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Baseball and the Meaning of Life
Baseball in Literature and Culture17th Annual Conference
Middle Tennessee State University March 30, 2012
James Phil OliverDepartment of Philosophy
Middle Tennessee State UniversityP.O. Box 73
Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37132==
307B James Union Building615-898-2050
"Delight Springs" - http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/
"Up@dawn" – http://osopher.wordpress.com/
Follow me, @osopher, on Twitter - (http://twitter.com/OSOPHER)
But of course,"You don't have to follow me.
You don't have to follow anybody." -Brian Cohen
Two years ago I presented “From Gibson to McGwire” here. I was worried about how the presence in the dugout of their new steroidally-enhanced hitting coach might interfere with the purity of my ancestral devotion to the Cards. How would it play with my own innocent openness to baseball experience and meaning?
I’m pleased (but should I be?) to report that Big Mac’s greybearded visage did not in any memorable way dilute my pleasure at the team’s improbable late-season run to their 11th World Series championship in 2011.
And now find I have no problem contemplating the post-Albert era in St. Louis either. So, the game really is much larger than any "star" performer.
But still I worry: Is my team loyalty admirable, or is this precisely the knee-jerk “my country right or wrong” attitude I routinely condemn in politics? Maybe we’ll have time to discuss that.
But for whatever reason, healthy or not, I don’t feel as alienated or jilted as some …
Look, as it turns out Albert Pujols was just an intelligent, attractive but ultimately sour girlfriend. Let me explain. Your entire world revolves solely around her, and everyone can see it except for her. You give her fancy gifts, tell her what she needs to hear, go to one fast food restaurant to get her chicken strips then another because "they have better fries," and join a gym to be the man she wants you to be rather than the one who you are simply to make her feel the kind of special love you think she deserves. But the secret is that she doesn't want the love. She wants the proof. She doesn't want to hear that you love her; she wants to hear how much.
Even worse, she wants to remind you how lucky you are to have her. When that turns dangerous is when you then struggle to maintain your relationship -- stepping up your game, buying fancier gifts, working extra hard just to not lose pace, and losing yourself to make her happy and to keep her from looking at other dudes. When that turns tragic is not when she leaves, but rather when you convince her to stay. A relationship which requires you to prove your love is not a relationship worth preserving.
The worst part of yesterday is that Albert Pujols tacitly told us that we are not in his league. The best part of yesterday is that Albert Pujols tacitly proved to us that we aren't.Anaheim, you can have her. Just tell her to please not text us.
“The best thing to do if you’re going to lose a legend or three…” (Pujols, LaRussa, Duncan)
“StL, a city that loves its Cards no matter who fills the uniforms…”
Freese: “That’s never going to happen again. But you have to turn the page. People have short memories. And so do we.”
CBS Sports “Card Tricks” 3.9.12
David Brooks
It’s probably more accurate to say that team loyalty of this sort begins with youthful enchantment. You got thrown together by circumstance with a magical team — maybe one that happened to be doing well when you were a kid or one that featured the sort of heroes children are wise to revere. You lunged upon the team with the unreserved love that children are capable of.
The team became crystallized in your mind, coated with shimmering emotional crystals that give it a sparkling beauty and vividness. And forever after you feel its attraction. Whether it’s off the menu or in the sports world, you can choose what you’ll purchase but you don’t get to choose what you like.
The neuroscientists might say that, in 1969, I formed certain internal neural structures associated with the Mets, which are forever after pleasant to reactivate. We have a bias toward things that are familiar and especially to those things that were familiar when life was new: the old house, the old hometown, the people, smells and sounds we knew when we were young.
Team Loyalty , childhood indoctrination, neuroscience
That sounds about right. For Brooks it was the ‘69 Mets, for me the ‘67 Cards.
I left Missouri more than three decades ago, and have even occasionally experimented with temporary shifts of allegiance.
But the team with the birds perched on bats is still magical for me, when nothing else is.
Before I say another word, let me hasten to remind us all that it’s only a game.
Richard Ford wrote a very nice foreword to Roger Angell’s 2003 collection Game Time , in which he noted that
Many people take it too seriously and need to be told to lighten up… life’s lessons can’t be taught very well by overpaid twenty-two year olds…
That said, Angell has been dispensing meaningful baseball wisdom for decades.
For instance:
Baseball always remains a fraction beyond our reach. Despite the sabermetric leap , it is irreducible and crazily difficult to predict.
New Yorker blog,Oct. 30.2011, “That Series”
And that’s true of our elusive quest for life’s largest meanings, too.
“I didn’t hardly think about life at all ‘til I was 65 or 70,” says one old spectator in New Gerontium (aka Sarasota) to another, in Angell’s hearing.
Plato said we shouldn’t encourage anyone to philosophize before their fifth or sixth decade. I don’t agree, but the game’s pace and rhythm definitely reward the grandstand reflections of those who’ve lived.
Like this guy. In 1989, Donald Hall was diagnosed with Colon cancer, but he eventually went into remission. His wife Jane Kenyon was diagnosed with Leukemia in 1994 and she passed away in 1995.
In 2006 he became U.S. poet laureate.
President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 2010.
His poem, "Baseball,“ included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around the sequence of a baseball game, with nine stanzas of nine lines each.
Hall is passionate for the Sox.
Hall on the Red Sox, 2004
Hall’s poem “The Coffee Cup”
New Yorker podcast: Hall looks out his window
“The meaning of life”…The topic sounds pretentious and vague and even a little comical, and although I’ve actually taught a course called “The Meaning of Life” I probably wouldn’t have proposed it for this year’s conference if I hadn’t happened to be reading Donald Hall at the very moment when I received Ron Kates’s email.
Hall now lives alone in the ancestral New Hampshire farmhouse he shared with Kenyon for many years. He wrote about that experience recently.
Generation after generation, his family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later. After a life of loving the old, by natural law the writer turned old himself.
Read more
The Baseball PlayersBY DONALD HALL
Against the brightgrass the white-knickeredplayers tense, seize,and attend. A momentago, outfieldersand infielders adjustedtheir clothing, glancedat the sun and settledforward, hands on knees;the pitcher walked backof the hill, establishedhis cap and returned;.
the catcher twitcheda forefinger; the batterrotated his batin a slow circle. But nowthey pause: wary,exact, suspended whileabiding moonriselightens the angelof the overgrowngarden, and Walter BlakeAdams, who diedat fourteen, waitsunder the footbridge
Ah, the game! The game!But what of the meaning of life…
Baseball connects American males with each other, not only through bleacher friendships and neighbor loyalties, not only through barroom fights, but most importantly through generations.
D. Hall, “Baseball and the Meaning of Life,” in The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball
Right… but if you’ve seen “Field of Dreams”…
or read Doris Kearns Goodwin on growing up in Brooklyn…
or hung out at my house, you’d strike “males” from that statement.
The little girl in Field of Dreams, you’ll recall, can see the ghostly “baseball men” her father sees. Both see with innocent eyes. The absence of cynicism, the openness to experience and meaning, couldn’t be clearer.
But, that film’s reach far exceeded its grasp, meaning-wise. James Earl Jones’s famous speech (“This field, this game, reminds us of all that was once good and that could be again” etc.) earned one of Roger Angell’s shorter bursts of eloquence.
“Get a grip.”
Dewey’s “continuous human community” John DeweyPhilosopher
EducatorClass of '79
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link.
Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” A Common Faith
Dewey's antipathy for spectator theories of knowledge did not block his acute perception of "the sources of art in human experience [that] will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd. . . ."
Dewey's critics charge him with an obsessive instrumentalism, but he understood well enough what William Carlos Williams called the "spirit of uselessness“ which for some of us can drench an afternoon or evening at theballpark, or a morning in the garden, in delight.
The crowd at the ball gameis moved uniformlyby a spirit of uselessnesswhich delights them —all the exciting detailof the chaseand the escape, the errorthe flash of genius —all to no end save beautythe eternal – (continues)
"When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on 'A Moral Equivalent for War' (sic), I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value.
He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations.“ Morris Raphael Cohen
OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us.
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman's pains.
—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.“What Makes a Life Significant”
Art of Fielding
Keeping score:
This year I read the best example of literary baseball fiction I’ve seen in ears, The Art of Fielding. It’s about baseball the same way Moby Dick‘s about a fish.
Actually it is about that, too. But also about “Aparicio Rodriguez” and the Tao of playing shortstop, of working to achieve mastery, of learning the meaning of humility, of pursuing a dream with courage and persistence and pain. It’s about the value and joy of practice practice practice.
Every baseball fanatic of years who contracted this blessed affliction in childhood understands "the thrill of the grass," the ripple of pleasure and anticipation and the promise of happy absorption that comes with that first glimpse of outfield through the grandstand tunnel.
“Go Cubs Go”
JUNE 16 2011. Chicago, my kind of town. Why do I only go every thirty-nine years? I actually think I appreciated it more this time, through the extended perceptions of my younger traveling companions.
Wrigley in '72 was not nearly the "religious experience" of Monday night, when a capacity crowd rose yet again in the 7th inning to give spirited, full-throated, un-ironic voice to our real national anthem. Harry's been gone for several years, but only in body.
Then, the improbable 1-0 win against the 1st-place Brewers sealed, there was this victory anthem. Younger Daughter, a Cubs fan by choice, was in heaven. We all were.
Good Enough
FEB.24 2012. My old teacher John Lachs delivered this year’s inaugural Berry Lecture at Vanderbilt last night.
”Why is Good Enough not Good Enough for Us?” It was just as I’ve come to expect of his talks through the years, thoughtful and elegant and crisply performed.
It spurned Platonism, the impossible and stultifying “pursuit of perfection” which he said…
is not the search for something definite and well-known. The limits of human capacity and the vagueness of the ideal make attainment of perfection impossible, yet its lure ruins our satisfaction with what is clearly excellent and therefore good enough.
This isn’t the “good enough” of Lake Wobegon, where things could always be worse, but the genuine good of ἀρετή [aretê] that ought to be enough to fill our hearts and entice our eagerness for the morrow. But most of us fall prey to perfectionism at one time or another, and cheat ourselves of the life satisfactions we’ve earned.
After the talk I asked Lachs if he’d seen Moneyball. He hasn’t. But consider the case of poor Billy Beane, Oakland Athletics General Manager.
Incapable of relishing his small-market team’s record-setting win streak or his own unorthodox contributions to that achievement, he’s a “perfect” illustration of Lachs’s thesis.
The A’s didn’t win the Big One at season’s end, so the perfectionist GM considered himself and his team a failure.
He couldn’t give himself a moment’s pause to mark and remember their remarkable success.
Final Score: 0-0
JAN. 14 2012. I find myself thinking this morning about Lawrence Krauss and Billy Beane, an unlikely pairing unless you spend as much time as I pondering the mysteries of the universe and the diamond.
Krauss was on SciFri talking about his new book, spun out of his viral video, making the case that there’s enough something in “nothing” to make a universe. Or multiverses.
And Beane was in Moneyball, the movie based on Michael Lewis’s book…
Beane, I think, at least as depicted in the film, is ultimately a sad figure who can’t celebrate his victories because he expects never to suffer big defeats. His daughter’s serenade is painfully accurate: “You’re a loser, Dad,” not because he loses but because he can’t fully accept his passing victories, can’t “enjoy the show.”
Still waiting to win the last game? None of us wins the last game, it all ends in a draw. Nothing-nothing. So maybe what a fan needs most , to find meaning in baseball, is the consolation of quasi-religion?
Annie Savoy's "Church of Baseball
I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball.
When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us…
The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring... which makes it like sex. There's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and concentrate.
I make them feel confident, and they make me feel safe, and pretty. 'Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime; what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball - now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God's sake? It's a long season and you gotta trust it. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.
Besides, I'd never sleep with a player hitting under .250... not unless he had a lot of RBIs and was a great glove man up the middle. You see, there's a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I've got a ballplayer alone, I'll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. 'Course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay.
To each her own. But I think what a fan needs most, for meaning in baseball, is not religion but patience. Time changes everything. It’s worth waiting for.
"The game is a repository of age-old American verities . . . and yet at the same time a mirror of the present moment." Ken Burns
Baseball has always had an uncanny appeal to intellectuals and poets, from Whitman ("I see great things in baseball") on,…
Morris R. Cohen, Robert Frost, Bartlett Giamatti, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Stephen Jay Gould, David Halberstam, Donald Hall, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Bernard Malamud,, John Updike, William Carlos Williams…
Those creatively images in which aswatting Ruth melds with an Aaron, Mantle, Maris, Mays, orMcGwire demonstrate at some level how this mere game canencourage its devotees to slip the bonds of time, in transientgreen reveries.
The late Renaissance scholar and baseballcommissioner Bart Giamatti wrote with unscholastic passion of theinner fields of play where we mortals may visit paradise
Transcendence may be unexpected and surprising, or it may bethe object of methodical cultivation. My delight in the game ofbaseball, for instance, or in a particular game, sometimescatches me by surprise but on other occasions has to be trackeddown like a shot lined deep into the gap.
The "national pastime" is public, and frequently baffling,but—with a respectful bow to documentary artist Ken Burns5 --itis a stretch to call it "large." It is only a game; but then,there are times when life is best played at, too
F. Scott Fitzgerald wasjust wrong when he called it "a boy's game, with no morepossibilities in it than a boy could master, a game" without"novelty or danger, change or adventure."
Closer to the mark isthe observation that it "has been a touchstone to worldselsewhere."6 But for me the transcendent dimension of this gameis not "elsewhere," it is (as in Field of Dreams) in my own backyard.
trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end,otherwise called the dance of death. -Peter Ackroyd, The Plato Papers: A Prophecy
