http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/ Attacking Football Sat, 11 Feb 2012 05:36:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/#comment-10697 Pelé as a Comedian - The Run of Play Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:23:11 +0000 http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/#comment-10697 [...] People who have religious experiences typically describe them as something ecstatic, transporting, and revelatory. I suppose there are smaller-scale “Counterpane“-type visitations in which one simply feels a mysterious presence nearby, but that’s not what Wallace is talking about. He describes the Federer Moment as “ecstatic”—ecstatic meaning literally out-of-body, being outside oneself—and it’s the mystic saints who tend to traffic in ecstasy, who are lifted up out of their corporeal shapes into a higher plane of existence where they experience a radiant consciousness of the connectedness of all things. What’s strange about this as a metaphor for watching Federer or for Pelé is that the feeling that generally seems to remain with the mystic saints once the mystic experience has ended is not one of peaceful acceptance of the body but a profoundly unsettled desire to exit the body again, one sign of which is that if the mystic saints are not actually prone to becoming suicidal, they nevertheless tend to become magnets for all kinds of physical torture, dismemberment, burning, impaling, crucifixion, whipping, and strangulation, and they tend to to accept all these things more or less willingly and with an eerie equanimity, not because their religious experiences have left them reconciled to their bodies but because their religious experiences have taught them that their bodies are prisons they want to escape. [...] [...] People who have religious experiences typically describe them as something ecstatic, transporting, and revelatory. I suppose there are smaller-scale “Counterpane“-type visitations in which one simply feels a mysterious presence nearby, but that’s not what Wallace is talking about. He describes the Federer Moment as “ecstatic”—ecstatic meaning literally out-of-body, being outside oneself—and it’s the mystic saints who tend to traffic in ecstasy, who are lifted up out of their corporeal shapes into a higher plane of existence where they experience a radiant consciousness of the connectedness of all things. What’s strange about this as a metaphor for watching Federer or for Pelé is that the feeling that generally seems to remain with the mystic saints once the mystic experience has ended is not one of peaceful acceptance of the body but a profoundly unsettled desire to exit the body again, one sign of which is that if the mystic saints are not actually prone to becoming suicidal, they nevertheless tend to become magnets for all kinds of physical torture, dismemberment, burning, impaling, crucifixion, whipping, and strangulation, and they tend to to accept all these things more or less willingly and with an eerie equanimity, not because their religious experiences have left them reconciled to their bodies but because their religious experiences have taught them that their bodies are prisons they want to escape. [...]

]]> http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/#comment-786 Brian Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:39:12 +0000 http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/#comment-786 Thanks, Steve. The song is "My Body Is a Cage" by Arcade Fire, from their album <em>Neon Bible</em>. You can get it <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Neon-Bible-Arcade-Fire/dp/B000MGUZM0/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1205346722&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">here</a>. It's pretty good. Thanks, Steve. The song is “My Body Is a Cage” by Arcade Fire, from their album Neon Bible. You can get it here. It’s pretty good.

]]> http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/#comment-784 Steve Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:33:46 +0000 http://www.runofplay.com/2008/03/11/the-tuesday-portrait-inner-life-of-samuel-etoo/#comment-784 This is a good track, definitely suits Eto'o who sings it? This is a good track, definitely suits Eto’o who sings it?

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