Chiseled commandments, invisible ink
On basketball's strange spectrum of deference and how it is to feel humbled.
Perseus, nude, 7’9”. In one hand, an adamantine harpe, a sickle sword, given to him by his father, Zeus, in the other the still writhing head of Medusa. His expression is sleepy, if a little smug. The sculpture, by Antonio Canova, Perseus Triumphant or Perseus with the Head of Medusa, was bought by the Vatican as a replacement for the Apollo Belvedere, which Napoleon carted back to France with him after his 1796 Italian Campaign.
The version towering over me in the MET is a replica. Canova made it for a fan in 1806, a Polish countess.
It is, of course, a beautiful sculpture. It’s always incomprehensible to me, how people got marble to flow like milk. Bronze, like Benvenuto Cellini’s earlier take, I get, because it starts as molten metal when poured into the cast meant to shape it. But marble, from its sourcing to transport to eventual shaping into bodies that appear they’d be warm to the touch or rivulets of cloth that drape, like the cloak off Perseus’ arm, an impossible, extravagant, impractical marvel at every step. In the MET’s European Sculpture Court, light spills down from the roof, made up entirely of windows, softening the marble even more. Perseus, like the nearby Lucretia stabbing herself in shame or the chained and bound Ugolino being set upon by his starving sons, are made placid. Blinking wide-eyed in from the comparative dark of the medieval gallery, his towering form with fingers tightly clenched in Medusa’s hair, is the first thing you see. It’s hard not to feel humbled, either by all that work or the severity of the myth it’s meant to manifest.
Perseus’ mother, Danaë, was imprisoned by her father when he learned via Oracle he’d be murdered by his daughter’s son. While locked away, Danaë was raped by Zeus in the form of a “shower of gold”, and her father then crammed mother and child into a chest and tossed it into the sea. After growing up on the island they washed up on, Perseus is challenged by his mother’s suitor, Polydectes, at a wedding banquet to bring him the head of Medusa. The challenge, an early prime example of a fool’s errand, would’ve killed Perseus if he hadn’t been helped by Zeus et al. Hermes loaned him some winged sandals, Athena gave him the reflective shield he tricked Medusa with, Zeus a helmet he stole from Hades to conceal him, plus the sword, and from Hesperides a backpack for the head.
Medusa, if you did not know, was originally a woman minding her own business. On a visit to a temple of Athena she was raped by Poseidon, who hated Athena because Athenians liked her better. For this, Athena cursed Medusa, turning her very nice hair into a mess of snakes and her, ostensibly, into a monster.
There are no shortage of stories like this in Greco-Roman myths, given the gods propensity for humbling via striking down those they’ve perceived are out to get them, or else because they’re just bored. In real life, revenge and idle time are still a pretty cozy pair.
Basketball — but this is all sports — gets so strange in its spectrum of deference. The rules are loose, but tend to go like this: the most productive of superstars sit on the dais of unmitigated confidence, encouraged to brag or to talk a big game because it’s understood they are held there by their skill which, if it waivers or slips, are given a grace period beholden to the overall climate of their team, the season, and the shifting stories of the league, before they are brought down a tier wherein displays of confidence or ego are seen in a range between plucky and tacky depending on aforementioned circumstances.
These are just the rules for stars.
Canova, commissioned by Napoleon to carve a life-sized likeness, rejected requests to show him in his French general’s uniform. Instead, he modelled the sculpture on Mars, the Roman god of war. Napoleon, as Mars, stands naked, sort of frowning into the middle distance.
The statue arrived in Paris in 1811 and was never installed. In 1815, with Canova presumably in on it, the sculpture left France and went to Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, after he’d won the battle of Waterloo against Napoleon.
Like taking the L and turning it into a life-sized win.
The rules for teams are even looser, wholly changeable, less chiseled commandments than muttered curses invoked in invisible ink and activated by the heat and bluster of high-expectations and low moods.
How and why things change, still unclear, but the longer you’re in this the more you start to pick up on signals of an impending shift. Like pressure headaches, or the requisite older person’s knee acting up before a storm. The tone, or mood around an athlete, a team, shifts. The reasons can range from completely (if cruelly) practical, like an injury, to the aforementioned shift in overall perception of conditional deference. Sometimes it just seems like people get bored of hearing about a team. We become, like the bored gods of Olympus, pretty petulant.
The Grizzlies, it feels like, are going this way. Upsetting that fine if fabricated balance of a team still exciting, still defying of the hum-drum laws of physics, still as brash and cocky as they’ve ever been, really nothing at all has changed except now, too long as the league’s undeniably fun team, come calls for them to be humbled. Does it get old, seeing joy bubble up every night like Ja Morant, Desmond Bane, Brandon Clarke, Xavier Tillman, Steven Adams and more were human derricks or divining rods for it? Not to me, maybe not to you, but to this precursory spectrum of ego and its expression in sport, I guess.
Strange to me, to reach so far in this direction to a team like the Grizzlies, maybe soon the Jazz (“overachieving”), the Cavs (“weird”), the Hawks (“can’t last”), and turn a kind, if roving eye to the Nets and the Lakers. The Nets, that have never proven this arrangement ever worked for a workable stretch of games and the Lakers, because LeBron James has generated a black hole for criticism with the spectacle of talent his career has been. The practicalities of mismanagement, maybe, being much more boring to talk about than a yet-to-be-named etherial, slippery to pin point of anguish or existential issue that, when found, could solve everything.
Morant is no Perseus, but I’ve seen him hold a basketball — one handed and flying through the air — the same way as the head of a Gorgon. I don’t ever want that will in him to stop.
Perseus, after a long life of killing and conquering, died by the same head he lobbed off in his youth. Attempting to lift his shield to wield Medusa’s head against his enemies, he turned it on himself because his eyesight was going. Basically doing a fatal, “Is this thing on?”
I mean this really loosely, but it’s hard not to parallel what Kyrie Irving has done — essentially to himself — with the willful disregard of a champion like Perseus, or any mythic hero that eventually succumbs to their own hubris. Forced now to gaze back on what he’s reaped, what he can’t really maneuver his way out of if he wants to keep playing basketball — for the Nets anyway — he’s been stilled in his tracks.
The stipulations he’s been given to return to play with the team, contrary to what James thinks, are not “excessive”. They are really the first recent instance we’ve seen of any kind of measurable, restorative process in the NBA, even if it came from what was a very prolonged catching out.
Do I think the same can be applied to athletes who commit domestic abuse or sexual assault? No, at least not now and not as-is. The layers there are too rife and legally surgical. But I do feel hopeful about what it could mean down the road. That yielding need not be automatically seen as submission, or sacrifice. That to yield, to acquiesce, can be hard and still soften. Humility for the sake of humanity, something like that anyway.
Canova, for a time considered the greatest living artist with patrons from pretty much every royal family in the colonizing world, instructed his brother the day before he died to use his entire estate to build a temple devoted to him. Tempio Canoviano, built on top of a hill in the small village of Possagno, houses every plaster model from Canova’s studio and most of his body. His heart was interred at the Frari in Venice, his right hand stuck in a vase and kept at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Is it prostration enough, to draw and quarter yourself, while planning to erect a temple to the whole thing?
I was in New York because Dylan ran the marathon. The Sunday morning his mom and I used the marathon’s tracking app to trail him around on the train, staking out three different spots — Williamsburg, 1st Ave, 5th Ave across from the park — to wait and try and pick him out of the never-ending waves of other people.
Watching the runners and wheelchair racers go by, thousands and thousands of them, all those bodies working, lungs heaving the heavy, hot, listless air best they could for 26.2 miles, that was humbling. To see looks of anguish like those carved in marble, or expressions of elation that can never really be captured like the real thing. To see people stumble, fall, stop; to see people in pain. To see people light up when they caught sight of the clustered groups, or maybe just one other person, waiting and cheering for them. Dude, I cried so much.
On 5th Ave we thought we’d missed him. The app already had him making the final stretch through Central Park, but two stops earlier a woman had told us the app was at least five blocks behind. It had started to rain and I squinted into the oncoming crowd, everyone a lot slower than they had been two hours before. Finally, a tall frame my body picked out before my brain did. We waved him over and I thought for a second he was waving us off, because he kept going, but he was waiting for a gap to cross over. He ran up and hugged me, for what felt like the longest five seconds, each beat I was thinking Oh no, because why was he stopping?
I’m no coach but murmured some combinations of “You don’t have far to go”, “You can do this”, “I love you”, “You’re doing so well”. He kissed me and pulled away, the crowd around us loving it, me not so much because he did not look so good. But he did it and I, for a delusional couple minutes, could’ve been Hermes handing over the sandals.