God is dead
A reaction to Liverpool, and winter.
Every winter for the past few years I have attempted to disconnect, and I know I need not explain what I mean. Last Christmas I tried so desperately and vigorously to disconnect that I broke down in panic when I couldn’t; I felt my only purpose in those two weeks was to relax, and if I couldn’t do it then I wouldn’t get another chance until next Christmas, and so I failed, and spent it terribly anxious instead, and more connected than ever: for the internet and being anxious go hand in hand, for me.
This year, I succeeded. My life is more balanced now, less desperate, and I eased into disconnection. I saw it as a gift rather than an obligation, an opportunity rather than a threat, and before I knew it the internet was off entirely, and I’d watched the entire extended cuts of the Lord of the Rings, and spent untold hours with people I loved, and powered through novels like I was thirteen again. The itchy, ping-pong thoughts that fill my brain with TV static when I’m regularly using the internet disappeared, and were replaced with a warm, lucid quiet, and I began to see again the things that were important to me. Most of all I felt fully, totally immersed in storytelling, for the first time in a long time. I felt I could give my whole self to the books, and it felt like childhood, and safe.
One of the novels was Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I will lightly spoil by this blog’s end. I’d not read that book since I was around the same age as its main characters (twelve) but as I went, I realised that perhaps no other work had been as instrumental in shaping who I had become, almost two decades later. Before I knew it, I’d finished all three.
Alongside this reading, I tried writing lightly about the Arsenal. I knew I wanted to give myself some time off from deadlines entirely, and that I’d begun to find coming up with something new and novel to say about a single football team every Monday quite challenging, and hoped some space would fill me with new and colourful ideas. And so I dived headfirst into my mythmaking, watching every game over the brutal winter and seeing what narrative threads I wanted to pull. I realised our midfield duo were doing something extraordinary, so off I went, researching and writing and stuffing a piece about Declan Rice and Martin Zubimendi full of the epicness I think these stories deserve, but that also often reads to me, with space, as somewhat manufactured, because I don’t think I’ve quite settled on what this blog actually is. I wanted to write every Monday, because routine feels good to me, and I’d always have a game to react to; but often I don’t have much of a reaction to a game at all, and trying to squeeze a story in grandiose style from those moments felt odd. I am drawn towards individuals more than anything, to Ebere Eze and Noni Madueke, to Rice and Zubimendi, to the stories we’re not telling about them, but there are only so many of those stories to tell. And I write, far too often, about myself, because Arsenal is so deeply tied to my identity that I can’t help but get tangled up in the things I say about them - but I find that difficult because I worry about solipsism, and I’m so used to my football writing being a product, a service, for the reader and not for me, and forget I can do whatever the fuck I like here and that it doesn’t really matter. And all of these thoughts combine until all that’s left to do is to write something far larger than the subject deserves, to squeeze a glorious tale of triumph from squeaking past Crystal Palace or Bournemouth, and to feel a bit funny about the whole endeavour.
So I didn’t finish my piece on Rice and Zubimendi because it felt too large, too legendary, and Arsenal were brute-forcing their way through winter fixtures like they were fighting for yards at the Somme. Instead I got myself up - really up, stomping around the living room in my scarf, smartwatch blaring about stress levels kind of up - for the Liverpool game, absolutely convinced it would generate the kind of feeling that drove me to turn my pen towards the Arsenal in the first place. And then that happened.
It was the first time, probably this season and perhaps for much longer, that I felt a vast emotional chasm between myself and the team. I wanted this so badly but they didn’t, that’s how it felt - and I was disgusted, disgusted because Arsenal were my emotional outlet and how dare they, how dare they not attack when I want to see an attack, how dare they not play with the same fury I’m feeling, how dare they not acquiesce to the contents of my heart —
I get so lost in stories, because it’s the only way I understand the world. At every turn I want to trust the hand of the author, to know she’ll deliver me to the correct ending, and sometimes I expect to feel that hand in the Arsenal, because for so long everything has felt authored; and perhaps that’s why I wanted to start this blog, to pretend I was this author, or to at least trace over the invisible lines I’d seen her pen make across the pitch, so others might follow it too; but football resists. In football there is no plan, none, not once the pitch has been taken, there is only intent and its chemical product, chaos - and although the players may look for their author in Mikel Arteta or God they will find nobody is writing but themselves.
At the end of His Dark Materials, one of the main characters, Will, reflects on the tiny moments of chance that led him to Lyra, with whom he is falling in love. These tiny moments may masquerade as chaos but of course they are not, because this a novel and they are authored, not by God but by Pullman, who decided to write a story in which God is a frail, evil old man who drifts apart and dies under the force of the wind; and the trilogy’s ultimate thesis lies in Lyra realising there is no Authority, no Authorship but that which she wields herself, as all humans do, and she resolves to use those gifts - conscious thought and its chemical product, love - to build what no God or Author could, as she says in the novel’s final line: “the republic of heaven.”
“It’s okay to feel unsettled,” Bluesky user Jack Somnambulist wrote in response to my emotional outburst as the final whistle went last night; “we have no control.” It’s such a simple, stupid thing to forget, that this is not a PlayStation game or a movie or a novel and will not conform to the natural shape of stories as it happens, as much as we might try to squeeze it into three acts. Jonathan Liew’s column confronted the home fans, who groaned and moaned their way through ninety turgid minutes: “What must it be like as an Arsenal player to play in front of these people right now […] maybe …it doesn’t help?” Misguided and ugly as it so often is, shouting is the only vehicle, really, by which fans do impose something resembling authority. Moaning is the noise of 60,000 authors disappointed by the gap between the story they were writing and the hard, uncaring chaos of real.
And I think that gap, ultimately, is what I’m interested in. I love stories because they make me feel calm and they make sense, even if they’re not true - especially then. That football is such a strange, complex and bizarre piece of theatre, that we all want authorship over something that refuses to be written but tell our endless, endless stories about it anyway, is so beautiful to me. So perhaps the form matters half as much as the attempt. God is dead; let us build our republic of heaven. It’s only a game, after all.
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