An Edgar Allan Poe-like essay: sports perception and "abstract perception"


Author. Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Abstract. A distinguished professional sportsman or sportswoman, such as Lionel Messi, may wonder who is the highbrow equivalent of them. Of course, they are not a Kafka, but they are not nothing surely. Various experiences of mine faintly suggest to me that someone thinks of their perceptive passes as like my paper ideas. Perhaps. I upload papers daily these days and I imagine the parallel-maker choosing an example from yesterday, but this example was arrived at quite methodically.
Draft version: version 5 (26th June Eliot reference added; 26th June Mill added, v3 26th June 2026 minor edit, v2, 21st December 2025, minor edit)
Software used (freeware): Google docs, Google.com, kleki.com


Although it was not mathematically derived
It was quite methodically that it arrived


        We live in the age of the Internet in which anyone can upload a document and it is available for viewers all over the world, if you can find it. For much of 2022 to 2023, I wrote and uploaded academic papers daily. One day I went to the bank and next to me was a woman who looked like Lionel Messi. It was the World Cup then, if I remember correctly. I shall risk diagnosis of paranoia and wonder "out loud" whether someone was suggesting that there is some analogy, or parallel if that is better word, between myself and the outstanding footballer, or soccer player as they are also described. In defiance of John Stuart Mill, someone says: "He may be the best footballer, but it would be ridiculous to compare him to a Kafka say; but there is someone in highbrow matters to which he compares and that someone is you"? I was watching a video in which a pundit spoke of Messi's passing of the ball to fellow players. How did he spot that pass? It is magic. "Likewise, how did I spot that objection, etc.: your abstract perception is like Messi's concrete perception." How to make sense of this though? Perception is sensory and objections and paradoxes are not perceivable by the senses, it seems. (In the University of Manchester library, there was a boy with dreadlocks who once loudly interrupted my conversation to say, "How can you compare this matter to football?" and there may be some truth in this. I did not have the wit to say, "Okay, Gullit." I have lost New York, but the Dutch still have Gullit.)


Anyway, leaving aside the very idea of abstract perception, I imagine the maker of the Messi comparison offering an example. "Yesterday you read Adam Kuper on the relationship between British anthropology and psychology. There were so many things you could write on and I would have expected you to write on Needham but you suddenly decided to write on W.H.R. Rivers, who was also quoted by Kuper: Rivers on how the Todas seem of the same general intelligence as the average educated European, though it is hard to tell. You subversively interpreted this as a slur, digging up old insults directed at doctoral students in a chapter on Spinoza, by another academic of that time. Of all the choices regarding what you could write on, you decided to write on that. It is like a sportsman passing the ball in a way difficult to foresee but valuable."


But I arrived at it quite methodically. I decided to type out Kuper's paper and make it available to everyone online. It was laborious work and to begin with I paid attention to every sentence, responses occurring to many. But then I somehow began to type without paying attention. Before this happened I considered what, if anything, I could say about the Rivers sentences quoted. Considering this matter there, it was an obvious move for me! (See Edward 2025a.)


I am like Edgar Allan Poe. Have you read his essay on how he composed The Raven. Poe writes:
"Most writers–poets in especial–prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine phrenzy–an ecstatic intuition–and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes…"
Then he tells us he arrived at his famous poem by a scientific method, like solving a mathematical problem. Here he is on how he determined the length:
"It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art–the limit of a single sitting–and that, although in certain classes of prose composition, such as 'Robinson Crusoe' (demanding no unity), this limit may be advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a poem. Within this limit, the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit–in other words, to the excitement or elevation–again, in other words, to the degree of the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio to the intensity of the intended effect:—this, with one proviso—that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all."
"We" normally think of Poe as appealing to the inexperienced masses and his opponents, the Bostonians, as appealing to respectable literary people. But did someone amongst the masses feel that Poe is telling too many lies (see also Eliot 1949: "hoax"), leading them to support the Bostonians? Anyway, if I lived at that time (does this even make sense?), I think I would forgive Poe, if not simply amused. But I do not forgive some prominent essayists, or not easily anyway. If his is a lie - and with Poe, this is a tricky matter - it is pleasantly funny. But my account above of how I arrived at my paper idea yesterday is no lie. I shall play Poe and you can play the Bostonians. "I'm Ralph Waldo Emerson." "I'm Henry James." "I am Edith Wharton." Go away from University of Manchester, you are messing it up!


References
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025a (latest version 2026). A booklet of some of analytic philosophy's faulty rational reconstructions. Available at academia.edu at:
https://www.academia.edu/145299070/A_booklet_of_some_of_analytic_philosophy_s_faulty_rational_reconstructions
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025b. W.H. Rivers on general intelligence across societies. Available on academia.edu (and soon on PhilPapers hopefully) at:
https://www.academia.edu/145498502/W_H_Rivers_on_general_intelligence_across_societies
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025c (latest version 2026). "Lionel Messi is to soccer as you are to _____"? Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/145431509/_Lionel_Messi_is_to_soccer_as_you_are_to_
(See this, for YouTube evidence of commentators suggesting comparisons.)
Eliot, T.S. 1949. From Poe to Valery. Hudson Review 2(3): 327-342.
(Cited by 370, according to Google scholar.)
Kuper, Adam. 1990. Psychology and anthropology: the British experience. History of the Human Sciences 3 (3). Available online soon hopefully!
(He looks a bit like Peter Goldie, Adam Kuper.)
Mill, John Stuart. 1861. Utilitarianism. Available at:
https://www.utilitarianism.com/jsmill-utilitarianism.pdf
Naipaul, V.S. 1969. The Middle Passage. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
(To understand the Dutch reference. By the way, maybe this boy is better compared to Snoop Doggy Dog, amongst his race, if there be such things!) 
Poe, Edgar Allan. 1846. The Philosophy of Composition. Available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55749/55749-h/55749-h.htm