Getting Straight to the Point: Reflections on the Sophie Cunningham/DeWanna Bonner Incident

 

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham pointing 

Photo by Grace Hollars / IndyStar (USA Today Network)

 

 

I. 

 

Formed by extending the arm, hand, and index finger, the gesture of pointing plays an important role within human non-verbal communication - as do other hand gestures, of course - although it by no means has a universal meaning. 

 

Thus, pointing - especially at other people - can be considered highly inappropriate in certain contexts and in many cultures; not only disrespectful, but rude and aggressive.

 

This seems to be because the extended finger is an accusatory gesture; one that makes people feel not only objectified and put on the spot, but blamed and shamed in some manner. And no one likes that; even those who are guilty of wrongdoing and deserve to be pointed out and pointed at. 

 

 

II. 

 

Whether that includes the professional basketball player DeWanna Bonner who was finger-pointed at for 22 seconds by opposing player - and now social media sensation - Sophie Cunningham, I don't know. 

 

Bonner certainly issued some choice words at Cunningham after a brief altercation involving Bonner and one of Cunningham's teammates (Caitlin Clark) in the 4th quarter of a game between Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury [1], but (as far as I understand) trash talk is an accepted, deeply ingrained part of the game in US basketball.

 

So whether she deserved to have Cunningham pointing at her - after foolishly making it clear how much she objected to being pointed at - for such a ridiculously prolonged period is debatable. However, what is not debatable is that the incident was hilarious (dumb, but hilarious!) [2] - and that Miss Cunningham is a true star of the internet age.

 

For as one might imagine, a countless number of memes have now been generated, including one (shown below) which gives us a glimpse of the celestial nature of a 29-year-old woman who has built a reputation as one of the WNBA's most fearless and competitive players, forever ready to stand up to her opponents on the one hand and stand up for her teammates on the other.   

 

D. H. Lawrence famously suggested in his late verses that aspects of divinity are revealed in the faces and forms of individuals when they are momentarily unaware of themselves in the moment. He calls this purity and it this quality which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes their flesh gleam with a kind of radiance and the bright flame of being [3].  

 

A lot of people hate (and fear) artificial intelligence, but seeing this AI generated meme arguably enables us to understand what Lawrence means ...  

  

Image of Sophie Cunningham giving us a glimpse

 of the goddess within her
 

 

Notes

 

[1] This game was played on 22 June 2026 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The Indiana Fever defeated the Phoenix Mercury by 86 points to 77.

      It might also be noted that Bonner and Cunningham have a complicated history as former teammates. Both played for the Fever during the 2025 season before Bonner abruptly left the team after just nine games. Cunningham later criticised Bonner on her podcast for failing to send a professional goodbye text to her teammates, establishing a deep-seated rivalry long before this game.

 

[2] To watch the incident on Instagram, click here. 

 

[3] For more on this idea and for references to the relevant poems by D. H. Lawrence, see the post titled 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021): click here. 

 

 

His Bowels Did Yearn Upon His Brother (Notes on Ganymede, by Daphne du Maurier)

Zeus küsst Ganymed (1758)

Fresco by Anton Raphael Mengs and Giovanni Casanova.*

(Palazzo Corsini, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.)

I. 

One of the distinguishing traits of the true pervert is that they have a very active imagination, one that is often informed as much by classical scholarship as by their sexual proclivities. They never quite see the world as it is, or the people in it - including themselves - as they are. They have what Lawrence terms glimpses. That is to say, they see in the faces and forms of young adolescents something divine as well as erotically fascinating:

[...] when lads and girls are not thinking,

when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean from self-consciousness,

either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder or mere stillness,

you may see glimpses of the gods in them.    

- D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods'

Thus it is that when the fastidious academic who is the narrator of Daphne du Maurier's third tale in her astonishing collection The Breaking Point (1959) goes on holiday to Italy, he quickly finds himself besotted with a youth and in a whole heap of trouble ...

II.

Arriving in Venice, our anonymous protagonist immediately feels as if he has entered an extratemporal space "outside the rest of Europe and even the world". This was Venice as an electrifying inner experience rather than actual location on a map. One that existed, magically, for him and for others who shared his tastes and were susceptible to the same secret enchantment. 

His excitement as he strolls the streets was "intense, almost unbearable", but it's as nothing compared to the moment when he first sees a young waiter, aged "about fifteen, not more", working at a café on the piazza:

"I told you I was a classical scholar. Therefore you will understand - you should understand - that was happened in that second was transformation. The electricity that had charged me all evening focused on a single point in my brain to the exclusion of all else; the rest of me was jelly. I could sense the man at my table raise his hand and summon the lad in the white coat carrying a tray [...] and this self who was non-existent knew with every nerve fibre, every brain-cell, every blood corpuscle that he was indeed Zeus, the giver of life and death, the immortal one, the lover; and that the boy who came towards him was his own beloved, his cup-bearer, his slave, Ganymede. I was  poised, not in the body, not in the world, and I summoned him. He knew me, and he came. 

      Then it was all over. The tears were pouring down my face and I heard a voice saying, 'Is anything wrong, signore?'"

It's significant how quickly he persuades himself that the blue-eyed boy is fully aware of the strange scene unfolding between them; how when the latter gives a smile and a little bow after the bill has been paid, the former takes this as a sign of Ganymede's knowing complicity.

The next night, he returns to the café and this time the glimpse goes beyond the first instantaneous flash:

"I could feel the chair of gold, and the clouds above my head, and the boy was kneeling beside me, and the cup he offered me was gold as well. His humility was not the shamed humility of a slave, but the reverence of a loved one to his master, to his god." 

The pursuit - the grooming - of Ganymede continues, despite an early premonition of danger; indeed, doesn't danger merely add spice to the game for an illicit lover? Of course, the affair quickly turns sour as reality begins to intrude: Ganymede is actually a very ordinary boy, of whom one could not expect too much, more interested in the latest rock 'n' roll records than he is in Shakespearean sonnets.

Just as well then, since he was bound to disappoint, that Ganymede is killed in a water-skiing accident. He may have been "beautiful as an angel from heaven", but he would soon have grown fat, grown ugly, grown old.

Besides, whilst the accident had been terrible - "a mass of churning water, of tangled rope, of sudden, splintering wood", and the young body of Ganymede drawn into the suction of the speedboat's propeller blades, turning the sea crimson with his blood - the horror soon passes and one comes to accept even the unfortunate consequences of such an affair, such as being forced to resign from one's job.   

At least that's true for du Maurier's cultured paedophile in this tragic tale. Having lost his old life and old friends and colleagues, having moved to a different part of town (the area near Paddington known as Little Venice), he happily adapts to a new regime of existence. At seven o'clock each evening, for example, he goes to his favourite local restaurant:

"The fact is, the boy who is training there as a waiter celebrates his fifteenth birthday this evening, and I have a little present for him. Nothing very much, you understand - I don't believe in spoiling these lads - but it seems there is a singer called Perry Como much in favour amongst the young. I have the latest record here. He likes bright colours, too - I rather thought this blue and gold cravat might catch his eye ..."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 579. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Ganymede', The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 83-123. All lines quoted and paraphrased above are from this edition. 

*Amusingly, the work was an imitation of an ancient Roman fresco, created to fool the famous archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, well-known for his interest in pederasty.

For a sister post to this one on du Maurier's tale 'The Blue Lenses', also in The Breaking Point, click here. 

The Southend Venus

And what's the good of a woman 
unless she's a glimpse of a goddess of some sort?

For Lawrence, women in whom one cannot glimpse something immortal  - that is to say, a transcendent loveliness of being, unfolding like a rose in the fourth dimension - are little more than animated lumps of clay.

Such women may be very attractive. And may even have winning personalities. But if their flesh lacks a divine gleam or sparkle, then they'll ultimately fail to engender any true sense of awe in a man. 

I thought of this when I watched a friend's teenage daughter emerge from the grey sea at Southend and stroll along the shoreline holding a phone to her ear like a shell, softly laughing and chatting, and pushing her wet hair from her face.

At that moment, her bare limbs pallid with light from the silent sky behind, she embodied Aphrodite far more perfectly than Ursula Andress or Pamela Anderson ever could.

For despite all their Hollywood glamour, they fail to manifest the purity and the stillness that speaks of the sacred and all the lovely morning-wonder that can be found even on a beach in Essex. 
      

See: D. H Lawrence, 'Glimpses' and 'The Man of Tyre', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

Note: An alternative version of this post can be read by clicking here.