The Death of Subjectivity and the Function of Baseball History as a Revelation

00:01

So this one's going to be called the Death of Subjectivity and the Function of Baseball History as a Revelation. I've pulled together three different photographs which I think describe this phenomenon in the most clear way or fashion.

The first one is a commemorative photograph of a group of coal miners headed to a baseball event in early 1900s. The second is the 1908 Nebraska Indian baseball team cabinet photograph. And the third is a photograph of the Red Sox spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas — 1914.

01:03

So the idea here is to talk about baseball history as a progression and a movement that shows really the lack of true individuality. Baseball history is traditionally marked by the individuals who make significant statistical contributions or change the way the game is played — or are remembered as standing out from the milieu of the phenomenon of baseball proper.

But the way that I see baseball history, and we've talked about this… as a communal phenomenon that is an emergent network — a series of happenings that are occurring in relationship to one another that are exploding like different star clusters in different pockets or regions of the Western hemisphere.

And these developments can all ultimately be reduced to one thing: baseball as a cultural phenomenon, as a pattern of movements, as a sort of religious cultural rite, which has predetermined laws of physics, so to speak. It's a map overlaid atop the laws of physics of the cosmos — such as the function of gravity on Earth and how generated force from a specific mass pushed through an object, whether that's a ball or a bat, which again has a specific mass, but is latent, right? The chemical reaction of a body in motion or a body generating force or generating energy through its metabolic chemical processes.

Baseball is a cultural overlay of this cosmological phenomenon of transfusion of energy and exertion of force in a mass cosmos — or in a space-time of objects and objectivities — as in the pitch or the swing of the bat, or the running to make a catch with the baseball glove. It's a cultural overlay of the laws of physics, which are themselves a physical ritual of communion with the sport of the universal, so to speak, in terms of thermodynamics and the fusion of the metabolic principle with the larger stellar nuclear fusionary process.

Thermodynamics, the production of energy and heat — which is the creation of space-time, right, through the… even if you just wanted to reduce it to a solar system perspective of this massive force and center of gravity, which is the illuminating heat generating, energy generating, transfusionary force of the universe itself, or of the solar system itself, the star that is the Sun, or the universe itself, as the Big Bang as it is conceptualized — the creation of a massive explosion of heat, which is a generative fusionary force, and that being replicated down even to a cellular level in terms of cellular metabolism.

04:40

That process engaged as an act of play, again, in terms of the human being or the human body as a metabolic engine, a thermodynamic engine, the engine of the creation, expulsion, and consumption of energy which are other beings and forms in the cosmos, which again are all reducible back to that basic nuclear thermodynamic principle of stellar fusion.

Baseball itself being the sport of being at play with those principles and with that principle in such a way that it is a higher art form, particularly in its nonviolence as in a non-consumptiveness; its noncombativeness and the strategy of baseball being a sort of physical chess or an athletic chess in the sense that it's a theatrical removed from contact, removed from bloodshed. It's removed from that primal realm of consumption and production and reproduction of heat force and energy as ingestion and digestion and hunting into a higher aestheticized form of play, which you can call high art — which again, I would call modernity.

I would call baseball an engagement with the full aesthetic potentials of creation beyond just the primal dictates of being human, which again are consumption, production, reproduction. Genetic biological imperatives to survive and reproduce.

Baseball itself then being, as we discussed it in a historical and political sense — being a force through which community is created across national borders, across race, across ethnicity, across religious perspectives… even in the face of violent colonial imperatives, particularly in Spanish Cuba and then the United States in relation to Cuba and the creation of the Negro Leagues in relation to segregation, slavery, Jim Crow era laws and cultural behaviors and norms which dehumanized black people in the United States of America. As well as the indigenous Native American population, which we discussed with the Cherokee Seminary Team; here depicted with the Nebraska Indians team.

07:17

So we're talking about a historical and political force, which is already a way of liberation by way of organizing community from the grassroots, from the underground, through barnstorming, through international desegregated leagues; across even linguistic borders, nonetheless cultural and national borders.

We're talking about a sporting or athletic technology, which is a high art of play elevated above and beyond the primal, visceral, genetic and biological imperatives of being human. It trans-functional on a higher plane, transcendental in terms of engaging the creationary laws of physics and the cosmological principles of thermodynamics and thermonuclear fusion, transfusion of energy down through different star forms, star clusters so to speak as a fractal principle active in the universe and a nesting doll effect from star to organism to cell, so on and so forth. It's the same impregnatory principle across scales that's active because you're dealing with the same fundamental thermonuclear transfusionary energetic force across all scales. This is a human creation of a sporting technology, athletic technology, which engages the body, engages the thermonuclear metabolic principle of the body.

A way and form of processing that metabolic energy, right? It radically reinterprets the genetic, biological code inherent in organismic life on earth into high art; aesthetic free play and harnessing of that survival, sexual, erotic, transformative drive as in physical activity; transmutes it into the aesthetic wonder and creative play of baseball in terms of the creation and production of force through sport; again, through athleticism, through movement, through movement in space time by an energetic body and organism.

It's active on that level, as well as being active on the historical political level of a revolutionary culture, which as we discussed in Cuba, as we discussed in America with the Negro Leagues. It is a radical transformation of existing cultural stultified norms, which are segregational, which are discriminatory, which are violent. It is healing those historical and political wounds through the creation of this productive culture of high aesthetic art as it relates to athletics as a political, social, and cultural opening to the real and true cosmological, thermo-logical interconnectivity of all organisms and forces of the universe at a macrocosmic level; imbued and embodied in a true, direct, uninterrupted human species organismic sense of the real, existential imperative of what is life; what is humanity beneath the conception, ideation; religious law and assertion of narrative and story beneath it and creation itself.

It’s a direct connection with these divine metaphysical principles of the universe in such a way that they are no longer chained or enslaved to the traditional biological genetic codes and imperatives which have dictated human species level behavior for millions and millions of years, as well as life on earth as a pattern of consumption, predation, and excretion of energy. Even just in terms of like scat. You’re looking at one of the most innocuous and primary productions of a living, phenomenological, mass participatory art form in human history — an art form that transcends all imperatives and narratives as traditionally defined in, by, and as humanity and human; elevates those narrative and biological impulses into a real myth, a real legend; a real cosmological unifying force with the underpinning; beneath, true principles of cosmological energetic transformation and transmutation proper.

10:18

You're looking at something that's revolutionary on multiple levels and unconsciously, I think… this is created as a technology which quickly becomes a political force, which is actively overhauling the norms, the violent norms of political cultures, national identities, separative, segregated conceptions of the human or the tribal with their own sort of... bounded cultural ideologies and theories of what is good, what is bad, what is meaningful, what is not, what is acceptable, what isn't the in-group and the out-group principle as it is historically classified — the tribe or the empire with its borders and its walls and its enemies, so on and so forth. This is a sport that is breaking down the walls of segregated, assumed self-other cultural rites of exclusion; principles of separation which function as the creation of civilizational, nation, and tribal level ego constructs of self and identity as a locus that begins and ends somewhere within the perceived narrative construct: skin, birth, belief — so on and so forth.

So the creation of that technology is really, it's a legacy in and of itself that also reveals in a profound way the lack of true subjectivity in terms of the energy and the thermodynamic forces which pass through it, which are the legacies that uphold the culture of baseball itself. And these are legacies that again are active across time, across national borders and bounds, across physical locations.

11:43

The history of baseball is a massive energetic force of transformation. It's a transformation generator and processor of human life in various different microcosmic ecosystems. 1865 Cuba, mid 1900s Japan, right? These different locations where the... the star force, the fusionary star force of baseball is highly active in terms of metabolic concentration of energy which is performing this physical rite of transformation of metabolic energy and force in terms of the human motor process or the human drive process being directed to this higher cultural art form of baseball.

Again, as a series of patterns, movements, functions of laws and rules which synchronize those movements across space and time — which are all by the nature of the sport of baseball devoted to this higher aesthetic art in the sense that they're not devoted to a preservation of self, the survival impulse of the reproductive impulse.

So you can see the almost the hidden radicalism of the function of baseball as a nonviolent strategic chess sport, which itself is not on a board, it's on a field of active physical movement and processing of metabolic heat energy — processing of this thermodynamic principle freed from the traditional rules and regulations, laws and bounds of the human being as a survival mechanism and a reproductive mechanism, as a consumption and production mechanism.

Of course, you're eating food and you're excreting scat, bodily fluids in order to continue this effort, right, in terms of hydration of the cells or consumption of calories to generate body heat, to generate energy through the body. But this process is being devoted to the physical artistic creative practice of the sport of baseball. And then you have this… pretty much it's a lack of belief is a great way to say it. It's a lack of belief in the sense that you have this participation across nations, across religions, across ethnicities, across races, across cultures. But this practice is devoid of belief in the sense that it is a direct and pure submission to the laws and rules and regulations of baseball as movement patterns.

It’s an agreement to the laws of being human and a ritual process in motion as a dance within those metabolic constructs as individual forces and furnaces in an aesthetic playground of ritual and of rite that is away from the dominant biological and genetic imperatives which produce and reproduce generations upon generations of the evolutionary furthering of that metabolic principle. It’s a freedom amidst a form of slavery which is the submission to the species level genome. It’s a declaration of individuality which simultaneously is a universal identity in the fluid participation in thermal fusion. The movement of the body dedicated to the free agency of the athlete. The pursuit of excellence and striving in movement with latent objects; generating force through them; with them to create outcomes of physical power and mastery of movement; exertions of aligned and simultaneous effort and force.

Again, it's non-ideological in the sense that it's a purely physical engagement with the act of sport as a rite, which is a direct encounter, a direct transmission of that, that bodily energy into the movement of flow. It's an entirely passion driven phenomenon, entirely passion driven sport, which is devoid of a belief system, which in any way is separative and purely as in terms of being in participation on the field, stepping into and onto the field. To master the craft of hitting a baseball, or throwing a curveball to paint the black of the outside corner; diving just as it crosses the plate. This is a highly aesthetic, transcendental pursuit of physical mastery in relation to the perfection of a movement devoid of purpose; in itself in a void of biological meaning or drive. It’s a redirection of that drive to the pure solitude and solitary pursuit of the mastery of the form of the drive itself — inherently formless as it is pure force — yet made and given form in the artistry and dedication of the body in movement toward the ethos of baseball as a form of virtue, excellence, and skeletal metaphysic.

14:54

And as such, in this implicit agreement with the laws and rules and game of the sport of baseball — which are themselves at a deeper level and more fundamental level — the laws and rules of physics of the universe… stepping into this field of agreement is stepping into this field of play and as such directing the physical, bodily, even spiritual metabolic energies toward the continuation of this process. It is the redirection of the entire, scaffolded force of millennia of human evolution toward the freedom and liberation of the drive into the passion and pursuit of the sport in meaningless art; as such, the creation of the generative power of real meaning itself through chosen dedication and alignment in metabolic burning with stellar nucleo-fusion as art.

So then when you look at baseball as a cultural phenomenon — which spans generations, nations, cultures, traditions… you're looking at a multinational global across borders, across bounds of cultures and ethnic identities metabolic technology and process, which is a high art and liberatory principle at an existential, cosmic level that is purely physical and purely participatory in the life of the body in such a way that there is a production of full body movement as generative force and the full harnessing of the body as a metabolic instrument of energetic power and creational force.

The drive of generative physical power as an aesthetic, creative, artistic act which in itself is the athletic pursuit of excellence — which is a sort of accumulation of the endless drive, which is the physical body in motion. And to perpetuate that — which, archetypally, is this Sisyphus task of perpetual movement and perpetual motion, perpetual processing of the energy of the cosmos.

This participatory movement is something that is entirely universal and entirely physical as in generating force through fire, fusion; the production and creation of heat and energy which is synthesized in the universal sense as movement; is itself the creation of space-time proper as bodies and objectivities in space and time exchanging ritual dance as in presence as a field of force and gravity. And to enter into that movement and to engage and hone that process of movement and the clarity of flow within that is the secret, sacred right of baseball that is crossing all of these borders and bounds. It is the unveiling of the metaphysical truth of the creation of the universe as a participation in this action across scales; as such, a suture of the wound of space and time and the hidden difference traditionally veiled to mankind by a sense of cosmological scope; perspective; understanding of the essential ties that bind all energetic processes native to the cosmos.

17:05

So when you have something like this Peabody Coal Company annual baseball event or the Nebraska Indians team photograph or this 1914 spring training photograph in Hot Springs, Arkansas, you can see these different contexts. All of these are actually occurring around the same time — within a decade of photo capture. All of these are from within the United States… these photographs are being taken.

But you can see and feel the diversity of the contexts in which baseball is occurring and unfolding and feel the visceral process of transformation of the ecosystems and environments and political and social and historical contexts around these photographs. Disappearing and nullifying this moment of time with this train, the architecture… as well as this early period of Native American assimilation into colonial American subcultures — as well as this moment in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with this almost logging town-esque architecture.

These are fleeting historical, political, and cultural moments which rapidly spin out of time and are corroded and destroyed by the essential nature of fire of the cosmos itself. They become historical sediment. They become ash that's burned into the ground. They actually, they're leveled to the point of which they become layers of sediment in the physical earth themselves and then are recovered as artifacts or ruins, et cetera.

So you have this historical movement that is occurring all around baseball, but baseball itself is being perpetually uplifted and returned, uplifted and returned to being into existence by this willful cultural participation and creation as a movement. As a legacy of continued, intergenerational participation; as a celebration of the transcendental artistic potentials and possibilities of being human; as such, an absolution of the stultified norms and modes of degenerative separation as in a destruction of the creative, spiritually evolutionary and revolutionary ethos of ontological uncovery so native to human history across all space and time — a nihilism of form reduced to a geriatric perception of life as a simple fulfillment of bios and genome. The reduction of life to these imperatives is the slavery of life to the prison of form. Baseball is an uplifting of life to the highest principles of creation through non-violent isolation of the subject to metabolic cultivation and forging of self through the athletic act; as such, makes man one with the creational and creationary star of the universe itself. The metabolic-stellar nucleo-fusionary chain is fulfilled. Fulfilled in the act of conscious participation in the shared cultural rite and script which is an elevation of those thermonuclear potentialities to their highest, Platonic origin.

19:12

So I'm gonna add one more photograph, which I think is actually very informative because it's actually baseball being played in ruins and this really helps elucidate it. So you have a sort of like skull of the dead moment in the sense that the subjectivities that pass through baseball have deep and profound and intersecting weight and collaborative force behind them.

And this is the historical legacy that we traditionally know to be baseball itself with all of the players and the figures and the events and the mythologies and the legends that color the history itself. But when you look at baseball itself as a artifact or technology of the cosmos or a technology of space time, you can see that all of these subjectivities burn through the sport itself, as well as the artifacts such as the stadium architectures themselves.

But particularly — these subjectivities… that are the lifeblood, that are the bodies and the forces that churn metabolically through the creation and upholding of the ritual technology of baseball. So the ritual technology of baseball has all of this energy and this life and this force and this literal metabolism of the blood, the energy of the body through this mass participation in this cultural ritual — which is fundamentally without ideology beyond, again, the rules of play — which are an implicit agreement to step onto the field and thus participate in this energetic movement as a series of full body gestural acts of metabolic and chemical fusion to produce form. Which, again, does not have a theological narrative or cultural underpinning as such as a genesis of the creation of the universe or a belief in a system of unfoldings of gods or spirits. This is a direct transmission of that physical energy by way of the leaping catch in pursuit of the ball or the windup of the pitcher on the mound.

The movement of that physical energy through the sport is that deeper kind of hidden esoteric legacy. It’s a movement patterning of poses which are immortalized throughout space and time in the photography that enriches our memory of the sport of baseball; furthermore, reveal its ritual technology as and of movement patterns which are themselves the true composition of baseball. A repetition of neurological roads. A memory engrained at the level of cellular musculature; a synaptic recognition and remembrance of the sport across space and time as a shared unity at the deepest, most hidden levels of the composition of the human spirit in experience through the living, lived movement of the body. These zones are leagues beneath the conscious mind into the ionic ocean of primordial formations of self. They are a form of cultural sharing that is imbued at the deepest organismic level of self and self-making; thus they are a transcendental shared body of culture that encompasses the entire axis of the self-body.

And that fragment, that fragment of self which is forgotten at the purest essential level of the energy itself, which passes through all of these different metabolic thermodynamic nuclear bodies in terms of stars themselves that are burning and clustering and exploding within this microcosmic stellar system of those who participate in the athletic sport of baseball across time and across space is as a mass cultural movement of the creation and production and movement and generation of force and energy, which is radically nonviolent in the sense that it's physical within the solitary space of latent objects, such as the ball or the bat or the glove. It is the consciousness of the primordial universal self in a universe that is latent first before the imbuing of spiritual consciousness into form. It is the zone of the focus of the mind and the attunement of the body outside of space and time — into the zone of planetary isolation; solitude among the latent mind of stars and forms, aeons before and into the origins of creation. It is a population of the zone of self that at once isolates and attunes to the moment of pure athletic flow and focus on latent mass objects propelled and impelled through space time by the coordination of the body and mind; totally unites and unifies at the level of the neurological and deep body by way of the shared cultural ritual and rite of the movement pattern — the agreement and acknowledgement honed and taken on by legacy after legacy in the history of the sport; of the game.

There is actually no physical contact of organisms and conscious bodies in baseball. No two particles touch in the cosmos due to the presence of electrons. An atom itself is mostly empty space. The psychic mode of focus and presence and attunement to hit a 100mph baseball coming at you from just 50 or so feet away due to the extended release point of a pitcher’s arm from a mound 60 feet, 6 inches away. This is a heightened aesthetic pursuit of neuro-muscular attunement which cultivates a level of presence that itself is closest to the Platonic origins of creation — a totally psychic mode wherein the body is totally present in movement and as such is perennially in formation by and through the subconscious generation of energy which is union and reunitement at the most primordial level of the human with the universal generative system of movement, motion, and energy which undergirds the entire cosmos. It is mind in no mind; total fluidity of action of the resting of the brain in the dormant mode of fast twitch cognition, where the mind must recede and reside foremost in the body to register and react in simultaneous combustion in a speed of generation of force and movement which resides below the register of conventionally constructed human notions of time. This fast twitch muscle fiber by way of honed neurological reaction time is beneath the moment; into a kairotic time.

22:10

There's this high art of the solitude and the solitary pursuit of excellence through the pure athletic production of force and energy and heat within the body which never really encounters an equal and opposite force. It's a deeply metaphysical abstract pursuit of the drive function present in the individual, which is the production and creation of heat and energy and force through the body, through the metabolism, toward this solitary metaphysical phenomenon of pitching a baseball or swinging a bat, which itself has no real purpose beyond the arbitrarily created and defined rules and laws which are the technology of baseball themselves — that are not actually dedicated to anything that is primary to being human in a biological or genetic way.

But rather — to redirect those energies toward this pursuit of the cultural artifact and technology of baseball. And that itself being the primary revolution of the sport. Furthermore, to have that pregnant or latent within the construct of baseball anticipates the radical revolutionary political and socio-cultural function of baseball in Cuba and the United States with the Negro Leagues — just by the nature of the reality of the essence of the way that baseball functions primarily: metaphysically, cosmologically, and thermodynamically. So that's what I got. Thanks for watching.