Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

4. Armature and Experience

93 4 Armature and Experience Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. A huge tree on one side and another house on the other limited the view of the ground. By standing in a chair a small boy of six could watch practice every afternoon and matches on Saturdays. . . . I doubt if for years I knew what I was looking at in detail.                —C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary What Do Men Live By? Some years ago while browsing through Anthropologie in downtown Santa Barbara, I came across half a dozen cricket balls among a collection of housewares and knick-knacks. I picked up one, felt its weight, and turned it around in my hand. It did not have a company name or the weight stamped on it, and yet, it was the real thing. What was it doing next to fancy door knobs and pretty dishes?What was it meant to do?Then it struck me: it was being sold as a decorative object, something with which to decorate one’s living room or study. It sat there, devoid of its original purpose, divorced from its originating context. Transported to the United States, this signifier of English culture and sportsmanship had finally been transformed into a pure fetish. The cricket ball is, of course, the most fetishistic of all cricket equipment. Each time it is passed around from one fielder to another, it is caressed, inspected . You spit on it and polish it on your trousers.1 The red stain on white flannels created by repeated “polishing” (when the cricket ball only used to be 94 Armature and Experience red in color) was the badge of the fearsome fast bowler. For cricket followers of a particular generation, the image of the red stain brings back memories of the ferocious speed of the Aussies, the West Indian and Pakistani pacers that made them superpowers in the world of cricket. More lush praise than is imaginable has been showered on a small red sphere flashing across the green outfield or on the vision of a ball being lifted in a sublime arc out of the reach of fielders. Listen to John Mitford’s praise of the batting style of William Beldham, one of the Hambledon men: The grandeur of the attitude, the settled composure of the look, the piercing lightning of the eye, the rapid glances of the bat were electrical. Men’s hearts throbbed within them, their cheeks turned pale and red. Michael Angelo should have painted them. His glory was the cut. Here he stood, with no man beside him, the laurel was all his own; it seemed like the cut of a racket. His wrist seemed to turn on springs of the finest steel. He took the ball, as Burke did the House of Commons, between wind and water—not a moment too soon or late.2 Aesthetics, cunning, timing, eloquence come together in this eulogistic “handling ” of the cricket ball. The magical moment when the bond between player and spectator is cast is the moment of representation and reverent adulation. Mitford continued: [Beldham] lives near Farnham, and in his kitchen black with age . . . hangs the trophy of his victories; the delight of his youth, the exercise of his manhood, and the glory of his age—the BAT. Reader! Believe me, when I tell you I trembled when I touched it; it seemed an act of profaneness, of violation. I pressed it to my lips and returned it to its sanctuary.3 The power of the practitioner to manipulate the ball effectively is fused with the bat, and in an inverse reckoning, the practitioner’s “magical” ability comes to be viewed as that which emanates from the bat itself. The fleeting glory is transferred to the bat to create a sacred permanence that may be touched and the grandeur of the past relived. Within the social world of the sport, objects gather meaning as their effects , like the red or black stain (powerful, and in this case, masculine) are received and disseminated to signify a larger everyday social space. In the new circuit of commodity-relation in the United States, this sport-related nexus of power and meaning is broken to be substituted by a power that is literally Armature and Experience 95 external to it; inserted into a new circuit of value, it now must gather new meaning. This rupture of meaning...