49er Football vs Hamburgers & Poetry

(From the Archives)

“Go 49ers!” a repentant burger-and-fries guy yelled to an old friend after the team won Super Bowl XIX.

At the Flume Burger Factory in Chico, California, Joe Montana was front and center. Customers could not miss “Cool Joe” painted on the wall, especially while munching a delicious Flume Burger, a fresh-grilled, quarter-pound hamburger. There was plenty of beer and fries during the big game—and, of course—49er football.

  

The restaurant, housed near Orient and Flume, is gone now (the mural, too). The wall painting, unmistakably done by a freshman, is not missed much, but Joe is, for sure. Many still remember his performance in Super Bowl XIX. The San Francisco quarterback made it look like ballet.

A casual group of us, who loved the price of the Flume Burger on post-football weekdays, did not like football. We hated it. But that changed for me after a philosophy class. On a foggy, early spring evening, on a night the university scheduled classes but closed the campus, I found myself rereading passages from the textbook, as did my friends. Paul Ricoeur, the author, noted that the metaphorical word was the cupola of meaning, the epitome of metaphorical understanding. What was a cupola, and why was it the epitome of importance?

Oddly, the closed-campus experience held the clue. Cupolas were windowed enclosures on the top of houses and buildings. Kendall Hall had one, the administration building, but you couldn’t see anything in the darkness as we waited to get in the building. Inside, we found an unlocked classroom. As the lights came on, we all settled in damp, cold, frustrated, and confused. Metaphors came to the fore in the confusing class that night. Even the classroom experience became multivalent. 

Cool Joe had just begun his long journey to fame in the Cotton Bowl that fall and would soon be in the news. I would never have guessed it, but by the time Super Bowl XIX rolled around, I’d be a big fan.

“Go 49ers!” I yelled to a friend after the team won Super Bowl XIX. I saw him in our apartment courtyard after walking home from the game. “Stormin’ Norman” got his name from another in our group. But good ole Stormin’ Norman had missed the class on Paul Ricoeur. He loved bargains, though, like the rest of us, a real burger-and-Fries guy.

The night in question, the campus had closed for a unique football game, although, in truth, I have been unable to find anything about the game when the class would have met. I have to believe it had something to do with Montana’s famous comeback in the Cotton Bowl, but that seems unlikely. 

Still, sports were a big deal on a campus filled with jocks, especially football jocks. Football and sports reigned supreme. Whatever the event was all about, it left the campus a barren ghost town. I remember that, yet we were all at our desks that night, huddled against the darkness. Our leader, Professor Charles E. Winquist, outlined his understanding of Paul Ricoeur’s “The Rule of Metaphor” on a black-slate chalkboard.

If you have ever read Czerny's translation of Paul Ricoeur or even looked at any of Ricoeur's work — a portion is shared below — you will understand the angst that night. Winquist’s classes came highly recommended, especially the one on religion and personality. One faculty member I talked with praised him as a scholar rarely seen at Cal State, Chico. 

Most in the Ricoeur seminar had attended Winquist’s religious studies class. There, we had read Evangelo Christou’s “The Logos of the Soul, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and an eclectic group of writers. There was Robert Funk, a historical Jesus scholar, and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, an archetypal psychologist. In his book about “Hermes and His Children,” Lopez-Pedraza explored, among other things, horrific murder, an inevitable archetype of us all, he said.

The angst in the classroom was palatable. Holt Hall, a maze-like building of classrooms and lecture halls, had been evacuated and laid to waste, or so it felt. Everyone on campus and in the world talked, watched, or played football that spring, it seemed. It had to have been just like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus on a Cornhusker Saturday. There would have been no one in sight. But there were no cornfields in the northern Sacramento valley, just almond Orchards, and rice fields, as best I knew. I mean, after all, how could the campus ignore academics on a class night?

The lecture on the chalkboard is forgotten, but not the anti-football lecture. It hit like a ton of bricks.

This is where the philosophy begins. The only way to understand what happened is by looking at “The Rule of Metaphor.” On page 299, Ricoeur wrote (and Czerny translated), “(that) the metaphorical utterance functioned in two referential fields at once.” 

Thus, in written texts and, as discovered in life that night, Ricoeur believed there was forever tension between the literal and the metaphorical. It was an ever-present, perceptional dissociation between two “statements of understanding.” Thus, symbolic confusion, the given tension between the literal and figurative of any given symbol, built referential “meanings” between what was and what was not, a new field of understanding.

Duality, Ricoeur said, explained how two levels of meaning were linked together by a symbol, often the core reason for the tension in language, words, and life. The literal understanding, or the first meaning, related to a field of reference attached to spoken, written, and experiential life. People saying or using sentence structures in language, words, or whatever, consider them as established and essential. 

Thus, when a given symbol is used differently, it creates a tension of misunderstanding, causing problems that are often unrealized and even unconscious. Thus, all of us huddled in Holt Hall had to listen carefully and read wisely, or we would miss it all. That couldn’t happen because then we’d be just like the idiot jocks and their friends. As one amongst us always called them, to coin a word, stupidents.

This understanding led to the second meaning, a referential field with no obvious characterization. Instead, it characterized “the other,” who made the predicates’ new description (a new understanding now different in spoken, written, and lived applications), confounding the original symbol. 

Take, for example, “carrying the ball.” In football, where it originated, a player makes progress down the field without passing the responsibility to someone else. In everyday language, it has taken on a second meaning, especially at work. It means a good employee who takes personal responsibility for their job. This is similar, so that person carries a ball, too. Unfortunately, someone unfamiliar with the historical usage of carrying the ball might get confused, or worse, rebuked by a clod: “What! You don’t get it?”

This is the tension Ricoeur talked about in his book. But this is a simple example, and as in most philosophy books, it wasn’t all that easy to understand. Thus, in Holt Hall, we weren’t learning about “The Rule of Metaphor,” but arming ourselves, however mindless, against a college sport’s culture. And in so doing, the very act of sitting in the classroom became symbolic, much like women struggling to learn in Muslim countries today. Our educational study caused troublesome tensions.

We geniuses weren’t genius at all, and most of us struggled with the lessons and were soon looking at one another, puzzled. It is fair to say no one understood a word Winquist was saying, and we sat in silence. Then I raised my hand. I asked Professor Winquist what he was talking about, what he was saying—exactly—because none of us had a clue.

No one went for a Flume Burger that night. There were chapters to reread. But football took on renewed meaning.

What happened after I asked the question was as close to a meltdown I had ever seen in class, or so I thought. Winquist answered the question, but not as we had expected. He began dissing football. Something never verbalized, and in an instant, laid bare our superior, holier-than-thou attitude. 

He spat his feelings out. Football sucked, or at least he conveyed that message (I forget exactly what he said), but we all agreed, football was a stupid waste of time. Then he moved to the fans themselves, often seen jumping up and down like a bunch of idiots in the stands. And, of course, we knew all about that, too. Then something odd happened. Professor Winquist stopped talking about it. He returned to his lecture as if nothing had happened.

In my final paper for the class, the only requirement for the semester, Professor Winquist wrote that it was a “complex, fascinating and profound exploration” Then he added: “I’m going to have to read Ricoeur.”

The comment has puzzled me endlessly. I took it to mean, right after Professor Winquist graded it, that he believed I’d missed the scope of the assignment. And yet, he invited me to lunch at the Creekside Cafe, a small restaurant on campus next to Chico Creek. 

I don’t remember much about our meeting, but he did question my decision to study humanist psychology in the North Bay Area. I told him I wanted to look at Berkeley, and it was closer. But I’d missed the point. Humanism was the exact opposite of what we had been studying, transcendentalism, the idea that we must analyze the reasoning process which governs the nature of experience. And, for me, reasoning meant God, too.

I had stopped everything in my life to read “The Rule of Metaphor,” and I still look at it regularly today. I can’t believe he had not read the book. In retrospect, I don’t even know if I have thoroughly scrutinized the lecture. What I am writing is a continuation of my study more than anything else. But it is grounded in the anti-football lecture’s manifest content, the literal meaning we all heard that evening.

The new symbolic assertion does not overcome the dissimilarities, though, and no doubt became a tension we all felt that night about the lecture.

The tirade had lasted a minute, or two, is all, but it walloped me upside the head, a referential field with no direct characterization of the situation we were in at all. Professor Winquist had answered my question metaphorically and correctly. And while I have never been sure it changed me for the better, it’s never left me lonely. It changed my life’s trajectory. We were all supposed to be at a big campus celebration that evening, or whatever, but we were not. Why? 

The metaphorical reality made apparent in the referential field, a classroom of students coveting an ivy tower had become a field of reference with hidden characterizations unrealized. The insight stunned me. My mouth dropped, and I stared at a man my brother’s age telling me about the elephant in the room. What we were doing had nothing to do with Paul Ricoeur, or “The Rule of metaphor,” but jocks, football, and zero empathy. We were ignoring the broader world outside the window.

“Metaphor becomes the power to re-describe reality,” a future reporter read, again, after the class, trying to figure it out. “Earlier analyses are not abandoned, however; we can still detect metaphors in the literal absurdity of statements and point to the words in which the metaphorical action is focused…. The metaphorical word, par excellence, is the copula (the top of understanding): the ‘is’ of the metaphorical statement contain(ing) an “is not,” for it asserts an identity that does not overcome dissimilarities.” 

It was like the trash in the wastebasket that evening, which should have been emptied. The word “garbage” is a metaphor, or can be when it becomes an expression of “an other’s” statement (or, in this case, a misunderstood lecture), “It was garbage,” we say. A new symbolic assertion that does not overcome the given meaning of garbage. And yet, it creates a tension, or misunderstanding, like the one we felt that night in Holt Hall. The anxiety of “misunderstanding,” a new referential field that often reveals truth.

Literal understandings do not exist in Ricoeur and Winquist's philosophical world, except as dried, crusty sediments on the surface of the deep, forever awaiting renewal. And so, no one went to the Flume Burger Factory, not because of football, though. Understanding takes work, and there was a chapter to reread.¹ 

Yes, football took on a renewed meaning that night. Charley Winquist had thrown us a pass and demanded we carry it on our own.

Footnote
 ¹  Everyone probably received an A in the course (a future reporter  did, anyway). It is worth noting that campus security had to unlock the building. Charles E. Winquist and his students wandered Holt Hall looking for an unlocked classroom (most rooms, including their lecture hall, were locked). There were only 5 or 6 in class that night. They found a tiny room open on the south side of the building.

It had been frustrating — the fact that classes were scheduled and buildings were closed. But the question will always hang in the air: Did Professor Winquist hate football? Probably not. But for sure, one student that night did, the repentant one writing this. Winquist did not share the equation shown in the selected chapter above that night (pdf here if corrupted). Words linked by arrows and diagrams probably filled the chalkboard, but a over b = a’ over b’ (“a” prime over “b” prime) communicated new, yet equal meanings. These are ever-present in communication, especially between different people, a “tension” revealed in the lecture that night. Our metaphorical misunderstanding of divisive reality. We weren’t studying anything that night. We were protesting.