We began James’ discussion of Mysticism yesterday. A student emailed me this comment:

Do you think Willie Mays is an official Gator now that he an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from SFSU? I thought you would have been all over that when you were talking Dwight Clark’s, “the catch,” in class today. Willie Mays has his own version of “the catch,” check it out.

Yes, I knew Mays was an official Gator. But what I hadn’t thought about was the prospect of ineffability from an athlete’s perspective.

I gave as an example of ineffability with respect to the sense of a loss of words the loss of words we experience when we witness something fantastic. I mentioned Dwight Clark’s “The Catch“. It was so amazing that we cannot adequately express it. I wrote the student back that I’d hate to be a sportscaster. They are paid to express the inexpressible and indescribable.

Here’s Willie’s catch:

But I wonder how apt the sports connection is. James says that ineffability is one of four marks of a mystical experience. The person who experiences it, James says,

immediately says that it defies expression and that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experience; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others…. [M]ystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect…. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony.

James is talking both about the person’s experience of something and the person’s inability to describe it as well as the non-experiencer’s inability to appreciate someone else’s experience.

But perhaps there is something of the ineffable about the experience from the athlete’s perspective. They do get into the zone. Maybe from their perspective there may be something rather mystical about what is happening to them. And it probably is the case that while the folks in the stands may be wowed by “the catch”, we can never fully appreciate the feeling the athlete had.