"That's How Baseball Go"

Thus spoke MLB's reigning sage Ron Washington.

Oftentimes I get asked by friends and family who live and die by football or hockey what I could possibly see in baseball. The classic complaint is aimed at its slow pace. Well, it's precisely because of the slow pace. Elizabeth Scalia of The Anchoress tells us why:

"Baseball is a game of inches. And hours. And in those moments between release and resolution are contained particles of infinity—the space between a prayer of supplication and the surrender of 'Amen'; the whisper of intention that brings what is empty and void into fullness. The hope for redemption.

We can relate to that just as we can identify with pitcher and batter; the individual confronting a full team of resistance with the humblest of weapons—a ball, a stick—speaks to our daily grinds, the resistance, the persistence, the victory of getting through a day; of correcting a flawed stance; of breaking a bad habit before it owns you.

A man screaming 'for the love of God' in the stands of Fenway Park made perfect and sympathetic sense to my son and me, because baseball may be a mere game, but it is one that relates to the continual process of the life of faith—a life of swings and misses, stupid errors, the clutch of despair, the release, the trust, the clockless innings of new chances that stretch out before us, endlessly, and so full of promise.

It breaks your heart, but it leaves you wanting more; it roars into spring, slips us through summer and delivers us, tired but still game, into autumn, and then we lie fallow—waiting in joyful hope."

Check out the full article over at First Things.

A football, hockey, or basketball game might be exciting, but it'll never make me care. Those other sports make for good entertainment, but only baseball is art. Players aren't mindless chess pieces being controlled more or less strategically by a puppeteer coach, but beloved characters in whose fate I have something of myself invested.

Wrigley Field lit by fans' flashlights

Baseball is art because, like art, baseball imitates life and the world around us. Every baseball game is a microcosmic recreation of the universe and the human experience of it. Two teams, home and away, good and evil, locked in battle. Where baseball is special, though, is that that battle is a slow, time-consuming, almost dreary affair. Like life, baseball is won in the details, in the things no one would ever think really mattered. Like life, 7 out of 10 times you step up to the plate, you're gonna fail. Like life, baseball is about prudence, perseverance, and above all fortitude.

This is true outside each individual game too. How many games are in a regular NFL season? 15? Baseball is day-in, day-out. We love baseball because when our players succeed in their microcosmic "life-play," it makes us believe we can succeed in real life, and it gives us the hope to keep trying, so that, one day, we might be counted worthy to say with St. Paul, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith," (2 Tim. 4:7).

The Raising Up Of The Low

Always in comedic works of literature we encounter a particular phenomenon. It's that which occurs to Trygaeus, the protagonist of Aristophanes' play Peace. The play opens with Greece plunged into the midst of war and all its suffering. You may remember from an earlier post that the Epic genre followed three stages of plot development. The same is true of Comedy, though in Comedy, rather than the stages being lived through as the hero's Battle, Journey, and Homecoming, in Comedy, these same ideas and qualities are lived through by the representation of the story's world as one which is Infernal, Purgatorial, and Paradisal. War is nothing if not hellish.

As the play begins, Trygaeus turns the world into a Purgatorial one by hatching a plan to end the war and return peace to Greece. The farmer has two of his servants mash dung into cakes and feed them to a beetle, the beetle he feeds til it is large enough to carry a man and rides to heaven to plead his case to the gods.

The goddess Peace (the incarnation of the principle) has been locked away by War. Much of the rest of the play consists of Trygaeus stirring up his fellow Greeks to pull away the giant stones with which War has plugged Peace's cell. It is hard work, and takes the full effort of everyone. This is the truth of peace, joy, and paradise. It can only be had by the consistent and loving work of everyone involved. We must cooperate in God's good work, we must become like him in loving action if ever we are to enjoy his bliss and, more than that, infect the world with it.

Of course, Trygaeus and the Greeks are successful, releasing not only Peace but her companions Festival and Harvest as well, (comedy, like God, always gives more than expected, more than deserved) who then set off for Athens with Trygaeus. The play ends, as all Comedies do, with a wedding, here that between the farmer Trygaeus and Harvest. Obviously, this is an analogy for the time of peace bringing a good harvest to the farmers, and, as a result, a cause for celebration.

Finally, after a council, a festival of sacrifice to Peace on the advice of the words of the poet Homer, the farmer and his Harvest are wedded, at the end of which Trygaeus invites the people of Athens to celebrate with he and his new bride, saying, "Follow me, sirs, if ye will, / And of bridecakes eat your fill." The grace of the comedic world has converted the dung cakes from the beginning of the play into bridecakes; i.e., a marriage feast, that which Revelation speaks of as "the marriage supper of the Lamb," (Rev. 19:9).

It is through dung, the most humble, prosaic, and down-to-earth thing one could think of, that Trygaeus gains entry into Heaven. It is always through the lower that the higher comes to us. It is through matter that we have form, through bodies that we have souls. It is through the action of God humbling himself that we are redeemed: "Though he was in the form of God, [Christ] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross," (Phil. 2:6-8). It is through such commonplace things as water, oil, bread and wine that the grace of this redemption is transmitted to us through the Church.

As I've said before, the heroes of our faith are those who never receive any glory, any praise for their good deeds. They are the ones who do the little things day in and day out for the good, the true, and the beautiful and never complain. The families who eat bologna sandwiches one night a week so they can give some money to the poor. The mothers who somehow manage to raise seven children almost singlehandedly and still make three meals a day. The fathers who work ten hour days and come home to six more of crying kids and chores.

It is humility which puts us close to God. We cannot build a ladder to heaven, nor can be build a tower (cf. Gen. 11). We cannot conquer heaven with our devices or our cunning. "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that in due time he may exalt you," (1 Pet. 5:6). As Christ himself said, in his kingdom, "the last will be first, the first last," (Matt. 20:16).

Tale As Old As Time

All works of art, no matter what the medium, are at the same time both new and old, both novel and traditional. As William Faulkner put it in his speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, one of the artist’s primary tasks is to “[leave] no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.” All artists ever do is tell a very old story in a new way—for a new time and place. Drawing on their own particular experience of the world, artists retell “the old universal truths” insofar as they have experienced them. To use Michael Oakeshott’s term, artists “re-create” the world and the human condition according to their own experience of it, and insodoing, they give life to and delineate the eternal principles of Truth underlying all that exists.

In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot called this simultaenous perception in the artist of both the universal past and his own particular present the “historical sense.” “The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

This is the principle which Joseph Campbell picks up on in his work in comparative my-thology. All myths, all great stories are really just different cultures’ takes on the same fundamental ideas and principles. All stories have their foundation in the same basic human experiences, thoughts, and desires. More than that, they have their foundation in the same truths of the world in which we live. That is what artists do, tell very old stories with new characters and new imagery based on their own personal experience of the world. That is what they must do, for art re-creates the world, and the truth in the world never changes, it merely takes on new shapes and faces.

Take for instance one of Campbell’s own favorite myths—the heroic journey. All heroes follow the same simple pattern: Battle, Journey, Homecoming. Though the pattern expresses itself differently across different times and cultures, nevertheless the pattern remains the same. Let’s look at a few specific examples:

Odysseus cleansing his house of the suitors.

Odysseus left his home, wife Penelope, and son Telemachus in Ithaca for ten years to fight in the Trojan War. After his victory, he had to travel another ten years in order to reach home. The point of this journey was that the hero should learn how to leave the Battle behind and prepare the way for a life of peace. Upon returning home, Odysseus finds his house overrun with potential usurpers. He applies the things he learned on his journey to the cleansing of his house, setting it in order once and for all.

In The Divine Comedy, Dante must fight his way through Hell, literally. He must then journey up Mount Purgatory, being purified more and more along the way, allowing himself to be prepared for his eventual homecoming in Paradise, in which he is granted the vision of God himself.

Christ our Savior came down from Heaven to do Battle against Sin by dying on the cross, even to the point of descending into Hell. Like Odysseus, Christ waits in order that the victory he won may be perfectly applied to his Body the Church through his heroic patronage, until the time is right for him to return and set his house in order once and for all.

Like every element of art and literature, this heroic pattern contains inherant within it implications and meanings beyond a simple tale being told. This is not to say that the any work of art proposes to send an explicit message. If that were the case it would be mere propaganda. That being said, by virtue of the truth that lies in its characters and events, it can be more than just characters and events. These characters and events, insofar as they are representative of larger truths and realities, are able to signify them, stand for them, personify and incarnate them.

In this case of the heroic journey, we can draw an analogy to the general experience of Mankind. All men must fight their own Battle for the principles of Truth, Jusice, and Honor. All men must endeavor on the Journey to bring the victory home, work to restore order to their sphere of influence. And it is the Homecoming, the setting into Order of our household for which we fight, and for which we hope. By extension from this analogy, we are all called to be heroes, in our own specific times and places—we are all called to live a heroic life, especially in those mundane things which occupy everyday existence. We must fight for Truth, Justice, and Beauty, sacrifice our lives to the principles which are greater than us, and the people whom we love. More than just being true for us men, however, we have seen how this heroic journey is true universally and eternally by virtue of the Christ having lived it out himself.

It turns out, then, that his is the Truth that poets, painters, composers, and authors have been recreating over and over again throughout history, bringing it to us in new ways, for new times and new peoples. Insofar as any character (fictional or real) is heroic, then, he is Christ-like, and the title of an old film about his life seems all the more apt—The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Celebrating The Prosaic: The Magnetic Fields' "The Book of Love" As Comedy

The vast majority of the time works of tragedy focus on one man, one central protagonist. This man is usually an important figure, perhaps a king. Assuming he doesn't die a horrible death (think Macbeth and Othello), this king must learn a lesson about pride by being knocked down off his high horse. He will probably still die in the end, but it will be a good death--one that means something (think Oedipus and Hamlet).

Works of epic literature nearly always focus on one man as well. He is also usually a king. Where Epic differs from Tragedy, though, is that the epic hero isn't just himself, he is the leader of a people, whose desires he represents and whose actions he undertakes. The true protagonist of any epic work is actually the people the epic hero personifies (e.g., Ithaca in the case of Odysseus and Rome in the case of Aeneas). Unlike tragic protagonists, Epic heroes fight to elevate themselves higher than everybody else. They must be the ultimate badass, the conquering hero on behalf of their polis.

In works of comedy we see something quite different. Comedies always focus on a group of people, at least two (a couple), and their relationships to one another. This group which consists of at least two people is in fact (or, at least, will become) a family. This family usually starts out in low estate; i.e., they usually don't matter much at the beginning of the work. By the end of the work, though, they have been elevated to the level of a royal household (like Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Trygaeus in Aristophanes' Peace, both of whom "wed" goddesses).

Titania and Bottom, by Sir Edwin Landseer

Where in Tragedy the king must be removed from the high place which he won for himself (and which won him his pride as well), and in Epic the hero must do everything in his power to conquer on behalf of his people, win glory and honor, and establish peace and justice on their behalf, in Comedy the protagonists actually do very little.

That is to say, nothing is won or conquered by them. Everything they receive is given to them by some external force as a reward. A reward for what you ask? Being stupid. Silly. Dumb. Idiotic. In a word: humble. The entire action of comedic works is geared toward the celebration of humility--of the prosaic, the down to earth. When the goddess Titania falls in love with Bottom he is literally an ass. Trygaeus gains entry into Heaven and council with the gods by riding a dung beetle there.

Consider the following song by The Magnetic Fields. As usual the lyrics are included below. And here's the direct link to a music video in case the embedded audio doesn't work.

The book of love
Is long and boring.
No one can lift the damn thing.
It’s full of charts
And facts and figures,
And instructions for dancing

But I,
I love it when you read to me,
And you
You can read me anything.

The book of love
Has music in it.
In fact that’s where music comes from.
Some of it is just transcendental.
Some of it is just really dumb.

But I,
I love it when you sing to me,
And you,
You can sing me anything.

The book of love
Is long and boring,
And written very long ago.
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes,
And things we’re all too young to know.

But I,
I love it when you give me things,
And you,
You oughta give me wedding rings.

This is the prosaic, the humble, the day in, day out lifestyle that Comedy (and Christianity) extols. "The book of love is long and boring." Married life, real life, isn't bliss. Far from it. It's full of troubles, trials, and pain. There's nothing at all romantic about it. "It's full of charts / And facts and figures." In fact, oftentimes even the supreme expression of love--the marital embrace--must submit itself to charts, facts, and figures. The whole point is to work through it. To bring good from it. To infect the people and the world around you with your loving hard work. The point is to stick it out. To keep doing it every day. No matter how "long." No matter how "boring."

"No one can lift the damn thing." This line is reminiscent of a passage from Revelation that has to do with opening a book.

"I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals; and I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, 'Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?' And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it, and I wept much that no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to into into it. Then one of the elders said to me, 'Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals,'" (Rev. 5:1-5).

No one can open, no one can lift the book of love, the Book of Life but the one who wrote it--the Author of life and love, Love himself. The book of love has always been his book. If we get one word in one footnote it's because he has given us everything we are, every insignificant bit of love we have been able to give to another.

"I love it when you give me things." Of course, this is the essence of real love. Action. Day-to-day, moment-to-moment giving. Of "flowers," "heart-shaped boxes," time, energy, foot rubs, and above all, self--body and soul. This is the self-giving love which leads naturally to "wedding rings." It is the self-giving love expressed ultimately in the marital embrace, the self-gift which, when complete, blossoms forth into a new creation, a child which could almost be said to be an incarnation of his parents loving gift of themselves to one another. But it is also expressed in those simple, boring, every day things like laundry.

Notice the balance in the refrain between "I" and "you," each given two lines, half a verse, parallel in form. Real love is a communion between two persons, each recognizing the other as a subject rather than an object from which something can be got. They are a person just as I am, and it is the relationship, communion, community of inter-subjective self-gift through boring, prosaic things in which love subsists. The song also mentions dance, which is a physical analogy for this kind of relationship.

It is the life that means nothing, that amounts to nothing that we all must hope and work for. Of course, it isn't actually nothing, for love, self-gift, and the new life that hopefully results are the most important things there are. They are what allow us to become like Love himself--who himself loved so much that he produced a Son from eternity, whose relationship of loving action with his Son produces a loving Spirit, in whom we have all been made able to share.

If you're interested, here's an amazing cover of this song by Peter Gabriel. Check it out.

The Dark Knight Rises Teaser Analysis or The Three Stages Of Epic Literature

I just don't know if enough has been made of the Dark Knight Rises teaser trailer which debuted before Harry Potter a few weeks ago. Maybe it helps that I saw it that very night on a digital screen in a theater with mind-blowing sound. I flipped the eff out. I think that was a warranted reaction, though.

I just came across a fantastic shot-by-shot breakdown of the amazingness that is this teaser, so you should read that, and I'll just add some stuff.

First of all, the author does a fantastic job of drawing the visual parallel between Batman and Gotham City as presented in the trailer. Batman is an Epic hero, like Achilles or Odysseus before him. Or Jesus for that matter. In Nolan's Bat-verse he follows the same pattern they all do point-for-point. The author of the article relates Nolan's Batman to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey," which is entirely valid. The majority of what Campbell did in comparative mythology is good and true.

At any rate, an Epic hero is always defined by his polis, the city from which he hails, for which he fights, and to which he hopes to return as king (if he's not already). For Odysseus it was Ithaca, for Aeneas it was Rome, for Christ it's the New Jerusalem. Not only is the hero defined by his polis and vice-versa, however, their fates are so completely intertwined that one could almost say the hero is the city, or at least an extension of it. Likewise with Batman and Gotham City.

As we hear Ra's al Ghul repeat from Batman Begins, a hero must be "more than a man." He must "devote himself to an ideal." A hero is not a man; he is a principle. As Alfred points out in The Dark Knight, he cannot be bound by the concerns of ordinary men. This was Hector's mistake in The Iliad, putting family and clan before duty, honor, justice, and his polis.

Much of the teaser consists of Gotham buildings in the process of crumbling. This is because Batman too is crumbling. He is Gotham's savior and champion. If he falls, all Gotham falls. Throughout the trailer Batman himself is portrayed as weak and ready to break.

(Interestingly, Batman and Commissioner Gordon can also be identified with one another. Their journeys parallel each other perfectly, as they do almost page-for-page in Nolan's inspiration Batman: Year One. As Gordon says in the teaser, they "were in this together." With Batman and Gotham hurting, it only makes sense that Gordon would end up in a hospital bed too.)

The Epic hero's journey can be divided into three stages: The Battle, The Journey (in which the hero descends to the Underworld), and the Homecoming, at which point he (re)founds his city and establishes the peace for which he fought. These three stages mirror the Tragic and Comedic stages, Infernal (Hell), Purgatorial (Purgatory), and Paradisal (Heaven). It is in Batman Begins that Batman must fight for his very right to exist. He struggles against all reason to accomplish his goal: to establish himself as an effective source of justice and order in Gotham. By the end of the first film he has successfully done this and won a small victory.

In The Dark Knight, Batman descends into the Underworld of the Joker's chaos, as does all of Gotham with him (even its favorite son Harvey Dent). Batman must wade through the Joker's madness before peace can be reign. Like the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas, Batman's is a journey of purgatorial suffering, a journey through the valley of the shadow of death. Fittingly, Gotham will be couched in the cold death of winter for portions of The Dark Knight Rises.

Batman and Gotham have not yet emerged from this valley into which the Joker cast them. The Joker made Gotham question the validity of Batman's role as King, to the point that Batman himself questioned it. Something we know he continues to do into The Dark Knight Rises from his conversation with Gordon.

Bane is here to kick Batman, Gotham City, and Commissioner Gordon while they're down. The Joker has left them tired and weak, and Bane wants to take advantage of the situation and usurp Batman's throne, exactly as he seeks to do in the comic books. It would not be insignificant or misguided to compare Bane to the suitors which attempt to usurp Odysseys' throne in his absence. I guarantee that the climax of The Dark Knight Rises will be Batman returning to his great hall to cleanse it of Bane's evil.

By the way, it should be clear that the perfect title for this last installment would have been Gotham City, as this is when Batman must "rise up" and defeat the evil outside and within once and for all, inaugurating an (as far as we know everlasting) era of peace and order in his kingdom. Understandably, though, they wanted to reference their previous blockbuster explicitly and went with the second-best choice.