Dedicated to the Game

The heavyweight teetered on his shoulder for a moment, and then the plane of his back tipped slightly beyond perpendicular to the mat. Everyone groaned. They knew that it was over. In those days, before high school students had really gotten into the steroids, heavyweights were heavy. If one got turned onto his back, the victim was doomed to stay there until the refree slapped the mat and the portly victor rolled off.

The poor kid who now faced being pinned to the mat in the district semi-final was typical of the heavyweight breed. He was a kid who was interested in athletics, despite being pretty un-athletic. He was too heavy. But he was large. He was tall and broad, and it made his weight wieldy enough to let him play on the line in football, and wrestle in the heavyweight division. Some of his species were hyper-aggressive, likely in response to the hazing they received from elementary school on up. He was well-adjusted however, which worked against him on the mat.

He had an unfortunate name, ‘Jonah’. In the bible belt, that immediately earned him the nick name, ‘Jonah the Whale’. We had hung out on the sidelines waiting for our turns to wrestle and I liked him, as far as I knew him.

I hadn’t qualified for the district tournament, so I was watching Jonah from the stands with my father and the choir director from our church. We were rooting for Jonah, because he was up against a wrestler from a rival school. If Jonah won, our team locked in the tournament win. It was not to be. Under the combined weight of his opponent and his own bulk, Jonah sank flat. His legs flailed briefly in a futile attempt to bridge his shoulders off the mat. The referee slapped his hand and blew his whistle. Jonah’s legs went limp.

The choir director turned to my father and said, “Now, isn’t that just like a nigger.”

My father usually would not reply to stupid crap like that. He saw no point in useless conflict. But this time, he looked like he didn’t even know what he might say. He was flabbergasted, and so was I.

It was not the words; it was the tone.

The choir director didn’t sound angry, bitter or vindicated. He had a note of sadness and resignation in his voice. He expected Jonah to give up and lose, because it was in Jonah’s blood to give up and lose. Jonah had inherited an identity which played in certain narratives and not others. To our choir director, black folks were lazy, unreliable and weak-minded. Jonah was black, therefore Jonah was lazy, unreliable and weak-minded.

For the longest time, I thought that our choir director was wrong about Jonah just  because he was wrong about black folks. But I finally came to realize that our choir director was wrong about Jonah, because he was wrong about everything. Jonah could be represented by blackness, or fatness, or type B personality, but none of those things were Jonah. Nor was it true to say that Jonah represented any of the things that you could say about him.

Put enough of those things together, and you might be able to pick Jonah out of a crowd, or even predict what he might do in a particular situation. However there was no Form of Blackness, Property of Personableness, or Elan Vital , which determined his ethnicity, his being good mat-side company, or his being the proper subject of Biology.

Yet that was the world according to our pious musician. It was a world of causative kinds, where things like Good, Black and Life were not points on our map of the world, but the lands themselves, which we had discovered or, as he would maintain, were granted us by God. It seemed that he saw things that way, at least.

For a time, I considered the possibility that I was being too hard on him by speculating that he was the type who might claim that opium caused sleepiness by means of a dormative property. Maybe he was the type that saw a grander conspiracy, instead. Not the Conspiracy of Forms, but the Conspiracy of Form. Perhaps he saw the fact that our experience permitted mapping and the application of logic as evidence of some existential purpose. It could not be otherwise, otherwise we could not know that it could not be otherwise. Of course, that was the problem with the Grand Conspiracy – there could be no otherwise to propose. It was undecidable in principle and so the Grand Conspiracy could only be held as a humble hypothesis, on faith.

And that was why I came to believe that he was the first sort of conspiracy theorist after all. Like most in the church hierarchy, he was not really interested in anything humble. The factors of an authoritarian regime never are. They want the appearance of humility which comes with deference to order. A humble demeanor sets people off their guard, which makes it easier to bludgeon them into line (inevitably behind the club wielder). Such individuals will also pay lip-service to the Grand Conspiracy in order to cultivate a humble self-image, since a humble self-image makes the beatdown easier to countenance (I am merely an instrument; it is for their own good). However, what they act upon is the Conspiracy of Forms, because order serves its servants.

Later that night, Jonah wrestled in the consolation round of the tournament. What had gotten into him, I would never know, but he came out in an uncharacteristic, cartoon fury, twitching and spluttering like Daffy Duck. It took the opponent aback, but it did not make Jonah more graceful 0r skilled. It did not keep Jonah off his back.

Again the groan went up. Jonah’s coach and family screamed futile encouragement. In a grim replay of his earlier match, Jonah tried to bridge. And it worked.

The move didn’t flip the other wrestler off Jonah’s chest, or even raise Jonah’s shoulders off the mat. However, in his fury, he had worked himself into a lather, and lubricated by his own sweat, he was able to scoot himself and the large boy lying on top of him, across the mat and out of bounds.

From there, Jonah’s determination saw him through. Buoyed by his miraculous escape, he could not be held down, and after two more minutes of panting and pushing, Jonah won the match on points.

When it was all over, Jonah was still black, still alive, still personable, and still a heavyweight, just as Socrates was any number of numbers.