Waiting for the Quails to Come

Last weekend, the Pens played two games. Both games were sloppy (which is troubling in its own right), but in the first, the team played with some passion against their longest-standing rivals and won; in the other, it looked like the cast of Night of the Living Dead had taken the ice. Zombies make surprisingly bad hockey players, as it turns out, and the Pens lost to a team in last place in the conference. Watching my team lose is always aggravating. It doesn't matter how much I yell at the the TV, how many times I counsel the coaching staff telepathically to "Bench Martin!" (counsel I have since rethought after seeing Tuesday's game), or how much I want the men on the team to start playing like they adults instead of petulant little boys. Nothing I can do, sitting in my living room, is going to jumpstart my team (lucky jerseys and superstitious rituals aside). This is, I think, the most frustrating aspect of fan-dom in any sport. It's difficult enough to watch the team you've placed your hopes in, the team whose players you've come to "know" (in that sense that celebrities are "known") and care about, the team you know can succeed if it would just get its shit together--it's hard to watch these people fail. But the real kick in the teeth is the utter helplessness of it all. When I consider the situation rationally, it seems absurd that I would place my happiness--even if just for an evening--in forces that are so completely beyond my control. At such moments, I seriously question why I put myself through this season after season, instead of spending that time and energy on the things I can control.

To an extent, the situation reminds me of Samuel Johnson's 1750 essay in the Rambler, sometimes titled "On Spring." Here he extolls the wisdom of a friend who placed all his hope in the advent of Spring: "if his health was impaired, the spring would restore it; if what he wanted was at a high price, it would fall in value in the spring." Noting that "spring, indeed, did often come without any of these effects," Johnson nevertheless felt that this "friend" had found a rather fortunate way to navigate the pitfalls of hope and desire, arguing that

It is lucky for a man... when he turns his hopes upon things wholly out of his own power; since he forbears then to precipitate his affairs, for the sake of the great event that is to complete his felicity, and waits for the blissful hour, with less neglect of the measures necessary to be taken in the mean time.

The claim here is that a man who places his hope in something out of his control will be happier because he won't make the mistake of trying to work towards the thing he hopes for--a course of action that, as Johnson says in his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," always leads us into the "snares" of "the clouded maze of fate." Johnson was generally a pessimist when it came to human happiness; he argued more than once that, while hope is an inevitable human emotion, it will just as inevitably lead to disappointment in every case. Our best course of action is palliative--we contain hope and its destructive potential by putting it somewhere where it won't do any harm. By placing our hopes in things beyond our control, we simply live our lives with an eye to the present, taking care of what we need to do and not worrying about whether our "spring" will come.

As much as I detest the pessimism of this, Johnson's argument isn't, I think, without merit. On game days, it's maybe a bit easier for me do my work without worrying about whether it's making me happy or not, simply because I'm looking forward to that evening. And, like the Spring Johnson's friend hopes for, the cyclical nature of the hockey season means that, even if one game passes without the outcome I'm looking for, there's always another game to look forward to, or another season. In that sense, by being a fan, I give myself something to look forward to at all times that isn't dependent upon the vicissitudes of my own life. On bad days--those days when I fuck up everything I can control, or when everything else I can't is going against me--having a game to look forward to gets me through.

But Johnson's friend always managed find happiness in Spring in part because Spring never really existed in the present for him: "he always talked of the spring as coming till it was past, and when it was once past, everyone agreed with him that it was coming." The same is not true for games, and ultimately Johnson's ideas about placing hope in "things wholly out of [our] own power" don't account for the kind of soul-crushing anger that, for instance, led some Vancouver fans to riot last Spring. For them, the fact that a new season was coming after the Canucks lost in game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals--the most devastating defeat a hockey fan can experience, I think--really didn't matter, because the frustration of the loss was, at the moment, too consuming. I can't talk about a game "as coming till it [is] past": the game itself is an event that I experience as it is happening, and my happiness or frustration at the outcome is likewise experienced in the present, not as something already gone by. And given how destructive a bad result can be--I've never rioted, but I've certainly found myself too angry to work for an evening or even sometimes for the next day--Johnson's formula seems like it can only work if we can ignore the hoped-for event when it actually arrives, in order to cast its arrival perpetually into the future. This constant deferral of hope also means a constant deferral of happiness--and for Johnson the pessimist, that's the point, since in his account looking for happiness is a long wait for a train that doesn't come. But any fan who has watched her team win the big game will tell you happiness is not some illusory phantom; the joy of seeing our team win is why we watch. The frustration is the cost of that joy. But that means that the game can't be just a safe receptacle for a potentially destructive desire; the game is more likely to engender those destructive emotions than contain them. And so it seems like, in placing our happiness is something "wholly out of [our] control," we're leaving an awful to chance.

But it may be that this leaving things to chance is exactly the allure of fanship in the first place. In Robert Browning's poem "Caliban upon Setebos," Caliban reflects that both joy and grief "derive from weakness in some way":

I joy because the quails come; would not joy

Could I bring quails here when I have a mind[.]

I'm only slightly less reluctant to espouse Caliban's worldview than Johnson's, but Caliban nevertheless makes an interesting point here. Absolute control is also, Caliban theorizes, absolute impassibility: the divinity that does "all it hath a mind to" "feels nor joy nor grief." The ability to feel joy or pain at all relies upon our limitedness, on the fact that there are things beyond our control. And this makes sense. When I achieve something, it makes me happy not just because I achieved it, but because it wasn't inevitable that I would achieve it--it had to be possible for me to fail in order for it to have been an achievement at all. In this sense, when I talk about focusing on those aspects of my life over which I have control in order to be happy, I'm really only talking about things over which I have some control. It's really the contingency of the outcome that makes its achievement a source of joy or pain. And if that's the case, then placing my hopes in something that is entirely beyond my control starts to make a kind of sense. If the condition of human happiness is human limitedness, then the experience of watching the game desiring a specific outcome but with no ability to effect that outcome is the experience of the condition of happiness in its most emphatic form. I imagine it's the same feeling that attracts people to gambling on slots or horses. In cases when we feel like we have control over an outcome, when we achieve something, we get to feel like we've overcome contingency, which is a powerful feeling--or rather, a feeling of our own power. But in those situations in which we have no control, when something we desire happens despite our lack of control over it, we get the opposite feeling--the sense of our own powerlessness. But when it all comes out all right, that powerlessness feels like a good thing. Our biggest vulnerability suddenly feels like an asset. 

Investing emotionally in the outcome of a game I'm not playing is a way to experience the limits of my control as pleasurable--at least sometimes. When the Pens pull out a big win with no help from me, it maybe makes it easier to deal with the fact that I don't really have control over quite a lot of things in my life. It means that, even when I'm not in charge, things sometimes go right. The cost of that experience is recognizing that sometimes things can also go wrong; but precisely the fact that it could go either way is what keeps me watching in the first place. It is, perhaps, a lesson in perspective: a lesson that the quails may or may not come when I want them, and a reminder that the joy in their arrival is the surprise.