Monday, January 17, 2011

Andrew and Tristan leave Seattle, drive through Raymond, Washington, and stop at a bar, the Leisure Public House, with a backyard bocce court in St. Johns on the way to Ian Crozier's house in N Portland.

7:00 PM, Leisure Public House, St. Johns, OR

Ian

3

Tristan

11

Andrew

2

What's the sense in voicing an experience that transcends language?  The idea of the bocce ball game is that communication momentarily occurs in an extra-linguistic realm; interaction becomes reduced to pure physics.  The problem is not that far from the project of the haiku poet.  Language becomes a means to express the moment of the extra-linguistic; the zen emptiness arrives through the language's fullness.  What immediately raises this discussion, and mirrors our project, is Basho's the Narrow Road to the Deep North.  In his travel journal frame Basho presents the circumstances of, and the poems that arise from, sublime moments.  Often they are linked verse, or poems that are created collaboratively with the acquaintances of his voyage.  What comes from this comparison is the distinction between collaboration and competition—while often working with a teammate, the bocce player is ultimately competing against another team.   One strives to get closer to the pallino than the opposing team and even knock their ball out of play if possible, a move more akin to violence than temperate and enlightened versifying.  But is the reworking of an image or idea in the mirrored rebuttal of a linked poem so different from knocking away the ball closest to the thing to replace it with your own?  If the commitment is to the elegance of the game rather than to its winning, love of bocce over ego, then the larger narrative of the game resembles linked verse in its highest form—the first poet initiates; the second takes the proposition and gets closer, or further away, or he knocks out the premise entirely to insert his own, all the while paying respect to the narrative and the rules that allowed his contribution.  

This night I remember playing very poorly but enjoying very much two pitchers of beer. I think I had lost my ID at this point and thus had beening having trouble buying beer in bars. This heightened the pleasure of the contraband beer.

I remember you guys deciding that too much beer had been drunk to safely drive home, so we walked out to the old St. Johns Bridge, which was something I`d been wanting to do. I remember walking out to the middle of the span, admiring the green gothic construction, possibly reading a plaque, dropping beer bottles down onto the foundation, and peeing off the side.

I do not play bocce as a poet.  I do not play as a college graduate. I do not play as a competitor.  I do not play as a student of physics.  I do not play as an afficionado.  I do not play as an astronomer.  I do not play for recreation.  I do not play for social reasons.  I do not play for haiku content.  I do not play for my self esteem.  I do not argue with reality's placement of the spheres.  I do not play with assumptions.  I do not generalize the results of the singular.  I do not traverse the universal rectangle.  I give thanks for the ability to interact with the principles of interaction.  I play bocce. 

*      *      *

Through my bocce history with Andrew and Tristan little arguments have always occurred and been restored cordially.  Once Kimberly and I played with Tristan and his brother and a frame ended with three balls that all seemed precisely equidistant, a foot or so, from the pallino.  All we could do was look at it.  Argument results from difference of opinion, and the closest thing to an opinion formed by any of us was that all three balls were a precise tie.  An older man had been occupying a bench and observing us for the last half hour or so—it was around 11 at night—and we called him over, at least just to confirm that something magical had happened if he couldn't provide an objective argument.  He looked at it for a minute, considering several angles, and decided he ain't never seen anything like it.  He considered a little longer and decreed "the green's closer."

Concerning scoring, however, there is one opinion I have held very strongly: that in the triangle that results from the pallino and the two closest balls, the ball that creates the larger angle is the closer ball.  

It is years since I have reviewed basic geometry, but I was once a very apt pupil.  However, Tristan would never argue with the calculations of my geometry during the journey and eventually I had to stop trying; he resented the very introduction of mathematics in the game, that theory should trump perception, that I might beat him on paper in a game played on earth. And, while I can't really argue with that, I maintain that my figuring holds.

When we got back into Portland it so happened that we ended up with two strong opinions, or rather realized that we had held two conflicting bocce notions the entire time, and that, until now, at the Leisure Public House backyard in St. Johns, North Portland, Oregon, no contradiction or argument had occurred.

We had driven all day, picked up two children's bicycles in Raymond, Washington—one of the principle tasks and impetuses for the trip—taken the 101 across the mouth of the Columbia River into Astoria and followed it back east on the 30 just into the northern periphery of Portland where we were to meet Ian.  Pretty quickly after crossing the Willamette, and entering quaint, historic St. Johns, we saw "bocce court" and paused to consider our options.  I was hungry, but didn't want to spend money; we needed gas; Ian was a ways away, I didn't know how far; and the sun wouldn't last long and we had a bocce court. I called Ian and he said he was very far away, he couldn't ride his bike to meet us.  North Portland was larger than I realized.  

Tristan stayed at the bar to read.  I drove to get gas and Ian and we returned.  It was good to see him knowing it would be a visit longer than an hour.

We began our game, three single teams like the early games with Andrew, and the pitchers of good local beer went down with the sun.  It was a big court and the surface was beat up with a season of neglect, and the balls were not moving well.  And the light became irregular leaving half the court, first, crepuscular, and, ultimately, in the dark.  At a certain point so few balls crossed the halfway line that a never before considered stipulation had to be addressed: a ball that hits the back wall is disqualified, as it would have, theoretically, continued further off from the action; so a ball does not cross into the field of play, and similarly does not score a point, should it not be similarly disqualified?  

"Tristan," I recall saying, "Are you fucking kidding me?  We have been doing this hours a day, every day for over a week and now you want to question a basic premise that we have taken for granted this whole time?"  The bartender was the most charming young man who, I thought, very much resembled the character in the American Office with the self-awareness, though Tristan and Ian disagreed.  He came out at about this moment to ask how we were doing and I tried as best I could to change my tone and explain the disagreement with a rational appeal to the physics of the sport.  He said he did not know the rules concerning rolls short of the halfway mark.  We did not need anymore beer and he went inside.  

"It's like in baseball," I continued, "until it lands in a glove or on the ground it is potentially in play.  My ball is potentially in play, and actually right now blocking the other balls, and is, in that sense, very much in play."  

"You're talking about your ball like it has decision in what it does.  But it is short.  It has failed.  It is not in the game." He made a movment toward it, "We might as well get it out of the way."

"No.  Tristan. Do not touch it!  This nuance is what makes the game beautiful!"

It was at this moment the nice young man came out.  He could not find a definitive answer during some internet research.  

"It's because it's intuitive," I said.  "If you understand the game this would never come up."

"Who are you to say what's intuitive about the game?  Who made you some kind of bocce prophet?" 

"The game is played from over here.  It wouldn't make sense that you would go over there to take a ball out.  It's all the field of play, but it only scores if it is in the other half at the end of the frame."

The nice man backed away from the conversation at a certain point, and we decided to change the subject to 7-11s, finish the game and move on.