MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
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Dedicated to Sócrates

(Picture: Jorge Enrique Singh; Sócrates shows on the right and in his role as participating in the movement for democracy in Brazil, in 1984)

Sócrates (captain of the Brazilian national football team at the 1982 world championchip in Spain)

(19./22.8.2023) I happen to own an autograph of Dr. Sócrates, captain of the Brazilian national football team at the 1982 world championship in Spain. An autograph?, you may say, very nice, but many people in Switzerland may have one, due to at least one autograph session in the summer of 1983 in Switzerland, one year after that particular world championship. Right, I may say then, I attended that autograph session, and I got my autograph there. But I still have got something else. I even have a book on the 1982 world championship, which I had signed by Dr. Sócrates at that particular occasion. What do you think of that? This is something, you may say then, but I sense that you have still something else to tell. Now, tell it. And yes, I have to speak of something else. And this is about the licences that you may take as a child, about the licences that I would not recommend to take as an adult. Since, roughly forty years ago, when I was eleven, twelve years old, I even managed to touch the shoe of Dr. Sócrates, captain of the Brazilian national football team at the 1982 world championship, at this particular autograph session. And I am going to assess now, roughly forty years ago, the success, or at least: the effect of such shamanistic pratices.

(Picture: DS)

There once was a time when I could hardly understand how one could not be into football. This was childhood, this was playing – in whatever places, and certainly hardly ever on the big field. This was playing in places where cars where meant to park (entrances to garages), meadows, beaches, streets. And I recall playing on a beach in the very South of France or near the Silvaplana lake.
Playing meant to be completely absorbed in playing, in the other-world of playing, the as-if-world (as if the gools in football, or if football as such would matter). A symptom of such playing is the playing into the dark, until nobody is capable to see anything anymore, and everybody is stopping, in some way: naturally, but in some other way stopped by the natural course of things: due to night falling.
Another symptom was the soaking-wet-ball, if we had been playing into the rain, until the ball was somehow much heavier and reacted, physically, in unseen ways, apart from leaving wet traces on garage doors and walls.

This world of childhood playing of football was linked to the mythic world of the Olympians. The stars, the clubs, the legends, the history of football. And if somebody could be the embodiment of all that – it was the captain of a Brazilian national team. There were other Olympians, of course, and many so in the German world of football with which I certainly did identify. But the Brazilian world of football, in some particular way, was and is also the embodiment of the more mythic world of football as such (while German football, alas, is less an art, but some national passion with very German national particularities)
But the thing is: unlike most male individuals who have grown up with football and into football, I have almost completely lost interest as to the adult world of football. I have, in one word, maintained the magic of childhood playing in the streets, meadows, and particularly on beaches, but I consider this time being sealed. And I am honoring that lost world. But having watched too many boring matches, and never having developed an interest in playing on the big field, I am focussed, in my relation to football, on that lost world of childhood playing. And I did not replace that world with being the lifelong follower of a club or something like that.

If I am coming back to getting an autograph from one of the Olympians, it is to revisit that relationship with football, which has more developed into a more general interest in whatever sport (climbing, lately), which means: rather in the various cultures, practices, stories and histories of sport, but the interest is rather remote, and as such it is the opposite of being absorbed in one such culture, and certainly it is not being absorbed in terms of wanting to reach the top in whatever discipline.
I do consider the gesture of getting an autograph from one of the Olympians as an expression of still being in the mythic world of childhood, the gesture of seeking and maintaining (cultivating in some way) a presence of the world of the Olympians, and whatever might have been the motive to touch – with one finger, probably, and very reluctantly, while being in the cue, and while the Olympian was sitting elevated on a panel – to touch the shoe of one of the Olympians, a Hermes, if one does like so, a Hermes with shoesize of 41 (Sócrates was a tall player with rather small feet, and his tall figure combined with a seemingly relaxed long-legged elegance), it might have been the motive to test if the Olympian was real, or it was the subconscious wish that, due to such touching, the magic skills of such person would be transferred to the person showing this kind of respect (or disrespect).

I do recall that Sócrates, on occasion of the autograph session, which did take place in a Swiss department store, was very quiet, only on one occasion, when someone seemed to yell something in what was probably Brazilian Portuguese he showed some reaction (I seem to recall that he did answer briefly). The occasion was roughly one year after the world championship in Spain (which had been so nerve-wrecking for a follower of the German team). And I am realizing now that the Olympian at least had something in common with the person getting the autograph, and this was the deep knowledge of the various dramas of the 1982 world championship in Spain. I am pround that Sócrates did sign the pocket book that I had (and still have) on that world championship (Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, with another player, and with Rummenigge dribbling, outdribbling the other player, is on the cover). And there certainly was the drama of the semi-finale between the German and the French team, which I had been following on the radio, and into the night. What a drama! And if I had had the chance to speak to Sócrates (he died in 2011), I would have asked him, how he did experience or follow that match.

Sócrates, by the way (and as you can see), did sign as Sócrates. As a children’s doctor he was also known as Dr. Sócrates. And his biography is interesting. But this is the other world of sport that I am interested in now. Then, it was the mythic world of football. And with the above I am honoring that part of my life, and I am paying my respect (if I had been disrespectful) to one of the Olympians.

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