Is Sport Important? The Thuringen Ladder.

You may have heard of our town. Thuringen has been getting a small amount of notice. Of course it will be the 'Thuringen Ladder' that you've heard of.

But we're not yet famous and as the ladder has begun to lose its fascination amongst us, the locals, I'll describe it to you who haven't yet come to our town, and perhaps you will visit before it disappears.

The Ladder, you see, is a sport. An endurance sport I suppose. It seems also to share the simplicity of the sprint or lifting the weight. The 'Thuringen Ladder'  has always been embedded in the town square and soars skywards further than anyone can follow with the naked eye. I am no engineer so I can tell you nothing of its construction. Yet in the early years it held us in awe, in the same way that a simple monolith can.

On a sports day, usually every Saturday in the season, a large crowd gathered very early in the morning to see the athlete who had won his way through the heats, before he took the first steps up the Ladder. These first steps were always strong and determined. The athlete could expect the cheering and singing that was his due until he had climbed well out of sight. For a while longer those with binoculars called out the stepping athlete's progress while most people turned to enjoy the jollities and the fair that always arrived the night before.

Every rung on the 'Thuringen Ladder' has a sensor, so the judges, assiduously following a series of small lights on the board in the judges' hut, can inform the crowd of the athlete's progress once he's out of sight. Even the athlete knows how far off the record he is, for every rung on the famous Ladder has a number engraved on it. 

Late in the day even larger crowds gathered for the descent of the poor athlete, often only  half conscious by now, and his appearance out of the bottom of a cloud or out of the haze was always first announced by the 'peerers', trained assistants wearing powerful glasses who are also skilled in spotting a falling athlete and can quickly clear the exact place in the town square where the failed and unfortunate athlete will dash out his brains. Many try to spot the descending athlete before these 'peerers' but it's quite impossible.

The main skill the athletes on the 'Thuringen Ladder' demonstrate is that of being able to ascend through thinning air. At some point every athlete begins to hallucinate and lose a certain amount of consciousness, and it is this that drives them back. A 'faller' by the way is considered both a disgrace and a failure, and is soon forgotten; his height is not recorded in the ledger even were it to be a new record, something which seems likely to have been the case in the past.

But now we are losing interest in the Ladder. Now, the Ladder is largely a tourist attraction, and most of the crowd on the town square every Saturday are visitors, and their number has always been limited due to our poor marketing instincts, a weakness we freely admit to.

And note this. Our contempt for the 'tourist ladder' has swiftly extended to a loss of interest in all sporting events. All sports! An unexpected loss indeed! And this is the point we're at now. The current talk in our town is often put in the form of a question. We ask: 'what was it that used to interest us in sport anyway?'  Music, our other enthusiasm, we're holding on to that.  Music either puts words to something we feel, or alters our mood. It refers out of itself. But sport? So someone can move more quickly than the rest of us; another can lift a weight that is beyond the rest of us. Someone can do something better than the rest of us - but if that 'something' is self-referring or to put it more bluntly, is otherwise pointless, why should we be interested? Music has a point: sport does not. 

And what was it we used to feel anyway? Respect for the athletes? Awe? These are weak emotions. Compare them with anger or fear. Or contempt. I ask you. Or was it the deaths that held our interest? Was it really that simple?

Pavement Monitors

It's as if everything is directed towards the waiting-rooms, though M. does realise that this is only an appearance and that in fact the flow of people has been orchestrated from an overall viewpoint and that there is no 'destination' at all. But in this enormous city under this enormous sky it does look like all the waiting-rooms are final destinations at which the management of this flow of population ends. All these waiting-rooms: the hospital waiting-room, the passport office waiting-room, the railway station (the one in this city, little more than a building for waiting), all the interview buildings and their waiting-rooms with their water dispensers, all the enquiries buildings and their long corridors lined with these seats made for waiting. 

Seen from above, which is M.'s accustomed position, a barely regulated flow of people approaches all these buildings from one side, from a street perhaps that at one moment is completely deserted and at the next is aflow with two hundred or so, and then from the other side of these buildings emerges a stream in a perfect and steady exit from which individuals periodically peel-off into their individual doors. It appears that everything works back from these waiting-rooms, that the pavement-monitors are there to feed these rooms in a controlled way. But M. knows that in fact these pavement monitors would still be in place were the waiting-rooms never to have existed. Ah these pavement monitors.

At the entrances to all the main thoroughfares and to as many of the minor ones as our budgets allow, the population is funneled between wooden barriers toward concealed holding-pens where stand these monitors. A monitor is constantly in touch with sub-monitors, lightly uniformed men who crab about the street with wide sideways steps to keep an eye on the swellings and the thinnings of this flow of population. At hectic times the holding-pen monitor generally releases a controlled flow determined by his expert interpretation of the many voices coming through his radio device, yet occasionally he must resort to releasing people in batches which he is careful to control lest a family, for instance, get broken up, for being kindly functionaries for the most part, these monitors are eager to avoid upset when it is relatively easy for them to do so. 

On uncrowded street-days these holding-pen monitors, constantly radio informed, speedily impart conversational topics ahead - the talk at a café table perhaps - should the newly-arrived suddenly wish to hurry forward and to contribute their own voice (something admittedly they only seldom do). Also, I am eager to pass on to you, there wait other types, cousins of these monitors so to speak for they do indeed all emanate from the same building each morning, who sit in small kiosks made of green-painted planks and pointed tarred roofs, and their job it is to be an ear and a voice to a varied list of matters that ranges (for instance) from being an attentive ear to angers of any sort, even quite personal ones involving a cheating spouse, to voicing some inspirational words from the Bible or from Spinoza perhaps.

The functionary who operates all of this flow dwells in a tower opposite M.'s own. The man is tall and wears some form of official cap. Often he stands at a broad layer of glass, as broad as the tower itself for his dwelling is enormous when compared with the fruits of M.'s modest work, and from there he often gazes down (as does M.) over all these streets and their flows and their monitor-stations. M. looks across at this man sometimes, though the man never notices anyone from the buildings around him, M. sees him gazing down and he wonders whether this official is capable of the depth of . . . whatever feeling it is that M. himself experiences when gazing down. And exactly what feeling is it that people like M. experience when looking at this human flow? What's the noun? M. sometimes wonders whether he and, possibly, others like him are in fact influencing the functionary, whether in fact he can intuit what M. is thinking and is merely giving physical expression to M.'s own thoughts.

What Can You Deduce From The Brushstrokes Of The Masters?

Now they think they can perceive certain medical conditions in the brushstrokes of the master painters. A clumsy strength in the brushstroke here, an insufficient sweep there, a tremble elsewhere.  

Of course they lag far behind some of us. My people have long ago discerned far more than this in the works of the Greats. Ah, well do I remember the days when we lunched at The D'Orsay: Sheridan (obstetrics and gynaecology) waving an arm at a late Morisot - 'half way through the second trimester'. Our dentist friend pausing before a Hockney with a lot of blue in it - 'upper right four occlusal'. Barry who sells cars identified Renoir as a Citroen man, I recall. And Cyril, that's the one who owns a confectioner's, dragged us over to a Rembrandt and told us 'There's a licorice-allsorts buying fellow' or he was a Dutchman.

Living In A Burrow

A few of you are drawn to a vague fantasy of dwelling quite alone in a burrow surely. The appeal of the burrow is 'to be away from' isn't it? The appeal of the burrow is to be self-contained, reliant on no help. You who are drawn to the burrow, importantly, are by nature aloof surely - never the party clown you are instead the don or the damaged. I am guessing that mainly you are drawn to the burrow only in daydreams - were it possible to become a burrow-dweller, you instinctively know you'd be comfortable in that place. But some are drawn to something tangible, an actual metaphorical burrow, and set up home in some form of den, be it an isolated castle (for the wealthy) or rooms somewhere hidden in the crowd.

Most non-burrow people seek an audience of some kind, don't you? Some of you court an audience you know (such as your family or your friends) and you look for comfort there. Others seek an audience you can see but don't know (musicians) and get comfort there. For your part, it's true that some of you burrow-people seek an audience too isn't it, an audience of a particular kind (an audience  you can't see and don't know) and don't you tend to be authors? But surely, for the most part, you burrow-people really don't want any audience at all. 

Two types of burrow-person exist surely: 'anxious creatures' and  'disinterested gods'. You the anxious person are made anxious by an audience of any kind and are pushed towards thoughts of the burrow surely. You are burrowing away from something. But the disinterested god on the other hand actively seeks a burrow: you go to the place. You are 'above' the others (aren't you?) in that you know that to compete is vulgar. Occasionally your skills are far greater than others' skills and perhaps you amongst them don't need to compete in order to flourish. You will not be put in the company pecking-order of course, you will not go along with the made-up idea of what constitutes 'power' or 'status' and I am guessing that you will never lower yourselves so much that you actually compete for the vagina? (Dear God not that.) Goes without saying, I'm sure, that you female burrow-dwellers will not dress up to be the man's choice either.

You wish to be 'above it all' (odd then, that a burrow should appeal) and you would try to be so, by simply absenting yourself. You will not compete. It's a misfortune that, for most, the actual burrow is only a niggling fantasy, for no longer can you simply slip off into the depths of extensive woodlands and live off the land as once you could. If you others trouble to look, isn't it the case that you can actually see these burrow-people trying to cope in your unsuitable place?

A Village Dilemma

You've probably not heard of us. We haven't been so crass as to turn our little peculiarity into a tourist attraction; though we certainly could have done. We are a mid-sized village, somewhat isolated on a large plain, and we have that typical European village layout where the life of the village centers on a length of 'high-street', and alongside our high-street stand two old and large trees which those who pass through would, I'm sure, scarcely notice, but which in fact each contain a cavity in the trunk within which there lives a man.  

When they were juniors perhaps the two men crawled into the trees, or perhaps at least one of them was put there by his parents, I am not sure, but what is certain is that by now the two men are far too large to squeeze out of the gaps that they previously crawled into, and out of which they now peer and converse with the villagers. A couple of people, perhaps it is family, bring them food every day; a few villagers stop by and talk. The question has arisen before, and it has raised itself again recently - do we cut them out of their two trees? 

Certainly the two men have no desire to move out; that's not the issue at all. There are selfish village things to consider, and there are also 'wider' matters to ponder. It may not be much but there is a 'cost' to the villagers of allowing these two to stay in place: someone is feeding them certainly, and no doubt there are other little entertainments brought to them; there will no doubt later-on be some medical problem that necessitates our chopping them out, and, of course, they have contributed nothing to paying the cost of whatever we decide to do for them. In a wider sense - yes they are sacrificing much by being stuck in their places, but also are they managing to avoid the contribution we generally expect of our people, they are managing to avoid work too. What do they do for us? Some say that one of the men is a little amusing, but certainly not much so; the other one is kind-natured. Then there are even wider matters to clear a way towards and to try to untangle: can we allow a man to constrain himself in this way, if it really is constraint, even though he has chosen and continues to choose to do so? We are troubled and no decision has yet been made.