“How can you not be romantic about baseball?”~ Moneyball

“The one constant through all the years . . .”

• Wrigley Field: Then and Now (view gallery) • Fenway Park• Clip from Field of Dreams

Wrigley Field, Chicago“A nice little place on the North Side.”

A pastoral game

• In rural or urban spaces, the baseball field remains constant, marking a small area – home plate, the pitcher’s mound, the diamond - where American dreams seem possible

• It is a pastoral game – the field is always a lush green even in a desert city like Phoenix

• Ballplayers and fans can immerse themselves in this space even as a city bustles close by

• “Let us go forth awhile and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms – the game of ball is glorious” Walt Whitman

Where the American Dream can come true

Hard work and talent pay off rather than privilege and social rank: • Babe Ruth, the barkeeper’s son• Joe DiMaggio, son of immigrant fishermen• Jackie Robinson, grandson of a slave and the

son of a sharecropper

Escape

• For fans, baseball has provided an escape from daily pressures (through the Great Depression and World War, the World Series in NY after 9-11)

• Nostalgia for a simpler way of living perhaps when the American Dream seemed more accessible, is conveyed in baseball

“Born to an age where horror has become commonplace . . . We need to fence of a few places where humans try to be fir, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.” (Thomas Boswell)

Hollywood and Baseball

• Field of Dreams based on W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe

• Iowa cornfield transformed into a mythical ‘field of dreams’

• Listen to Terence Mann’s speech about baseball as “the one constant through all the years”

Field of Dreams

Released in 1989, the movie is based on Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe and tells the story of an Iowa farmer who is compelled to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield after hearing a mysterious voice tell him, “If you build it, he will come.” The ghosts of baseball’s past begin appearing on the field and movie viewers are treated to a nostalgic tale of redemption for the Iowa corn farmer and also the disgraced Shoeless Joe and the ghosts of the Chicago White Sox team, banned for throwing the 1919 World Series.

A ‘sacred’ space?

Why baseball endures

• Baseball endures in spite of the money, the scandal, national expansion, steroids etc

• It is one of the myths of American culture – it provides a link to our past, to tradition, an escape from the daily urban grind

• Connection to our childhood innocence – perhaps our idealism

CONSIDERING THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

Our need to give order to our worlds

• We have a need to organize our world (our homes, communities) so that certain signs or values are commonly understood.

• We all know that “red” means stop and “green” means go. Think about what would happen if one of us changed the rule.

• Man-made laws, customs, and consensus help us arrive at an organized or ordered world

• “Primitives” and religious communities see order coming from God(s)

• Ordered world is a cosmos; a world without order is chaos

Cosmogynic myths

• According to Mircea Eiliade in The Sacred and the Profane primitive people believe that the God(s) they worship created this cosmos

• Cosmogynic myths help explain the creation of a universe or a people

• What is a myth? “a dream-like symbol that evokes and directs psychological energy, vehicles of communication between the conscious

and the unconscious, stories that convey the deepest Truths people know, the ultimate meaning of reality for a particular

society or culture.” (Kelly and McGinn)

• Myths convey a culture’s collective attitudes about life and death, the creation of the world, how we came to be etc

• For example, in Christianity, the Creation story explains that the world (a cosmos) was created by God in six days – he brought order.

• He made humans “in his image”• How do we create spaces “in our image” – think

about the ways we organize or give order to our homes

What does this have to do with you?

• Consider your first apartment or your dorm room. It begins as a vacant space. What do you do with it to make it your place?

• How will it reflect your values? • Why do you choose one piece of furniture over

another? • You will create it “in your image” – in the same

way those primitive peoples create a cosmos to reflect what they believe/value.

Sacred places

• Refer back to Week 2 (symbolic, ordinary, and derelict landscapes)

• Cities – the Holy Land, Mecca etc• Churches, temples, synagogues• People in a sacred place behave differently than

in ordinary or profane places• A sacred place is a threshold where we can

cross over from the ordinary into the sublime or the divine

In everyday life

• The way we act/interact in a lecture hall is different than the way we behave in the hallway outside it. Opening the classroom door, we cross a threshold, and different values are in place.

WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO BASEBALL . . .

Field of Dreams Scene 1

• Inside the house (profane space) – the conversations are about impending bankruptcy, the cornfield etc

• Outside in the corn field/baseball field (sacred space)

• FIeld of Dreams

Is this heaven? • We have a cornfield in Iowa which has been plowed up by Ray

Kinsella to create an ordered cosmos • Ray meets the dead Shoeless Joe Jackson who was banned

from baseball as one of the Black Sox in 1919 who were accused of fixing World Series game.

• When Ray and Annie say they will not sell the field, is it because they have ‘crossed over” to see it as a sacred space?

• What does this say about Iowa? • As he plays ball with Ray, Shoeless Joe shows “sacred” the

game of baseball was to him. “The sacred” is not just a place – it is a way of being “in place,” in the world.

The center of the world: “Axis mundi”

• Cultures often consider their homeland as "the center of the world" because it represents the center of their known universe.

• China—"Middle Kingdom”—suggests that the county holds a significance, at the center of the world

• At the center of the center is a point known as the “axis mundi,” where earth and sky almost meet. It is common to find shrines at these holy places. For example, for the Sioux tribe it is the Black Hills, in Japan, it is Mt. Fuji

• When Ray stands on the pitcher’s mound, he is elevated at the center of the field – is this the axis mundi?

• Ray has created “the imago mundi” what Eliade describes as an important tenet of religion – the building of a miniature sacred cosmos.

Dwelling on the threshold: a ‘liminal space’

“…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. “ - Richard Rohr

“The waiting place . . . “

• These thresholds are inevitable, and we all experience them – milestone moments like graduation, getting a new job, marrying, buying a house, being diagnosed with an illness, having children.

• In these spaces, we are disoriented for a while, “in-between” and wondering what’s next.

• We all learn how to navigate a way through these transitions – some better than others.

• Sometimes a guide or mentor helps us find the way

Shoeless Joe can easily cross over the edge of the cornfield, but he cannot cross the boundary between the sacred and the profane ordinary world. He cannot accept a cup of coffee.

“Are you a ghost?” Karen“What do you think?”“You look real to me.”“Then I guess I’m real.”

Moonlight GrahamStepping across the line

SENSE OF PLACE IN IOWA

Farming in Iowa – the reality • In the 1980s a popular theme in movies and pop music was the plight of

the famer struggling against all odds. This gave rise to Farm Aid movement.

• Corporate farming was on the rise with the disappearance of the family farm destroying small towns and their economies

• In 2002, Fred Kirsehenemann, Director of the Aldo Leopold Center at Iowa State University warned that only 140 farms would remain in Iowa by the middle of the 21st century if current trends in corporate farming continued.

• The public, however, often perceives the agricultrual industry as not much different from how it is represented in a movie like Field of Dreams – pastoral and unchanging.

• Nostalgia for the past overshadows the economic reality which is that the small family farm is dying

Heritage Tourism

• The Hollywood version of an Iowa field transformed the shooting location into a tourist site, fulfilling baseball fantasies for 70,000 visitors each year

• “Heritage” tourism is growing in the travel industry, its sites evoking nostalgia for simpler times and places. This is powerful for people who seek connections to the places associated with the values embodied by certain representations (books, movies etc)

• If people outside Iowa view it only through a nostalgic and romanticized lens, then they may not see serious contemporary problems. For example, rural poverty, immigration issues related to a large migrant worker population

Our impressions of other countries

How is your view of another country or state shaped by the way it is represented in film?

The Quiet Man (Ireland)Harry Potter (England)Braveheart (Scotland)Fargo (Dakota)The Sopranos (New Jersey)Breaking Bad (Albuquerque)Sons of Anarchy (Fictional Charming set in “real” San Joaquin county) -

Commoditization

Erik Cohen, tourism scholar warns:“Commoditization is said to destroy the authenticity of local cultural products and human relations; instead a surrogate, covert staged authenticity emerges. As cultural products lose their meaning for locals, and as the need to present the tourst with ever more spectacular, exotic, and titillating attractions grows, contrived cultural products are increasingly ‘staged’ for tourists and dedicated to look authentic.”

(Consider theme parks, Las Vegas, cities that host the Superbowl)

The “real” field of dreams

“You can feel the magic here.”

• Dyersville Iowa, population 4,000• The farm was purchased for $3.4 million in 2012 No professional ball game has ever

been played on the field• Globally, the field immortalized by Hollywood is one of the top sports tourist with

up to 70,000 visitors each year• The Dyersville field has been the site of family reunions, weddings, first games of

catch with a child, final wishes. • Sunday afternoons host games with aging amateurs – “ghost players” - who dress in

old-school baseball uniforms and walk out from the corn

Source: Plaschke, LA Times)

25 years after the movie was made, people still come to Iowa.Photo: Putney for the LA Times

For Discussion

Has Dyersville, Iowa, developed an opportunity for sustainability OR is it at risk of exploiting its representation in a movie and not its reality? How is Dyersville and its residents impacted when they reap the economic benefits from heritage tourism?

Now what?

• You may begin to see evidence of Eliade’s ideas everywhere - the sacred and the profane, the imago mundi, the axis mundi, liminal spaces. What are some examples? Think about your choice of seat in class today.

• Consider the differences between Eliade’s ideas and a Hollywood director’s view of a “sacred space” and how this shapes your view of these places.

• Are you in a ‘liminal space” at this point in your life?

References and for Further Reading

Clinging to the myth of doubleday and baseball’s origins - NYTimes.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/11/13/sports/ baseball/13doubleday.html?_r=0Costner, K., Madigan, A., Jones, J. E., Brown, D., Whaley, F., Liotta, R., Lancaster, B., ... Universal City Studios. (1999). Field of dreams. Universal City, CA: Universal.Donaldson, M. E. (1988). Teaching field of dreams as cosmogonic myth. Journal of Religion and Film, 2(3).Eliade -- Sacred Space. (n.d.). Retrieved from http:// webserv.jcu.edu/bible/101/Readings/Ritual/ EliadeSacredSpace.htmMcGinn,Ph.D, S. (n.d.). The basic ideas of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane (J. Kelly, Ph.D, Ed.). Journal of Religion and Film.Daniel, P. (2014, August 2). They built it for a movie, and people keep coming to the field of dreams. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved May 13, 2015, from http:// www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-field-of-dreams-plaschke-20140803-column.html#page=2