Page 18 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

Ivanovic once said of the yips, “If you start thinking about how you come down the stairs and think about how each muscle is working, you can’t go down the stairs.” But if you’ve fallen down the stairs, it becomes impossible not to think about how you come down the stairs. “I’m a person who overthinks and overanalyzes everything,” Ivanovic went on to say, “so if you give me one thought, it creates a lot more.”

The yips have many names—whiskey fingers, the waggles, the freezing. But I like “yips” because it’s such an anxious word; I can almost feel the muscle twitch inside the word itself. The yips are most common among golfers. Over a third of serious golfers struggle with them. Golfing yips usually appear when golfers are trying to hit putts, and people have tried all kinds of cures to stop the spasms. Right-handed golfers might putt left-handed, or they might try unconventional grips, or long putters, or short ones, or bending over the club and anchoring it against the chest. And the yips don’t only affect putting. One of the world’s leading golf coaches can only effectively swing a driver while looking away from the ball.

The yips do not seem to be a result of performance anxiety, although anxiety can worsen the problem—as it worsens many physiological problems, from diarrhea to dizziness. Some golfers, for instance, feel the yips when they play on a course but not when practicing on a putting green. I get the yips when playing tennis on forehand shots—my arm muscles jerk just before the racket hits the ball, and like that golfing coach, the only way I’ve found to avoid the yips is to glance away from the ball as I swing.

But weirdly, I don’t feel the yips when I’m warming up or hitting with a friend, only when we’re keeping score. Their situational nature has led some to argue that the yips can be cured by psychotherapy, specifically by processing traumatic events in one’s sporting life. I am a big fan of psychotherapy, and have benefited tremendously from it, but I do not have traumatic memories of tennis. I like tennis. I just can’t hit forehands while looking at the ball.

Of course, just as anxiety can cause physiological problems, physiological problems can also cause anxiety. For professional athletes, the yips are a threat not just to their livelihood but also to their identity. The answer to the question “Who is Ana Ivanovic?” was invariably, “Ana Ivanovic is a tennis player.” Rick Ankiel was a pitcher. Until the yips.

This complicated interplay between the so-called physical and the so-called psychological reminds us that the mind/body dichotomy isn’t overly simplistic; it’s complete bullshit. The body is always deciding what the brain will think about, and the brain is all the time deciding what the body will do and feel. Our brains are made out of meat, and our bodies experience thoughts.

When we talk about sports, we almost always talk about winning as the measure of success. Vince Lombardi famously said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” But I’m dubious of that worldview, in sports as well as outside of them. I think a lot of the pleasure in sports is found in performing well. At first, winning is a sign that you are getting better, and then as you age, winning becomes proof that you still have it—the it being control and competence. You can’t decide whether you get sick, or whether people you love die, or whether a tornado tears apart your house. But you can decide whether to throw a curveball or a fastball. You can at least decide that. Until you can’t.

But even after age or the yips steals away your control, you need not give up. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch defines courage by saying, “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway.”

Ana Ivanovic never recovered the ability to toss the ball the way she did before the yips. But over time, she invented a new serve. It was less powerful, and more predictable, but she became a top-five player again, winning four tournaments in 2014. She retired a couple of years later, at the age of twenty-nine.

Rick Ankiel sunk all the way down to the lowest minor leagues of professional baseball. He missed the 2002 season with an injury, then blew his arm out completely in 2003. After recovering from surgery, he briefly returned to the major leagues, but he couldn’t find his control. So in 2005, at the age of twenty-six, he decided he wouldn’t be a pitcher anymore. He would play in the outfield.

In professional baseball, pitchers don’t just become outfielders. The game is much too highly specialized for that. The last player to have a career that included winning over ten games as a pitcher and hitting over fifty home runs as a hitter was Babe Ruth, who retired in 1935.

Like Ivanovic, Rick Ankiel was licked before he began, but he began anyway. He played as an outfielder in the minor leagues, steadily improving as a hitter. And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St. Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game. Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel.

I give the yips one and a half stars.

AULD LANG SYNE

I FIND IT FASCINATING that in a world where so much is so new, we welcome a new year by singing “Auld Lang Syne,” which is a very old song. The chorus starts out, “For auld lang syne, my Jo, for auld lang syne / We’ll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.” Jo is a Scots word that can be straightforwardly translated to “dear,” but auld lang syne is more complicated. It literally means something like “old long since,” but it’s idiomatically akin to “the old times.” We have a phrase in English somewhat similar to “for auld lang syne”—“for old times’ sake.”

Here’s a bit of my old long since: In the summer of 2001, the writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal emailed Booklist magazine to inquire about a review. At the time, I was working for Booklist as a publishing assistant; most of my job was data entry, but I also answered many of the low-priority emails that came in. I responded to Amy with an update on the status of the review, and I also mentioned that on a personal note I loved her zine-like column in Might magazine. I told her I often thought about one snippet she’d written, which went, “Every time I’m flying and the captain announces the beginning of our descent, the same thing goes through my mind. While we’re still pretty high above the city, I’ll think, If the plane went down now, we would definitely not be OK. A bit lower, and no, we still wouldn’t be OK. But as we get real close to the ground, I’ll relax. OK. We’re low enough; if it crashed now, we might be OK.”

She wrote me back the next day, and asked if I was a writer, and I said I was trying to be, and she asked if I had anything that was two minutes long that might work on the radio.

We don’t really know when “Auld Lang Syne” was written. The first verse goes: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot / And never brought to mind? / Should auld acquaintance be forgot / And auld lang syne.” Versions of those lyrics date back at least four hundred years, but we owe the current song to the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. In December of 1788, he wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop, “Is not the Scotch phrase ‘Auld Lang Syne’ exceedingly expressive? There is an old song and tune which has often thrilled through my soul. . . . Light be the turf on the breast of the heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment.” On the back of the letter, Burns wrote a draft of the poem. At least three of the verses were probably his own, although he would later say of the song that he “took it down from an old man.”

Part of what makes dating the first verse difficult is the poem’s eternality: It’s about drinking together and remembering old times, and almost every idea in the song—from picking daisies to wandering through fields to toasting old friends over a beer—could’ve been written five hundred, a thousand, or even three thousand years ago.

It is also, incidentally, a rousing ode to splitting the check, with part of the second verse going, “And surely you’ll buy your pint cup and surely I’ll buy mine.” But mostly, the song is just an unapologetic celebration of the good old days.

I guess I should tell you that Amy is dead. Otherwise, her death within this review might seem like some kind of narrative device, which I don’t want. So, okay. She is dead. The rare present tense sentence that, once it becomes true, stays true forever.

But we are not there yet. We were still in the past, I think. Amy asked if I had anything for the radio, and I sent her three mini essays, and she liked one of them, and asked me to come in and record it for her show on Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ. After that, Amy invited me to be on her show more often. Within a year, I was recording frequent commentaries for WBEZ, and then for NPR’s All Things Considered.

In April of 2002, Amy convened some of her writer and musician friends for an event at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago called Writers’ Block Party. She asked me to read for it, and I did, and people laughed at my dumb jokes. Amy hired someone to walk around the theater giving everyone compliments, and the complimenter said they liked my shoes, which were new Adidas sneakers, and that’s why I have worn Adidas sneakers nearly every day for the last nineteen years.

Robert Burns originally had a different tune in mind for “Auld Lang Syne” than the one most of us know, and although he himself realized the melody was “mediocre,” you will sometimes still hear that original arrangement.* The tune most associated with “Auld Lang Syne” first appeared in 1799 in George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

By then, Robert Burns was gone. He was only thirty-seven when he died of a heart condition (possibly exacerbated by his habit of raising many a pint glass to old acquaintances). In his last letter, he wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop, “An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” Even on his deathbed, Burns could turn a phrase.

Within a few decades of Burns’s death, “Auld Lang Syne” had become a popular part of New Year’s Eve celebrations in Scotland, a holiday known as Hogmanay that can trace its history back to winter solstice rituals. By 1818, Beethoven had written an arrangement of the song, and it was beginning to travel throughout the world.

Between 1945 and 1948, the tune was used in South Korea’s national anthem. In the Netherlands, its melody inspired one of the country’s most famous football chants. “Auld Lang Syne” is often played at Japanese department stores just before they close to let customers know it’s time to leave. The song is also a staple of film soundtracks, from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in 1925 to It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946 to Minions in 2015.

I think “Auld Lang Syne” is popular in Hollywood not just because it’s in the public domain and therefore cheap, but also because it’s the rare song that is genuinely wistful—it acknowledges human longing without romanticizing it, and it captures how each new year is a product of all the old ones. When I sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, I forget the words like most of us do, until I get to the fourth verse, which I do have memorized: “We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine / but seas between us broad have roared since Auld Lang Syne.”

And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past—seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them—and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

In 2005, Amy published a memoir in the form of an encyclopedia called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. That book ends, “I was here, you see. I was.” Another sentence that once it becomes true, never stops being true. Her Encyclopedia came out just a few months before my first novel, Looking for Alaska. Soon thereafter, Sarah got into graduate school at Columbia and so we moved to New York. Amy and I stayed in touch and collaborated occasionally over the next decade—I played a bit part in an experience she curated for hundreds of people on August 8, 2008, in Chicago’s Millennium Park—but it was never again like it had been in those early days.