The Emergence of the Powers: Hack Wilson and the Carravaggian Act of Being to See, to Truly See

00:01

So I’m going to hit you with kind of a big one here. And this strikes really at the heart of being. The heart of being in the sense that it a summons of the real kind ontological architecture of this next phase of development of the project — which is seeding deeper and deeper into the essence and source and heart of being itself.

The new title of the text would be Baseball: an ontological revelation of being. And the photograph I chose for that is the famous photo of Hack Wilson taking his massive hack, right… that massive swing, the sheer force of power and nature that’s flowing through his stature.

So this one is going to be on Hack Wilson, the phenomenological force of Hack Wilson — as in the presentation and representation of the will, as in the incarnate human body in motion and movement.

01:01

What’s so specific and specifically important about Hack Wilson is that the very phenomenological presence or bringing about of his body into existence itself… and that itself being an aperture for the revelation of the profound powers of being in terms of the essence of the will as an existential force proper, right, beyond all individual or conception of organism — precisely through the contrast that Hack Wilson shows us.

So this… he’s five foot six, wears a size five shoe, and is the is the child of a prostitute and an itinerant steelworker in Pennsylvania. And I’ll actually give you the exact location — and both of them were supposedly very serious alcoholics… in Elwood City, Pennsylvania in 1900.

Retrospectively, historians look back on his life and suggest that he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, significantly stunted development through the mother’s indulgence of alcohol while he was in the womb.

02:19

You have this man who is born to...

Nothing.

His mother was either 16 or 17 years old, is called an unemployed drifter, but in other accounts, she’s a prostitute from Philadelphia. And his father was a steel worker who was several years older than her. And his mother died when he was seven years old. Both were heavy drinkers. They never married. And he’s working. He got very very very little education. I think something approximating elementary or middle school education. And goes, leaves school and works at the the locomotive factory swinging a sledgehammer for four dollars a week. He’s 5’6”, almost 200 pounds with an 18 inch neck and feet that fit size five and a half shoes.

The features of his physique, large head, tiny feet, short legs, and broad flat face are now recognized as hallmarks of fetal alcohol syndrome.

03:29

So he’s working, and I think in another… he’s carrying hot lead in a printing factory slightly after he worked in that locomotive factory — and he is playing baseball during this time and follows a similar trajectory of… actually the miners who live in his kind of local enclave, this Pennsylvanian hotbed of factory workers and miners, many of whom — like Coveleski and Daubert and Grove — go on to become significant figures in baseball history. We’re discussing some of the greatest players of this era, if not of all time — including Hack Wilson.

So this is to say, right, if you look at the stature of Hack Wilson as depicted here, you can see this inner balance of the physique and what has brought him into being — again, specifically relating and discussing the fetal alcohol syndrome, right? Discussing the fact that both of his parents were heavy drinkers and he himself becomes a heavy drinker… I would say genetically and epigenetically, really. This is something that is basically a predilection that is built into his biome in the syndrome that he develops while he is in the womb. Alcoholism, fundamentally, is shown to have strong genetic markers. Alcohol and alcoholism marks his literal body, his literal form.

You have this man again who is born to a mother who is a prostitute who dies at the age of seven and a father who is a steelworker who actually abandons him to the woman who owns the building, I believe, they lived in… who is considered quote unquote his grandmother. And then he (his father) comes back and takes Hack Wilson and they go several different places as Wilson ages.

And Wilson works these hard manual labor jobs and builds the physique and the musculature that you later see featured in some of his most iconic imagery as a baseball player.

05:29

You’re looking at… this fabric, again, right, to gesture back toward the essential will. This fabric from which the ontological form, this presence and appearance of being in time of Hack Wilson is gestured forth from. It’s something that almost reminds me of Victor Hugo and his work Les Miserables, right? Or to, again, I’ve talked about Marx and I’ve talked about Hegel and I’ve talked about the importance of this proletarian working class — existentially destitute corridor of American history.

This entire class or gesticulation of this group of people who are themselves the American working underclass — who build the skyscrapers of American Empire and American civilization — and baseball itself is the collective revelation of the powers of these people.

Again, to bring about Les Miserables — because I think this is such a potent allegory and way of understanding… just how important philosophy is when it is intimately and intricately related to the historical material conditions of humanity, and particularly of the death in history that occurs of the working class proper, and how a figure like Hack Wilson rises into prominence through this improbable existential heroism.

Not only from his class condition… again, literally being raised by a prostitute whose steel worker father abandons them. Both of them being alcoholics.

08:01

This is a man who was born with no prospects, socially, culturally, politically, and even more fundamentally — ontologically, existentially — through the very nature of the condition of his existence, which is brought forth from the womb, as in the womb of being, or you could just say that the womb of his mother, this fetal alcohol syndrome, which he inherits. He inherits this epigenetic trauma, which is literally born into his body. Right?

And then experiences the epigenetic trauma of extreme alcoholism as in a culture of early life and familial and ancestral upbringing — an extreme social political cultural fragmentation in which, again, to gesture back towards the Dizzy Dean essay… this man is an existential nothing. He is a zero brought into time, again in the Heideggerian sense, a zero thrown into being and time from the abyss into the ontologically phenomenologically present abyss of space and time as it occurs as historical materialism, which is veiled through various different phenomenological games such as capitalism or economies or wealth… or the shiny tools and objects and instruments which inform most of humanity’s desires and constructs and ideations.

He is thrown from nothing into nothingness. The only difference in a metaphysically existential sense is that he appears to be; in this way he feels. There is something hyper-Frankensteinian about this, the way that this is coming about being into form. This is at large — a teleological extension of the ordinate powers of being. This is the real condition of being thrown. It has no aperture. It is appearing through the sensate and senses… entirely unmoored. Clinging to concepts, visions, constructs. Constructions of reality — in an attempt to appear real. Wherein and whereas it is always already moored in the abyss which founds it.

08:56

So you have this literal existential form of Hack Wilson which is born or thrown into the dice game. A bare foothold on this dark ladder of being.

As Althusser puts it, it’s this dice game of chance into which existence is continually and consistently thrown and exposed to the elements and thus plays a hand or rolls a die and figures a form or figures a number. And this number is then in intimate relationship with the entire historical, ecological, material ecosystem of the existence in which that die is continually being thrown.

The true chance of history is perhaps too phenomenal or intricate for us to adequately or accurately image. For the full system of recombination itself to actually take root in our minds would be for the exploded superstructure of history to reveal itself in the total cosmic macro- and micro- systems exchanges of energy and information that occur in all times, for all times to make themselves phenomenologically manifest.

09:26

So Hack Wilson is thrown into the die of the early 1900s in this poor steel town… born to a prostitute mother with a debilitating physiological condition which is itself the aperture of his being.

So again, think about the aperture which is being informed by the neurological biochemical systemic process of the organism itself, which is the perspective, which is the view, which is the vision of possibility, potentiality and existence itself as being reflecting in and back upon itself through the aperture and vessel and technology of its making, of its origin. Of its telescopic or microscopic system processor.

So you have Wilson working these incredibly difficult, heavy manual labor jobs, which are building his body and exposing him to things which are detrimental, highly destructive and toxic, but at the same time building physical musculature of his body in a zone in which he is to hard labor and die.

10:35

But again, we talk about baseball itself being this profoundly esoteric but also ever-present and very in-your-face, mystery school of the poor and the working class and the destitute, the fundamentally impoverished. So we’re talking about politically impoverished, economically impoverished, racially impoverished. And we’re also talking about existentially impoverished, right? In the case of Hack Wilson, which is such a phenomenal and phenomenological case of the existential emergence of being — because Hack Wilson emerges from this substratum, which is almost more native than the political and cultural and racial and ethnic ruptures that are being experienced as representational devices in culture and civilization by figures like Greenberg or Paige or Robinson.

And even moreso fundamental than the Ruthian rupture of the existential and essential force of will into being in that the existential and essential force of will into being is emerging through its most unlikely form.

Ruth himself has the stature of an athlete, even as he puts on weight and he ages throughout his career through his excesses and indulgences. Wilson is born in this cavern of being in the sense that there’s an existential deprivation of the phenomenological formation of the aperture and lens of the being through this profoundly debilitating syndrome, which ultimately takes his life as a repetition of this epigenetic trauma which is born into his body.

To understand… this is a literal lived and embodied history that he is carrying forth and carrying on, which again is the history of epigenetic evolutionary trauma of the human species itself proper, but is manifest phenomenologically very apparently in the literal form and figuration of Hack Wilson as it appears outwardly, but of course as it is again experienced inwardly.

12:31

So when and as this force of will emerges through Hack Wilson, he’s picked up by the semi-pro teams. He actually is picked up by John McGraw initially; the New York Giants. He’s deemed not ready, even as he hits the longest home run in Ebbets Field history as a young player.

He’s deemed by McGraw as as unready — and Ross Youngs, the famous Hall of Fame outfielder, says — they just got rid of the best outfielder I’ve ever played alongside. They’ll regret this. And so he gets sent down to the minor leagues and he gets picked up by the Chicago Cubs in the process. And his career slowly ramps up with these excellent seasons. There’s this span of three or four excellent seasons which build and culminate into his famous 1930 season.

Which — I’ll actually read you the statistics here because I personally would consider this season the most phenomenal offensive season of all time and I’ll explain why.

So...

13:49

In this season of 1930 with the Chicago Cubs, Wilson has 56 home runs, 191 RBIs — which is the all-time single season record, which has stood since he set it in 1930.

723 slugging percentage, 454 on base percentage, a 356 batting average, and he had something like 210 hits. And of course he was voted the most valuable player that year by the sports writers.

14:32

What this is, right, and we have to look at a deeper level because we’re looking at the more essential ontological emergence of being of the force of will.

And we’ve gone a little deeper here because we stripped away the essence and factor of time, which we kind of made a cartography of and we mapped in terms of how consciousness evolves through time, especially through culture, but also through the glacial evolution of organisms as a biochemical consciousness which is continually iterating on itself over time through reproduction and the experience of existence… again, which is the epigenetic.

So the genetic and the epigenetic, right? These are two different ways in which information is being changed and transmuted and transformed over time in space and in time, which again, right, this is the foundations from which Hack Wilson is thrown.

But what we must experience here and I rarely do this, but I’m going to do it here is to put… this image front and center — which is to say add a second image into the actual lecture and talk itself… is this shot of Hack Wilson swinging.

Because this is the ontological ground. We’re talking less about the fracture of a momentousness or the period of time of a life or the evolution of a species or the evolution of the cosmos, in terms of a movement over time and through time.

16:03

We’re talking about the made apparent phenomenological emergence as in a transparency, as in a transparency of the force of the will of being itself.

And this is the idea in the case of Hack Wilson as an existence… of self overcoming as in the historical material and literal embodied conditions of and for which the phenomenological emergence of the will can happen.

The total existential effulgence of the will can emerge from this profound fundamental existential self overcoming.

16:45

So when you look at Hack Wilson again, right, you look at his history. Where he’s born, how he’s born, his early life, the literal physical embodied biochemical… this is the deeper culture, this is the existential culture of the organism as it appears phenomenologically in space and time.

This is the apparatus and apparition of Hack Wilson acting and moving through the essential force and figuration of the will. And he is manifesting, right? He is manifesting through, again, right? This is where it is most clearly visible — through this incredibly deeply high contrasting existential human condition in which he is living. The aperture and vessel, which he is bringing to light, bringing to being, bringing to phenomenological realization, this presence of the force of will.

17:39

And this is again why culture is so important — and I’ll dig into this for half a second — is that there is this meta text here that we continually discuss and I bring it up every now and then… is — from time, which is this exact moment that the effulgence of being has made presence in the swing of Hack Wilson, which is being witnessed by the fans in the stadium, the catcher, the umpire, whoever else is present to have a sensate witnessing of this most unlikely, most high-contrast emergence of this phenomenological power of the essential will of being.

But this photograph, the visual culture, this historical object is what allows us to remember revelation through time and across time, even though revelation has already occurred and is occurring. This is a way of recapturing it and remembering it.

This revelation moves from time itself to the fragmentation of the image object, which retains the quality of light which was present in the moment of revelation, to... a fragmentation into which it’s buried. It’s like sediment in history, which needs to be recovered — whether that’s by the Hall of Fame or an archive or a collector or an unwitting individual who recovers this object emergent from and within time, buried… which is the memory of the soul of history.

This fragment of light, which is a revelation of the eternal, the existentially ever present — which again is the mythological symbolization of Dionysus and Osiris, which is to say the dismemberment of the body into history and through time and the process of recollection necessary to resemble, reassemble this, I guess I’ll call it the erotic full body and the full erotic as in eros presence of being, which is the totality of the powers of love as in the force of existence which is generative. The proto-generative.

19:51

And so when you witness Hack Wilson swing, all of the conditions which emerge and mold and sculpt Hack Wilson are a high contrast ecosystem, this high contrast container and fulmigation of the compound of Hack Wilson, which emerges into space and time through the act of baseball, here particularly the offensive swing of the bat.

This to me sums up not only his existence in so many ways, but the existence of the cosmos in the sense that we’re witnessing from these most unlikely terms, right, the most unwitting figuration… which is the phenomenological veiling of the essential totality of the powers of being and the will and force of being, that we’re witnessing through that most unlikely appearance and figuration — sort of hooded figure, this liminal figure — there’s the dweller at the threshold archetype, which I think holds very true here, imagistically.

It’s that we’re standing at the edge of phenomenological revelation, and what is necessary is for being in time to reveal itself, and in that moment that being in time reveals itself, time is over.

Because the timeless dimension, again, the object at the end of time, the transcendental object — as we discussed in the last essay — is revealed.

21:17

And so often it is required — in terms of revelation for that transcendental object, which is to say the revelation of the entire powers of the will itself, existentially, to emerge through this the most unlikely host or this the most unlikely guest, which is to say...

It is that which it does not appear to be. And this again goes so much into the Vedanta and into the concept of the rope appearing as the snake or Maya, that the phenomenological world is not as it appears to be. And as we inquire deeper into how this phenomenological world is projected or thrown into existence in that we appear it or it appears to us through the sensate body to be this series of different figurations and appearances and constructs, which are then interpreted into the organism’s aperture — its faculties of judgement in the Kantian sense — the desire to consume, the desire to reproduce, the desire to construct a reality which is palatable to the survival drives of the biological organism, right?

All of these different ways in which the experience and appearance of reality is veiled.

22:40

What is required is this aesthetic event of the emergence of the powers of being through a phenomenological host. That which appears to be reveals that which is. The veil is fallen. This is the historical, esoteric, and cultural symbolism of the Veil of Isis.

And that is always a movement, right? It is a movement hyper-symbolically in the falling of the veil; in space-time the revelation of that which is proto and prior to time and space themselves as relative gestures and gesticulate unities within a larger, essential Being — that which is construct and constructor.

Because we’re moving outward from the conviction of the appearance of being, right? And this conviction is always deceptive. Because the appearance of being is the conviction of forms, and it’s also the conviction of individuals, it’s the conviction of the organism. And so to emerge from this conviction is to be disillusioned. And to be disillusioned is naturally and necessarily the state of the zero, the state of nothingness in which is the ground for the emergence of the ritual, spiritual theater and mystery tradition of baseball itself… is that we have the feats which define American civilization, which is to say they are American civilization’s most important cultural artifacts.

Not only in terms of the visual historical object, the image history of American civilization, where so much of the most important images of American civilization are occurring through its... literal theatrical pastime. It’s literal athletic pastime. But also, it’s emergence through the vessel of those who enter this theater.

24:47

And we discussed Dean, we discussed Ruth, we discussed Paige — all of these figures who are household names in the larger mythological and legendary history of baseball itself.

But when you come across a name like Hack Wilson, of course, we’re talking about someone who — in a more existential embodied biological experiential way was not built and is not built from that same phenomenological sculpture of heroism, so to speak. That same archetypal cloth which is typical of historical power revelation and revelations.

So maybe you have the Statue of David, or you have the traditional archetypal depiction of the athlete, or you have an expected manifestation of powers through a specific appearance of form in space and time. Let’s say, radiation from the phenomenological appearance of the sun, or the power of a tank.

25:25

This is the equivalent, maybe the inverse equivalent of a train barreling towards you and it appears to be… a five ton coal train coming towards you and it hits you and all it is just smoke.

25:45

Right? So when we witness this — it’s such a great analogy because when we witness the phenomenological powers of the emergence of being of the essential will itself, we’re witnessing it through this incredible… very credible, but again — this phenomenal, this fantastic aperture of Hack Wilson, this five foot six man born with fetal alcohol syndrome who worked in a locomotive factory and then was carrying hot lead around… massive plates of hot lead in a printing factory.

Nearly swinging out of his shoes from the force generated in his body.

26:30

This power, this torsion, this essence of will — even again beyond the phenomenological depiction and appearance of that force, witness from this unveiling — again this unveiling through this high contrast moment, it’s almost a Carravaggio or a Carravaggian act of revelation through this high contrast moment of the appearance and sheer force of will generated through the aperture in the body of Hack Wilson.

26:59

The entire gesticulation of Hack Wilson in the womb and in contradiction and contraction of being itself as in his early experience and his experience in the personal biological womb itself. Through that aperture, you are actually granted this permission, this permissiveness into the essential truth and force and action of the universal cosmological underpinning of the will itself proper.

27:28

This is again, I’ll make another analogy and this is not a pejorative one. It’s the equivalent of an ant carrying 10 times its weight on its back or something along those lines. We’re looking at these metaphysical phenomenological emergences of the appearance of will in space and time and baseball itself as a cultural theater for that… is primed for and dedicated towards and for the emergence of that will. This is what baseball attempts to show through detachment, distance, and aesthetic disinterest and orientation toward the art of hitting, pitching, catching the baseball… swiping the bag. It is interested in the revelation of the will itself. It is not oriented toward the human. It is a mode and method of expression that almost ignores the human if not but to avoid it. To pitch past the catcher. To hit past the fielder. Humanity is a distance to be leapt. And the one who leaps is consciousness itself. It is a deeply Nietzschean sport — not only of the overcoming of self, but of the overcoming of man.

27:57

And so again, I brought this about in my heroism essay with Greenberg and Robinson.

And it’s worth just going a little bit deeper into that — because with Greenberg and Robinson, we were discussing these ruptures in historical, civilizational, cultural time in terms of integral ruptures of inclusion, exclusion, conceptions of good and evil, right, which are the expansions and contractions of a civilization’s aperture of meaning and power and structure and order.

These are the sort of, these are the wars of humanity which are already existent within contradiction as in a conceptualized apparatus or way of viewing and seeing the world. This heroic leap of Hack Wilson, which is the leap into the abyss of being, this heroic leap in the generated force and power which is born through him and his experience, which culminates in this moment in particular, but also the moment of the 1930 season where this heroic revelation of force and power of will is realized through him in this most total and fundamental sense phenomenologically — which again is recorded in the history books of time through the cultural aperture of baseball and thus made available to us to reflect back upon a hundred years into the future. This is our mythological Grecian text — for and through which to peer back in and down upon the sedimentary nature of time and recover the ontology of existential heroism incarnate in history and space and time. This is the revelation of the American in coalition and revolution in and of and upon and reflecting the Greek ancestral history.

29:18

This is... the moment in which we are gifted something far more essential than what culture or history or civilization or even humanity will allow. And the reason for this is because it is beyond concept. It is a priori. It is prior to concept. It is prior to reason. It’s prior to language and prior even to truth, as in the embodiment of the latent powers that which… necessarily, there’s a contraction of and in the organism in terms of how those powers can actually be inhabited.

There’s the metabolism, there’s the nervous system, there’s the literal architecture in terms of the bone structure, there’s the organ systems — lenses — these technological, biological and chemical lenses which consciousness itself is wearing, which are the powers as they currently exist as a formal limitation.

As an aperture of being, the necessity of food, water, sleep, all of these different biological limitations which inform the way in which that being perceives the world, right? And so then you have this circumstance with Hack Wilson, born with fetal alcohol syndrome to an alcoholic prostitute mother who dies at the age of seven, and an alcoholic steelworking father who abandons him… who works these incredibly hard labor jobs in the locomotive factory and in the printing factory carrying these hot lead plates, heavy hot lead plates.

31:12

You’re looking at a way in which being reveals itself that is far beyond anything other than embodied realization. The improbable embodied realization of the powers of the will which extend beyond. So again, we’re talking about limitations as the cap or the cultural limit, as Pascal puts it. It’s something I like to quote. God is the cultural limit, in Blaise Pascal’s notebooks.

We’re looking at something that exceeds that. And it exceeds it in such a phenomenologically radical way, in the case of Hack Wilson. It exceeds it beyond all expectation in terms of the appearance of the form itself and the formal event itself, that it becomes a transcendent and transcendental moment of the emergence of something which says something beyond that which the... the powers of the senses are able to phenomenologically contextualize and situate, which suggests a larger transcendental emergence.

And beyond that, again — this is just speaking as a witnessing of this power, this force that is manifest through Hack Wilson — but rather the embodied powers that emerge through him are, again… to take this away from a reflection or an interpretation or an imagistic representation of what is going on here and enter directly into this disclosure — to enter directly in this sense in and with the body of Hack Wilson into this larger existential cosmos of being, which Hack Wilson is revelating and inhabiting and incarnating indelibly through this will, right?

I don’t know if there’s another way to describe it — through this will, and that the channeling of the powers of being, the food, the musculature, the presence, the force of will… right, again, in a high aesthetic way to swing the baseball bat to produce a hit. This is not… this is not dedicated toward traditional human drives.

We can then witness phenomenologically the essential presence of the will and force and being of the will in a way that is far deeper than even we said with Babe Ruth, in terms of this is the physical being who is primed for this act and is even biologically chemically in a position, in a situation to produce this high transcendental act of cultural revelation through dedication and devotion of will to self expressive productive form of will as in powerful motion, movement, skill. We’re looking at someone, in the case of Hack Wilson, who through his experience in the womb and through his early childhood experience, all would expect him not to be prepared to manifest this act.

34:17

But yet he manifests it, right? And so then I have the back of that first image I showed you. The editorial text accompanying the standing portrait of Wilson at the ready. And this will, I think, pull it all together for you very well.

This is the editorial tag which declares Wilson in this 1930 season.

By August 19th, he had hit 52 home runs for the new National League record, which stood until the steroid era of baseball. His final number, which if I remember, it was 56… stood till the steroid era of baseball, which was the 1990s.

It’s declaring him the new home run king, ahead of Babe Ruth who had 46 at this point in time in the season. And this is a statement… this is a statement of culture in reflection on and upon Hack Wilson and what happened that season. This is a witnessing, this is a cultural witnessing of the existential essential unfolding of the powers of the will within Hack Wilson.

35:24

But to actually understand at a deeper level just how profound this unfolding is, is to look at... everything about him. It’s to look at his history. It’s to look five foot six, size five shoes. He was a lifetime alcoholic and died at the age of 48, penniless, broke. The National League ended up paying for his funeral because they needed to scrounge together something along the lines of $350 to make it happen.

This is a man who, in every sense, had to overcome conditions. We’re not even just talking about cultural conditions or class conditions, which of course were highly present in his sense. Familial ancestral conditions, again. But then the physiological, biochemical condition of his own being, of his own body, to generate the force and necessary strength of will to accomplish what he accomplished in 1930, which may be the greatest offensive season of all time.

36:47

And so when you’re looking at that amount of self-overcoming, you’re looking at the most intimate aperture. We’re not just looking at a cultural or civilizational phenomenon or historical phenomenon. The outward play of history and perception and perceptions. How beings perceive the world and one another, or even themselves. This is not a reflective revolutionary form. It is not dependent on sight. We’re not looking at being in time as much as we’re looking at being in form. The existential embodied experience of being in form, and the entanglement — as in Jacob wrestling with God. The intimate engagement with the powers of self revealing and self revelation as in the express manifestation through flesh the formless terms of God and the Godhead. The eternal. The flesh lowered to and among the zero. The absolute terms. The critical body.

Being as it is manifest and directly grounded into the way in which it must emerge or unfold its powers. And the extent to which being must reach through the abyss to form ritual flesh language of self to speak the true terms of being into the abyss of flailing sight, sense, sound; the crumbling dirge of history.

37:17

So in this sense, there’s the oft quoted philosophical maxim by Leibniz, we’re living in the best of all worlds, right? What if that was not the case theoretically? What if we’re living in the worst of all worlds? And we have to unfold the greatest powers of being in the worst of all worlds. This being the heroic existential task located by 20th century Western philosophy at large.

And as is in the case with Hack Wilson, this phenomenal act of existential heroism is something far more essential than the kind of conventional cultural tale and narrative of overcoming some sort of external obstacle — although those external obstacles were very much so present and actually everpresent in Hack Wilson’s life in so many ways.

There’s actually a biological, chemical... obstacle. There is the obstacle of his own being. There’s the obstacle of the appearance of his own being — and again this is in some ways the human condition itself — which is why it’s so powerful to reflect upon this. Because this is what we’re looking at in terms of the aperture of the human being, and baseball as a site of that self-overcoming. Which is perennial.

But to look at the deepest example of that is to look at the manifestation and appearance of the human being in space and time which is radically unequipped to deal with the real theater of the emergence of the overcoming of the self… is the existential task at hand of humanity. And this, of course, is the child.

38:45

When given, again — this existential task at the root of spirit historically and materially… this is the power of the intersection of the incarnation of the individual and the development of the skill and the powers of realization within the individual intersecting with the historical and material conditions in time. When given this cultural aperture to realize these powers… and this is what is so important, this is why we can remember Hack Wilson, and this is why we can observe and realize what he realized within himself through image culture.

To be able to remember that is to recall, through the importance of the cultural, historical, civilizational archive of baseball and baseball history itself, this existential emergence of the essence of the will which was cultivated in these conditions of Hack Wilson’s life, his early life and his life in the womb, which was cultivated in these conditions, which appear not to be possible in the most profound, immediate, sensate way — the embodied physical form… but emerge as radically possible. Not only possible, but transcendentally, revolutionarily possible in terms of carving his name indelibly and infinitely historically into the record books in terms of the achievement that culminated in his 1930 season. After that season, he slowly declined and, due to alcoholism, passed away.

40:18

You’re looking at the rising of the powers of this will through the thermodynamic entropic body, which is the realization of the self. The harnessing of that. The honing of those powers through the ritual architecture.. in this case, of baseball. The harnessing of the will to and through form unto self realization as in total self expression of the latent powers of the will which exceed and excel and thus reveal existentially what is hid, what is secret — the eternal powers of the will beneath the apparent ephemeral powers of the individual, or the organism.

And again, we’re not just talking about the realization of the self in terms of the epic arc of Hack Wilson’s life and the trials and tribulations, which he literally overcame in terms of the history of his life. We’re talking about that through his appearance and through his existence and through that self overcoming, you’re witnessing another self overcoming — which is the self-overcoming of existence unto itself, through itself, which is the aperture and vision of being that is presented and formed in phenomenological space-time, which is the organism, which is the biochemical organism.

He is actually, through himself, in this much deeper and more profound essence of the will, identity and essence of the will way — working through the aperture and vessel and technology of his body to produce this revelatory act and vision of the will present through him.

41:16

Which is self-transcendental — even unto the realm of the will becomes him and elevates his very form into a, there’s no other way to say it, it’s the spiritual status of existential power as in the revelation.

The will is being revelated through him, the most unlikely forms, again, the mote, and Christ says the meek shall inherit the earth. This is the most profound example that may possibly be available to us in baseball history of someone working through a biological, chemical, physical aperture which is profoundly presented away from this possibility, this heroic revolutionary possibility of the revelation of these powers.

And through his literal life, history and historical circumstance cultivates the emergence which culminates in the 1930 season, which is existentially transcendental of the entire field of baseball itself. It’s so unlikely that it revolutionizes the legendary architecture and superstructure of the entire discipline and medium itself through the physical, again through the physical phenomenological emergence of the powers of his being — which are actually expressed through the entire physical form of his body.

42:49

And you take a look at this swing, this is a full expression. This is a full expression of the powers of being. This is a full expression of self, which again is transcendent of language and prior to language.

This is precognitive and post-cognitive.

42:54

In that it is a full incorporation of the powers of being into presence.

43:01

And in that, right, he’s producing a revelatory phenomenological act. 56 home runs, 191 RBIs, 350 batting average. These are some of the best statistics ever produced in an offensive season in baseball history when you combine them.

All through the aperture of this man who’s 5’6”, wears size 5 shoes, and was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother who was a prostitute who died at the age of 7. And his father was a steel worker who left him.

43:33

You have to see this profound realization. This is a man from within the powers of himself pulled out something that we witnessed and witnessed in the field of being, which is near inexplicable.

You say Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, whoever else. It’s like experiencing… again, an extraterrestrial event or that the planet Pluto flies out of orbit and stops right next door to Earth and you can jump off of Earth onto Pluto.

It in many ways breaks what we perceive to be the physical or phenomenological laws of nature in its improbability.

44:27

And this is what’s so important about the manifestation of the force and the transcendental essence of the will through the individual, is that it is making possible something that is a rupture in what is perceived to be possible.

And this can be witnessed through history and historically and in historic time, specifically through the autobiography or the biography of Hack Wilson. The full manifestation of his lifetime, the full manifestation and realization of his life’s work.

Which again, there were many things, many obstacles, including his real-time battles with alcoholism and violence and confusion, his attempt to survive these circumstances, again, to just survive them biologically and as an organism.

But in this 1930s season, the high aesthetic powers and the high aesthetic ritual of combined with, integrated with… in this historical material moment, again, the 1930s, this is the rise and the rising of peak power baseball.

45:34

The metabolic force of will with Hack Wilson rising to the height of his powers to meet this historical material moment produces this essential realization of the thermodynamic thermonuclear powers of the will.

If you want to use supernova or star systems or any of these other terms… these are all just different ways of, at different scales… we’re looking at something which is a transcendental spectacular revelation of being through the most unlikely emergence which again again in many ways describes the the history of human evolution itself; the history of the revolution of the cosmos proper — this level of profundity which we can explore, and we can experience this level of profundity existentially through the cultural act which makes immediately and imminently present the timeless dimension — and thus we are able to reflect in and upon the entirety of the powers of existence itself… and this makes it available.

And Hack Wilson is making it available to himself and through himself — and this is precisely the function of self-realization in history. But to have self-realization occur to this magnitude and on the level of this cultural stage and presence in the full force and thrust which is produced through the organismic self to reveal the existential self, which is to say that the existential self — the force of will of all of the cosmos through Hack Wilson — is to us… it must necessarily throw into question the entire nature of our being, which reproduces the question of the human condition, which reproduces the essential existential questions which form Hack Wilson’s entire being in time.

47:12

Which is to say the period of the 1930s to the 1950s, World War II, Camus, Sartre, existentialism, Simone Weil, the questions of the revelation of the essence of being in time, Heidegger.

Because in this period of time, it is being revealed more so perhaps than ever before through the technological instruments which are expanding the force and thrust of will as it is manifest in space and in time, being in time — particularly culminating in the advent and demonstration of the nuclear bomb.

47:50

We are witnessing a fourfold or a tenfold manifestation, culturally, historically, politically, of the powers of the will through technology, which are creating a revelatory and revolutionary apparatus through which to perceive reality, which are throwing the question of human existence back upon itself. It’s having to re-examine the entire foundations upon which it built due to the nature of the emergence of this extreme political technological power, which is manifest phenomenologically in space and time. This is a revolution of history and historical consciousness, exponential revolution, as in never before seen, not even close.

48:30

To have Hack Wilson emerge in this and from this is very similar, if not the same, to the recombinative powers that are constituted in the nuclear bomb itself, the advent and construction of the nuclear bomb.

How could such a force be produced from the existing forces of nature which we observe?

48:53

And this again is the revolution of the quantum mechanical out from under and beneath the Newtonian, which is the phenomenological forces of nature as in the laws of physics. This transcendental order which is emerging out from the phenomenological appearance of that which is, which is revelation. And so to have Hack Wilson, this most high contrast formation of these phenomenological, these pre and post phenomenological forces of the will… enrapturing phenomenological world and the world of appearances and revealing something deeper, something hid beneath the substratum of the human and the appearance of things.

This is itself what the ancient Hindu tradition gestures and gesticulates towards — the emergence of Vishvarupa, which is the eternal or universal Godhead, the formless that is within and is all forms.

But this is the call for revelation which must emerge and does emerge most intimately through the most unlikely and improbable physical and body conditions which revelate. And this is the trans-historical and supra-historical function of existential heroism. It’s the emergence from within the powers of th individual clothed self into space and time… the emergence of the full power and the effulgent essence of the will from within the most unlikely material withheld, limited, embodied conditions.

And to experience that in such high contrast with Hack Wilson’s season in 1930 is a rescripting and rescripturing of reality, which we observe in the record books today.

50:40

And it’s a testament, right, to what he sculpted and crafted within the forge of his will, within the forge of his person, the realization of a transcendent existential power from within the most unlikely historical material, social, political, and embodied biochemical conditions.

51:03

This is true possibility and this is true revelation in the sense of something emergent beyond that which is known. So that’s what I got. I’ll catch you on the next one.