Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about euphoria, Charles Willeford, the picaresque narrative, someone else’s dreams, and the first round of the NBA Playoffs.
The Dream House is an art installation in a third-floor walk-up in Tribeca, a collaboration between composer La Monte Young and multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. It’s next door to a fancy gumbo restaurant and not far from the World Trade Center Memorial and a bunch of industrial plastic wholesalers, a stretch of downtown Manhattan marked by both thoughtless wealth and grinding poverty, each pretending the other doesn’t exist. The space itself is kind of janky, homemade in a way that now feels a little dated—it’s lit in soft pinks and purples, with cardboard helices dangling from the ceiling, and some pillows scattered around the edges of a soiled carpet. Sometimes there’s incense burning. Magenta scrims cover the street-facing windows. A multitonal drone fills the air, so loud it shakes your guts, but other than that, the whole thing is pretty sparse. Lots of its online reviews complain about the smell and/or the surly staff, which are two of the markers of online reviews that let me know I’ll like a place. I like the Dream House a lot. It might be my favorite place in New York City.
One way to contextualize the Dream House is in terms of the mid-century artistic obsession with simulating dreams using synesthetic combinations of light, color, and sound, one shared by people like Brion Gysin, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol (who included La Monte Young in the lineup of a pre–Velvet Underground band called The Druds; Young quit after two practices). Hypnagogic work like this might seem easily classifiable with drug-addled Aquarian escapism, with maybe some Jung thrown in to temper the whiff of pachouli, but that’s not quite right. Most art isn’t meant to “do” anything, let alone produce an objective effect in its viewer, but Gysin, Warhol, and the rest of them embraced (to varying degrees) this utilitarian, homogenizing shadow of capitalism in a counterintuitive effort to valorize subjective individual perception. Gysin even went so far as to patent his “Dreamachine,” a spinning tube with holes in it, lit from within, believing it could be a mass-marketed television substitute.
The only problem with all this is that after spending plenty of time in my life staring at a Dreamachine and sitting through more than my share of abstract, endurance-testing movies, I can say confidently that as far as producing a waking dream state is concerned, most of that shit doesn’t really work. But the Dream House does. The first time I went there, I lay on the floor for over an hour after discovering that I could change the pitch of the drone with my mind, and when I left, I carried a dim, somnambulant lucidity back onto Manhattan streets that felt, for once, like they weren’t strictly divided between haves and have-nots, but belonged equally to me and to the gumbo eaters and to the African dudes selling fake Vuittons and to the 9/11 tourists buying them, all of us, together, on the other side of the magenta-tinted windows.
It wasn’t true, of course, but that’s how it felt.
I have a distinct memory of blacking out once when I was a kid. I was walking down the stairs when color began draining from my vision, followed by a dim awareness that I was falling, except it didn’t feel so much like I was falling as I was staying upright while the world wrung itself into knots around me. My head hit first. When I opened my eyes, I was in the middle of the living room floor while my mom, believing I had been purposely spinning until I was too dizzy to stand and with what I now recognize as the terror of a parent seeing their child in pain, yelled, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Anyway, that’s what I thought about while watching poor, round Desmond Bane trying and failing to get into the lane for four futile games against Oklahoma City.
It’s a shame that the phrase “suffocating defense” has become a cliché, because the metaphor’s pretty accurate. Throughout the first round of the playoffs, watching LeBron flail for purchase as Jaden McDaniels’s tentacle arms engulfed him or Steph Curry fumble like a hesitant child trying out a beginner’s magic set against Houston’s unceasing pressure was like seeing someone get choked out. They relinquished possessions to lumbering big dudes who immediately dribbled the ball off their feet (shoutout Quentin Post), or to poor souls whose capricious gods chose those precise moments to abandon them for sins they had not yet committed (shoutout Jared Vanderbilt). You could watch the first round for the story-length narrative arcs centered on teams and wins and losses (Curry’s Warriors, after all, found their way to beating the Rockets in Game 7 after nearly blowing a 3–1 series lead), but you could also focus on something more visceral and sentence-level—the vicarious animal sympathy of the dismal, moment-to-moment poetics of individual humiliation. You too have a genetic memory of what it’s like when the present slides into an inexorable, airless future, one that’s both slow and fast, both microscopically precise and infinitely sprawling. If that memory were a person, it would be Houston’s Amen Thompson.
But this year’s playoffs have also shown which players seem most at home when immersed in suffocation’s slow, frantic rhythm. They’re the ones like the Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who doesn’t force his own tempo onto a possession but somehow smoothly tiptoes across its beat like he’s walking on shifting clouds. You can throw in Jalen Brunson and (of course) Nikola Jokić as players who seem to play with a similar elasticity, though through different means—Brunson seems to access his atemporal syncopation via coiled violence, Jokić through eldritch, puddinglike hypnosis. It seems to mark a generational shift, as many of the current wave of star players don’t seem to have measurable, quantifiable advantages like LeBron’s strength and speed or Curry’s ballhandling skill but seem to succeed through warping the game’s fabric, teleporting across the court, somehow moving more quickly through time than their opponents can move through space.
There are yogic breathing techniques meant to raise a practitioner’s consciousness by counterintuitively denying them air. If you were ever a kid looking for a cheap high, you might have called it “speed dreaming.” The goal of this kind of intentional asphyxiation is the same as with the Dream House or the Dreamachine or the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: to gain access to a liminal space between waking and sleeping, dying and living, because that’s where you can do anything.
An example of possibilities in liminal space: Aaron Gordon’s game-ending dunk off of Jokić’s airball in Game 4 of the Clippers–Nuggets series, which leaves Gordon’s fingertips essentially exactly on the line between “time remaining” and “time expired.” That Jokić misses the shot is surprising in itself; Ivica Zubac plays the same “suffocating defense” on Jokić that he played all series, but (as in much of the rest of the series) it doesn’t matter too much—Jokić, oobleck in shorts, jiggles and glides unbothered to where he wants to go. But watch Kawhi Leonard, helping off Jamal Murray: he almost seems to be moving lackadaisically and the steps he takes are little itsy mincing ones, but somehow he crosses the court in a blink, scuttling into Jokić’s face like some giant nightmare insect with enormous, too-human hands. Imagine Jokić seeing this from the corner of his eye, the split second of panic he must have felt as his control of the moment’s pulse is disrupted.
The term “euphoria” comes from the Greek, meaning “the power to bear something easily,” and was traditionally associated with illness—you were euphoric when medicine worked. Gordon’s sweat- and joy-drenched face (a lot more appealing now that he seems to have taken John Travolta in Battlefield Earth as a personal style inspiration!) in the aftermath of his dunk looks euphoric, like someone who is realizing that this is one of the best moments of his life as he’s experiencing it. This is a rare thing—in comparison, Gordon’s face after his next game-winner, an otherwise unexceptional transition three-pointer in Game 1 against the Thunder, curdles into a joyless and affected “mean mug”—and I can’t help but think it was enabled by a momentary and unconscious slip into Jokić’s liminality. It’s as if Jokić’s shown him how to dream. The medicine worked. He’s free.
For me, the story form that comes the closest to dreaming is the picaresque novel. There’s a narrow, technical definition of the genre (which includes a misfit/rogue protagonist and an essentially satiric authorial outlook), but I think it’s best understood with a definition as loose as the form itself: a character drifts around and has stuff happen to them. Some kind of quest might thread it together, but the narrative is largely freed from the funneling action of a distinct plot. Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy are the archetypes, but there’s also Dead Souls, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and most, if not all, of the Charles Portis novels. If you think about it too much, everything starts seeming like a picaresque novel—does The Sheltering Sky count? Does Light in August?
The example I especially love is a picaresque memoir (!), Charles Willeford’s I Was Looking for a Street, which barely mentions Willeford’s writing career or his twenty years in the army but focuses instead on his days riding boxcars as a child tramp in the Depression-era Southwest. As fourteen-year-old Willeford seesaws aimlessly back and forth between Arizona and West Texas, the prose builds momentum through unlikely juxtaposition rather than dramatic tension. An episode in which a man pays Willeford fifty cents a day to whip him doesn’t lead to commentary about power dynamics or exploitative sexuality, but about knowing the value of one’s labor. When Willeford carries a severed foot to a station so he’ll be believed when describing the extent of another boy’s injuries, the anecdote’s denouement is when Willeford ends up misplacing his baseball cap. This feels justified, and even satisfying in context. A lot of the book is about hats.
I Was Looking for a Street, like a lot of picaresque stories, not only acknowledges that the most consequential moments of our lives might be completely disconnected from any grand narrative arc but implies that those moments might matter so much to us because of that disconnect. In severing meaningfulness from economic determinism, or God’s will, or the algorithm, or whatever, we’re able to separate our desires from any objective purpose. It’s not nihilism (our choices still have consequences); it’s just that we’re utterly incapable of understanding what those consequences will be. We can’t quantify them. All we can do is stitch together what matters to us, right now, and figure out if it meant anything later.
This, to me, connects to the grand irony of art designed to induce dreaming. In making art that (by seeking to create a distinct physiological reaction in its viewer) had an objective function, Gysin and Young and Zazeela and the rest were trying to squeeze us through a mousehole in which utility validated uselessness. Slipping into waking dreams won’t necessarily make you richer, happier, or more successful. So does it have any purpose at all?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Two plays ended the Knicks–Pistons series. In the first, Jalen Brunson hits a three to break a tie with less than five seconds remaining. Again, we see Brunson’s odd ability to manipulate space when he shakes the telescopically limbed Ausar (identical twin brother of the aforementioned human stranglehold Amen) Thompson’s defense. Operating from the logo, Brunson isn’t moving very quickly as he slips into a merely adequate crossover (he also looks down at the ball while he’s doing it like an eleven-year-old) and there’s maybe a tiny shove with his off arm but not much. Thompson somehow goes from right in Brunson’s face to ten feet away in two mismatched strides. Brunson is wide open when he lets his shot fly.
In the next possession, Cade Cunningham gets a return pass after inbounding the ball and immediately attracts three Knick defenders. Throughout the series, Cunningham has been great, beginning to take on Brunson’s or Jokić’s or Gilgeous-Alexander’s ability to access the game’s secret, liminal spaces when confined and stifled by defenders. And here, he seems just as unhurried as those players do. Both Deuce McBride and Miles Bridges, their arms pinwheeling manically, swoop past him, exiting the screen like defeated henchmen. It’s as if Cunningham is manipulating the game’s gravity. It’s great, like watching an action movie hero learn to control their powers. The play starts with 4.3 seconds left, but it all seems to take way longer.
But then, with only Josh Hart in front of him, Cunningham passes to Malik Beasley (who’s as wide open as Brunson was), and everything breaks down. For whatever reason, unlike Aaron Gordon, Beasley can’t enter his teammate’s dreamscape. The ball comes on him all wrong, slow, then fast, and it hits Beasley in the hands, then seems to ricochet off his face, before bouncing out of bounds. The game, and the Pistons’ season, is over, just like that.
The way sports narratives get constructed pushes moral judgment in comparing these two sequences: Brunson’s an “alpha” while Cunningham isn’t (yet), or that winning in the playoffs requires individual selfishness over the indulgence of others. But these narratives take as a given that knowing the final score of a game is the key to that game’s essential meaning, which doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like thinking that reading a Wikipedia plot summary of a book is the same as reading the book itself.
The closest I Was Looking for a Street comes to a resolution is the moment when Willeford finds a cowboy hat in a pool hall bathroom. His traveling companion Billy Tyson, a boy his age who has a speech impediment because he only has front teeth, has informed Willeford that he’ll only return home to Kentucky once he has a cowboy hat, since he told everyone he knew that he was leaving to become a cowboy (in his travels, Billy already has acquired denim and a pair of cowboy boots). But Willeford, awed by the craftsmanship and grace of a real cowboy hat, considers keeping it for himself, going so far as to enter a momentary daydream about finding his own jeans and boots before returning home to Los Angeles, and telling everyone there that he’d become a cowboy during his travels. The fact that even then, “cowboy” was more archetype than occupation only encourages this fantasy, as Willeford writes, “It was the imaginary West of myth and movies, and I suppose it always had been. O God but I wanted to keep that hat!”
Willeford eventually decides to give Billy the hat as he’d planned, reasoning that to keep it would be “stealing another man’s dream.” And as Billy takes the hat and begins to sob that he can go home now, Willeford realizes that in life, he’s a loser, because “a winner would have kept the hat for himself.”
This would be the point of a lot of stories, but this isn’t the book’s (or even the paragraph’s) main epiphany. It’s not as if Willeford pretends that the dichotomy between winning and losing is unimportant—anyone who writes so much about the highs and lows (mostly lows) of begging isn’t going to construct a universe with such a naïve morality—but it’s not the only way to tally things up. Willeford makes that clear a few lines later when he calls it “a comfort to know something so important about myself.” For Willeford, stealing someone else’s dream simply isn’t an option, no matter the objective category to which it consigns him. If that ultimately damns him, well, at least he doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going anymore.
Again, what’s the point of dreams? What’s the use of art? Well, nothing, really! But as the aesthetics of regressive utilitarianism are, on a worldwide level, empowering the world’s cruelest and dullest people, maybe it’s worth rejecting, at least in part, the idea that everything has to lead to something useful, something quantifiable, something that helps you win. If Cade Cunningham’s a loser, just like me, just like Charles Willeford, just like (probably) you, it’s not the end. We’ve still got our dreams. We’re still alive.
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.
Illustration: Arunas Kacinskas.
