American Mythology -- Perseus, Mantle, and Baseball as Profound Spiritual Form

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So in this episode, I want to sum up and reflect on the past couple of episodes because I think a lot of what this is about is a reclamation of the essential humanity and dignity of early baseball. And so we've gone into the Cuban leagues, we've gone into the Negro leagues, we've gone into

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early professional baseball in America through the quote-unquote major leagues, the Federal league as well. What this is really about is it's a dignified reclamation project of the real foundations of the history of not only the sport of baseball, but the foundations of nation building through lived mythology.

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What I mean by lived mythology is with the turn towards modernity, and again, I have this previously — you have the Nietzsche quote, God is dead and we have killed him. It's more complex than that and ultimately more profound because what you have is you have a turn towards a direct, immediate, grounded mythology that's built in the dirt, it's built in the blood and sweat and struggle and toil of a real

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Jacob wrestling God moment in American cultural history and in global cultural history through sport. Sport becomes, there's a level of primacy that sport take in terms of a groundedness and immediacy of humanity that was not present in Greek civilization. Sport was more so a entertainment and theater for striving in the Greek sense.

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You still have the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon of gods and mythological traditions which held and bound that civilization together very tightly. When you have the turn towards American modernity or Western Hemisphere modernity, you have nations like the United States or Cuba or Venezuela. They're searching in light of this fractured

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self-assembling global identity, the nationhood is being shaken, the previously native ethnic religious foundations, cultural foundations are being shaken. What comes in to supplant that as an identity construct as well as a spiritual framework for existence is the sport of baseball. And this is a global

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collective mythology that is being built in real time. Like the skyscrapers of New York City, for instance, it's being built by human hands. These legends are human beings. And so it makes me think of the Michelangelo painting, that one moment. I think it's the Sistine Chapel —

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where Adam and God are reaching out and touching hands. And really what it is, it's not blasphemous. By any means it's not. It's a spiritualization and a embodiment of the human ground of being, a transfer and an awareness that we are the ones who are on the field of life. And so when you have a figure like DiMaggio or Satchel Paige or Gehrig or Martin Dihigo — you have figures

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who are in real time

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this showing us our spiritual form and striving and athletic excellence and cultivation of self through the prism and medium of baseball. And I was thinking about this, I'll pivot a little bit because I'll share this image. This was going to be another part of the

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essay and image that I'm constructing here. It's… I'll just pull it up right now.

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I was going to refer to the beauty and the power of Mickey Mantle's swing. So what I mean here is that Mickey Mantle's swing to me almost reflects the essence of baseball because it's a balance of aesthetic beauty and power. And so again, we can again refer to Michelangelo or Da Vinci in terms of the sense of the divine

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portion of the human body and the human body and movement. I mean, if you had Michelangelo working in the present day, you'd probably be making a sculpture of Mickey Mantle mid-swing. This is just a power of symmetry and technical perfection that emerges from athletic excellence, cultivation to craft. I was watching another one, a video the other day of Warren Spahn's windup.

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The analyst who was analyzing his windup for sports technique was talking about the fluidity and grace of his motion and how he generated power and force, but also craft in terms of technique and control of the movement and thus where the bat or the ball is going. This is so much of what baseball is. It's a balance between the generative force of being and the technical perfection of athletic movement

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behind it. Baseball is much more of like a structural ballet than a sport like football or gladiatorial combat, etc. Because this is not a contact sport. This is not a violent sport. This is a sport of strategy and technical perfection. It's an athletic vision of excellence in which individuals perform great feats in coalition. But no, it's like in the physics sense, no two particles ever touch. It's a

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solo effort that's wound up in a mosaic of collective feats, not only on that individual diamond, but in the entire mythology of baseball itself. Of course, you have the rare home plate or outfield collision, but this is the technical perfection of movement. I think of Francisco Lindor at shortstop. He makes these incredible fluid plays and you watch them unfold. It's like he slows down time. He himself is moving in slow motion.

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It's like time has been slowed to almost a stop because of how perceptive and engaged in the practice of fielding that he is and how perfected his technique is and how fluid it is. And this to me is the sign of athletic excellence and greatness, which is directly embodied. I've done a fair amount of work in physics. I've done a fair amount of work in philosophy. And these are all very cerebral abstract pursuits that end in equations. So they end in logic tracks.

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What baseball is, is a total embodiment of the ethos and the ontology of being. And so what I mean by ontology is the real chain and real meaning of being through embodied practice, embodied cultivation of technique. I do a lot of weightlifting as well, and that's something that's very

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high priority for me, it's a balance between technique and power. Technique and strength. It's this constant mutualized practice. You build strength, you cultivate technique, you build strength, you cultivate technique, and it's this constant ecosystem of bosons and fermions, so to speak, the two particles that construct the universe. This is again, it's very Nietzschean. It's the Apollonian and the Dionysian. It's the two

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impulses, order and chaos, and they're always in the process of being balanced. When you look at Mickey Mantle's swing, this is just the direct embodiment of the universal ontology of being itself in power and cultivation of form. Power, strength and control and technique. So there's these dual impulses that are at work consistently through baseball. And so when you have that seated down into a very perfect medium, such as the game and sport of baseball,

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how it is played and performed, the pitcher, the hitter, the catcher, all of the fielders, they're all practicing this principle. And so what I'm really gesturing toward is this is

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something that people are making. And so when I say people are making it, it's a labor construct. And this is what we miss so much, I believe, as a modern civilization and Western civilization itself. There's a deification of not making. This is the contemporary ethos of the collective or culture. It's that

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in not making or in my laziness or in the fact that I'm not engaged with life and I'm not in this passionate intercourse with the framework and field of life itself, I've achieved success. It's the idea of a CEO who's lounging on the beach in Cabo or something like that, right? It's this idea that once we stop doing this project, we've made it. It's the attempt to escape life. What I'm talking about is going deeper into life.

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I was watching this video actually, it's someone who builds houses and he just turned to the maker of the video and he said, I want my grandchildren to look at this and say, my grandfather built this house. This is the idea that undergirds the skyscrapers of New York City. This is the idea that undergirds the steel city of Pittsburgh or the city of Detroit. These are cities that were made by creative innovation and active building. Pride in the work. Pride in the craft. Devotion to the creation of structural beauty, symmetry, and aesthetic power and meaning incarnate in form. Stone, metal, flesh, blood.

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These are cities that were made by people who cultivated with detail and precision and aesthetic honesty and practice. These beautiful landmarks, these artistic landmarks, these churches in small towns or these post offices in small towns, which have long since been abandoned in the Appalachian or the Rust Belt. These are works of art.

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And these are works of art of American ingenuity and industrial ingenuity, the creativity of collective laborers. And baseball is and always has been the sport of labor. It's been the sport of the working class, sport of those who do. Mickey Mantle, again, is just a perfect example because he comes from a mining family. I'm conjuring here a mythology, a legend.

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A spiritual consciousness that is very specifically American, which is a laboring consciousness. It's an industrial consciousness, and it's a consciousness of the working class. This is something that's hitherto unprecedented, and it's something that, it lives very close to Christ in the sense that Christ was a champion of the underclass, whether that was the prostitutes or the poor or those who struggled.

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So what you have unfolding in baseball is, I'm not going to say a Christian mythos, but a Christ mythos. It's a mythos of the working underclass, the labor class, who themselves, through their very participation, become these mythic, Promethean, Herculean figures in their practice of bringing the spiritual center of being into consciousness, into life.

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Into awareness, into the everyday, through this ironworks, through this forging of baseball. Again, wood, steel, leather — this very, very earthly and earthbound medium of the sport of baseball. So this is something that's just crazy because of how unprecedented it is in a religious sense. And I do want to make that very clear. It's religious sense, really.

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This is — through the creation of the sport of baseball — American culture and civilization itself is grounding down a centuries long history of mythological dissociation or abstraction of the spirit and force and life of being and in a godly sense. And it's being incarnate into the practice, the ritualized spiritual practice of baseball. Again, blood, sweat.

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This is being ground down into the human being and we are creating the mythological legends and central figures. Again, I said this in one of the previous essays. The United States is not, this is not an empire of intellectualism. It's not an empire of the arts really at all. It's an empire of baseball. So in Europe you have Descartes, Voltaire, Nietzsche. In the United States you have Mantle, Mays, Aaron.

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Right? So it's a very different canon that we're working with here. And it's a beautiful thing. This is something that should be honored and respected and understood for the real contribution that it is. And that's a lot of the work that I'm doing here. It's to understand the American mythological and cultural framework for the beautiful creation that it is.

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Because what it does is something that's arguably more profound than what science can do or philosophy can do or what art can do. Because it's a perfection of the craft, the creation of the craft of baseball, but then the perfection of the craft of baseball through these figures like Gehrig or Mantle. These are people who as individuals undergo significant trial and turmoil in their personal life and they step onto the diamond and they become

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these larger than life figures, but they are still deeply, deeply, deeply human. So in Greece, you have Perseus, you have Hercules, you have these stories of the half man, half god, or the demigod figure. These people who straddle the two worlds, they straddle Olympus and they straddle the earth. This is what the sport of baseball avails America, and it avails America of this in a way

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that...

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you don't have in Greece, you have a mythological abstraction. Hercules and Perseus are icons, they're iconography, they're religious aspirational figures. So when you look at Christ or you look at Buddha, we're trying to find and create and locate a contemporary mythic epicenter for culture and civilization as an act of spiritual striving toward which people move.

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This is a cultivation of spiritual excellence. And in America, it's through the devotional form of baseball, through the spiritual athletic practice of baseball. This is incredibly profound. And when you look at this picture of Mickey Mantle, you look at this mid stride, mid swing, this is, I mean, it's American beauty in action. It's American athletic form and excellence in action, because he is, you can tell by the leverages —

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by the angles, by the geometry of the movement pattern that he's cultivated. This is a man who's dedicated his life to baseball. He has made baseball the spiritual sadhana of his life. And sadhana just means spiritual practice, essentially. It's the everyday spiritual toil. So you have these modern day monks, essentially, or aspirants, who through the sport of baseball rise into mythic legend.

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The mythic legend is itself the iron pillars and steel girding of the civilizational skyscraper of America itself. It's a beautiful thing. And again, we have to look at the origins of this sport. It's Gehrig, the child of poor immigrants living in the Bronx. And he's sleeping in the YMCA and just working there to make his way through his early years, as — I think, part janitor and part trainer. Mickey Mantle, the son of a miner.

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Walter Johnson, a farmer, Dizzy Dean, his parents are sharecroppers. This is the real epic mythic foundation of America. And it's so much deeper and more profound than any abstract myth as a civilizational, spiritual, cultural, social, religious backing can avail any other civilization. Because it is us. It’s emerging from the real, grounded, earthly, toward the earth and toward the toil of the earth fabric of what constitutes the foundation, pride, and laboring history of unity and struggle and emergence that is America itself. So what America has done and did

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and is doing with the sport of baseball and its epic lens, its historical lens, which has now spanned almost two centuries… what we're looking at here is

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the grounding down of spiritual truth, myth, grandeur into the blood, sweat and grit of

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the athletic cultivation of greatness. Again, in the Herculean sense, in the Persean sense — Hercules and Perseus are figures who undergo great physical trial, which is also spiritual trial, which is also psychological trial, similar to Christ in the desert. Christ fasting, Christ on the cross. Jackie Robinson enduring what he had to endure to integrate the major leagues. Rube Foster, the son of enslaved parents — the man who built the revolutionary Negro Leagues and was one of the greatest pitchers the game of baseball ever saw. These are all spiritual, physical, psychological trials. They're trials of the whole form of the human being.

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These are the modern day myths. Without exaggeration — because what this avails us is — it's again in the Perseian or Herculean sense… these are real people. These are people who come from, I mean, Satchel Paige, you don't even know how old he is because he was born in such a rural, poor area of the American South. There's no records for him. These are people who come from incredibly difficult circumstances and they rise

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in the American civilizational sense. And it's not that they rise to a level of wealth where they all of a sudden become these people who disappear from the culture. Not at all. It isn’t about money. And that’s the real secret, hid behind the superficial, surface level American obsession with capital and accumulation. They rise in a spiritual, mythological, epic sense to become the legends of American civilization. They rise through action. Through the beauty and grandeur of the mythic dance of centuries. They rise through the sport of baseball as practice, craft, devotion; athletic beauty. It is as intertwined with their lives at the soul level. It’s not only a mirror for them of spiritual struggle, but for all of us — as examples, as those who lived, live, and work among us — of the beauty of the human spirit and soul. And it is that profound. So I want to leave you with this. Think this is solid here. Just a beautiful picture of Mickey Mantle. It's the

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embodiment of athletic excellence because it's just him and the ball. Total focus. Just look at where his head is and look at that line, a diagonal line that goes straight from his front foot to the back of his head. The perfect backwards L that he makes generating force and leverage with the turn of the hip. Turn of the hip; the force and thrust that moves that bat through the through the plane of the strike zone.

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This is what the Greeks attempted to capture in stone. The American civilization is so much of what the Greek epic mythology attempted to conjure into being through abstract storytelling, mythology. Virgil, Ovid, Homer, you have a whole mythic epic tradition of the early, early, early Western civilizational constructs. Italy, Rome, Greece, Dante.

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It’s a spiritual striving and we have this as the historical lens of American civilization. We have this documented. It's in it's in photos. It's in videos. It's in baseball cards. It is real and it lives. This is the completion

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in a lot of ways of the foundational Greek mode of consciousness, the foundational teleology and epistemology of being which is articulated by the Greeks. Heraclitus or Plato — Heraclitus, the cosmos is fire, all is fire and returns to fire. That's something that's brought up by Schopenhauer later on that Nietzsche catches on to in terms of striving and the will.

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The will is embraced here, not negated — and it's an embrace on the diamond as a form of athletic striving. There's a concept for that in the Greek. It's called arete. It's the striving for excellence, virtue, the striving for greatness. And the baseball diamond itself is the realm in the field upon which this occurs. So when you have people like Mickey Mantle, we look at Prometheus or we look at Voltaire in the Western canon, there needs to be room made here. Mantle, Prometheus, Voltaire. That in itself is an epic lineage and triptych of the evolution of spiritual consciousness in and through Western civilization.

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There's a different understanding that's been created here in the American civilizational context. And I would argue it's perhaps and maybe even a greater understanding. You have to avail yourself of the possibility of stripping away all of the pretense, all of the logic flows, all of the scientific formulae; the attempt to understand reality and embrace this complete and total embodiment of athletic flow. It's called Wu Wei in the Dao.

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It's total presence, total focus, total embodiment through the practice and the toil. So Mantle straddles this. It's like Perseus the monk. Gehrig, Hercules the monk. It's a beautiful form that comes into incarnation in American civilization. And it's something that we don't really have a political or social consciousness for before. And it's something that I would argue we do not really fully understand yet. So that's a lot of what this is about here.

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Good to see you. I'll catch you on the next one.