epistle to a lager lout
(1,007 words)

A football game is a reflection of the cosmos and the cosmos is a reflection of love. Ghosht, Pyar, Ishq.

Ghosht is the Urdu word for 'meat'. The physicality of things is the meat of the Game. A bum pass sounds like the word, ghosht - especially in Scotland, where the ball is often sodden. The players move with difficulty around the pitch; there are obstacles at every turn. Even if you stand still, someone else is gonna come and get you, take the ball off you, propel you inelegantly back into the void. Tackles, tentacles, fish. Our lives are the ghosts of our selves. The ball itself is meat. Hog leather. And yet, it is fashioned in the form of a perfect sphere. It is insufflated, not with blood, but with breath. Breath, moving across darkness, becomes the Word. Like you and I, Ghosht strives to be more than itself, to lift and stretch its reality, and the realities of a million spectators, each of whom become instant birds, ersatz judges. A parliament of fish and fowl.

The center circle of the pitch is our world; half-perfect, half-diabolic. The halfway line separates our consciousness from that of the other. The Game is about entering the internal (and external) world of another, and thereby beginning our journey towards our goal, towards illumination. Through physical love, do we strive for spiritual, cosmic love. That's where Pyar comes in. Pyar is the Urdu word for romantic, human, physical love. It's an awkward word: PYAR. You have to get your tongue around it. To produce the correct sound, you have to dribble the tip of your tongue over your hard palate at a certain frequency. You could never train a golem to say it. The love which may grow between human beings is always difficult; half-sublime, half-satanic; simultaneously selfish and selfless; it's a schizoid midfielder of a thing. It never knows whether to go for goal, or to just be the backbone. It requires intelligence, adroitness, instinctive cunning. But it needs something more. Through the difficulty of the first phoneme, the field suddenly opens out at the end of the long, deformed aleph sound and we end on a note of satisfaction, satiety, post-orgasmic tranquillity. A long, rolling field 'rrr'. A classically Scottish, 'rrr'. That's where most people stop, of course. A fag afterwards is their idea of spiritual enlightenment. The rising smoke, their deity. The ghosht of love, become music, is not the end; it is merely the means. The rhythm of the build-up suddenly falls apart; it just takes one pass to be less than perfect; and you're back in the void, chasing after comets in the darkness without border.

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If the passes work out, then the next obstacle is the semi-circle on the outside of the box. This is Aflatun's shadow world of ideal concepts. Only the sublime halves of our souls exist here. It mocks us from afar. Mocks our wars, our pestilences, our hopeless long-shots. And if we try short cuts, it penalises us mercilessly. That brings us to the ref and the goalie. Both are archangels. One dwelleth among us, sorting out our petty squabbles, dealing justice and injustice in equal measure (since how can we know justice unless we experience its opposite), and sometimes, dealing death with a blood cipher. It must be a pretty depressing job. No wonder the Referee dresses in black. It takes a lot of pyar to get through this life, and not to despair of the garden. If you hog the ball, and not pass it on when you should, if you are driven by an excess of ego, then you will falter. You'll be shot on-target, a missed opportunity. A brilliant save! But for you, the glorious egotist, the flawed genius, there will be no salvation. That's where the goalie comes in. The penalty box is the goalie's stomping ground. It surrounds the original paradise which, in its turn, encircles heaven - the goal. Goalies are always different. Whichever archangel tossed us out of the beatific place now stands guard outside its walls. They have to be able to see, far and wide, to bounce and spring and slice and do everything in their power (which is almost, but not quite, total) to prevent us from sending that piece of ourselves, that devil's simulacrum of our world, that pig's bladder filled with holy breath, across the last boundary of this life.

Ishq. The Arabic word for the highest, purest form of love. The love which can exist only between God and sentient being and which is transmuted, through breath, into immanence and transcendence, revelation and its opposite. The sound of the perfect shot. Ishq. The trajectory of the ball as it spins on its axis through the air, with the eyes of a million tripping lightly across its transfigured surface. With a football boot, with muscle, bone and breath, you can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. A photon of love. The sound made by the 'i' is the intention, made real. The swing of the leg, the harmonic arc of the body, mirror the lines and curves of the field and the elegant, unseen fractals of the air. Aleph, undeformed. One. The long 'shhh' sweep of the ball through the sky. The last archangel knows that this time, you've managed to transfigure the kernel of yourself past the gates of the old, apple-green paradise and up, over the line of gnosis, into the vault of heaven's net. Qaaf. A fit way to end. Music from the deepest part of the vocal apparatus, from the throat's throat. And yet, that which is produced is not guttural, but sibilant almost like the pure note which lies somewhere within Middle C. The sound of the ball as it strikes the net. A sound which, amidst the alleluia epiphany of the oceanic roar, is never heard, except by those who know.

Haiku, as love-football. Om. Tattva. Baraka.

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