Cathedral versus Stadium

Once upon a time in the synagogue Abraham was the guy no Jew could be as good as. Once enough time had passed, Moses was another guy no Jew could be as good as. For Christians it's Jesus. For Chinese, for the longest time, it was Confucius: or at least Lao Tsu. We build cathedrals to enshrine the past.

That's on Sunday: or whatever day your "sabbath" is. And all the cultures we're acquainted with have some sort of a sabbath, don't they? On Saturday we go to the stadium and root for Jeter, or Rodriguez. Whoops. I refer to Yankee Stadium: and there's a problem there, right away. In Yankee Stadium we might well be looking at Jeter: and remembering Henderson, or the Mick, or Dimaggio, or Gehrig, or Ruth ... anyone of whom some fan might think of in sacred terms: the past diminishing any possibilities for the present.

If the Stadium is a shrine, then no new games ought to be played there. When the Mick sprinted for second, no one is the stands was passing out copies of the Iliad so all could read about fleet-footed Achilles. No, no: in the stadium our heroes are better than those old guys.
After all, don't the Olympic records keep getting broken? each new Olympics? A properly reverent society, that is stunted by reverence, would have no new Olympics, or would handicap the Mick with weights added onto his ankles.
But of course we don't do that: because then we would be conscious of a hidden function of a cathedral!

My church was quite right never to listen to anything I said about theology: in church no ten year old can possibly have anything to say: and no thirty year old, and no eighty year old either. Yankee Stadium's function has gotten confused. That's why some of us prefer basketball, where all of "the greatest players of all time" are still alive, many of them still in uniform. (Double whoops: we just lost George Mikan!) That's why it's a good thing that civilizations don't last very long: and all new civilizations need a Life Magazine to canonize its youngsters: Einstein, Pollock, Glenn ...
That's why school systems in a young civilization have to be shaken out and revolutionized every few decades. On the one hand, on the cathedral side, the Thanatos side of the culture, we use Pythagoras to bludgeon the math student into a permanent humility. Music students have to listen to Brahms in school; and save their Ray Charles for after school: and no rational comparison of Mozart and Charles is possible in the school: not in a culture where the school has a cathedral function. It gets confusing if the school gets run by the other hand, by the stadium, the Eros hand. Suddenly Bush is as great as Lincoln. (Hell, didn't Bush have the decency to slaughter people abroad instead of at home?)
(Has any culture ever been more conspicuously a stadium culture than the Soviets, tearing down everything and putting up Stalin, tearing down Stalin and putting up ... anything else?) (Uh, yeah: the Chinese reds!)

Previously Knatz.com has expressed these themes as "creative" cultures versus "custodial" cultures. (Can any mortal, gendered consciousness treat grandfather, father, and son as equals?) The stadium / cathedral equivalents just occurred to me as I was watching the Roland Garros semi-final, the "match of the year" between Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal. Federer has been an irresistible force recently. Then along comes young Nadal, nineteen years old today, and establishes himself as also an irresistible force on the clay court circuit. What will happen when irresistible force meets irresistible force? Nadal started the better, Nadal finished the better. Nadal won. Today. I was ready before the match to accept Nadal as a great; but not until Federer had established himself as the greatest: which requires him to win the French Open, the one tournament which has hitherto eluded him. "Cathedral" was dominating my sentiments before the match. Sure it's impossible not to love the teen muscle man, but I had heart bumps every time Federer's ball went, long, wide, or hit the net.

Roger Federer routinely looks fresh after he's demolished an opponent. Even on the terre battu he's looked immaculate as he shakes the umpire's hand in victory. Nadal by today's conclusion looked like he'd through the brick-crusher while it was making the red clay. John McEnroe was quite right to recall the nineteen year old Boris Becker in relation to Nadal. (Or did he compare him to the young Bjorn Borg? Both comparisons fit.)

Wait a minute here, Knatz. Are you telling us that your sainted Rod Laver no longer commands the sole prime elevation in your cathedral? Don't tell us you're converting your cathedral into a stadium!
Ain't it a bitch? Few cultures, thank god, few personalities, are so "creative" they have no saints, nor so "custodial" that they have no living heroes.
Over the next decade I'll be happy if Federer and Nadal wrest similar quantities of victories from each other.
What we should have, folks, in the present, in the making, in the immediate future, is a rivalry for the ages.

2011 09 05 It's something to reread the above on a Labor Day a half dozen years later. Prophetic! (I'm here because I'm adding IonaArc titles to PKnatz: then I may also move the post itself.