My coda to Tony's coda to the Spirit & World Series conversation

Aloha Tony--

As I begin to write my coda to our Spirit & Series dialogue, it feels as if the statue of limitations has run out. Or, perhaps not: my life's time-line includes many years that I don't remember well (at least not as themselves), but those years during which the Cardinals won or lost the World Series seem better punctuated than most. The punctuation I'm now most deeply immersed in, as a teacher of English composition, is the semi-colon, but there's also the exclamation point (the one I'm reminded was a single quote, backspace, period on a manual typewriter). The Cards were in the series twice in the late 60s, when I was a child, three times in the 1980s, when I was in graduate school, then four times again since I've lived in Hawai`i. These Series gather other memories together, like snowballs (though where I live there's a snowball's chance in hell that there are snowballs), fleshing out my various lives, re-casting me in places where I watched games, re-joining me to friends from each era. I'm reminded of the ways in which my emotional lives have changed; the intensity of the losses and the wins is lesser now than it was, though I do confess to losing a couple of days to this most recent loss, catching up on needed sleep while luxuriating in my grump. Insofar as there are real continuities to our emotional lives, I've carried these emotions, attached to this team, to every place I've lived since I was an 8 year old in Virginia. When the emotions revive I'm in a restaurant in Charlottesville watching one of those old projection televisions, or I'm in my car asking my son to call the game for me, or I'm in the living room sharing the joy and sadness with my family.

While the Series was going on, I was teaching a unit in my Honors class on the Khmer Rouge. We read Chanrithy Him's memoir, When Broken Glass Floats, and had a guest speaker, Hongly Khuy, come talk to us about his own experiences during the genocide of the 1970s in Cambodia. One of my students in that class is also a Cardinals fan--by way of his grandfather--and we would attend to the grim task of talking about genocide until class ended. Then, in ritual fashion, I (sans smart phone) would ask him quickly what the score was. After the Series ended, we talked briefly about how odd it was to move between these two subjects, their relative weights so utterly different in our minds. He noted that part of the reason he got over the loss so quickly was the comparison he made between these two events.

Something moves me to look up a poem I remember reading, though the content escapes my memory. It's William Carlos Williams's "At the Ballgame." Written in the late 1930s, this poem directly addresses the conflict between game and genocide. But Williams doesn't address it as opposition, rather as part and parcel of the same phenomenon, that of the crowd.  His poem can be found here, but I'll quote some of it now. After describing the baseball crowd, its "spirit of uselessness," its attention to detail, its excitement, Williams makes a horrifying turn:

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them—

He warns against the very beauty he sees before him, not as he sees it, but as it reminds him of 

another crowd.

The Jew gets it straight— it

is deadly, terrifying— 

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly—  

Like the Adrienne Rich poem we read in class on Friday, "Eastern War Time," Williams juxtaposes two scenes, the one in the United States (where a girl goes to school, a crowd to the ball game), with one of genocide, holocaust. He isn't interested in evil--the evil our guest Hongly said was in all of us--but  in spectatorship as a lack of thought:

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought 

The ballgame might take an afternoon, but the crowd is permanent. Just as our emotional lives are permanent in their own ways, the human tendency to look on, even to look for beauty (what is purity

but a perfect totalitarian desire), to look on as others suffer and die.

This is getting far more grim than I'd intended. So let me, for now, suggest that while Williams noticed a permanence across the continuum from sporting event to totalitarianism, we can also imagine a disjunction between them. We are discontinuous, as well as consistent, characters. If we know, or can imagine, the differences between these polar similarities, we can create lives for ourselves that combine joy with ethical fitness. In whatever small way, our discussion of the Series has struck me as an extended reading of this poem I'm ending with. We choose the beauty, even the 

grief, of the Series, but we also aim to refuse the apparent beauty of ideological purity. Baseball is not an ideological sport, but one that depends on chance events, on knowing that identities are not bound up in your last action on the field, that a loss can be as good for you as a win, no matter how awful that feels.

 I'm now back to watching the off-season news.  What can the Cards do about the shortstop position?  Will Matt Carpenter play third, while Kolten Wong plays second? Does that mean that 2011's hero, David Freese, will be moving elsewhere? What pitcher can we do without? Which must we hold onto? These are not rhetorical questions; they're real ones that members of my Cardinals hui are mulling over, just as we once thought hard about the Albert Pujols question.

So, Tony, good luck to your Sox next year, but watch out for the Cardinals!  Young pitching, lots of talent in the field, and we might just have another contender. 

Tony Trigilio's coda to our Spirit & Series conversation

I'll be writing my own coda soon.

Hi Susan--

 

As giddy as I am after Sox’s World Series victory, I’m sorry the Cardinals were the team they beat.  I would’ve much rather seen them win against at a group of ballplayers I disdain.  I could’ve seen ex-Sox villains like Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett moping in the Dodgers’ dugout, and the schadenfreude would’ve been more satisfying than seeing Yadier Molina consoling Michael Wacha after he was leaving the mound after the Sox had blown open the game.  How can a fan not like Wacha, or Molina, a backstop maestro?  Even as I write this opening paragraph, it’s clear to me that baseball is still a space where I allow myself to revel in attachment.  My remarks on Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett were literal, not metaphoric, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I really would’ve taken pleasure in their misery, as I did watching A-Rod’s face after Pokey Reese scooped up the final out of the 2004 ALCS and A-Rod realized the Sox had just come back from a 3-0 series deficit and the Yankees had completed the most profound choke in the history of baseball’s postseason.  But, of course, ballplayers are millionaires in Ayn Rand’s America, and they don’t really feel something as strong as “misery,” I think, when they lose.

 

This baseball fandom—at its worst, it’s like jingoism, and I understand that, at a spiritual level, it can be as obscene as fetishizing a national flag.  Writing about it, though, helps me understand the need to channel our desires rather than try to avoid them.  What happens if I take this desire and, like you did with the giving and receiving of Tonglen practice, turn it into something that is communal rather than divisive.  Putting myself in front of my laptop after every game and writing about my spiritual and psychological reactions—rather than just clicking my heels at a Sox win, or cursing the Sox when they lost (OK, but I’m still holding a grudge against Saltalamacchia)—helped me see, however temporarily, how the energy of my sports fanaticism can be redirected.

 

I’m sad to see our Spirit & Series exchange ending.  The back-and-forth of our emails helped me avoid a total, unmitigated attachment/addiction to the Sox during their high moments, and prevented the displaced, out-of-body aversion that comes when they look more like WoeSox than Bosox.  But I have a long way to go.  Our cats, Simon and Schuster, kept a wary distance from me during games (all those unpredictable, jerky movements I make during a game—all my shouting when someone hits a homer or obstructs another player from running to home plate—and all they ever want is a little pinch of catnip to smooth the rough edges of the day).  Shimmy was a paranoiac—who could blame her, when G.W. Bush used to break into her litterbox and bury her copy of the Constitution in the sand and clumps of waste—and she had no patience for my postseason clapping and hollering.  She hid under the bed after each game's first clap and shout.  Thank you, by the way, for mentioning her in your recent posting.  Shimmy’s ashes looked down on me with disappointment, I’m sure, that I couldn’t stop cussing when the Sox swung and missed. 

 

I’m grateful that our exchange spurred me to root around in my imagination—the creative imagination and the spiritual imagination—to try to make peace with baseball attachments while in the act of experiencing them.  After Game 6 ended, Fox showed an image from behind home plate of the final out.  I thought about how often I would sneak into the behind-home-plate seats at Fenway during blowouts or at the end of rain-delayed games—in short, anytime the more well-heeled paying customers had already left.  I remember one time in particular, early 1989, with my dear friend Mitch (who, bless his heart, texted me Saturday from the Sox’s victory parade), when we slid into seats two rows from the backstop in the ninth inning of a Sox/A’s game.  The start of the game had been delayed by rain.  The Sox were up 2-1 in the top of the ninth, and closer Lee Smith was trying to end it.  Dave Parker, instead, bashed a gigantic, game-tying home run over the Wall—one of the most impressive homers I’ve ever seen, and it landed somewhere in western Massachusetts later that morning.  Fox's camera Wednesday showed the same view, behind the plate at Fenway, in their replay of Koji’s final strikeout.  Seeing the Sox jump like giddy children after the final out, feeling the camera shake slightly from the crowd reaction, I realized that I never once envisioned the Sox winning a World Series at Fenway.  No matter how rich my imagination might be, I never thought to imagine what a Series-clinching game would look like at Fenway.  I never visualized what it would be like to see the Sox’s shortstop leap into the air after the final out, with the Wall behind him in left, staid and stoic yet drunkenly eccentric, towering now 37 feet above a World Series win.  All the games I’ve seen at Fenway—and, as I mentioned earlier, all the papers I’ve graded at Fenway—and I never pretended to envision what a World Series clinching win would look like there.  Blake once wrote that “what is now proved was once only imagined.”  But this final shot of Koji reminded me, humbly, that sometimes what is true (in this case, a Sox championship clinched at Fenway) was once absolutely unimaginable. 

 

Best,

Tony

Spirit & Series: A continuing dialogue between Tinfish Editor & Tony Trigilio.

Game Three Thread:

Dear Tony--

I understand what you mean by wanting “the game to dissipate like a dream you can’t remember five minutes after you’ve awakened,” but one of the lessons I've taken from my blogging practice (funny phrase, that) is that writing in that moment before memory takes hold, before memory-as-interpretation alters the event, at the moment before dissipation, is as necessary as allowing things to sift out. I remember a Ph.D. poetry student saying at her defense that she wanted to wait for events in her life to sit for a while before she wrote about them, and realizing how much a part of our regime as poets that has been. Of course I understand that this particular moment was one you didn't want to write from! What fascinated me about The Play is that it hinged on action and not intention. That the third baseman Middlebrooks stuck his legs in the air, ever so briefly, as Allen Craig tried to navigate his way past third, running as if he needed a GPS, or at least a walker because of his bad foot, didn't matter in the least. My family and I were yelling “interference!” at the tops of our lungs in the living room, and then I remember saying, “the ump saw it! He saw it!” For a Buddhist, intention matters. If Middlebrooks's intention was pure—if he had not intended to trip Craig, as perhaps he did not—then that matters a great deal. But in baseball, it does not. (I love this comment in the FOX stream, from the twitter feed of one Old Hoss Radbourn: “If you can't trip a guy at third base then I weep for America.” Here's the rule:

The act of a fielder who, while not in possession of the ball and not in the act of fielding the ball, impedes the progress of any runner.

Comment: If a fielder is about to receive a thrown ball and if the ball is in flight directly toward and near enough to the fielder so he must occupy his position to receive the ball he may be considered "in the act of fielding a ball." It is entirely up to the judgment of the umpire as to whether a fielder is in the act of fielding a ball. After a fielder has made an attempt to field a ball and missed, he can no longer be in the "act of fielding" the ball. For example: an infielder dives at a ground ball and the ball passes him and he continues to lie on the ground and delays the progress of the runner, he very likely has obstructed the runner.

While the play still re-runs (or re-hobbles) in my mind—Allen Craig at third, Jose Oquendo, red hoodie down his back, windmilling for him to run home as the ball goes into the left field foul area (again!), Allen Craig trying to start running, but tripping over the third baseman, Allen Craig hobbling home, lying on the ground, his face blank, not knowing what had happened, the Cardinals running out to pick him up, gently—the rule has its own majesty. It's about action and judgment, like so much in baseball, about accident and result, about the moment and then the memory of that moment. (I mean to devote the better part of one of these epistles to the role of memory in our baseball lives.) My husband, Bryant, loves the random chance of baseball, especially when the teams are both so good. One foot, or inch, one way or the other and the play would have been made. But the rules do not mention accident; they only allude to what happened. In this case (“an infielder dives at a ground ball and the ball passes him and he continues to lie on the ground”) the rule book called the play, even if the third baseman didn't have time to move away. McCarver and Buck could have called it no better than that!

You wanted to talk about our attachments to our teams; I want to tell you about mine, then open that conversation up to how our attachments to our teams lead to our connections to other people. To move from attachment to connection seems a step in the right direction. I became a Cards fan in 1967 (another Series between the Cards and the Red Sox) when I was on the cusp of turning nine years old. I don't know that I yet knew much about baseball, but I heard about the Series; because I'd been born in southern Illinois, I decided to cheer for the Cardinals. The first “word” I read was the TWA sign at St. Louis's airport, where we'd drive my dad, who traveled a lot since he was in the Air Force. So there's also a linguistic tie. When a friend said she'd made a bet on game seven that the score would we 7-3 and wouldn't I hope the Red Sox scored that third run so she'd win her bet, I said no, I wanted the score to remain lower. Oh my, the arrogance of youth!

That was the team of Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda and—I nearly always forget—of Roger Maris. A later iteration of the team included Willie McGee, who threw the ball out last night, a symbolic act that Fox chose not to carry. Sangha showed me this morning: the highlights from McGee's 1982 Series, when McGee and I were rookies (I in grad school), and then the rather older, but still very thin man walking to the mound and quietly lobbing the ball to Ozzie Smith, sporting a bright red jacket. Somehow my loyalty to this team has stayed with me, has strengthened. “Oh, it's an identity issue, is it?” Leonard Schwartz once put it to me. Yes, the nostalgia of origins—the nostalgia I generally am extremely skeptical of—has its place in me, too. When I'm asked what my home town is now, I sometimes say “Busch Stadium.” Whichever stadium happens to be there . . . I wrote more about my fandom http://www.hawaii.edu/vice-versa/archive/issue_3/issue_3/schultz/schultz.html, edited for that issue by Tim Denevi, a great baseball guy.

From attachment to connection: my (pre-)husband became a baseball fan the first time I took him to a UH game and he realized he could drink beer and talk to people. He's evolved into a maniacal Cardinals fan, though he won't admit it publically. Our son, Sangha (named for the spiritual community and—as it turns out—for being “handsome,” which is what the word means in Khmer), rivals me in his intensity about the Cardinals. At 14, he is not always patient with his parents; yesterday, when Bryant and I commented that Holliday had made a very dumb base-running play, he got angry with us, accused us of “hating on Holliday.” Another moment of judgment, another moment of being reminded that Holliday is one of our best players in this Series. When the Cardinals were playing game five against the Pirates the other week, I couldn't find the game anywhere (I do not have a smart phone). It was not on the radio (which was carrying a talk show about our hapless football team), nor could I use the orthodontist's wifi, as I waited for my daughter to get her bands tightened. So I called home on my rather prehistoric cell phone, and Sangha called the game for me. When Radhika and I got into the car to drive home I put the speaker on and Sangha kept calling the game for me. The 45 minute ride home brought home to me the ways in which we create sanghas of a sort around this game.

My other baseball community is on-line. Several years ago, after starting to collect writers who are also Cards fans at AWPs here and there (Aaron Belz and I found Kyle Semmel in Austin first by wearing our caps at the Tinfish table), I launched a Cardinals Hui (or group, in Hawaiian) on facebook. This time of year the Hui is very busy, sharing articles, photos, laments (the media hates our team!), predictions (one among us, Harold Anderson, called a walk two pitches before it happened during one game, and now gets frequent questions about “the future”), and play by play commentary. Community also rules in Hawai`i's baseball world; for the first time ever, there are two Hawaiian players in the Series, Shane Victorino, who got the Sox in with a grand slam, and Kolten Wong, who has been terrible since coming up in August for the Cardinals. But last night—oh my!--he had a great play in the field and he got a strong single to left. I'm hoping all those Sox fans here noticed.

On 10/27/13 4:05 AM, Tony Trigilio wrote:

Hi Susan—

I’m writing in the wake of another Sox loss—probably something I shouldn’t do.  I should allow the game to dissipate like a dream you can’t remember five minutes after you’ve awakened.  Saltalamacchia threw to third base again?  Or did he—I had a wild dream that he botched another throw, then I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and by the time I went back to bed, I’d forgotten everything.  This is where I should begin writing: start by forgetting what I was dreaming.

Earlier tonight, Liz and I watched the 1950 noir film Highway 301 with David Trinidad—lots of hoodlums talking trash in their postwar gangster-ese, complaining about “nosy dames” and telling getaway-car drivers to “shove off” at the first sound of police sirens.  Afterward, walking through the alley, the pavement damp with splotchy puddles glaring under receding rows of streetlights on either side, we felt like we had walked into a generic Warner Brothers noir set.  All we needed was a cop swinging his flashlight and a thug in double-breasted suit and fedora hiding behind a trashcan.

Then we went home and watched the Sox lose.

Like you, I want to write about the beauty of the game—those moments that are like Emerson stepping in a puddle, all mean egotism vanishing.  Actually, I don’t know if I feel right invoking Emerson.  If Emerson were alive today, he’d spend 20 pages arguing sabremetrics.  Wins-above-replacement are signs of natural facts; natural facts are signs of higher, spiritual Pythagorean Expectations.  I’m not saying that beauty in baseball only comes from the brush-cut grass and portly managers spitting chaw on the dugout steps.  I’m obsessive about numbers, and sometimes the combination of batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage just gives me a sublime chill.  But I can’t find beauty in the deliberate evasiveness of sabremetrics. Sabremetric categories seem like ungainly closed systems—for instance, I just want someone to explain to me how “replacement” is defined in “wins-above-replacement.”  I love numbers, yet I’ve never been able to find a lucid explanation of how the phantasmic “replacement player” in the “wins-above-replacement” formula is defined.  While Emerson makes the game into mathesis universalis, Thoreau grows his beard and forbids anyone from washing his uniform.  Hawthorne makes an errant throw to third (probably the fault of his ancestor judge who served at the Salem witch trials).  Dickinson rewinds over and over the Fox super-slow-motion shots of the bat hitting the ball.  She pauses at the fiery red moment when you can see the vibration on contact traveling up the batter’s forearms.  She could stare at this for hours.

It doesn’t matter, though, because they’re all buried in New England and they would’ve been Sox fans and they’d be really disappointed tonight.

But what if I really could watch the Red Sox with a realization of no attainment and no non-attainment?  I loved what you wrote about Lance Berkman’s remarks on his clutch 11th-inning hit in 2011.  Berkman stayed inside himself, as baseball players always explain to reporters—a persistently inscrutable phrase, but maybe something clearer now, if, as you say, I think of it as a description of why we sit on our meditation cushions.  Tomorrow, I’ll go to the Zen temple, where the sangha will stay inside itself.  I don’t mean this phrase in a privatizing way that walls off the rest of the world—not Paul Ryan forcing everyone in his office to read Ayn Rand, not Rand Paul braying about the Voting Rights Act—but instead, “staying inside oneself” as a gesture of mindfulness, coming back to the breath 101 times after being distracted 100 times.  This is a thing of beauty—and maybe the pause between each pitch, like the pause between inhalation and exhalation, creates the conditions for this kind of beauty.  Each windup is the breath touching the nostrils as it enters the body; each thud of the ball in the catcher’s mitt is the tickle of the breath against the upper lip as the body exhales.  But maybe the breeze I felt coming from a few hundred miles south of me, in St. Louis (Saltalamacchia’s wild, flailing bat, swinging at a neck-level pitch)—maybe this is really the breath tickling my upper lip.  If so, I need to remember there’s beauty there, too, a beautiful mindfulness like in Williams’s poem, “Thursday,” which ends with the poet “feeling my clothes about me / the weight of my body in my shoes / the rim of my hat, air passing in and out / at my nose—and [I] decide to dream no more.”

I’d planned to write about why we have so much passion for our teams—why our friends and colleagues notice red iPads (odd coincidence, I sat through a meeting on curriculum changes this week, too), or why they text congratulations to us when our teams win, as if we played in the actual game ourselves.  I hope to get to this in my next email.  This one, now that I look back, really was an effort to continue the thread you started, about what makes the game beautiful.  It’s when Lance Berkman and William Carlos Williams stay inside themselves—equally aware of the materiality of the mind and body and the illusory self-presence of both—and decide to dream no more.

Best,

Tony

Sox vs. Cards: Dialogue with Tony Trigilio (Sox fan & Buddhist)

[The second installment of my conversation with Tony Trigilio; this time I'll put it in the order of call and response.]

Aloha Tony--the morning of game three has arrived; it's sunny here, with big white clouds out past the dark green trees, and the sheer Ko`olau mountains we live next too are clear and corduroyed. I was thinking first of how the subject of our first conversation continued into my Thursday afternoon experience of Game Two and attending a rather gory department meeting. And then I wanted to move into perhaps happier territory, namely what in baseball seems to beautiful to behold.

So, Thursday I was able to adjourn to my utility closet for the first hour of the game, just long enough to see that Wacha was on and there would be no re-run of the disastrous first game. That game earned me heckles and jeers from colleagues, custodians, and students alike; I had to duck my head walking down the halls of my bare-knuckled, industrial, needing-massive-renovation building. At 3 p.m. The department meeting started, and I'd been advised to go. On the plate are changes to the curriculum (down-sizing, because we are a “dwindling” faculty), a proposal to end the mandatory teaching of English 100 by all members of the faculty, and (contrary to both, seems to me) a proposal to get full-time tenure-line faculty a 2-2 load (we now teach 3-2, for the most part).

I sat in the back row, my bright red iPad cover noticed by the associate chair ("is THAT a Cardinals' iPad? You mean you don't have a logo on there?"). I do have the logo on my small red Dell computer, but he need not know that. The iPad was open to two tabs: one, the box score, and two, my facebook Cardinals hui, a group of us writers who love the Cardinals, along with some of our friends. The hui promised to be my eyes (or, as Ned Stuckey-French put it, my tickertape) during the meeting. My nerves were singing, as the game was close. For a while it was 1-0 on the strength of Matt Holliday's triple. On one tab he was a red dot on third; from the hui, I got the report of a “LOOOONG” hit. Another colleague was pretending to root for the Red Sox, just to get my goat. The meeting began with a long discussion of the future absence of Bible as literature and all the 300-level lit courses, including poetry (about which I spoke, as I always do, thinking that regular lit courses often leave poetry out all together). Then we moved on to the 2-2 load and the 100-rotation and, as the game continued to be very close, my nerves humming, I spoke up wondering how, if we are dwindling, we can cut our own teaching load. I started speaking (rather loudly as I remember) about adjunct labor, or what we used to be good at avoiding. To make a long story short, when one politically enlightened colleague spoke up to say “we are not a charity” about the adjunct situation, I walked out. The next day, I found my two pens in my mailbox; I gather I had trailed them behind me as I left.

I walked to my office, angrier than I've been in a long time, only to find that Ortiz had hit a home run off Wacha, and my team was now down by a run. So I trudged to the parking structure and began my long slow commute home with ESPN radio on (Hershiser is brilliant, but pompous). Somewhere on H1, the Cards start getting singles. And then: a surprise! Kozma, who had almost got picked off second a couple minutes before, led a double-steal with Jon Jay, and they ended up on second and third. Wow. A surprise to this fan, the announcers, everyone! When Carpenter hit his sac fly and all hell let loose on the base paths and in the skies over the infield of Busch—the brilliant Yale pitcher depositing his throw to third into the left field stands and the Cards taking the lead—I pumped my fists and yelped in traffic.

Nothing of the spirit so far, I presume, except acknowledgment of suffering and joy, but I do want to pause to remember other moments of surprise: Ozzie's home run in 1985, Edmonds's amazing catch in 2005, the craziness of the 2011 Series, when being down two outs and two strikes seemed to mean nothing to the Cards . . . these are moments that make a crease in time. The random chance of baseball, combined with the skill it takes to take advantage of it, appeals to my avant-garde leanings. To pluck a certain hit out of thin air, to dive and stop a ball headed for the outfield, to block a ball at the plate, to do something impossible under incredible stress, oh my. When Lance Berkman was asked about his two out two strike hit in 2011's 11^th inning, he responded that he had stood at the plate and had no thoughts at all. He was there, the ball came toward him, he hit it, but without any cognition. Is that not the moment we sit on our pillows for, Tony?

Anyway, I got home the other day in time to see the end of the eighth inning and then the ninth with my son, Sangha. First Carlos Martinez, who later showed up for the presser in turquoise shirt, turquoise bow tie and nerd glasses, threw 98 mile an hour fastballs (with great movement, Hershiser had said on the radio) and got his outs. Manager Mike Matheny did what Tony LaRussa would never have done; he kept Martinez, a righty, in to pitch to Ortiz, a lefty, and it paid off. Then Trevor Rosenthal (Closenthal, we call him) finished the game.

My friend Kyle Semmel says he has a strong and strange feeling about today's game, how crucial it is. We'll see in a few hours. Hope you're relaxing before the excitement begins, Tony. I'm just pleased now that Willie McGee will be throwing out the first pitch. Oh how I loved him in center field and on the basepaths.

More later--Susan

Hi Susan—

I’m writing in the wake of another Sox loss—probably something I shouldn’t do.  I should allow the game to dissipate like a dream you can’t remember five minutes after you’ve awakened.  Saltalamacchia threw to third base again?  Or did he—I had a wild dream that he botched another throw, then I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and by the time I went back to bed, I’d forgotten everything.  This is where I should begin writing: start by forgetting what I was dreaming.

Earlier tonight, Liz and I watched the 1950 noir film Highway 301 with David Trinidad—lots of hoodlums talking trash in their postwar gangster-ese, complaining about “nosy dames” and telling getaway-car drivers to “shove off” at the first sound of police sirens.  Afterward, walking through the alley, the pavement damp with splotchy puddles glaring under receding rows of streetlights on either side, we felt like we had walked into a generic Warner Brothers noir set.  All we needed was a cop swinging his flashlight and a thug in double-breasted suit and fedora hiding behind a trashcan.

Then we went home and watched the Sox lose.

Like you, I want to write about the beauty of the game—those moments that are like Emerson stepping in a puddle, all mean egotism vanishing.  Actually, I don’t know if I feel right invoking Emerson.  If Emerson were alive today, he’d spend 20 pages arguing sabremetrics.  Wins-above-replacement are signs of natural facts; natural facts are signs of higher, spiritual Pythagorean Expectations.  I’m not saying that beauty in baseball only comes from the brush-cut grass and portly managers spitting chaw on the dugout steps.  I’m obsessive about numbers, and sometimes the combination of batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage just gives me a sublime chill.  But I can’t find beauty in the deliberate evasiveness of sabremetrics. Sabremetric categories seem like ungainly closed systems—for instance, I just want someone to explain to me how “replacement” is defined in “wins-above-replacement.”  I love numbers, yet I’ve never been able to find a lucid explanation of how the phantasmic “replacement player” in the “wins-above-replacement” formula is defined.  While Emerson makes the game into mathesis universalis, Thoreau grows his beard and forbids anyone from washing his uniform.  Hawthorne makes an errant throw to third (probably the fault of his ancestor judge who served at the Salem witch trials).  Dickinson rewinds over and over the Fox super-slow-motion shots of the bat hitting the ball.  She pauses at the fiery red moment when you can see the vibration on contact traveling up the batter’s forearms.  She could stare at this for hours.

It doesn’t matter, though, because they’re all buried in New England and they would’ve been Sox fans and they’d be really disappointed tonight.

But what if I really could watch the Red Sox with a realization of no attainment and no non-attainment?  I loved what you wrote about Lance Berkman’s remarks on his clutch 11th-inning hit in 2011.  Berkman stayed inside himself, as baseball players always explain to reporters—a persistently inscrutable phrase, but maybe something clearer now, if, as you say, I think of it as a description of why we sit on our meditation cushions.  Tomorrow, I’ll go to the Zen temple, where the sangha will stay inside itself.  I don’t mean this phrase in a privatizing way that walls off the rest of the world—not Paul Ryan forcing everyone in his office to read Ayn Rand, not Rand Paul braying about the Voting Rights Act—but instead, “staying inside oneself” as a gesture of mindfulness, coming back to the breath 101 times after being distracted 100 times.  This is a thing of beauty—and maybe the pause between each pitch, like the pause between inhalation and exhalation, creates the conditions for this kind of beauty.  Each windup is the breath touching the nostrils as it enters the body; each thud of the ball in the catcher’s mitt is the tickle of the breath against the upper lip as the body exhales.  But maybe the breeze I felt coming from a few hundred miles south of me, in St. Louis (Saltalamacchia’s wild, flailing bat, swinging at a neck-level pitch)—maybe this is really the breath tickling my upper lip.  If so, I need to remember there’s beauty there, too, a beautiful mindfulness like in Williams’s poem, “Thursday,” which ends with the poet “feeling my clothes about me / the weight of my body in my shoes / the rim of my hat, air passing in and out / at my nose—and [I] decide to dream no more.”

I’d planned to write about why we have so much passion for our teams—why our friends and colleagues notice red iPads (odd coincidence, I sat through a meeting on curriculum changes this week, too), or why they text congratulations to us when our teams win, as if we played in the actual game ourselves.  I hope to get to this in my next email.  This one, now that I look back, really was an effort to continue the thread you started, about what makes the game beautiful.  It’s when Lance Berkman and William Carlos Williams stay inside themselves—equally aware of the materiality of the mind and body and the illusory self-presence of both—and decide to dream no more.

Best,

Tony

Dialogue ( & a poem) with Tony Trigilio (Red Sox fan) during the World Series, 2013

 [Tortilla on our Cardinals shrine]

[On the blog, the spacing of this prose comes out looking like poem. I'll leave it that way.]

Aloha Tony--I hardly know what to say after yesterday's disastrous performance by
my Cardinals, their/our fifth straight loss at Fenway in a World Series. Losing Beltran was the unkindest cut of all. But I've been thinking about the spiritual element of baseball, and the way
being a fanatic about the sport, especially in October, seems to go against many
of the principles we try to hold to: clarity of mind, detachment, acceptance of impermanence,
balance in all things.

As I told you in a facebook chat box (not a diamond, but a box), during the last game
of the National League Championship series I walked toward my office and away from
my last class of the day with a feeling of absolute serenity. I walked slowly even. That's
a rare feeling for me in October! Then, during yesterday's rout, what I saw of it, between
classes and other duties, I began to feel hostility toward Boston, its players, my friend
from MA who is suddenly emailing me about baseball, nearly everyone. When my husband
suggested I leave the utility room in the English department where I've spent many Octobers,
in favor of a public space, I said no, not with the score the way it is. Shane Victorino is from HI,
so everyone will be cheering for him. (So is Kolten Wong,but the guy has yet to prove he can hit.)
Add terrible self-consciousness onto the list of bad spiritual practices then, alongside
black and white thinking and sheer obsessiveness.

So why am I a fan? Apart from having made a decision to support the Cardinals in 1967, during
another series with the Red Sox, I wonder. I made that decision when I was eight years old, going
on nine. Most such decisions don't last this long, but here I am in 2013, with a 14-year-old son
who loves the Cardinals and a husband who played along until it took, and a daughter who at
least wants to watch the highlights. Some of it is that I find baseball to be a beautiful sport,
one that allows for meditative spaces in which to think about what happens next--on the field
or in my head. But some, quite frankly, is that it allows these "base" feelings free reign. I can
indulge myself in aspects of my character I usually steer around, and the results do not hurt
anyone. (Even if my dad, during the 1987 Series, once told me he was worried I'd have a heart
attack!)

Do we go with these feelings, exploring them in this relatively harmless space of sport, or do
we work through them as they occur, practicing detachment as we watch our Cards and Bosox
this afternoon/evening?  I have a department meeting at that time--an important one--so will
have to watch the box score on my iPad as I argue over the English 100 rotation and the hiring
of more adjuncts (that's a real problem).

Go Cards! Susan


Here's the poem I wrote after Carlos Beltran's injury yesterday.  If we lose him for the Series, we're sunk. He's waited 18 years for this chance . . .


(after Frank O'Hara)

Poem (Carlos Beltran has hit the wall)

Carlos Beltran has hit the wall!

I was watching Fox TV in a utility

closet alongside six hand trucks old plates

old microwave old coffee pot old tea

but I had a class to teach on Joe

(“I remember”) Brainard and I

was in such a hurry to get to moore

hall that I missed seeing you crash into

that low Fenway wall as you reached

for Ortiz's would-be grand slam so

my son had to tell me on the phone

CARLOS BELTRAN HAS HIT THE WALL!

there is snow on the television screen

there is rain in Honolulu

I have been to lots of ballgames and shouted

“dirt ball!” at the pitchers but I never actually hit the wall

oh Carlos Beltran we love you get up

--Susan M. Schultz

Some fresh links

Ron Silliman did a good review the other day at his blog about new anthologies, among them Tinfish Press's Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories).  You can find that here.

Tony Trigilio interviewed Tinfish Editor, and has just posted the podcast on his Radio Free Albion series, here.  We talked about many things, from the St. Louis Cardinals, to dementia writing, to Jack London, and then to memory cards.  Tony is a lovely, lively host who already has a wonderful line-up of podcast people.

I'm just back from five sick days at the Boston AWP. The Tinfish table was located in outer nowhere.  Not the best of our conference stints, but really lovely to see some good friends and meet some more.