All About Baseball, Partly

Billy, a former dentist,
strolled by the backstop, coming back from first base,
and pretended to be speaking to no one:

"Why are we here?", he asks.
"Why are we really here?"

He does not mean, Why are we playing baseball?
He is playing a different game.
He has been reading, again.
This time it sounds like Martin Heidegger.
Once it was the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Another time, the God Particle,
and polarized light from the Big Bang.

Neither one of us is smart enough to understand what those things are,
but both of us are as curious as kids about what they are.
We ask each other just to ascertain that we are not alone in our ignorance.
When we solve those problems, we are going to turn to the Infield Fly Rule.

It would be wrong to say
that the guys come to Udall Park
to talk about particle physics
or to contemplate the meaning of light, and life.
They come to play baseball.
But shit happens, you know:
protons collide, and cancer eats at you.
The Civil War has to be fought, still,
with surrogate soldiers in self-deceptive uniforms.
We have to pretend that health care is ruining our civilization
while it repairs our knees and hips and kidneys.
Skin cancer patches are everywhere.

Why are we here?

Baseball.
And because there is something lovely and absurd
about sixty, seventy, and eighty-year-olds playing baseball
when they could be home staring at Fox News.
There is no reason to think when you have Fox News.
Baseball makes you think:
What is the count? The score?
Who is supposed to be in the On Deck Circle?
Deep, deep thoughts Fox never explores.

And how is Amos doing? Or Buddy?
Is the cancer moving fast?
Did someone say Sergio's wife was sick?

Why are we here, really?

It isn't just about baseball, is it?

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

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