YOU CAN'T SPELL 'ABSURD' WITHOUT UA

Harken, if you will, to the Indian summer of October 1999. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was gearing up to take its place as the third largest population center in the state, as it does each Saturday the Crimson Tide plays in Bryant-Denny Stadium. Eighty-four thousand sunsplashed folks lined up to watch Alabama play SEC foe LSU. Among them was a group of graduate students and a visiting professor -- a sweet little poet from Slovenia named Tomaž Šalamun -- who had never been to an American football game.

Now, Slovenia is an interesting place. Set in the netherworld between eastern and western Europe and once part of the former Yugoslavia, it is no stranger to political upheaval. It is a place where poets have been jailed -- yes, for writing poems -- as Šalamun was for five days in 1964. But it's small. Like the mythical Freedonia in the Marx brothers' Duck Soup, there's something absurd in how small it is. Slightly larger than the state of New Jersey. Just over two million citizens--about four Bryant-Dennys full.

"Slovenes," Šalamun once told the American poet Robert Hass, "never break rules. You should see them at traffic lights. It says stop, they stop. It says go, they go."

Maybe for precisely that reason, Šalamun's poetry breaks rules. It can be absurd. Delightfully inchoate. It is, at its best, an ecstatic babel of tongues. This, from his Four Questions of Melancholy:

Jonah

how does the sun set?
like snow
what color is the sea?
large
Jonah are you salty?
I’m salty
Jonah are you a flag?
I’m a flag
the fireflies rest now

what are stones like?
green
how do little dogs play?
like flowers
Jonah are you a fish?
I’m a fish
Jonah are you a sea urchin?
I’m a sea urchin
listen to the flow

Jonah is the roe running through the woods
Jonah is the mountain breathing
Jonah is all the houses
have you ever heard such a rainbow?
what is the dew like?
are you asleep?

I think of Tomaž Šalamun for two reasons now. First, because in 1999, upon seeing his first American college football game, he had one of his many charming epiphanies, the kind that gave him an undeniable halo of Otherness. Part Chance the gardener, part benevolent space alien. In this instance, the poet's epiphany had to do with the virtue of play-fighting our civil wars once a week -- as opposed to letting our various sectional, factional, ethnic, and economic rivalries ferment for years and then fighting them out for real. I have to wonder if that's an epiphany he'd stand by today.

The second reason I think of Tomaž Šalamun at this particular time, in this particular place -- early 2007, central Alabama -- requires a bit of a Šalamun-esque associative leap, so bear with me.

The University of Alabama has just agreed to pay a man $32 million -- fully one-tenth of the Slovene GDP -- to run its storied-but-stagnant football program. The man in question is Nick Saban, who as minor coincidence would have it, 1) once coached at LSU and 2) has hereditary roots in Croatia, which is just a deep post-pattern away from Slovenia.

LSU. Tomaž Šalamun. Alabama. The Balkans. Absurdism.

Let me say that I have no qualms with absurdity. There's value in things not making sense all the time. No less a paragon of reason than the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara, former Defense secretary under Kennedy and Johnson and architect of what was until recently America's most absurd war, has gone on record as saying rationality will not save us. I agree.

There's the good kind of absurdity, though -- "Jonah, are you a sea urchin? / I'm a sea urchin" -- and then there's Vietnam.

So which kind of absurdity is it for a state university to guarantee a football coach $4 million a year for eight years? (That's 20x what the governor makes, for those of you scoring at home.)

Hmm.

Listening to Saban's introductory press conference in Tuscaloosa was like listening to Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, and Norman Schwarzkopf all rolled into one.

"To the fans and supporters, the boosters, everybody that is here that loves this program, loves Alabama football, I want everybody to know that we need a lot of positive energy for everybody to make a difference in how we go about what we try to do to have the best football team in the Southeastern Conference, the best football program in the Southeastern Conference. I think everybody should take the attitude that we're working to be a champion, that we want to be a champion in everything that we do. Every choice, every decision, everything that we do every day, we want to be a champion. Everyone take ownership for what they need to do relative to their role, whatever it is, whether it's being a fan, a booster, be a good one. Any kind of supporter that you are for this team, everyone take ownership that we support each other so we can have the best possible football program that Alabama has ever had."

It's impossible to deny that football-- the ra-ra-sis-boom-bah variety and/or the hand-to-hand combat version -- plays a significant role in shaping American hearts and minds. Especially those of its young boys and men. I, for one, cannot seem to shake a deep-seated emotional investment in my Pop Warner days as a wishbone quarterback -- games won, games lost; what-might-have-beens; where-are-they-nows. All that's to say that I, like a lot of American men, have had my values and my psyche shaped in no small part by sport.

But Saban and his ilk -- (Would you be surprised to learn that the football coach at the University of Iowa is within spitting distance of $3 million per year?) -- are selling a lot more than male socialization or the promise of Glory Days. They are, in fact, selling nothing less than the antidote -- at least a synthetic version of it -- to human suffering.

Selflessness.

Judith Herman writes in her seminal book on violence, terror, and abuse -- Trauma and Recovery -- about the successful treatment and reintegration of "shell-shock" victims in WWI:

"[M]en of unquestioned bravery could succumb to overwhelming fear and...the most effective motivation to overcome that fear was something stronger than patriotism, abstract principles, or hatred of the enemy. It was the love of soldiers for one another."

Whether we're huddled in a trench, waiting patiently at a stoplight in Ljublana, Slovenia, or seated thirty rows up at the twenty-yard line, we all want to think there's somebody out there counting on us. To listen to the new coach, folks in Alabama -- at least the half rooting for the Tide -- can rest assured: Nick Saban is just that someone. (Hooray!) But, alas, Coach, I still have a couple of pesky $32 million questions:

1. Are you aware that the selflessness you're selling is ersatz?
2. Is it my fault or yours if I buy it?

Here's hoping the answers to such questions prove as fruitfully elusive as they do to the ones you might find in a Tomaž Šalamun poem. ("have you ever heard such a rainbow? / what is the dew like? / are you asleep?") The straight ahead, logical responses don't seem nearly as fun.