The Human Scale of Love
Football proves that everything human beings have conceived is totally and simultaneously complementary. It is the primary phenomenon that overturns the need for refutation—the old model of superseding one thesis with another. It un-lasts even as it endures; at every moment, it dialectically reinstates the rupture through an anti-dialectical move—one that begins with what is not, yet advances in its synthesis via the reverse of each movement, as opposing forces, while embracing reality, one and another occupy the same spot in space. It denies itself until it reaches the fateful instant that proves its discontinuity—simultaneously defying all the laws of the universe—to deliver glory or tragedy in one final, infinitesimal, and immeasurable miracle. Whether a goal is scored on a rutted, muddy pitch without floodlights or in the most pristine, high-tech, and advanced field setting, it must always accept its tragic fate—and this will never change, precisely because the fundamental quality of football itself will never change either: the fact that it cannot be exact, since it relies precisely on the suspension and evasion of an unbearable emergence of errors, rooted only in fleeting insights, instincts, and intuitions. Its soul mirrors the very spirit of life, animated by a primary element that is utterly erratic—the ball—which is not merely carried along by inertia, devoid of will, but which, astonishingly, seems to possess a breathing of its own, one that will be mischievously and eternally unpredictable.
