Playing With The Void

Playing With The Void

I was talking to my friend just a little while ago about this void, this sense of meaninglessness and emptiness that he feels in his life. People fill it with drugs, sex, television, pills, control, power - you name it. And he’s been in the process of slowly but steadily removing these things from his life. ‘Seeing through the mask of the persona, or the personality’ - I was saying to him. It’s this pervasive thing, this attitude that we have, perhaps entirely out of a pure sense of desperation in the face of the vacuum of existence; the visceral, physical embodied sense of the passage of time: ‘What can I really hold onto? What can really give me meaning? What survives?’ On my birthday this year, I stumbled across a Bob Gibson autographed card, from the 1960 Topps set. It had clearly been signed later on in his life, his name scribbled tightly together in bold blue marker across the middle-front of the card. I immediately, instinctively, ran over to tell my dad - ‘This is it, this is the birthday gift I want this year’. And I looked at that moment; I look at it now - it was this childish moment of pure joy, a total kid move - I saw the card and it was like I was eight again. We went to this little shack, after baseball practices; after I’d earned money umpiring or working at the ice cream shop down the street - it was called AJ’s Sports Stop. Piled to the brim, desks, drawers, full of vintage. I got a ‘60 Topps Spahn, a ‘57 Pee Wee Reese, ‘57 Erskine, Drysdale… it was a lot of the old Brooklyn Dodgers. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard says, ‘life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’. These moments that I’ve just detailed may seem like superficial timelines, but they reveal a deeper, hidden inner truth about legacy, family, and ancestry. His dad watched the Dodgers and Giants play at the Polo Grounds and Ebbets while he worked as a newspaper salesman. When he lost his job when my dad was just a young boy, he drank himself to death. The day his dad died, his mother told him to go to work. So he did. I’ve had an incessant need throughout my life to understand. To understand everything. How the world works, the universe spins, the psychology of the human mind, you name it. But I realized this year, something so incredibly important. What I needed to understand most is how I got here - how I got to this place, this emptiness, this vacuum, this pain. This pain that I know so many feel, in so many different ways, and struggle to articulate. So we turn to drugs. We turn to sex, violence, numbing ourselves. To food - anything that will let us feel again. Even an inch or an ounce of pleasure, of something, even pain - to let us know we are alive. This year I turned to baseball cards, and it opened up my past in ways I couldn’t have expected. All of those players we got - those were my dad’s dad’s favorite players. He never got to hear from him what Ebbets Field was like… what it was like watching Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig,

the Babe. The only cards he had were his own - the bright, almost fluorescent Topps 1975 edition being most prominent. He’d flip them in the playground at school in Queens, or on the street corners with his friends and classmates. We still don’t know which of the cards he has ‘are his’, so to speak. And this is how I feel about life, my life, and the essence and nature of time and change itself. I can’t draw a line between myself, or anything. I realize, through years of inner searching, that I am almost entirely composed of the past. My desires, my urges, my dreams - they’re constructed. My biological destiny, my cultural assumptions, my language - they’re learned attributes, designed to help me survive in a climate which I never truly understood; perhaps a climate which we never truly understand. This, the absurdity of standing between time and timelessness, temporality and the eternity and the void and abyss of uncertainty and oblivion - this, to me, is the human condition. So when I think about baseball cards, or when I hold a baseball card, I think about the philosopher Albert Camus, and how he talks about the essence and nature of the absurdity of the human condition, and how we deal with it. We’re born from millions of years of evolutionary developments which were brought on by a composite force much greater than us, but a force of which we actually are. And we all, across all religions, nations, and creeds, have many different ways of describing this, signifying it, and culturally experiencing it together. For me, when I hold a baseball card I hold something that perfectly represents the ephemerality of what it is to be human - this moment in time that is corroding into something infinitely otherwise. But I am also holding something that reminds me of the importance of play; the importance of remaining an eternal child. Here’s another quote: “The perfect state, the summum bonum, is Play. In play, life expresses itself in its fullness. God’s life is play. Adam fell when his play became serious business.” This is by a Christian mystic named Jakob Boehme, who lived a couple hundred years ago, in a time where there was no America, nor the concept of the baseball card, nor the sport of baseball. When I think of play, I think of what is necessary in the face of the unknown, uncertainty; the struggle of existence. For so many of us, at so many different stages and phases of our lives play is and was all we had. As children, all we did was play - until we were reprimanded and structured by adults into the play-acting adults we became. And life became deathly serious: filled with bills, life or death decisions, relationships with contracts, rules… that if broken could destroy the sandcastles we had built for ourselves, so perilously out on the ledge of infinity. We are here to find joy; we are here because we must find joy. And I think that’s what draws so many of us to the game of baseball; the collection of baseball cards as a way of holding and experiencing a piece of living history. The game has changed so much in a few brief years that anyone even from a generation or two generations past could scarcely recognize it. And yet, it

would be an undeniable sameness. An essence that remains in the singing of the national anthem, crackling across a radio broadcast of a Dodgers/Yankees World Series. Red Barber, or Gary Cohen - as it is in our household. I’ve lived for those summers these past few years: just being in the kitchen of my apartment by the river in Richmond, Virginia, the screen door propped open, just listening to Gary, Keith, and Ron. I don’t even need to see the game - but I need to hear it, feel it. Be present with it. Be in time with it. Like a piece of music. Life for me feels most complete and most coherent with baseball on in the background. It’s like white noise, or something that holds me up; reminds me that I’m here, experiencing life with everyone else in this world; especially with everyone else who loves and cherishes the game of baseball. At Citi Field this past fall, deep into the playoffs against the Dodgers, my dad and I sat with the 7 Line Army out in straightaway center next to the Big Apple; everyone was in sync. It was a perfect harmony of passion. People who couldn’t miss this game; who couldn’t miss our Miracle Mets make it this far. Baseball, as a child, was my identity. It was a huge part of who I was. I can’t say I was anything then but the influence that my dad; my parents had upon me. It was hours of pitching practice. It was going out to the field and hitting balls with my dad; playing catch in the front yard; diving into the big bush by the edge of the neighbors’ lawn. Baseball, in large part, raised me - like it raised my dad. Baseball was what his dad left him; he didn’t leave him with much. No one taught him how to manage money, how to grow up, how to be a man. What it meant to do anything in this world. He, like my mom, didn’t have the luxury of having a family that did anything but further alienate them from themselves; inflict great suffering and pain - brought about, in large part, by their own trauma. Traumas and wounds that stretch back farther than any of us may ever know. And here I am; I know that I am and was a product of that. A product of houses that couldn’t afford toothpaste. Where domestic violence was regular. But I do know that something that was left to me remains because I choose it, and that is the sport of baseball. The passion, the excitement I feel at looking at a card of Grover Cleveland Alexander; finding the unexpected art of a strip card, or looking deep into the past at the Gashouse Gang, the Black Sox; the stories of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. When I look back at baseball, I look back at a legacy of persistence. Of men and women and their families who worked in the fields and on the farms of America; of men and women and their families who struggled through periods of deep strife in the two World Wars; throughout this country’s brutal history of segregation and slavery. When I look at the history of baseball, I see a mirror into the past that shows me myself - a mirror that shows me humanity; how we are all linked, through the greatest turmoil; pain, and suffering and what it means to emerge from these great struggles victorious.

For in play we are victorious; in baseball, the experience of the sport, of the game is an immense victory. It is the triumph of the human inclination towards play; the growth and development, changes and shifts of a game that has had to rapidly adapt to technological and global innovation. At some point soon, I’ll write an essay talking about Jackie and the Civil Rights Movement. We have to understand that baseball is that big; that the victory of the sport itself and our work as curators, archivists, and treasurers of the game in our impassioned participation in the legacy of baseball is a way of not only keeping the memory of those who came before us alive, but honoring their contribution in making perhaps the most important institution of this country what it is. They don’t call it America’s Pastime for nothing. And it’s that word - Pastime - that tells it all. Something we do for a hobby. Enjoyment. Play. We need to be there as a species. For so long, throughout the course of human history - we have suffered against the elements; against one another; drawn barriers, borders, boundaries. And like Jackie in 1947, play breaks boundaries. Play is a radical integrator. It brings people together. It doesn’t seek to separate. This entire essay reminds me of Lindor on the Mets; what he’s brought to our team. Every single game, he signs for at least a half an hour - line after line of kids with cards, balls, and jerseys. Game after game, no matter how serious the stage, he makes sure to hug and say hi to his friends on the other team. This is what it is to be a true leader, regardless of what baseball says or means, or what the score is. It’s to pick up someone else who is suffering, struggling. Someone who needs a hand; someone who needs a friend. In the hardest moments of my struggle as a young child with the deep seated intergenerational trauma of my family lineage, picking up that 1960 Topps Warren Spahn card is a memory I will never forget. I’d finally save up enough money; march right into AJ’s Sport Stop… and I’d know one of these old legends, these players. From what my dad had told me about his dad. And so I got deeper and deeper into the game. The history of the Negro Leagues; the archives at Cooperstown. As time went on, it became less about the game, playing it, whatever it was - and more about what baseball means, what it can provide us in times of horror. Because baseball was always there. We kept playing right through both wars. Jackie stayed on that field when fans said unconscionable things to him. I’ll never forget this quote by Rachel Robinson: "I thought it was a very supportive gesture (refusing to sign a petition that threatened a boycott if Jackie Robinson joined the team), and very instinctive on Pee Wee's part. You shouldn't forget that Pee Wee was the captain, and he led the way. When Jack first entered (the Major Leagues), there were still a lot of people who didn't know if it was the right thing to do. Pee Wee used all of his leadership skills and sensitivity to bring the team together... Pee Wee was more than a friend. Pee Wee was a good man." At the deepest level, its not about the game. Its about the possibilities and opportunities for real joy and human connection that the game brings to us. It’s about the possibilities of a real and

radical togetherness. A real sharing around the hearth of the heart, who we are, and the joy of play that brings out the radiant, loving child in all of us. And in our darkest moments; when our souls are pitted up against strife, uncertainty, emptiness, and oblivion, these are the times when we need baseball the most. It gives us a reason to play. A diamond to play on. Cards to trade. It gives us a space, a structure - in which we can share and make memories; a foundation steeped in time and shared language. And by way of this foundation, we can build something real, in the midst of the sound and the fury.