How did it come to pass that I find myself sitting here in some fancy restaurant looking out over the Caspian Sea, being introduced by my minder as VIP, given the best seat in the house so that everyone stands up as I walk by? How did I get here? These are usual existential questions that arise from time to time. But I could equally ask myself next week: how did it happen that I find myself sitting in this armchair at home in the specific location of Kennington London England picking my nose?
The truth is that all specifics seem too random. Why this and not that? Our life should be universal not particular. The particular always seems unlikely.
Much the same instinct comes into play when we think about the unlikeliness of the specialness of, say, the historical Jesus Christ. A bloke with a beard in an iron age tribe in some desert region in the back of beyong 2000 years ago. How could that specificity be universal enough for us today, here?
I suppose one job of art over the years has been to aggrandize the specific.
peoplearerubbish.com

Footballers, especially those from South America and Africa, are religious people. Catholic or muslim, before they start a match they look up to the heavens and pray. With God’s help, they say, we will win this match. The trouble is, even god can’t make both sides win. You sometimes think that at the end of the match when Brazil have lost, say, what are the players thinking about god’s participation. Did he forsake them in their hour of need?
It is at such times that we turn to St Augustine, who explains about suffering, deserved or undeserved: “For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brighter, and chaff to smoke, under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed…so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.” (City of God)
So, the same suffering is imposed on virtuous and evil alike, but for Brazil, losing 1-7 against Germany, the suffering is there to purge and clarify them. In brief, it is all part of a greater good. Augustine of Hippo himself would have been an Algeria supporter. I wonder how he would have reacted to the painful exit at the hands of the Germans.
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Better than sex, says the amply tatooed haircut of a footballer at the World Cup, referring to the goal he has scored. I suppose the moment the back of the net ripples or bulges or shimmers is tantamount to the orgasm. Reminding me of George Steiner on chess: “As one breathes in the first scent of victory – a musky, heady, faintly metallic aura, totally indescribable to a non-player – the skin tautens at one’s temples, and one’s fingers throb. The poets lie about orgasm. It is a small chancey business, its particularities immediately effaced even from the most roseate memories, compared to the crescendo of triumph in chess, to the tide of light and release that races over mind and knotted body as the opponent’s king, inert in the fatal web one has spun, falls on the board.”
Not wrong as far as the moment of release is concerned. Why even I myself have on rare occasions experienced difficulty in… no matter… no matter. Though perhaps the metallic sensuality might be an acquired taste.
More conventional evocations of performances of the brouhahha of orgasm surface perhaps in the gorgeous explosions of late 19th and early 20th Century symphonic music. Wagnerian climaxes were specifically interpreted as sexual at the time, and Brahm’s tendancy to evade that moment has been frequently linked to his repressed libido. For me, it is Mahler’s crystalline, shattering dread climaxes, shot through with imperfectly sated desire and the forlorn attempty to capture that fugitive instant that best recreate culmination. One-nil!
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