Jose Mendez and The Call of Humanity Through Spiritual Portraiture

00:00

So this is going to be about the haunting of the baseball card and specifically the card of Jose Mendez here. This is the Nacionales Cigarros 1923 set.

This is the real importance of photography and image relics that in coalition with text — because text gives context, it gives dialogue, it gives circumstances.

01:29

We're looking at a very important topic, which is the dehumanization of black baseball players. The dehumanization of black baseball players, not only in Cuba, but in the United States.

01:56

When we look at Jose Mendez or Alejandro Oms, we're moving into a new context, which is Cuban black baseball players and the struggle for the integration of the Cuban professional leagues; the integration of baseball in 1900.

03:00

And the struggle — not only living in this incredibly tumultuous political, social, and cultural climate of Cuba — but being black in that climate. As much as the Cuban public admired these baseball players, black Cubans were still treated as less than in Cuba, even after abolition.

03:28

They were allowed to play baseball with the white Cubans. And they were celebrated. Mendez, Oms, Dihigo. These are figures of the Cuban national legacy that were celebrated and revered. Dihigo is a little further on in the 20th century, but Mendez and Oms are really powerful examples of this incredibly tumultuous transitional period in the Cuban national mind.

04:26

Oms survives tuberculosis. He dies pretty young. Jose Mendez also dies pretty young — at age 43. He was born during this period of intense tumultuous uprising, as was Alejandro Oms — Mendez was born at the end of the 1880s.

05:02

When you look at this picture, when you look at this photo on the card… you see something you don’t see very often in baseball cards or even photography as a whole — the humanization of the condition of his spirit; of his psychology and his emotions. It is so transparent and so visceral. This is why I'm terming the haunting of the baseball card or the ghost of the baseball card. The transparency of feeling that is given in this depiction of Mendez, this is what's beneath history.

So when we're exhuming history, we're not really worried about statistics; it's almost like we're not even really worried about details. And this is the really crucial thing. It gets back to this concept of historical recovery, because what we're exhuming when we're exhuming history is we're exhuming the soul and retrieving the soul.

06:26

It's almost like the underworld mission of Orpheus. And it's funny to use that metaphor — because this takes me to Satchel Paige his popular idea and euphemism: don't look back because something might be gaining on you. And of course in the Orpheus myth, he looks back to make sure Eurydice is still there and she inevitably is taken back into Hades — because he's told that he's not allowed to look back to make sure she is there with him as he retrieves her from hell.

What he's doing there is he's exhuming a ghost. He's attempting to bring the dead back to life. It's to provide and restore the humanity and the dignity. To bring the life back. As a global project of the retrieval of this humanity. And what it comes back to is ultimately that the suffering is denied, repressed, marginalized, silenced — that is dehumanized.

This is an ongoing political and social problem in our world today, around the world, both in terms of immigration and native populations — especially if the color of their skin is dark. This dehumanization has such such horrible effects on the psychology and on the spirit of a human being.

When I look at this picture of Jose Mendez, there is a gift that's being given to us here. A gift of his ability and willingness to bear his soul to the camera.

And it's so easy, I think, when you're discussing these things, to create a form of cultural recourse — which is like a metaphor — to encompass this person's experience; to maybe discuss a physical detail or discuss how they were received in a certain place or to compare them to another person or individual. These are all forms of subtle erasure of the direct, embodied, immanent soul of historical experience of humanity. The complexity and contrast; the hues and powers of the emotional embodiments therein. The real history of human time.

11:04

The gift of this image is a direct encounter. It's not just a portrait. He's gazing back into your soul with his. It's a moment of immense magnitude in vulnerability that has been preserved for the camera, with the camera as a technological device of visceral memory and recounting of countenance and expression. What would we really know of Jose Mendez without something like this? I would say, quite simply — very little.

He could even tell you the story of his life, like Satchel Paige did in his autobiography. So much of what Satchel Pagie created as a mythos and as an imagination is the bounds between myth and history are stretched and contorted. And this is a large part of Black absurdism and Black surrealism as cultural and literary and artistic movements is that the experience, the traumatic experience of history — as a lived experience — as it is digested and metabolized… there is an imaginative crux that's formed there. Between the literal thing itself and the experience of the thing itself and the psychological ingestion of the experience; then how the figure or the character of the individual is formed through that crux of trauma and impact and burden. In terms of exclusion, in terms of racial violence. In terms of erasure. In terms of being seen and objectified as less than and dehumanized.

This is a really important part of what we are discussing here with the spiritual image and portraiture of Mendez; the importance of acknowledging Satchel Paige as a bard and a black cultural artist and storyteller of the highest order. He is in the same frame and word as the best… Ellison, Baraka. He has woven life; himself through baseball and his human experience has painted a vision of reality among the greatest literary figures of the 20th century; American history at large.

In the portrait of Mendez, you are having a real encounter with someone. Unmediated by language and speech. In total presence and witnessing of pure soul and being without words. He is not hedging his expression — the soul in his face and his eyes. It made me think of Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks:

‘I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.’ (p. 109).

‘“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible… All I wanted was to be a nian among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together. But I rejected all immunization of the emotions. I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man… Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of my being….’ (p. 112-114).

It's this idea that he's being seen from the outside as something that is wrong or bad or violent or violating in this highly racialized context, this highly violent context that's being created through this perceived extreme difference in humanity. His humanity, his soul, his inner nature and his desire to know, to build, to share, to love — is not being seen. He’s being objectified as a black man — a man to be afraid of, or separated from, or treated as less than.

13:45

When you have this encounter, the true encounter of soul to soul, the direct unmediated eye to eye spiritual contact of vision between beings — humans, animals, across our entire ecological sphere of totality… because I'm having this encounter now and you have the encounter by the nature of looking at the image — it is a profound depth of suffering, struggle, experience. The experience to be seen, heard, understood — to find language for yourself. For your soul. To express the entire free nature of your being and thus to be fulfilled in this world and thus self realized. To become the artist and painter of your own life. The freedom and the majesty.

The turmoil and almost horror of presence that's been distilled in this image of Mendez. The horror of presence for the witnessing of history for someone who is and has been lucid to it. There’s a prophetic quality to this image. Someone who has been witnessed to things that you're not going to read about. Things that have been eternally submerged and psychically communicated in the thrust and presence of his very being. His stature, his gaze, his facial muscles. The full presence of his form. This is where I have a very visceral and radical deviation from history and historical materialism — for this reason very reason.

Because of the way that psychological metabolism functions.

The experience that is being detailed.

15:13

Whether that's statistics, whether that's historical events, these things as ledgers do not and cannot account for the psychological metabolism of the experience of horrors, which are encounters that are never encapsulated or encompassed by a physical reenactment or retelling of an experience that someone has.

This is the real, deeper spiritual power of the photographic encapsulation. It allows for history to emerge in full body, to return — that has been compressed and condensed into sediment… literally into rock or into stone or into dirt, just by the nature of the passage of time in terms of the decay and entropy of the human body or the destruction of monuments and architecture and statues, as we discussed.

This expands and restores historical time at the deepest level, at the level of the spirit and at the level of the soul — which is the level of the human experience. And the gift that Mendez gives in this photograph is the total bearing of the vulnerability of the soul and the total presence therein of his humanity, that we are able to then experience and actively commune with now. He reaches across time with the conveyance of the eternality of his nature; of his innate humanity. To be received, to be heard, to be listened.

17:32

This is something that's deeply sacred. And it's sacred because of what it affirms and what it denies. It affirms his humanity. And it denies the myth of his lack of humanity or his dehumanization or his inhumanity, which is the story that has been and is being told. So when we get to this level or substratum of experience, witnessing it and being present with it not only in oneself but in another right is the sacred.

This the sacred act, the religious act or the spiritual act — and again, this is the power and the beauty of baseball in its truest form. It's easy to get caught up in the action right or the movement — both in history and in baseball — and that's a lot of the tension that baseball continually elucidates. It is that we're between two poles. Being and becoming. Action and the stillness of presence. It's the moment of high action and then the moment of complete stillness and rest. It’s the musicality of time. And the beauty of baseball is that it restores both and allows for both as essential rhythms and facets of the experience.

And this moment with Mendez in this picture here is complete and utter stillness, which is the being. There's total presence. He's totally engaged with this photographic act. And through his eyes, you are given the opportunity — he's present with the opportunity; providing it through his engagement with the photographic act — to show you who he is and how he feels.

19:37

This kind of historical restoration act is utterly of the essence. Utterly necessary and completely powerful.

This is really what baseball is asking of us, right?

20:09

When you look at baseball history, especially when it comes to segregation and integration; especially when it comes to people who were slaves, who labored in the mines — what baseball is asking of us is to restore our collective humanity. That's the real historical call of baseball beneath the game; beneath the perceived history of surfaces and refractions and glimmers of light, the cultural narratives that are being told.

And in order to do so, I think it's incredibly important that we have these relics and these artifacts — especially these images. This one photograph here, tells us more than almost all of the information that's currently available to us about Jose Mendez and his life. Because we in that sense are on the outside looking in, right? We're trying to understand by way of historical details, which merely serve to accentuate the depths of the real picture of humanity and the human being. The essences; the turmoils, the wrestlings. The notations are something that can enhance the picture.

But without this kind of spiritual encounter, there's a huge hole in our ability to perceive, our ability to understand, our ability to know, and our ability to humanize, and our ability to be human. To commune with another across space; across time. And this hole is the hole of presence. It becomes absence, negation. The loss of the form of the body. The viscerally metabolized experience of time and struggle. The craft and form of the body as it passes through entropic cycles of being. This is the real wear and drag of time. It cannot be symbolized textually. It is worn, adorned, embodied, encarnate — sensually and physically.

23:23

This portrait to me is an essential artifact — because of what it says… not only about Jose Mendez and Jose Mendez's life, but he also is able to, and through this, speak for his time. He speaks in this vulnerability of presence in a deeper method of engagement. He speaks in this way for and through the soul of his people and the trials therein. He speaks it through emotion, or the art of duende. The art of the soul, the dirt, the fundamental ground of being. In this way, it becomes transpersonal; a cultural embodiment of a community’s experience. This is the way an artist speaks. Through the individual touching the communal; through the communal touching the eternal.

23:50

It's quite difficult to hear these voices — because you're piecing together these stories and these histories. Particularly in an island nation like Cuba, which underwent so much political turmoil over the 19th and the 20th centuries. Restoring these historical narratives down to the level and the substratum of human experience is very difficult because you're already just trying to piece together the basic historical, physical, fundamental facts of events. Even these legacies are fragmented; recovered in archival documents in attics, lost to natural events; war and uprising.

24:26

There's a good quote here, from Mendez’s SABR biography:

‘Mendez was the very embodiment — through his name, skin tone, and Yoruba cultural heritage — of the Cuban nation as represented by the ideals that led Cubans to fight for independence during his childhood…

The special Negro Leagues committee, Cooperstown's election of 2006, was likely long overdue and can be justified as a needed antidote to the sport's unforgivable racist past. But quick fixes are often prone to flaws in execution….’

25:01

So an argument about his election to the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.

This is an issue.

‘Early life details are equally incomplete and shadowy… Nieto's Spanish language volume is mostly hagiography plus endless strings of box scores… Details of Mendez's death are also at best quite sketchy….’

So here you go. This is the realm of myth and legend. Again, connecting this to Satchel Page. This is so important. Because historical black narratives and black history is a legacy of erasure by way of institutional racism. Violence and colonial power, extricating resources by way of force — as is the case in American slavery and Spanish colony; the subsequent American legacy of political control and exertion of force in Cuba at the turn of the 20th century.

25:53

When you're looking at the turmoil of the Cuban nation, it's so difficult to truly understand. A real picture, a real objective picture by any means. Even in a well-established empire, historical narratives are corrupted by bias. The picture that is painted is the picture the political power wants you to see. Empire being the backlogs and institutional archives of libraries, congressional systems; the cultural modes of production therein. Images, texts, newspapers. Et cetera.

Here it is, right? It's so easy to get landlocked into those details and physical events. And those are disputed grounds. That’s the territory of war. Who writes the resolution of time; whose belief system or ideology of power it favors. Who is human and who is inhuman therein; accordingly, the status symbols and monuments of power and control and authority that are constructed therein.

When you're confronted by a moment like this — a moment made possible in, by, and through historical transmission of the soul — you realize it isn't so much about that, right? It's not about the stories of events. It's not about the disputes of authority, like the Cooperstown induction. That whole thing to me is screaming, silently — you're on the wrong track. You don’t understand. You’re not seeing.

26:51

We are here to really see. It's an argument over something that's inessential. What's essential is the encounter that's present here, that Mendez gives as a gift through time, that is preserved in the object of the baseball card here. This Cigarro Nacionales Jose Mendez card.

This is a historical moment that transcends time. It's a spiritual breach. Its the eternal by way of the temporal. It shatters the passage that we seek to retain and understand and thus construct our identity by reaching back through time to our essential origins as a species. It’s the ancestral incarnate. It’s the voice of the dead. We're reaching through time into something eternal, which is the real communion. The real presence between individuals through this. The baseball card, the image, the photograph — it is a mediation that dissolves time as an elixir into the direct perception and experience of truth; the transcendental realm.

This is something that almost bypasses and springboards over and through history, by way of the reality of history, or what history really is — fragments that reveal. Not constructs of narrative and ideology and concept that conceal. This is the real historical materialism. Recovery of soul through the body of that which remains. The artifactual. Because it is the allowance to get to the core and the essence and the center of being, which is the vulnerability and the total presence. Only the remaining image or the soul embodied or imbued object provides this.

Through these artifacts and through these relics, if you just tune in, if you tune the dial a little bit, you're there. You're there. You're in the history, you're in the truth of history because you're no longer lingering on these surface level details to try to form and inform a construct which only tells you about what was going on on the surface anyway. And these constructs are always already incomplete. They’re segments of linear narrativization. Timelines. What is beneath time? The direct unmediated encounter of the soul is present here through the artifact.

28:42

This is what's so important about historical restoration. And this is why it's so important that these artifacts are preserved and that they are made available to the public to be understood and to be engaged with. Again, the purpose of museums, purpose of archives, the purpose of really conscious curation at the public level. Because it's a historical restoration process and project of humanity. And through the right artifact, you're able to do that and you can accomplish it and you can see it. You can restore and sanctify humanity that was previously denied — through racism, through discrimination, through nationalism and dehumanization.

And thus you are doing this great spiritual service to the history of humanity and to Jose Mendez in this process. We are restoring our interconnected unity.

29:30

This is the power of the artifacts, especially this kind of very direct, vulnerable portraiture. I don't think you really see something like this very often. This here is very haunting and visceral. You look into his eyes, you look into the way that he engages with the camera. He wants you to experience the fullness and wholeness of his humanity. His dreams, his horrors, his struggle, his emergences.

And to experience his humanity is to, in some ways, understand him. To know him. There is much about Jose Mendez that will always be unknowable. His internal human experience and the trials of that experience… the suffering, the joys, the elation. There is such a deep privacy to the human experience; that which is unexpressed and perhaps which is inexpressible. The privacy of experience that is metabolized and transformed and transfigures the soul of the being from within. A lot of joy and pride and creation through baseball, I can imagine, through profound mastery of the sport, the craft.

This is a call. This is not a number. This is not a description or list of events. Where someone went, what someone did. This is a call to say, this is the metabolism of my human experience through the entire churn of my lived life. I am wearing it and saying it silently upon me here. And meet me there. Meet me here. So that's the end of this episode. I'll catch you on the next one.