The billowing drapery presses against and reveals her body beneath, defying the hardness and permanence of the stone in which she’s carved, and thereby manifesting the ephemerality of victory as that which must be snatched at that precise, fleeting moment when it is in reach.
The Greeks and Romans understood that Victory is a body. It’s a body that’s liminal, one that ambiguously both presents herself to the victor and intervenes on behalf of the victor to the forces beyond the control of the combatants. At the temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis, she solemnly bears down to loosen her sandal straps before walking on holy ground…
… and then presents sacrificial bodies to Athena Nikephoros, “Bearer of Victory”:
These aren’t the sacrifices of Victory herself, but rather those offered by the demos - the people who form the body of the community, who offer bodies of sacrifice as a means of overcoming the forces that would snatch the body of Victory away from reach in the manner of the seven point combined total of four Elite Eights, two of which were in overtime. Talking about a demos that is out of step with the forces of Chance (Tyche). Chance isn’t in the hands of the combatants, but rather the irrational forces by which the ball bounces in whichever direction. These forces must be appeased by the sacrificing of bodies, delivered by the body of Victory herself who will manifest at the anticipated moment of her unbelievably and holy self-revealing.
The people must sacrifice.
As you know, beer is alive. In its containment, that living stuff that runs through the fermented grain-infused liquid comprises a highly valued living body that began its life with its emergence from the earth, continued through its harvesting, infusion, aging, and containment. It will sustain you and give you strength. But as such, it’s the most powerful body that you can sacrifice. When you forego that beer to pour it down the sink, that libation reunites with the earth as a received gift that sends a subtle reverberation that influences the element of Chance through divine sacrifice. What is given many times over tips the benefits of the offering back to the sacrificer.
In the manner of the bridge priests of old, tomorrow I will embark on a solemn procession to the bridge over the stream behind my house, holding a can of beer. I will open that beer and pour it into the flowing stream. The tumbling free-fall of its liquid body downward toward the water will manifest the firmness of my conviction that It Is Time. The immediate drag of the current on its body, followed by its continuous flowing downstream as far as the eye can see, will ensure its reception and destination in assurance of its destiny.
This is the body of Victory. It’s a dynamic and fluid body, replete with violence and restoration and the flows, growths, agings, and generations of bodies and the world, but one that finds durability in re-binding with the past. Just as a sacrificed beer returns to its source, so does Arizona Basketball return to the greatness that’s inherent our previous Final Fours of the past. The sacrifices of the intervening, accumulated painful losses, like the sacrifice of that one beer that you pour away tomorrow, is integral to the experience of re-binding, a testament to the perpetuity of that repeated fastening in the face of flux, and thereby a peace made with -- and final overcoming of -- that very flux.
It Is Time to Bear Down.
