After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild. 

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change. 

Naming the rebuilding year allows us a reprieve from the exhaustion of constant forward movement. It’s also an acknowledgment of the importance of defense—while we are mashaling our resources, the other team is making moves. But when we are boxed out of our usual routes, we open new avenues. The way to change the game is by pursuing goals that the rules do not technically allow. The horizon is larger by far than we know, and the tide can stretch out to meet new boundaries. Picking our way across the damp sand, we are looking for flotsam and jetsam we can use. 

Dilettante Army invites scholarly writing on rest, reorientation, and Rettung. Topics might include: tanking, resting your starters, grassroots organizing, Syria, the future of Gaza, disaster recovery, mutual aid, collective projects, the ground game, strategy vs. tactics, media cycles, buying time, incremental gains, post-revolutionary fervor, obstructionism, left-wing melancholia, messages in bottles, the Vasa, flotsam and jetsam, quiet quitting, reinvention, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Donne’s “The Storm,” radical roots, building blocks, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

Submission pitches should be emailed to Dilettante Army (dilettantearmy@gmail.com) by Monday, February 10, 2025. Before submitting, please read our submission guidelines for more information on what we publish.

Image: 1919 Chicago White Sox World Series Ticket Stub