Orin at B.U.: punting and Joelle (pp. 295–296)
here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. […] Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be God.
Context
Spectation experienced from the object's side, and it reads as a return to the womb. What Orin craves in punting isn't athletic — it's the crowd, thirty thousand voices melding into "One Soul," a single amniotic vowel that drowns out thought and feels like "the voice of what might as well be God." The crowd is the drug: a mass so total it stops being individual people and becomes one enveloping sound, and Orin's whole self dissolves gratefully into it, "his own self transcended as he'd never escaped himself on the court." It's the audience-loop from the other end — where the viewer dissolves into the screen, the performer dissolves into the roar — and the vocabulary (womb, amniotic, one big vowel) marks it as regression, the pleasure of being unmade back into a pre-self. The ball, elsewhere in the scene, seems "to chase the very crowd-roar it had produced": the loop closing, spectacle feeding on the sound of itself.