Despite the lack of rigor, this fantastically interesting article can be forgiven both because it is meant for a broad audience and because it takes up so many issues that I implicitly raise in my commentary on the kinetic beauty of sports. Also, I am using this writing as a way to reenergize my cognition.

Stanford’s Hans Gumbrecht has clearly been reading my blog and stealing ideas to create his new work, In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Using Kantian aesthetic theory, which I have little knowledge of, Gumbrecht argues that beautiful sports plays “give a distinct ‘impression of purposivensess’.” However, the article’s author argues, I think rightly, that a great deal of “aesthetic clout” comes from the context of an athletic feat; the buzzer beating shot, the overtime goal and such are, of course, much more ‘pleasurable’ than any shot, any goal, and heightened all the more when done in the playoffs, Olympics or World Cup tournament.

More interestingly, and in conversation with Kristine’s post on experiencing the self, the article engages David Foster Wallace’s attempt to reconcile “the incredible banality with which athletes typically talk about [their] extraordinary abilities and accomplishments.” Wallace concludes that neither a lack of intelligence or articulation explains this phenomena, but is instead a necessary condition of an athlete’s ability. That is, precisely because they move and perform in a space outside (beside?) the intellect they are able to accomplish the extraordinary. However, this space cannot then be communicated or explained in the intellect and must needs be relegated to banal commentary, i.e. “I feel great,” “I saw the shot and took it.” Wallace’s argument can best be understood in his own succinct language; “that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it––and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."

This is precisely the paradox of an immersive experience, or experience generally, because an athlete’s success in those tense moments is built on the ability to shut down or void the thinking, reflective, critiquing self; athletes occupy another space which is voided the moment one tries to communicate it. However, there seems to be an interesting correlation between athletic or kinetic immersion and intellectual immersion, which at its highest level, produces the moment of insight. The clarity achieved in these moments is both immersive and perfectly self-articulate, but all within an interior space-time that mutates (if not annulled) in its contact with the external. In contradistinction to intellectual immersion, kinetic or bodily ‘wholeness’ achieves perfect articulation in the external through the perfect movement/ action but must remain internally aloof. Thus, rewriting Kristine’s observations into a question of athleticism, is it possible to be both kinetically and intellectually immersed? Is it possible to experience internal self-articulate insight while experiencing a, or perhaps through, kinetic immersion that achieves external articulation in its perfect performance.