Riddings Leisure Centre, 2008
Tried Without Due Process
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
. 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
. 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)
. 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
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,
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.”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.