s obvious why this is a sketchy line of thinking. Hagakure, the book that lays out the samurai code, is seen by some as a celebration of the backwards thinking that led to the catastrophe of World War Two.

The self-sacrifice inherent in bushido, where you literally elevate the status of your lord, your leader to one who determines your life and death, it’s been argued, charts a direct line to the suicide bombings and military brutalism of the decades leading up to 1945.

And yet, others argue that it wasn’t the code of following a valid leader with bushido-like reverence, per se, that led to the catastrophe, but rather the fact of the military takeover of Japan by a handful of bloodthirsty tyrants. In their minds, the problem was that they were following the wrong leader.

In theory, bushido entails serving one’s lord with “honesty, justice, courtesy, courage, compassion, sincerity, honor, duty, loyalty, self-control”—virtues not unlike those preached by the Western incarnated man, directly descended from the first ever humans, in the West’s foundational myth (like Emperor Jimmu is in The Kojiki): Christ.

The difference being, Christ wasn’t said to be the first Political Leader of the Nation (at least not explicitly; it was essentially a slave uprising he incited against the Romans…).

A WORTHY LEADER

The thing about Shohei’s emperorship is it’s not determined by blood and it isn’t built into a system of political divinity, unlike every Japanese Emperor’s until World War Two. Shohei’s value is quantifiable and tangible. A big part of his success is purely work ethic: it’s virtually impossible for most players to both hit and pitch as the amount of daily practice they’re expected to do exceeds any sane metric. Shohei lives and breathes his chosen craft, it’s legitimately inspiring and, I’d argue, inarguably exemplary. His demeanor is humble and courteous in a way few athletes’ are.

My favorite Shohei moment is when he accidentally almost hits then-Oakland A’s left fielder Mark Canha with an up and in fastball. He’s trying to do a high fast ball, only he misses slightly and it damn near grazes Canha’s face. Canha responds understandably—it scared the shit out of him—yelling, “C’mon, Sho!” slightly aggressively. Shohei’s catcher immediately gets up in Canha’s face, it’s disrespectful to yell at Shohei like that, as he well should. Shohei’s reaction is priceless. He initially squats down and bows, holding his head in his hands, in apology for almost hitting Canha in the face. Then a whole scrum happens, when Canha starts yelling back at the catcher, and it’s mayhem. The benches clear. But Shohei just stays standing there on the mound, looking around smiling—embarrassed almost. He catches the eye of the umpire, and shrugs almost like he’s apologizing. It’s so infectious, the umpire just shrugs and smiles back. All around them, grown men in tight pants act like little boys.

Waiting to check-in my dad at the airport after visiting him in Hokkaido, I notice Shohei’s on the TV again. “Shohei,” I announce. I’ve been commenting on it all trip. We sit there and watch, we’ve got time to kill.

It’s not just a regular highlight. It’s news. He and his wife have given birth to their first child: a baby girl. Shohei comes out and thanks his daughter for making him and his wife “very nervous yet anxious” parents. It’s on every TV. It’s a damn national holiday.

The question is not whether you should follow a worthy leader with honor and duty to the death, literally or symbolically. Instead, the question is: are you choosing what and who you follow, deliberately, intentionally? Are you following the right leader? Of course, an overly collectivist outlook can lead to tyranny. But an overly individualized one, that rejects all forms of patrimony, leads to chaos. Excess. Complete detachment from the forces that allowed such a lax collective view to spawn in the first place. My emperors are dead writers. Worthy mentors. I revere and follow them. I serve them, yet not blindly. I choose the right mentors and leaders.

Shohei, I’d wager, is a good, worthy leader.

Sean Thor Conroe (Sho Kamura) is a Japanese American writer.

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