From Nothingness To Nothingness
Yesterday I watched a basketball game.
I do not submit this as pressing news, but as I watched on what passes for television (I streamed it on the internet) and as I watch only three or four such American sporting events a year this way, yesterday offered me a portal into a world I otherwise ignore.
Some of the weirdness is predictable. Most notably, how little advertisements change. Cars drive along perfectly empty roads, fast food sizzles, soda and beer uncork you into a party of the hedonistic sublime, and upcoming movies or television shows are what you must watch or cannot miss. Other than phones and tech entering the rotation it may as well be 2000. Or 1990. Or 1980.
I had either forgotten or never noticed, though, how almost no information of any kind passes to you as you watch, even during the game. Yes, some player factoids and team records get mentioned, though surprisingly few. Outside of the game, 5G as an upgrade from the previous lesser Gs suggests bigger numbers are better than small ones and a 50% sale upcoming at Old Navy suggests the opposite, but that’s about all the work numerical “facts” of any kind.
And the more I watch, the more I feel as though I am in a referent-free zone.
But for it being Christmas, almost nothing I hear grounds me in time of any kind. One image in one commercial of a person in a mask points to “today,” but other than that nothing offers any relevant sense of “now.” “Then” gets hinted at in the spots that advertise an upcoming Civil Rights drama and a series about Magic Johnson. Yet both of these have actors playing real people about whom there is actual footage or who are still alive and the trailers for each suggest Disney and sentiment far more than history or documentary. And when Matt Damon evokes the past as part of selling us some form of Cryptocurrency, he walks through a simulacrum of a mock-up of a world history museum, or some such, meant to capture, I guess, a sense that things happened in the past, things like discovery and adventure. “Fortune favors the bold,” Bourne tells us. Is all this to lend gravitas to the recommendation we invest in something that does not exist or to remind us that economically, gravity never mattered?
Phoenix, the name of one team, and Golden State, the name of another, can be found on a map, sort of. But when Russell Westbrook’s commercial claims his fashion line “gives back to the community” no actual community is named. Stephen Curry gets guided around Oakland (part of the Golden State, FYI) in another “you should feel good” commercial, but the place is more impressionistic than hard-boiled and that is the closest thing shown to actual space shown for the several hours. Otherwise, no car drives through an identifiable city, no place anyone from the planet earth might recognize is shown, no place name they might know gets mentioned.
Words are arrows. They leave your brain and arrive in mine, or vice versa. As they fly and in how they land they pin meaning to the world. In the few hours of T.V. time yesterday they flew only from nothing to nothing.
That can be fun or an escape or a good way to sell stuff.
It also rigs the game against us.