Thursday, October 31, 2013
Tinfish Press Sale: Our 2013 Collection!
Spirit & World Series: Dialogue with Tony Trigilio, Instance #4
Here is the utility room off the main English department office in Kuykendall Hall, where I've spent many hours--days--during the months of October in recent years. It's the only place I can find a television to myself; oddly, there's cable in this room. In the foreground, you can see my iPad (with red keyboard), this year's addition to the arsenal of the fan. I use it to talk to the Cardinals Hui on facebook before, during, and after games. Occasionally, the department secretary will come in for a visit. She's a Dodgers fan who is now rooting for the Red Sox--as indeed everyone seems to be. Yesterday, the husband of a colleague came in to use one of the hand trucks and managed to say "go Red Sox" on his way out.
I confess to a feeling of dispiritedness today. It's been a long October of adrenaline and the end seems near, probably not the ending I wanted, but the end nevertheless. Of course baseball's history is at once linear and cyclical, but right now I'm feeling the blunt linearity of it. My Cardinals, who won so many games because they hit consistently with runners in scoring position (the lovely acronym is RISP), now strike out more than they hit. Hot hitters like Matt Carpenter have been tamed. Our best hitter, Allen Craig, when he plays, is operating on one foot as the other was injured two months ago. The bottom of our order (Jay, Kozma, the pitcher) is mostly hapless. In the meantime, we're watching one of the greatest displays of post-season hitting ever. David Ortiz fails ever to not make contact with the ball, and his World Series batting average soars over .700. Why we don't walk him every time, I don't know. But that's simply another of the mysteries of this series; our second year manager has made some odd decisions, as has your new manager.
But back to spiritual practice, if I can muster some detachment for a moment. The day before last, the game ended with the Cardinals down by two runs, a man on first (Allen Craig had a double, but could only hobble as far as first, was then replaced by the speedy Kolten Wong), and Carlos Beltran up. If anyone can reproduce the miracles of 2011 for us (those of Berkman and Freese), it would be Beltran, despite his rib injury. The camera was on the field when suddenly the Red Sox started leaping in the air and Carlos Beltran's face turned ashen, angry. Kolten Wong, leaning the wrong way, had been picked off first by Koji Uehara. Wong slammed his helmet into the ground, the game over. No guarantees that Beltran would have hit the ball, but the rookie's mistake took the prospect of a perfect ending away from us. (No, fb friend David Kellogg, this was not "karma" from the interference call.)
Several minutes later, a tweet came over my transom from Viva el birdos, a website clearly run by literary folk: "Mike Matheny is a big believer in getting guys right back on the field, which is why Kolten Wong will pitch to David Ortiz tomorrow." I laughed. Someone on that feed also advised us not to send tweets to Wong ourselves and provided a link to a John Cheever story, scanned at an angle, about a character's catastrophic turn (I didn't read it, just gleaned something of the poster's intent). But then when Wong tweeted an apology for his mistake to #CardinalNation, I did respond, in brief, to say we were still at 2-2, it was ok. It's not like he was the only Cardinal who'd made a mistake in the game.
I felt a tonglen moment over Wong, easier because I feel like I know the guy. I don't, but he went to my university for three years and I'm sure I saw him play baseball here. He looks like one of my students, and his earnest apology reflected what's best about Hawai`i, a sense of community that includes a responsibility to represent the best in it. He clearly was feeling his kuleana, and that he'd not lived up to it. Wong is a Hilo kid, from an outer island, small town, suddenly thrust on the large stage. He'd just had his first good game in a long while, getting a hit and making a fantastic play in the field the night before. To make that last out on such a mistake was devastating. Reports had it that he was crying in the clubhouse. These are not the actions of a hardened professional athlete (like the older Shane Victorino, also once an outer island kid, possessed of a harder attitude), but of a young man who's feeling his private way onto this public stage.
In Tonglen practice, which I understand more than I practice (like so much in this spiritual field), you breathe in someone else's pain and release it. I could do that for Wong by the end of the evening, but of course the true practice would demand that I do it for members of the Red Sox and their fans, including the Johnny come lately's. Hahd fo do. Why do I find myself respecting only those Red Sox fans who have suffered (the pre-2004s, in other words)? What is it about suffering that garners my respect, when sheer joy does not? Why did I and my friends instinctively trust the Khmer Rouge survivor who spoke to our honors class in memory & forgetting, when we often do not trust ourselves? (Admittedly, I've jumped from the trivial to the truly awful here). Why do I trust my own suffering more than my own joy? I wonder. And why does this trivial space of baseball remind me of those times, as if the trivial were simply a spur to memories of what really mattered?
For what is a career in baseball fandom except a career in memory? I remember sitting in front of some older colleagues in 1988 (I think it was) when the Cardinals played the Padres at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu (the Padres stadium was under repair so they repaired here). These colleagues were talking story about their lives; this was true oral history unfolding. But they were telling their lives through baseball: the games they'd seen; their dads watching, one having a stroke during a game (as I recall); the catastrophe for that colleague when the Dodgers left Brooklyn and he lost the will to cheer for any particular team ever again. Their memories were layered--as I advise my writing students to bring subjects together via compressed metaphor--so that they were telling at least two stories at once. And now I find what I barely remembered, the 1991 review of The Baseball Encyclopedia by one of these former colleagues, Arnold Edelstein, the one whose father had a stroke during a game. He writes: "The numbers can provide unexpected dividends for biography if we can picture the readers of the Encyclopedia using them not as signs of the players or teams but as Proustian reminders of particular days within the general recurrence of the years." (Biography, vol. 14, no. 3, Summer 1991, 273), available through Project Muse.)
I am so enjoying this exchange, Tony, that I hope this Series goes to 11 games. And it's the layering that matters to me, the way in which baseball is not "just a sport," as so many in our intellectual tribe would have it, but a filtering system for living a life in the moment and then contemplating it for many thousands of moments after. I think I might have some time for my pillow this morning, so over and out for now. Thanks, as ever, for your perceptions. And, because I so admired your cat Shimmy, I'll now post a photo of our cat Tortilla, lying on a rally towel. The photo credit goes to my son, Sangha.
Monday, October 28, 2013
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
Sunday, October 27, 2013
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 11th 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
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Tony Trigilio's response to the WS dialogue on matters of baseball and the spirit
While you were watching Game 1 in the English Department
utility room, I was asking my students to call to their minds the imaginary
room in their homes that they all go to -- the secret sanctuary room in their
heads that no one else knows about. Let’s
all go into that room, I said, and write everything we see. A few looked at me strangely, with facial
expressions that suggested I should slow down, take a step back, because, hey,
what if we don’t have secret imaginary rooms in our heads (but of course they
all do, and they all had a lot to write about).
In that moment I recalled the recurring dream I used to have of an
imaginary room in an apartment I inhabited in Boston. You had to step down into it, like a sunken
living room, and it had a couch that always seemed beautiful in the dream but
was mostly bland when I’d wake up. Gray, cheap vinyl -- really, a
disappointing object for my unconscious mind to care about. The secret room I wrote about had a
100-gallon fish tank and a chrome kitchen countertop with a pineapple on
it. But nothing that would allow me to
watch a baseball game.
Because of the night class, I had to record the game on our
DVR. I watched the first pitch around
10:15 central time, which I’m guessing was around the 7th inning in real
time. Around the third (DVR’d) inning, I
started getting text messages. I knew
this meant the game was over. With the
Sox leading 5-0 at that point (in unreal, DVR time), I hoped the texts were
from friends celebrating a win, but years of Sox misery creates ridiculous
fatalistic habits, and I worried that the texts were condolences to make me
feel better about a historic Cards’ ninth-inning comeback. I guess my awe at St. Louis’s glorious
back-from-the-dead win over Texas in the 2011 World Series -- ensuring a winter
of well deserved misery in the George W. Bush household -- still wasn’t enough
to erase my memories of the ‘86 World Series against the Mets. If you’re a Sox fan of a certain age, you
feel like an evil deus ex machina is always waiting in the bushes to sabotage
you.
I thought about just fast-forwarding to the end, or just
reading the texts and getting it over with, but then a calm came over me, too,
and this made me think of the serenity you felt during the NLCS. This was the same calm I mentioned in one of
our Facebook emails -- an equanimity I felt when Koji Uehara was pitching to
Austin Jackson in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the ALCS. I watching the DVR’d version of the game, but
I knew it already was over because I’d received a few text messages. The game was too tense for me to dare read
them. As Jackson came to the plate, I
paused the recording. I was too anxious
to continue watching. But then a soothing
understanding came over me. The game was
already over in real time, and I wasn’t feeling ecstatic or despondent. The game was over in real time and I didn’t
feel a thing.
I was thinking of the old Zen story of the sailors who
anchor their ship inside a dark cave to protect themselves from a dangerous
storm. They’re suffering from horrible
thirst, so one of them casts down a bucket into the cave water, hoping it might
be drinkable. It’s delicious – he’s
dying of thirst, and this is the best water he’s ever tasted. Bucket after bucket, he gulps down the cave
water. The next day, with more light
filtering into the cave, he looks down and sees that the cave is actually a
burial ground, and the water he had been drinking is tainted with ooze from decomposing
bodies. As soon as he realizes this, his
stomach turns upside-down and he starts puking violently. Once he’s recovered -- weak and dehydrated
from vomiting, but no longer sick -- he comes to a sudden, calming realizing of
emptiness. “Nothing happened between
last night and this morning,” he says. “The
water was delicious last night, and it’s the same water this morning, even
though I’m aware now that the water is tainted by corpse putrefaction. But the only thing that really happened was
my mind.”
So I restarted the recording. Koji was pitching to Jackson, but the game
was already over. The only thing
happening was my mind.
Well, shantih shantih shantih, if only I could maintain that
equanimity. It lasted until the first
pitch of Game 6. All my own base
instincts came back right away. To make
things worse, my extended in-laws are all Tigers fans -- they all grew up
around Toledo and Detroit. My
father-in-law, Stan, and I have a great rapport, but we both went dark during
the ALCS. When the Tigers won Game 1, he
didn’t text me; when the Sox came back to win Game 2, I held back. Neither of us wanted to gloat and make the
other person feel bad. But of course we
wanted nothing more than to disappoint the entire city of Detroit (me) or Boston
(Stan). But by the time of Victorino’s
grand slam, I can’t say I was feeling any equanimity at all. I was attached to a Sox victory -- thoroughly
attached, in the Buddhist sense, as in “addicted.” I didn’t matter that my joy hinged on the
disappointment of an entire fan base, including my wonderful extended family of
in-laws. Jose Veras is, I’m sure, loved
deeply by his family and friends, and if I were truly living up to the
Bodhisattva ideal, I wouldn’t want him to feel as horrible as I’m sure he did
when he hung that curveball to the unspeakably intense Victorino, who then
knocked it over the wall for the Sox’s second game-turning grand slam of the
series.
But, like you, baseball is my place for base instinct. No place for bodhisattva ideals. I’m reminded of an email I sent a dear friend
in Boston last month. I was explaining
to him that the emotional distance I’d cultivated during the Sox’s 93-loss,
last-place plummet last season was disappearing. This was around the same time that Mariano
Rivera’s unending retirement tour took him to Fenway, where the Boston Cello
Quartet played his signature song, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and the team
gave him a 1934 seat from Fenway park (with his number on it). I want to boo
Mariano Rivera every time I see him take the mound. He caused me irreparable baseball-misery over
the years, and the bare fact that he reached baseball-retirement age doesn’t
take away the pain. Every time I hear
announcers rending their garments over “Mo’s” retirement, I think of Kevin
Millar’s walk and Bill Mueller’s single in the 2004 ALCS -- I still see Rivera
sprawling on the mound after his futile attempt to stop Mueller’s hit from
getting through the infield -- and I feel a twang of justice in my heart. Literally, I call this “justice,” which I’ll
be the first to admit is a total perversion of the word. But here I am, suspending all my political
anger at, say, the Republican party’s desire to let poor people die from lack
of health care, and I’m saying it would be “unjust” if Rivera saved another
game against the Sox. It defies all
spiritual reason, but there I go, right to my basest instincts, as Jonny Gomes
starts his obsessive-compulsive rituals in the batter’s box, looking like he
can barely contain the twitches and spasms of his central nervous system.
I get it, absolutely, how in the middle of the last night’s
game, you could start to feel hostility toward the city of Boston. Along with San Francisco, it’s the city of my
imagination, but if the Sox were playing the Giants in the World Series, I’d
want every single baseball fan in the Bay Area to be disappointed today -- even
though I begin each day with a meditation session that (at least when baseball
isn’t involved) is meant to create the conditions for me to be good,
altruistic, and full of loving-kindness with everyone I encounter that day.
I planned to talk more about how we root for our individual
teams -- I’m fascinated by what you said about the roots of your
Cardinal-rooting, and I, too, came to my chronic Red Sox fanaticism through
circuitous paths. I grew up in
Pennsylvania but I’ve lived most of my life in Boston and Chicago, the only
cities that truly feel like “home.” When
I watch Fenway games on TV, I feel a pang, knowing that my apartment was about
a 10-minute walk from Fenway, following the trajectory of the right-field foul
line. But I’ll save this for our next
emails.
Best,
Tony
Dialogue ( & a poem) with Tony Trigilio (Red Sox fan) during the World Series, 2013
[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
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