FROM THE NEW ARTIST
(but written in 1986 when b. ball was just beginning its loss of innocence)
by Victor Greentree

I dream of a future world which still relishes baseball, and many other earth things that we love. What advanced consciousness should mean is a wiping away of the film, the haze of perception, which now prevents us from seeing the real significance of our present world.

Marshal McLuhan was right about baseball. Twenty-five years ago he predicted:

the inclusive mesh of the TV image ... spells (its) doom. ... the game is passed on as a joke, like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. ... This is especially true of periods of suddenly altered attitudes, resulting from some radically new technology.

Our technology certainly has ruined our grand old game. Unlike McLuhan, though, I know the exact moment it began to happen: when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's record and when teams started playing on astroturf. Maris's "new record"--after the addition of two teams in 1961--was of course THE BIG LIE, the erasing of all historical documents and their reshaping to suit the present authorities. It sold tickets, sparked new life into a declining public interest, and ended the "tyranny" of the old-time greats over youngsters like Maris who, through attorneys and player-agents who probably dreamed up the deal in the first place, were about to usher in an era of multi-million dollar contracts. And that was the end of baseball--as a sport. Players were now entertainers on a par with Wayne Newton and Sinatra in Vegas. They had all kinds of deals written in and their bodies were now of measurably astronomical value. Any minor infirmity called for a battery of orthopedic consultations and a refusal to play--or "talk to my attorney."

Comparing Ruth's 1927 season of 154 games with Maris's demonstrable one season flash in 1961 of 165 games is like comparing apples and tangelos. (What we really need are two sets of records.) But more importantly, it established the precedent that any player's seasonal total of a statistically compiled factuality that was greater than any of his predecessor's would now blot out the past and tradition in favor of the instantaneous all-meaningful here & now. As for the alchemy of sod into synthetic veldt, I must agree with third baseman Dick Allen who said at the time,

"If horses won't eat it, I don't want to play on it."

McLuhan goes on to explain just why baseball is now unsuitable for modern minds and times:

For baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age... TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball... In contrast, American football is nonpostional, and any of all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance.

In contrast to McLuhan's tortuous technocratic prose--a fine specimen of the non-literate age--here is a poet's uncluttered vision. It cuts through petty intellectualized zit pickings like "the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living" for a momentary excursion into the truth about ourselves:

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.
Donald Hall

What McLuhan, a Canadian, doesn't understand about baseball would take megabytes. Baseball isn't just a sport. It is our one major mass public contest which can go beyond itself into a religiously explicit way of thinking. Of all our major games, it is the only one independent of external time. There are no halves, no quarters, no clock. The game only ends when the last man is out. Theoretically, it could go on forever. For this reason, entering a ball park is akin to entering a Gothic cathedral, say, at Cologne or Chartres. One has the sense of being in that Other World--and leaving the mundane far behind.

And then, there is the strange mystical arrangement to baseball's symbols: the bat fashioned only from the Ash, in Nordic myth the sacred tree of the god Wodan. The ball, the horsehide, covered with the dead skin of this hellish beast. And the strange individualistic duel of the two heroes: the pitcher with the horsehide who directs the time of the game, and the solitary batter with his Ash staff who must combat his control. But the magic goes much further if one is inclined to believe in numbers. Look at the ball diamond. It is really a mandala--with four corners. As in the Native American Medicine Wheel, each corner has been established as a fixed earth direction: homeplate, to the west, centerfield, to the east--a left handed pitcher is a southpaw. But the central point of the mandala, the pitcher's mound, makes five. Five is a number very sacred to Our Mother Earth, the Goddess. To Earth Time. The other numbers sacred to Her are three and nine. Three corresponds to the phases of the moon: waxing, full, waning. In baseball, we find nine players per team playing nine innings of three outs, each out consisting of three strikes.

To watch a ball game, even as the distorted image of television's present commercial casting, is to view a holy reenactment. For in the Goddess' realm--where two gods traditionally battled over the reign of the year's cycle of seasons--baseball is our game of summer and our male-dominant Rite of Spring, clearly out-doing Easter. In Easter we find all of the universal elements of the return of life to the earth: the resurrection of the God of life, the Easter egg (which derives from the archaic "glain," a red egg produced in the spring by two copulating serpents, a symbol of fertility), and the name Easter, itself, which comes from the Teutonic spring goddess, Eostre. But, for Americans, what symbolizes that winter finally has ended and life will go on is that early April chilled outing: Opening Day. Here is our Spring Equinox, the balance moment when time tilts from darkness into light. And then come glorious hot summer days of bats and games and homers. Long afternoons in the stands and nights outdoors with the lights on. And the culmination of everyone's dream of eternity: the All-Star Game. Our Summer Solstice festivity, honoring the gods on a green field of mandelic time.

You sometimes wonder how so many people could watch baseball all these years and fail to notice these things, but it does seem to have happened. And yet a possibility asserts itself: Some see utopia in futuristic social forms, in a kind of spiritual mind pureness, an abstracted advanced technology state, a crystallized "critical mass". And, while all that may in fact someday be true, I cannot help thinking that for the near term at least it will mean a greater appreciation for the simple, overlooked gifts we already possess. I dream of a future world which still relishes baseball, and many other earth things that we love. What advanced consciousness should mean is a wiping away of the film, the haze of perception, which now prevents us from seeing the real significance of our present world. Rather than something entirely Star Wars-ish, it need merely allow us to appreciate. Without that appreciation, any so-designated new technical age is meaningless anyway. What good are the external, material forms of any particular media without increased internal awareness? And awareness allows us to choose with sensitivity the values in any and all media and frees us of their domination. Our occupying the generation of computers hasn't precluded our use of the book or the spoken word.

While baseball has declined, the decline hasn't affected gate receipts. On the contrary, many of baseball's present ills stem from its success in TV markets. Because advertisers were willing to pay huge amounts for the television rights to baseball games, the sums involved became enormous and players, admittedly underpaid, began demanding some of the profits formerly culled by owners. Players who formerly depended upon skillful play as the chief means of gratification were now becoming millionaires. And wealth brought unionism and contracts with all sorts of trade options that, in conjunction with another TV gift, expansionism, meant the end of the dynasties, the illustrious great teams of the game: the 20s Yankees or the 40s Cardinals or the 50s Dodgers. In fact, no team in over a decade has even won two world championships in a row. Save one. An expansion franchise that simply bought it.

And so we come to the present moment and THE BIG LIE, when profit and non-understanding media have even eradicated time. The World Series, which traditionally was our harvest festival marking the end of summer, has been thrown into late fall when below freezing temperatures--plummeted further in games played at night for TV market reasons--create stiff hands and less than ideal playing conditions for the "best games of the year." We anxiously await the day Toronto and Montreal complete the summer sport's season in a blizzard. Football now starts in July, baseball ends in November and basketball seems to run forever. College basketball teams now play a professional schedule of twenty-five to thirty games a season and high school teams have nationwide schedules. With this expansionism and demands on athletes to perform at a ruthless pace, the World Series and other season-end tournaments are no longer culminations and measures of greatness, but a struggle with exhaustion at the end of a long itinerary.

But sport after all is merely symptomatic of a culture. Of THE BIG LIE. Of a civilization which knows only "the news of the day." We no longer celebrate Washington's or Lincoln's births. These have become the vague and bland President's Day. With the omnipotent confidence that human beings can actually save daylight, and for no other reason whatsoever, we require all citizens to reset their clocks twice a year temporarily throwing everyone's time balance haywire. Almost all of our important holidays, occasions for traditional remembrance, have been switched to Mondays to create the non-seasonal, amnesiac "long weekend." And Christmas begins the day after Thanksgiving, and trick-or-treating children are gone, vanished, swallowed in a cloud of our big city paranoia.

What a future world could mean is the bringing of art to everything. To the making of understanding media. For example, what might artists do with baseball and television? McLuhan was somewhat right in his comparison of the television image as a medium for baseball and football. Football is a sport that adapts almost directly to the tube. Most all of the action occurs within the frame of the television picture and when it moves out of that frame, as in a long pass or a long run, the action is linear and uni-directional and easily followed by the camera. It isn't as suited for live viewing because there are a limited number of seats in a stadium that have the exactly right-sized viewing screen as one would find on TV. If one is very high up, then the players become very small and one sees a whole field most of which is not being used. If one is too close, one misses overall patterns of action. In addition the space-sense that football occupies is dense (all events are enclosed within the frame) and its sense of time is rapid. These factors saturate the television screen giving it a high level of excitement.

In contrast, baseball is ideally viewed within the stadium. Only in this live cathedral-like presentation can one perceive the enormous space and time of the game. Because time is so slowed and the space so great, the viewing area must include all of the players at once. This is unsatisfactory on television because, due to the size of the screen, the players become ant-sized. The sense of space and time is accentuated by the erraticness of baseball's time pattern: long periods of zen-like no activity with irregular brief spurts of intense action.

Baseball can be viewed successfully on television, but to do this takes careful artistic choices. First, to replicate the vast space of baseball, it needs to be shown with no announcers or commentators. Baseball must create a silence within which one's awareness of the action can arise, rather than having that awareness blotted out and then recreated by an external observer. Telecasts would have just the noise of the stadium crowd, carefully recorded, and a small area of the screen at the bottom giving score, balls, strikes and outs. Second, to replicate the vast space of the playing field and spread-out players, there needs to be a continuous series of rapid close-up and near-shot images. These "player shots" would be split-screen multiple images showing as many as four players at once. Of each outfielder, of each infielder. The close-ups would show the player's expression, how he is moving, how he is standing, how he is filling the time as the pitcher prepares to throw the ball. These would occur between pitches, for when the time comes for the pitcher to throw, the focus would go just to that interchange of pitcher and batter. (Although, in the interim times, pitcher and batter can also be shown.) Then, if the batter hits a ball, the entire simultaneous multiple events should be shown in multiple split-screen images. That is, there would be enough cameras and cameramen to cover simultaneously all areas of the playing field. The game also requires a very good director-editor who can make these combinations, even if the telecast is very slightly time-delayed. (Note: it already is.)

In this way, television can be an ideal medium for baseball coverage. Baseball isn't "a game of one-thing-at-a-time" but in fact very much like the information age of minute, multitudinous events. As such, it is adaptable to media like television and film that make use of split images. The contrasting rituals of football and baseball are analogous to the differing types of consciousness altering music. Football is like the very fast and busy rhythm of the African drum or complex electronics while baseball is like the endless drone sound, the OM chant. Both can alter consciousness but in opposite ways. The fast rhythm speeds up our nervous systems to a pulse-like sensation, but when we relax into that pulse, we become very peaceful and quiet. We must slow ourselves down to enter the reality of the OM, and when that slowing has taken place, we can perceive all of the many subtle details--the hundreds of resonances contained in a single OM. An artistic use of television for baseball emphasizes its OM quality and then shows the resonances in split images.

What this discussion of baseball would show is how a man-made technology which is non-spiritual, a sporting event, can become reflective of the spirit world--with understanding. Understanding simply means then bringing our awareness to media. When we bring our awareness to any medium, whether it is spiritual or non-spiritual, that medium then understands us. Understanding media understand the human condition in its deepest sense. This makes for a positive healing attitude because we feel a sympathy with our environments. A totally understanding medium, the Earth, understands us without our having to input our nature into it, without our doing anything. It is Earth Time. Relatively understanding media, man-made technologies, become understanding to the extent we interact our psyches with them.

The interaction can be spiritual or non-spiritual. Non-spiritual media are any not directly spiritual: the political, the humorous, the instructional, the entertaining and so forth. But the non-spiritual must also come out of awareness. The significance of awareness coming into prominence was described by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain:

The evolution of human consciousness would then have become the dominant area of human activity, and we would have shifted from the Information Age into the Consciousness Age.

Yes, we are at a crossroads at this very moment: should we continue on the present track of information-consumptionism--what I am compelled to call our Counter-Art Society and shall describe shortly--that leads to a world run by computers and robots? Or must we choose--be forced to choose--an entirely new age? The Age of Consciousness, or Awareness, would close the split we now find between the secular and the holy, the daily and the special, that now makes modern life so discordant and schizoid. Shall artists bring understanding into all media?