My letter to Cardinals management. Could be better, but I have a day job!
47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9
Kaneohe, HI 96744
21 February 2017
William O. DeWitt, Jr.
CEO, St. Louis Cardinals
Busch Stadium
700 Clark Street
St. Louis, MO 63102
Dear Mr. DeWitt & other members of the Cardinals front office:
While I have never lived in St. Louis, I have been a Cardinals fan for 50 years. I was born in Belleville, Illinois, but never knew it as home. When the Cards made the World Series in 1967, however, I took them on as a my home team, and they’ve been that ever since. I’ve made several trips to St. Louis over the years, alone and with my family, to meet up with friends and to see games. I founded the Cardinals Hui on Facebook for writers (like me) who are also Cardinals fans. We often watch playoff games together on-line. My husband and I are White; our two kids are Asian American.
My first baseball heroes were Black: Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood. Even as a child, I knew their careers were more difficult than they ought to have been. I remember reading Gibson’s From Ghetto to Glory early on, which confirmed my suspicions. More recently, I’ve read biographies of Curt Flood and joined his daughter’s movement to have him put in the Hall of Fame. Now my family and I follow Kolten Wong with particular interest because he’s from Hawai’i. So I was horrified when I saw comment streams on a Facebook page yesterday attacking Dexter Fowler in racist and otherwise ugly language. I put in my two cents on two of the threads, but that didn’t seem enough. I failed to write to you do so after Michael Brown was killed while wearing a Cardinals cap and the team remained silent, but I am writing to you now.
Fowler has every right to his opinion on the travel ban. That his wife is Iranian and can’t travel to see her family is a real problem for him. That her sister has a hard time coming to this country is another. What I would like to see from the Cardinals is some active support for him, our only African American player at present, and one whose family is from a country held under suspicion by our government. Perhaps baseball can bring us together rather than—like so much these days—tear us apart. But for it to do that will take some real effort from you. You might even need to break some eggs. St. Louis is a complicated community; acknowledge it as such, and help to bring people together. But above all, support players whose lives are affected by racism and immigration issues.
Thank you for the wonderful experiences we had at games in recent years. I hope that 2017 proves a successful season for our team.
Because all green
mountains walk, they are permanent.
What
does the green mountain do at 3-0? Does it take the pitch & trust
in permanence, or does it swing?
Although they
walk more swiftly than the wind, someone in the mountains does not
realize or understand it.
The
green mountain is a catcher, sad in the knees, who reads the pitch &
runs.
“In the
mountains” means the blossoming of the entire world.
It
means the beauty of a passage from first to third on a single to the
opposite field. It means the exfoliation of diamond into water, of
water into cloud, of cloud into radio voices reduced to silence, the
audio's on-deck circle.
People
outside the mountains do not realize or understand the mountains
walking.
They
are on streets or in shops, praying at other altars, staring at their
apps, as just past their eyes the mountain walks toward the mound,
nursing its fork balls and cutters, change ups and sliders.
Those without
eyes to see mountains cannot realize, understand, see, or hear this
is as it is.
The
vendor in Hiroshima started every call “ICE COLL, ICE COLL.” In
the seventh, balloons littered the field, wafts of cigarette smoke
ascending into a cacophony of trumpets & drums.
If you doubt
mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking: it is not that
you do not walk, but that you do not know or understand your own
walking.
I
do not doubt that the pitcher gives up walks, or that the batter
takes his walks, or that the umpire walks to the mound, which walks
toward the outfield, away from sharply hit liners or drag bunts, or
that whoever walks walks the same path as all those who walked
before. The genealogy of walking scatters chalk in its walk.
Since you do know
your own walking, you should fully know the green mountains' walking.
My
mother said she counted steps, though not for long. My father & I
marched down corridors while he barked numbers & hut-huts,
chanted martial mantras. I walk with my children, when I'm not
driving them. A walk without aim finds counsel under the Koolau.
Green mountains
are neither sentient nor insentient.
Our
sentience gathers in neurons, ganglia, prions. We are ourselves and
not. Our machine becomes us when we walk through letters that on the
typewriter end with a ding! Return.
You are neither
sentient nor insentient.
I
am the sentence that I write. My sentence walks across the screen
like a mountain in its folds. Clouds were white-out before that
paradigm-shift.
At this moment,
you cannot doubt the green mountains' walking.
I
choose not to doubt Michael Wacha. He stands on a mound that
resembles a mole on the steep mountain's green skin. We hope the rain
delay does not last.
Italicized
sentences by Zen Master Dogen
[Norman Fischer, a Giants fan, bet me a poem on the Giants-Cardinals game two days ago. I lost, so this is my poem for Norman.]
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.
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.
[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.
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.
[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
Over a week ago I received an email from a poet here in Honolulu--not a submission to Tinfish, he was clear on that--but a set of poems that chronicled the St. Louis Cardinals' 2011 season and World Series win. He and I sometimes run into each other on campus, each of us sporting a Cardinals cap. I might be wearing the cap with the bird on it, he a red home cap. Or he an away blue cap and I the STL logo cap in red.
No sooner had I opened his attachment (that word is ever fraught) than I realized that the first poem marked a visitation. The poem's title is "The World Series Fell from Heaven," but there was more of heaven to the poem than my poet friend knew. It begins:
When I watched the Cards lose in DC
in June it was the sort of pure
pain all sports fans learn to endure.
His "sort of pure pain" was over a baseball game gone wrong. "A come-from-ahead-then-fall-behind defeat" describes a game I remember, too. It was this game. I paste in the line-score.
7:05 PM ET, June 14, 2011
Nationals Park, Washington, D.C.
The game started one hour after my mother died; by the time I reached my friends' house in suburban DC and asked that the game be turned on, the Cardinals were well ahead. Perhaps it was 6-1 or 6-2. We were making what small talk we could. And then the Nationals made their come-back, fueled as much by the Cardinals' sorry relief corps as by their own hitting prowess. My poet friend was sitting next to an obnoxious Nationals' fan--one of those who is not really a baseball fan, but cheers loudly for the home team--and I was performing an odd wake for my mother.
That evening, I returned to my hotel room and wrote this blog entry. There is no mention in it of the St. Louis Cardinals. Instead, I wrote in part about a coincidence that brought me back the voice of my father by way of his old friend, Jerry Lawlor. Here is the paragraph on that coincidence:
Ellen took me home with her and Steve. They & Max asked about
my father. I offered history: Michigan farm, auto plant, air force
(when it integrated, he knew Tuskegee airmen), IBM, Western Union.
Ellen said, Jerry Lawler. Jerry Lawler! My father's Irish friend,
office roommate of Col. Dudley Stevenson, Tuskegee airman. Steve called
Jerry; we explained the coincidence. He darted off to find a letter.
Please, do you mind? I'm looking. Dear Jerry, the letter read. My
father's voice, Irished. Jerry, you
never put yourself above others, gave credit to them & did not take
it. The experience of an Irish immigrant. Martha & Susan join me
in wishing you a long & enjoyable retirement.
And here is a photograph of that letter, its wording true:
I've been reading W.G. Sebald's books now that the semester has ended. In Austerlitz, he writes: "if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then
where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every
river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in
those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's
qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is
fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed
in time differ from those left untouched by it?" Sebald's work is (dis)organized by coincidences, synchronicities. An ordinary life is never ordinary, hides its memories like a glacier. One such glacier returns a lost man to the author, but not to the man who had loved him, who had killed himself. The dead are never dead, always on the cusp of returning. The living are never out of their sight. Or all of us exist in a time that is sometimes outside itself, wafting like the dust Sebald found comfort in, not clean like the line of a railroad track.
I have always had at the back of my mind this notion that of course
these people aren't really gone, they just hover somewhere at the
perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits.
It's the nature--super-nature--of these visits that fascinates me in this year since my mother's death. If I have often lived in within her memories (of The War, of an adventurous life that somehow ended at my birth, becoming ordinary), the post-memories I have of her come of other peoples' lives and memories. Her death has brought me new friends, Terry Hong of McLean, Virginia, where my mother lived for many years, and Jee Young (Vera) Lee, of Honolulu and Meadville, Pennsylvania, my mother's home town. Toward the end of her conscious life, my mother confused her memories with mine. I don't do that, but memories are inevitably a mixed genre, her recollections mine in the context in which I heard them. A car seat. A living room. The kitchen where she chopped vegetables. Nothing grand. Just the ordinary events of otherwise unmemorable days, now pushing through time's surface like a fin, or a leaf.
There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I'm hardly
interested in the future . . . at least about the past you can have
certain illusions.
I want to argue with Sebald over that one. Future and past are both provinces of the imagination, both susceptible to illusion. But the passage from his work that strikes me most strongly--is most compelling in its oddity--is this one, again from Austerlitz:
What made me uneasy at the sight of it [the capital of a cast-iron
column in Pilsen], however, was not the question whether the complex
form of the capital now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had
really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the
children's transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in
itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface
seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember
me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no
longer recollect for myself.
It's the idea that memories do not live inside of us, but that we live inside the world's memories of our passage, that is so awkwardly telling here. To have forgotten is odd enough, but to ask that the world remember for us is as beautiful as it is presumptuous. A death leads to a televised game leads to a poem leads to a box score leads back to a father's 1984 letter to a colleague. The symbolism of loss arrives in numbers on my screen.
[Cardinals players react to David Freese's game-winning home run in Game Six]
Yesterday we threw a party. I had long wanted to watch Game Six (click for the box score) of the 2011 World Series (best game ever) as art rather than as an adrenaline-pumping, jumping-off-a-cliff, heart-wrenching event, or what it had been on October 27. So we broke out the World Series box of DVDs, an early present for the kids (believe that if you will!), and began our trip down memory lane. Soon it proved to have as many trips and falls as memories, and the afternoon became an exercise in trying to remember what had happened when. When Diane broke out the thread from our then-live Facebook feed (off the Cardinals Hui) and began reading back my reactions to the game then as we watched it now, which is now then, things got complicated.
It didn't help that the live feed in Hawai`i had been knocked off the air for at least half an hour during Game Six, leaving us to scramble to find the game on the radio, but none of us could remember which innings were those we had not seen. It didn't help that we remembered certain heart-stopping events: Matt Holliday and Rafael Furcal failing to catch a ball in short left field; David Freese missing a routine pop-up, which ended up rolling off the top of his red cap; the Rangers' pitcher missing first base with his foot, even as he caught the ball. But we simply could not remember where in the game's narrative they occurred. An inning would begin and we would say, "oh this is when really bad stuff happens," and then the inning would end happily enough. An earlier inning would have started and we would have forgotten, say, that Lance Berkman hit a home run. We were like a jury that knows a crime was committed, even that the principals were there, but can't for the life of them figure out what really happened or if the defendant is guilty or not.
"I know what you said now," Diane would report from her Facebook thread. "But I can't say!" (There were kids in the room.)
She continued: "this is where my boss wrote to say he assumed I was watching the Cardinals (lose)."
"This is when Sangha started slamming doors downstairs."
"And now you're saying you can't pick Radhika up from soccer because the game is still going."
I've always thought communal readings of poetry were best, because so many minds come to the poems from various points in the time-space-line that meaning accrues. The same process helped us put together what we had seen a mere two months ago. The suspense that had built up during the game on 10/27, especially at moments when the Cardinals were down two runs with two outs and two strikes on the batter (they are the only team to come back twice from such deficits), transposed into suspense over what we remembered and how well we remembered it.
Then the last innings unfolded. We remembered those better. David Freese's triple, Lance Berkman's hit, David Freese's walk-off home run, those we could summon up without the video, the conversation, the Facebook thread. Suspense over. The Cardinals pushed the Series to seven, we felt good about the states of our memory, and my husband declared that if we put the DVD of Game Seven in tomorrow, he thought the Cardinals had a pretty good chance of winning.
David Schacter is a psychology researcher, professor, writer who has had a lot to say about what happened yesterday afternoon. I've been reading his books, first The Seven Sins of Memory (2001), in which he categorizes our typical memory problems (like tip of the tongue syndrome, absent-mindedness, lack of name recall and many more), then explains how these sins are actually advantages. Many of those advantages seem to have to do with hunting and gathering, but still. I'm now reading his earlier book, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996), which should help me remember some of the material better. In order to remember, he claims, we need to create complicated contexts around the information we want to remember, or we need to feel emotional pulls to those moments that stick. Names are hard to remember, because they are context-free; we remember someone's story, if not their name, but we do not remember their name while forgetting their history. Our brains erase events we don't need to remember (if we're lucky, we remember the crucial events) but leave traces of what did matter. And so, Freese's "idiot play," as he called it later, remains in our minds, but without the sense of what inning we were in, except that his error occurred somewhere in the middle of the game. And his walk-off homerun is seared into our memories, even though the fact that there was a 3-2 count on him was remembered only by 12-year old Sangha. Diane said, "I thought he just walked up there and hit it out right away!"
As Cardinals fans, this mattered deeply to Diane and me. Why should it matter to anyone else? Pull the google map lever a bit and consider that a lifetime of watching baseball games becomes an anchor to autobiography. My former colleagues Arnie and Phil sat behind Bryant and me at a Cardinals-Padres game at Aloha Stadium in 1998 and told each other their stories by way of which games they had seen, and when. Arnie, as Arnold Edelstein, later wrote a review-essay in Biography about the autobiographical nature of being a baseball fan, about the way the dry numbers in a baseball encyclopedia evoke memories for him of his father's death. See Biography, Volume 14, Number 3, Summer 1991, pp. 272-275 (Review). Pull the lever out further and further, and you get to the point where memory and autobiography begin to fail; you get to dementia, where I spent years, obsessively watching my mother lose hers. You get to the place Walter Mosley began from when he composed the marvelous novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2010). Famous for his detectives, Mosley has written a book in which the primary search is for memory. A significant part of the plot involves the fantasy of recovering lost memories--a pact with the devil for memory, but also for quicker death--but that's not the part of the book that I will remember, if my emotions have anything to say about it.
Ptolemy Grey is 91 years old. He still lives on his own in an apartment full of his past (read trash, read disordered papers, read hoard), full of present day insects and rodents, without a working toilet or bath, and in a mind inhabited by the paranoias, fears, and confusions of dementia. Mosley taps into the horrible poetry of this condition; Grey's internal monologues are beautiful, even as they make us fear for his safety. Grey turns help away, gets attacked regularly by a drug addict, lives in a stew of time that is at once the misprisioned present and a wash of past events that enter his frame like a tide, and then fall back. (These monologues reminded me of ways the depressive mind confronts the world, also in a wash of memories and fears and blind-alleys.) He tries to stay in the present by playing his radio loudly, but dares not turn any knobs lest he lose the stream and not be able to recover it. These sounds he sets against the babbling of his uncontrollable memories:
"So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well" (12).
Ptolemy is a time-traveler with no need for a time-machine; his brain's disorder gives him a free, if often, terrifying ride through the past-as-present. That Ptolemy is an old African American man means that his memories are often traumatic; his childhood mentor was lynched, a little girl burned to death in a house. History has not been kind. His memories, as we say, are "bad." And his present includes the death by drive-by shooting of his great-nephew, Reggie, the man who cared for him and his failing memory.
The only way to solve the mysteries in the book is to give Ptolemy back his memory, if only for a time. As in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, there's gold involved, a real treasure that Ptolemy must shelter from rapacious relatives and entrust to the young woman who comes like an angel to save him. This makes for exciting reading, but Ptolemy himself is less interesting as a cogent character. The tragedy of the book's ending (layered within the comedy of its certitude, its completion) brings back the poetry of Mosley writing Alzheimer's through Ptolemy, whose memories are again as grey as his matter, as his memories:
"He held out his hand and the girl who reminded him of birds singing took it into hers just like he thought she would. He signed and maybe she asked a question. The music became a sky and the words the man on the television was saying turned into the ground under his feet. One was blue and the other brown, but he was not sure which was which. Everything glittered and now and again, when he looked around, things were different. Another room. A new taste. The girl always returned. And the door that was shut against his forgotten life was itself forgotten and there were feelings but they were far away." (277)
Walter Mosley talks about his mother's dementia here, and how it influenced his writing. Or watch:
Mosley's description of the person with Alzheimer's in this clip is compelling because it does not separate that person from the rest of us, but shows how the loss of memory is a shared experience. Failing to remember Game Six is not dementia, but falls on the continuum between total recall (itself a fiction) and total lack thereof. Hence, Mosley: "My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there’s not a direct connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back. There’s a word, they know there’s a word, but they don’t remember what that is. There’s a word that describes something. There’s a thing that they have to do, there’s something that’s very important. It’s almost there within the range of their mind and they have to sit there and go through a really convoluted process of thought and memory to try to retain that—to regain it. And sometimes they can and sometimes they can’t." The Last Days of Ptolemy Greyis a beautiful, tender portrait of dementia. One of the best I've read.
Toward the end of our party yesterday, I remembered two Cardinals games I watched on television in Washington, DC in June. I was in Virginia because my mother was dying--she died on June 14, 2011--and, oddly enough, the Cardinals were also in Washington to play the Nationals. On the night my mother died, friends took me home with them and I asked them to turn on the Cardinals game. They did. The Cardinals were ahead, but not for long. They must have put Ryan Franklin in to save the game, and they ended up losing in a rout. No, I call up the box score and it was Batista that night who took the fall. (For a very different rendering of that evening, see this post.) The next night I visited Kyle Semmel and Pia Moller in Bethesda. We watched another game. The Cardinals lost again. Losing and loss drove on twin rails those two days, though I encountered a couple who loved the Cardinals on the Metro trains both coming and going on that second evening. Only in September, when I went to a game in Philadelphia, did the Cardinals win for me in person--though they did so after Al Filreis drove us away from the stadium. They won that game in 11, after blowing a lead with two outs in the 9th. It was a foreshadowing, even as those earlier games had seemed a foreshortening, a kick in the stomach after the far far more significant mother-loss.
Note: In trawling the web for images of David Freese, I found this audio of his game winning home run off the BBC. The sonic dissonance is delightful.
[Our Cardinals shrine, October, 2011, with Tortilla]
The St. Louis Cardinals clinched the Wild Card on the last day of the regular season, September 28; they won the World Series exactly one month later. During those four weeks, I watched almost every pitch of every game they played; when my husband, Bryant, and son, Sangha, were home, they did, too. Our daughter, Radhika, watched a lot of it, and had to find a ride home from soccer during Game Six because darkness fell during the baseball game and we would not leave our television screen. (If you're wondering about this detail, night games occur during the afternoon in Hawai`i.) So "watch" is too weak a word; I lived and died on every pitch. I screamed on some of them, and my son slammed doors downstairs in his room on others. When games got terribly stressful, I could hear Sangha outside hitting a ball with his own bat, doubtless imagining a good outcome for our Redbirds. October was the "baseball research" month of my sabbatical; if any administrators are reading this, the rest of my sabbatical was devoted utterly to my writing and research, I promise you that. Well, except for this earlier post . . .
That was the story. The DVD that arrived in the mail the other day is discourse. Who knows why the moment when Prof. Michael Levenson unveiled this distinction by way of Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman, was so memorable to this poetry person during her muddled graduate school career? I don't remember much more than that distinction (see this entry on Genette's narratology for all that's been lost to me over time), but I'm thinking of it now as I consider the move from the postseason to its memorializing by MLB Productions, as narrated by Jon Hamm of St. Louis. The 2006 video was narrated by Tommy Lee Jones, whose intonation on "they had forgotten what it meant to be a member of the St. Louis Cardinals" was as perfect as Pavarotti's . . .
By now, the 2006 DVD has re-organized my memories of most of what happened that year. But 2011 is still so fresh in my mind and recently adrenaline-drenched body that the DVD works against memory, like backwash. To mix metaphors from flood to drought conditions, it feels like sandpaper between the synapses; I want to resist its intrusions, even as I watch it (again). Of course it leaves stuff out. That it provided me the occasion to teach Radhika the meaning of "foreshadowing," when Nelson Cruz is shown running for a fly ball during practice, many hours before he failed to rein in Freese's 9th inning triple in Game Six, is gravy, but not meat. Where suspense was most acutely constructed over time--strike, ball, ball, strike, then what?--the DVD replaces these acuities with the single pitch, delivered in super slow motion, heightened by music. Yes, David Freese (it's almost always David Freese) gets that crucial hit, but the drama's contrived rather than lived. My memory still lives in that present tense of mid-October, but the DVD wants it to abstract itself, become historical time, lose immediacy and then recover it through gimmicks. Not yet!
There's the matter of the squirrel. The squirrel did not simply author an odd event; s/he was a mythological being. (When Tony LaRussa suggested that the squirrel was female and was hanging out with Jason Motte's male glove, he was corrected by the tortoise, but more on this in a bit.) While there is a clip of the Busch Stadium squirrel running across the plate between Skip Schumaker and Roy Oswalt of the Phillies (this was the NLDS) we don't get the aftermath of that famous moment (prefigured when the squirrel ran behind third base the day or two before). First, here's the squirrel in action. It does not run, it leaps, all four legs sailing through the air:
First, Oswalt freaked. Second, the squirrel became a cult figure, emblazoned on rally towels and shirts, made into stuffed animals waved by fans at the stadium, covered in the St. Louis media. The squirrel was captured when the teams went to Philadelphia, and taken to a park, so that he never again appeared on national television. Third, the squirrel acquired a twitter feed. It was not so good a twitter feed as Jason Motte's glove, Sir Glovington A. Wilson, which was not so good as Allen Craig's tortoise, Torty Craig's feed, but it was a twitter feed nonetheless.
Torty Craig's last tweet warmed this poet's heart: "'The shell must break before the bird[s] can fly.'" - Alfred Lord Tennyson | Our #STLCards have flown to the greatest of heights. #11in11" But throughout the playoffs, TortyCraig wrote stories about the Cardinals' clubhouse, stories that moved in backwards order of his tweets (what say you to that, Gerard Genette?). The mystery of his authorship consumed a good deal of my time. I assumed he was outfielder Allen Craig (or Master Allen, as Torty called him), but sometimes he tweeted just after Master Allen hit a home run. I thought I'd busted him, calling out one of the Vivaelbirdos.com writers (who is studying for his MFA), but word came back, via Aaron Belz, that DanUpBaby had denied authorship. Aaron wrote a piece on Huffington Post about Torty Craig. Aaron, himself a Cards fan-poet-tweeter, knows poetry when he sees it: "Like a poem by Ezra Pound, it's compact, strange, and manic. Other tweets are downright absurdist: 'Sometimes Jason Motte's glove joins our conversations. That is to say that Jason & his glove talk & Jason & I talk. I can't hear his glove.' Welcome to the 21st century, we guess."
The DVD leaves out the poetry, the mythology, the tweets, time's chronological passage into suspense and sometimes nauseating anxiety (as during Game Six of the World Series, when the Cards came back not once but twice from being two runs down with two outs and two strikes on the batter, only to win on Freese's walk-off home run in the 11th inning). It replaces real time angst with sentiment, the sometime tedium of the game with constant action, lives in the climax and denouement without really touching the narrative arc (do I have this at all right, oh prose writers of the world?). So what does it offer, aside from the nostalgia we yearn for and now have?
It gives us Lance Berkman's shoes. I kid you not. The most beautiful moment of the DVD comes when Berkman (late of the evil Houston Astros) comes up in the 10th inning of Game Six. The Cardinals are down by two, again, and there are two outs, again; Nolan Ryan has risen from his seat in his black coat and is nearly smiling. The Rangers are about to win the Series. But Berkman has not yet gone down two strikes. He has not yet hit the ball into center field to tie the game--again--and he has not yet looked at the camera (sans playoff beard) to say, "there was nothing in my head, nothing." He is at the plate. But we don't see him there when the camera shows us his shoes, toes pointed toward the plate from the left side (his better side), cleats metallic gray against dull dirt. We see his red and oh so carefully polished shoes. This image is worth the price of admission. It is the image of suspense, in the course of a seemingly endless game, but it is also the image of love--time spent--for the game. Time we do not see went into shining those shoes. Time we do not feel went into the selection of those shoes. Nobody else's shoes were so bright. Berkman later tells us that these at-bats go quickly. But that's his temporal field. For us, the moment was excruciating, and the DVD embraces the moment, holds it longer than it should, but winks at us, too, bright light flashing off red leather.
Here, discourse earns its cleats, trumps story, if only for a moment, and then David Freese hits his famous 11th inning shot to win the game, send the Series to 7, and we're back in the land of serious nostalgia, men in white and red romping across the field of view, Freese throwing his helmet down between third and home, celebrants leaping, tearing off his shirt, the all-too-quick return to cliche (alas only Berkman and the losing Rangers' players evade baseball cliches in the film, Berkman too clever and the Rangers' too disappointed to utter the obligatory "team efforts" and "we came to play baseballs").
Five years from now, the red shoes will have trumped Game Six's suspense as it was lived in real time. But for now, the playoffs and the Series are embodied memories, still capable of jump-starting my nerves. Besides, the full set of games is on order--being shipped as I write this--and I'm planning a Game Six party for just after Christmas, after Sangha knows what plot I've been hatching for his Christmas morning. The party will happen in real time, the game in realish historical time, and the result--however well foretold by the archive--will seem as astonishing then as it seemed in late October. I can believe the Cardinals won the Series, but I still cannot believe they won Game Six.
Neither could the New York Times, for three minutes during Game Six. They put out an article with this bold headline: HAPPILY REWRITING TEAM HISTORY, which chronicled--in what they thought was historical time--the victory of the Texas Rangers over the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. How do we characterize the narrative stance of the writer of this deluded paragraph?
Now there will be new pictures, iconic shots that will live in Texas sports lore. The Rangers blew the lead with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth before Josh Hamilton's two-run homer in the top of the 10th. It lifted Texas to a rollicking 9-7 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals, and shook the Rangers' status as the oldest baseball franchise without a championship.
No, there will be but one photograph, and this is it. No, wait, let me play you the video, in time:
For a while, my office computer was out of time. I'm on sabbatical, so I don't go in often, but every time I did, I'd turn the computer on and it would be stuck in September, 2011. The New York Times headlines were in that month, and so was the St. Louis Cardinals' home page. Jaime Garcia was pitching, and the Cards were chasing the Braves for the Wild Card. It was as if none of what I've just written about had happened. It was as if Kenny Goldsmith were teasing me with a conceptual month-before-the-Cardinals-won extended grab from every screen on the computer. Turned out the "work off-line" function had been turned on. When I unchecked the box, I was given back my present tense. Back in the world in which the Cardinals are 2011 World Champs, I feel a bit like Wordsworth crossing the Alps. Sublimity comes after. But not via DVD.
Game Six Forever.
[With thanks to the Cardinals facebook hui and farewell to LaRussa, if not quite Pujols. RIP Bob Forsch.]
