Pitchmarks #33 - 18th February 2024 - Litost

“Desperation”; image courtesy of Dogleg Media https://www.instagram.com/dogleg_media/

“Litost is an untranslatable Czech word…I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it hard to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it” Milan Kundera; “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”

As sometimes happens, a few words stop me in my tracks, and though I continue to go through the motions of everyday life, I am at the same time detached, grappling with an unexpected twist in my thinking. I’d been writing about the single great shot that always emerges at the very depths of golfing misery - “for golf always grants us one moment; enough to drag us out again the next day” - but a reader - Eddie - had kindly responded, saying that it is “not the one shot that brings a true golfer back. It's all the shots. Poor shots motivate as well, though differently than the good ones”.

This left me stymied, for I’d been relying on this notion of the golfer’s addiction being to the rare, great shot far too easily. Was that just a cliche that I’d accepted carelessly? Could those fleeting moments of glory really be powerful enough to override the litany of disasters that surround them, surround us?

This time last year, I had coffee with “a lifer”, a gentleman in his seventies, who’d been playing since he wore short trousers. We’ll call him Terry, to protect the innocent. And Terry was at the point where this game had him up against the wall, on the cusp of giving up, his resignation in hand. But before he submitted it, he wanted to talk, and I wanted to listen, and so we refreshed our cups and he ran through the shots he’d hit in his sixty years of golfing. Not all of the shots, of course, or we’d still be in those chairs today, but the ones that he deemed truly great; the ones he’d carry to his grave with him. Six decades of golf, and he came up with six shots, which by my reckoning is about one a decade. And Terry was no hacker - he played off a single digit handicap for most of those years.

In “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, Milan Kundera defined litost as “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery”, but in the deafening silence which indicates that Terry’s list of achievements is now complete and delivered, I feel that we need another Czech word to accompany it, for while he is surely knee-deep in litost at the scant consolation golf has given him in exchange for a lifetime of torture, I am up to my neck in the “sudden sight of [another’s] misery”. Empathy gets close.

As it happens, Terry renewed after all…perhaps the thought of another memorable instant seemed a worthwhile investment of another ten years, or perhaps, as Eddie had suggested, I’ve been barking up the wrong tree and the bad ones are just as valuable as the good. After all, each of his half-dozen highlights seemed to begin from a position you wouldn’t want to be in to begin with, and I am reminded of the late, great Dave Allen, and that when asking for directions in his homeland, he would be advised that “I wouldn’t start from here…”. Maybe we have to go through such trials in order to grow.

So I drift off into some inner dialogue about my own experience of litost, and arrive back on the seventeenth fairway of a match fully thirty years behind me, with an unlikely lead and the defending club champion in the left-hand bunker. I am just short, and a half from here will be enough for a famous scalp, but my bottle deserts me, and I choose to putt where I would always - always - chip, and I manage to somehow duff the putt the way I’d feared duffing the chip, and three more putts later, I am drowning in litost, my torment compounded by losing the last and the nineteenth.

I realise I have been carrying this scar around for three decades, and that it is about time it healed, and that, by Terry’s scale, I ought to have at least three redemptive examples to offer you, to counteract this abject failure. But as Kundera also explains, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, and I am so immersed in this recollection of my own misery that I can’t remember the counterpoints, and wonder if they have ever surfaced. Or perhaps one a decade is only the average, and they’re all lined up around the corner - all three of them - waiting to emerge in some heavenly chorus next time out…

So maybe Eddie is right, and the formula of this crazy game has been hidden in plain sight all along. Maybe the secret sauce is not in the exceptional moments of success, born not of talent but of the simple law of averages, nor in the wide spectrum of comical horrors that accompany them, but in the blend of these factors. Maybe the compulsion that Terry and Eddie and I suffer from is to the cruel uncertainty of each result, or even to the state before such outcomes manifest? That moment of breathless hope at the top of the backswing before the toppling lunge to litost begins.

Golf is a game we wage against almost unbearable odds, but they are only almost unbearable. Somewhere in there, at a rate that pans out for the best of us at one per decade, there is enough to give us hope, and anything that offers even a glimmer of that treasure is worth an ocean of silent litost in exchange, for, as Kundera notes, “when life's prospects are favorable, people forget their past suffering, and when they are in pain they forget their joy”.

So I will continue to smile and laugh in the face of every duff, fat, hook, slap and sh*nk, for they move me one calamity closer to the exception that proves the rule; one aberration nearer to the greatest feeling on earth.

And as for litost? I find it hard to imagine how anyone can understand golf without it.