The Field of Play 9.19.26 Lecture

The Field of Play 9.19.26

I. From the highway to the stadium

On the road you can really see the infrastructure. There’s the difference between the natural, organic, tree-lined fields of flowers and the interjection of farms and agriculture. Then there are the massive highways with their road signs and symbolic order, and the cranes of the McDonald’s and the gas stations. It’s very American countryside: flat tires on the shoulder, lifted trucks, then miles and miles of towering trees interlocked with one another, forest ecologies at the outskirts of the Walmart Supercenters.

We went deep into these infrastructures cosmologically in the last lecture. Now I want to go further into the culture of sports, cosmologically.

I was watching the Tom Brady and Peyton Manning playoff games. I loved Tom Brady as a kid. There were those old Patriots teams with Tedy Bruschi and Vince Wilfork on defense, then Randy Moss and Wes Welker in the second era of their excellence. I watched them from the time I was very little.

That got me thinking about driving through these extremely small towns on Friday nights. There’s maybe one dentist, a lot of older residential buildings, one main street, a gas station, a Dollar General, maybe green storage facilities or oil fields. It’s a very specifically American experience. Its existential side is depicted beautifully in Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights , which helps me talk about sports in a cosmological sense.

I’ve talked about this already with baseball, way back in the early lectures and essays, so I don’t want to go too deep. This work extends back almost two decades now, so I’m building on things that have already been done, and I can’t go back through all of it.

II. Freedom and the theater of human performance

Once we’re aware cosmologically of the human situation, we enter a larger existential situation. That includes the technology and the vast technological and symbolic recursion running from stellar nuclear physics to the genome, to the sprouting seed, to the complex nervous system and its synapses. Sartre explains this situation well at mid-century: freedom of action in this extreme existential expanse terrifies the human being.

We experience this in the relation between civilization and wilderness. On one side is survival out in the wild, among bears and brutes, in the forests and mountains, far from modern convenience. On the other, in the midst of modern civilization, there’s the sports stadium. That holds for American history and for world history alike. The stadium, the team, and the sporting event carry massive symbolic significance. This goes back to the Olympics and gladiatorial Rome, and it’s manifest across the world in European football, American football, baseball, and so on.

Most people conceive of the sporting event as people kicking a ball around while you cheer on your local professionals. But beneath that appearance, I’m suggesting, there’s a deep, unconscious, species-level recognition of what the sporting event entails. It’s the theater of human performance.

We see this most clearly in the Olympics, where the world’s nations gather and the best athletes in each event compete for international titles. It’s primarily a theater of witnessing full metabolic possibility: the combination of skill, wit, and pure physical ability. These people have spent their entire lives mastering a specific discipline at whatever level of complexity, whether baseball, wrestling, tennis, or water polo. They’ve cultivated the ability to perform very grounded somatic actions.

III. Why sport, ontologically

I’ve always gravitated toward sports as much as, if not more than, philosophy, science, or literary and poetic pursuit. That’s because my work is ontological. It’s about the essence of being, the meaning and character of being. We’ve discussed the importance of somatics from star to cell to human being. Once we understand it, we understand the importance of being in the body, and the sporting event is that par excellence.

I’m lingering on football here, and football carries real danger. So much of my work is intellectual. The first time I got a concussion, hit on a crossing route in high school, that was it for me, because it hurts so much you can’t think. And we now know with CTE how risky the game is. But I appreciate and respect it precisely because of the existential risk it entails.

You’re putting your body and your mind on the line in the field of relations, which is the physical theater. The field of relations is the theater of space and time we live in. Driving a car, walking a city street, and sitting beneath a lamppost are all expressions of being in time. This is the phenomenological condition of existence, and we all participate in it with varying degrees of consciousness and activity.

What the sporting theater does, especially at the highest levels, is gather individuals who have spent their entire lives unifying the somatic dimensions of the body. That means mind, hand-eye coordination, motor processing, and the ritual of learning a skill. I’ve written a fair bit on players like Lou Gehrig and Rogers Hornsby, on their dedication, discipline, and craft. They field ground balls over and over, swing the bat, and work on timing. These are very difficult acts. Practically speaking, hitting a baseball may be one of the hardest things a person can do, and stepping onto a football field one of the riskiest.

As we’ve discussed with cosmological play, this craft and practice of sport is simply full-body immersion play: mind, body, and spirit at play, as Plato would say.

What’s so powerful about sporting culture is that it is so material, so physical and somatic. The culture of philosophy, art, and literature is dissociative, and I’d make the same claim for science. Some of the greatest scientists who ever lived are people like Ted Williams: scientists of the physical act of being in time. Williams gave an incredibly powerful and sophisticated analysis of hitting a baseball, one of the most scientifically complex physical acts there is.

Sport is the implementation of science. It’s metabolic science and thermonuclear science, plus the mathematics and geometry needed to analyze the speed and motion of an object, all lived somatically. Living that experience is different from analyzing it abstractly in number or letter. We move out of the sphere of representation and into the sphere of world: living, action, movement, the expression of being in space and time with full-bodied participation.

IV. The stadium as Greek theater

What I’m doing here is undergirding what Bissinger describes in Friday Night Lights. It’s especially stark in the American experience of vast southern and northern poverty alike, in small towns that gather around high school football and baseball fields. Those fields are expressions of the American spirit, the zeitgeist of the nation, as Hegel would say. People gather there to participate in what is really the secular transcendental event of our time: the sporting event.

They gather in stadiums that resemble Greek theaters. I’ve discussed Nationals Park in Washington, DC, a bowl cut into the earth, shaped eerily like the old Greek theaters where the comedies and tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides were performed. The American theater of the tragic hero, of Joe DiMaggio or Babe Ruth, is the theater of American baseball.

I’d argue this sporting phenomenology is an even more sophisticated understanding of the mythic nature of creation and the human condition than the Greek mode. But it gets trivialized and called pedestrian or plebeian, especially in circles that consider themselves serious about the philosophical project. They’re “serious” about thinking about being precisely because they’re dissociated. Some of the most advanced science being performed today happens in and through sports, including sports medicine and nutrition. What I’m advocating is the most holistic possible engagement with the experience of being in time, and this is where I see it.

Watch a tactician like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. There’s an extreme unity of field vision, tracking fast motor movement among a multiplicity of other bodies, and timing the throw. You have to practice to throw a tight spiral with this unwieldy, inflated pigskin. You have to hit a target moving at top human speed among other players also moving at top speed. The receivers run preprogrammed routes you’ve practiced over and over from a massive playbook, which has to be memorized and then enacted on the field. This is one of the most sophisticated actions available to a human being.

It’s like the mastery of hitting a baseball, or the mastery of the expert pitcher who calls his own game. He chooses where he’s throwing and what pitch in relation to what he knows about the batter: his tendencies, his weak spots, his history, and the history between this pitcher and the man who just stepped up to the plate.

V. Theater, or temple

Obviously there’s the theater of uniforms and teams representing cities. People root for their city’s team and wear its jerseys. That’s cultural participation, local and regional, the spectacle of the event.

At a deeper level, though, it’s an opportunity to participate in a transcendental rite of being. That’s what I want to angle toward. Superficially you could call it theater. At a deeper level it’s more like a temple or a church, because what people gather to witness is the passage of mastery, incarnate in historical sporting figures and passed down from Ty Cobb to Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle to Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver.

The history of these sports is ridiculously well documented and stored in archives like the Baseball Hall of Fame. When we look at it, we’re looking at a hidden sacredness. I think it’s inexhaustible precisely because of the unity with the body it requires, and the level of intelligence and embodied participation demanded at the top.

That’s especially true at certain positions: wide receiver, quarterback, the leader of the defense (usually the middle linebacker), pitcher, catcher, and the best hitters. The strategy, contemplation, field vision, and game knowledge involved are extremely sophisticated expressions of consciousness and awareness. So is the practice of specific movements coordinated against an opponent.

This brings me back to the way Jim Morrison maps the city. I think he calls it a game of sex and death, with sex at the center. That’s all well and good at a disembodied, dissociated level of consciousness, which I’d call the animal level. Much of what we experience as humanity is animality: food, water, shelter, survival, reproduction. That’s the sphere we want to get out of, I’d argue, because the play available to us lies just on the other side of it.

VI. The town that stops for football

That juxtaposition is exactly what’s cut and carved in Friday Night Lights. The Permian Panthers play in a small Texas town with an oil-field economy, and football is really what the town has. Bissinger’s book is a documentary history. He moves from the lives of the high school players to the lives of their parents, families, and community, all built around passing this sport down through generations. The fathers played for Permian. The mothers were cheerleaders or classmates. It’s all set within an extremely local, communal, really tribal environment, bonded and bound fundamentally by high school football.

I don’t think the book is fully conscious of how clearly it renders this, and it isn’t meant to be. What’s happening is that the center of the community, which formerly was usually religion, has shifted. That isn’t to say religion is no longer primary in many of these places. But football is the force that closes the entire town for the day. The town’s economy stops, because everyone goes to the game. It turns kids of 15 to 19 into hometown heroes, almost demigods.

We see a lot of this in American celebrity culture, especially sports celebrity. It causes real problems when sports figures are treated as sources of knowledge or truth. That’s in large part the American condition, and presidents born out of Hollywood, celebrity, and industry are partly an indictment of it. The democratic tendency is to elevate heroes from one superficial domain into people who try to set the direction of society at large, and that doesn’t bode well.

VII. Carving a space within the persistence theater

To return to the thing at hand: we’ve traced the whole cosmological and historical arc down into civilization and culture, from Lascaux to McDonald’s. Looking through these concentric circles of what’s available to humanity, the existential issue is the persistence theater. As with Sartre, there’s no exit from it. It permeates every aspect of reality.

But when we become conscious of it and turn it into low-level background noise, instead of letting it occupy the whole of human experience, new worlds open up to us. I’d argue those new worlds are culture, in its most sophisticated forms.

As we see with Wagner and Nietzsche, this has historically been an aristocratic domain of the arts, especially performing arts like opera and theater. I want to extend it to the sporting event, in a more ontologically holistic sense. Sport is full-body competition responsive to changing circumstances. Theater and opera are programmatic: they follow a script, a set series of events that unfolds as written. It comes down to degrees of abstraction from the condition of being in time.

The development and sophistication of the sporting event has moved it away from gladiatorial, life-or-death combat, which is really a warring sensibility. It has become a set of games of physical strategy and displays of mind-muscle coordination. We’ve gone from gladiators to football, with rugby perhaps the closest now, and then soccer and baseball. These all align with very similar modes of participation.

That’s what I mean phenomenologically. This kind of behavior is the most sophisticated available to human beings, because it requires us to stay present in being, which means in the body. It requires us to navigate a theater of changing circumstances using mind, body, and spirit, that is, passion. Tom Brady is a great example of someone whose passion is unified with his mind and body in the mastery of a skill: calling plays, reading defenses, leading his team down the field.

I’ve described this at length in relation to baseball and Greek mythology. Sport brings Greek tragic theater into the realm of embodied participation. That’s exactly why we no longer recognize it as such. It has evolved, stepping into the real domain of experience, so that going to the game just appears to be going to the game rather than entering a modern Greek theater of the heroic journey, like Jason and the Argonauts.

The team or the player on the field is set to work solving a series of problems inside a simulated theatrical environment with its own rules. Yet, like the heroic journey or the Odyssey , they move through space and time within larger ontological precepts, throwing the dice of existence with the full scale and skill of their abilities. To create this sporting theater is to carve a space within the persistence theater at large, where these capacities can be honed and used to their fullest when you step onto the field of play.

That’s different from driving a car, going to the grocery store, or working in a lumber mill. In those tasks the fullest extent of our being is largely veiled. Partly that’s because they aren’t theater. They aren’t made into an event; they’re considered everyday life. And these everyday tasks of labor don’t require the fullest extent of who we are in mind, body, and spirit. They don’t demand the full commitment of existential passion.

That’s what distinguishes the sporting event from art, which is usually scripted or somewhat disembodied, not requiring full physical exertion. It also distinguishes sport from firefighting or soldiering. Those require something like full-body acuity, but not necessarily the commitment of existential passion or joy. So we create these artificial theatrical spaces where our full capacities can be used. That’s the critical, essential fact of sport at every age and level of commitment.

Moving through space and time in the sporting world is, I’d say, the furthest extent of any civilization’s capacity to localize the transcendental through embodied commitment. That’s very different from the sacred as it appears in religious ritual, sitting in the pews or in the act of prayer.

This is a difficult concept to elucidate. What high-level sport asks of you is three things: the extreme unity of mind and body, moving at full speed, with the existential commitment of passion or joy. You throw yourself onto the field and play at full commitment. I’m trying to cross over from the art of life into the art of play, as a civilizational act of creating these theaters and fields where the drama can play out fully. My argument is that this is where we see the fullest capacity of humanity.

When Artaud, in mid-century France, tries to create the theater of cruelty, what he describes in many ways resembles American football or baseball: a return to true, complete presence and embodiment. I’d call it the return of the sacred. It’s the possibility of the sacred as fully committed being in time, which is really unity with timeless being.

I’ve described this before in relation to wu wei, the cosmic agon, and the state of the conscious mind in flow, in sport as in musical or creative flow. It’s the state of right experience, of making existence pass well.

For me that’s baseball cards, baseball radio, listening to these lectures on the open summer road, and an early fall evening on the porch in a rocking chair playing slide guitar or listening to John Coltrane. I think this is what existence asks of us. It requires us to step so fully into being in time that we become timeless being itself, characterologically. That’s what lies beyond and behind persistence against constraint. Heraclitus said it best: the aeon is a child at play with colored balls.

VIII. Devotion

That’s what I’m gesturing toward: the domain beyond or behind the real, the domain of the hyperreal. It could be John Coltrane’s lifelong, full-bodied practice and commitment to music, which ultimately became the spiritual offering of A Love Supreme. It could be the life of Honus Wagner in baseball or Tom Brady in football. These people dedicated their lives, with almost monklike devotion, to the practice of these theaters. That practice is full-bodied ontological commitment to being in time, and the presence it requires.

With many of these figures, as with Rogers Hornsby and hitting, it becomes a single-minded devotion and obsession. What I’m suggesting is that they get far more out of their commitment to this fuller ontological zone than they would from most of what we conventionally call human experience, or the modern world at large. They’ve thrown themselves, mind, body, and spirit, into the Platonic gymnasium, so to speak.

I think Plato’s background as a wrestler plays a large part in his philosophy and its articulation, since by tradition he was a high-level wrestler. He understood what the ontological requires: throwing oneself into embodied, somatic commitment to the real, within a theater that makes that expression possible.

That theater requires its own zone of rules. When you step into a baseball or football stadium, you pass through a threshold into a different zone, a gateway of experience, much like stepping into a church or temple. It’s a sacred space in the sense that it’s devoted to the fullest possible expression of the entirely embodied, committed individual. Ultimately it’s an ontological zone of the experience of God, or of being.

IX. Incarnation

Look at a pseudo-secular nation like America, largely Christian in its ideological inclination, even Christian nationalist. Behind that supposition, I think, we see a civilizationally embodied Christ myth stepping forward: Christ as the body of God, the incarnation of God.

Sport is absolutely entwined with the American ritual of being in time, the American everyday. Football, baseball, and basketball seasons are American sports, and they dominate the experience of American time across spring, summer, fall, and winter. They’ve been overlaid on the regular seasonal turnings of nature.

We see this dominance because sport incarnates religious, theological, and mythological problems, which are ultimately existential conditions and consequences, into a field of play. By learning that field of play and its rules, we can step ever more fully into our ontological and existential condition.

You don’t need to be a Plato, an Emerson, a Spinoza, or a Socrates to understand what’s going on. You need only to witness and experience the game at whatever level you can receive it. Unconsciously there is a group-level knowledge of what the game articulates somatically, of what it reveals about nature, existence, and being.

That’s why the sporting event is so popular: because of what it does and can do ontologically. It makes this deeper dimension of ontological truth available to everyone, without the gateway of particular levels of cognitive intelligence or neurological sophistication. It does this by creating a zone of experiential, unpredictable, improvisational theater.

X. Baseball and jazz: the emergence of situations

When I listen to Coltrane, or to Gary, Keith, and Ron calling a Mets game, what I hear that’s so beautiful is the response to emerging situations. So this is really where we arrive: baseball and jazz as fantastic ontological, spiritual, and specifically American expressions of our core problem, the emergence of situations.

I’m driving on the highway, and every moment a new situation emerges that I must respond to. That’s a high-contrast, high-speed version of the same problem we meet in everyday life, in grocery stores, on a bicycle, on a city street. Situations and conditions emerge from the complex interplay of this cosmological organism of persistence against constraint, working locally on the ground of the earth. That means the gravity of this planetary body in relation to sun, moon, and stars, the seasons, and day and night.

Sport turns that into an existential art form. It may be most visible in tennis, interestingly enough, or in jazz. Think of bebop, of Miles Davis and Coltrane, of Bill Evans and Miles Davis. All these bands somehow happen to have Miles Davis in them. The backbone of the band experience is responding to emerging conditions, loosely based on a template, maybe an old standard like “My Favorite Things.” In baseball the template is the rules: 90 feet between the bases, 60 feet 6 inches from the mound to the plate.

Within that loosely structured space you enter the realm of sacred articulation. It’s a high-contrast zone of experience where the human existential condition is heightened to the point of revelation. That’s what I mean by theater. Watching Miles Davis or Bill Evans play the Village Vanguard, or Coltrane in Amsterdam or wherever else, you step into a zone of human performance. Human performance at its highest is the ability to respond with acuity to changing, emerging circumstances. That is adaptation: evolutionary adaptation, cosmological adaptation, persistence against constraint.

I believe it’s Miles Davis, or maybe Monk, who says there is no wrong note, only the note you play afterward. That’s a radical expression of the creative, formative law of the universe: play. It names the iterative intelligence I’ve described as the theater of persistence against constraint, which runs through all things and dimensions, star to cell to human being to stone.

This is a process-level architecture. It’s being expressing itself in time with various, sometimes increasing, degrees of consciousness and sentience about its own character. It experiments within space and time, which is an emerging cosmological condition. That condition begins with the birth of the universe and the distribution of that massive wave of energy into stellar forms, ecosystems, and beings. Over time this is what gets iterated: energy transforming and being transformed.

Coltrane steps into that current of history and time, the changing circumstances, and exhibits mind-body-spirit intelligence iterating in real time against newly emerging possibilities. That is a profound expression of self, of spirit, of existence.

This goes back to the cosmological work of existential literary philosophy we discussed with Rimbaud and Dostoevsky: the capacity to reveal being itself through the creative act. It’s a consciousness of the principles of creation and an act of participation in them, perhaps not at the level of ontology, but at the level of lived experience. Watching Juan Soto hit a baseball, you’re watching someone who has in many ways mastered a theater of existence. He throws us back toward the highest possibilities of what it is to be at all, specifically in the human forebrain epoch of cosmological evolution.

XI. From the unlikeliest circumstances

This was one of the founding ontological lectures in my huge baseball series, the one on Hack Wilson. Wilson was likely born with fetal alcohol syndrome to two deeply addicted laborers in industrial Pennsylvania. From a young age he worked as a printer’s devil and in factories, building his body through extremely hard labor. He went on to set the major league record of 191 RBIs in 1930, and that same year he came close to Babe Ruth’s home run record.

What that lecture expressed was the highest possibility emerging from the unlikeliest circumstances. Here was a man debilitated from birth by addiction that literally shaped how his body formed, born into extreme poverty. By the force of his very being he built his body and left one of the most enduring marks possible on the highest cultural theater of American history, which was baseball.

Or take Mariano Rivera. Born into poverty in Panama, he played as a boy with a cardboard glove. He became the greatest closer in baseball history, the pitcher who finishes the game, always entering to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, and the first player ever unanimously elected to the Hall of Fame.

These are the stories that interest me most. I’ve covered Jake Daubert and Stan Coveleski, some of my favorite players of all time. Through the lens of sport, they show this full mind-body-spirit expression, this total ontological commitment to mastery, engaging the whole somatic body on the field of life.

That asks of us: what does it mean to be? I think sports tell us something beyond pure persistence. The situation appears to be brute persistence against constraint: gravity, metabolic degradation, the passage of time through the body, the pull of sun, moon, and stars, the energetic continuum we live in, and our inability to keep our pseudo-closed, entropic systems closed as heat escapes. Within that condition, sports show us the fullest capacities of play.

XII. Democratic greatness

That’s why I’d go so far as to put baseball, jazz, and American football, especially the quarterback position, above even the most sophisticated Wagnerian operas and the aesthetic objects of German and European art. Those are built around an aristocratic, class-based vision of beauty and genius. I’m coming from the American democratic mode.

I’m taking this popular, secularized sport, which in baseball’s case was composed largely of the sons of slaves. It included European immigrants who couldn’t read or write, working in mines and mills at seven or ten years old. It included sugar-mill players in Cuba whose parents had been enslaved. These are some of the greatest participants in some of the greatest ontological forms available to us.

That complicates the historical narrative of greatness, genius, power, and strength, which has been synthesized largely through aristocratic forms of perceived meaning. I’ve written extensively about early American baseball press photography as the unacknowledged artistic revolution of the last 200 or even 250 years. I see it as that significant. It was an entirely new technology, immediately subordinated to the practical, democratic work of national news journalism. Yet it produced some of the highest first-order artifacts of human experience I’ve ever seen. They mostly depict the poor children of slaves, immigrants, farm workers, sharecroppers, and factory workers.

That’s exactly why the movement goes unrecognized. The WPA comes after it. Understand that: the WPA comes after this. This is the originating force behind what we now experience as documentary photojournalism as art in American historical consciousness. What flows downstream from it is substantial, and I’ve done a lot of work on the forms that emerge from those artifacts.

Much of that comes from my childhood fascination with Negro Leagues history and with industrial labor as it related to baseball in the early 1900s. It also comes from working in the baseball archives at the Smithsonian’s American History museum when I was younger. There I came to understand the depth of value, meaning, and substance behind something so unassuming: the human story these fields contain as they’re passed down from generation to generation.

XIII. What is persisting

This returns us to Buzz Bissinger and Friday Night Lights. These sporting events don’t only bind communities. Where there might otherwise be impoverishment in education, or in the possibility of contemplating ontology with the necessary abstraction and depth, they provide something else. They offer a secular, communal, lived experience of the sacred through fully embodied play and immersion. They cultivate discipline at the highest levels, mind-body and mind-muscle connection, and the coordination and practice to perform these acts with dedication and joy. At the cosmological level, that joy is what lies behind and beyond persistence against constraint.

What is persisting against constraint? Heraclitus says it’s the aeon, the child at play with colored balls. I’d say much the same. The universe is a vast force of blind persistence, recombining its elements within increasingly complex local containers to produce new actions, new results, and new possibilities for the synthesis of consciousness itself. It opens new navigable terrains, like the opposable thumb and the forebrain.

Without the opposable thumb and the forebrain, you don’t have Stan Coveleski’s performance in the 1920 World Series or Christy Mathewson’s shutouts in the 1905 World Series. You don’t have the beauty of the theater of American baseball, from radio to vintage cards to the creative diversity of uniforms and team names.

You don’t have the ontological greatness of the Negro Leagues either. They were built from the ground up by communities so dedicated to this existentially sacred form of baseball that they organized an entire infrastructure of communication, transportation, and economy. They did it even while excluded from the primary institution of white American baseball, from the end of the 1800s into the 1900s.

This is all present in history. What I’m trying to bring forward is why it matters, and why it shouldn’t be dismissed. The reasons are manifold. At the deepest level, it is what lies beyond the part of life we usually allow to be purely essential: to survive, to reproduce.

Take Rogers Hornsby, whose entire life became subordinated to baseball, as happened with many of these figures. You might ask why anyone would dedicate a whole life to a sport. John Coltrane’s entire life became dedicated to jazz. The reason is the possibility behind this adaptation. I’d call it an evolutionary adaptation toward existential expression, necessary to perform at the highest level in these cultural theaters of improvisation. They have loose laws and loose rules, but within them lie infinite permutations of possibility.

This is the historical unity of jazz and baseball. Duke Ellington even had a baseball team. These historical figures participated, at the highest level, in some of the most important ontological revelations of possibility, not only in American history but in world history.

Modern sport is a relatively new thing, increasingly separated from war, even if figures like Ted Williams still went to war, into another kind of theater. In cosmological history, the sophistication needed to build these creative theaters is remarkable. It takes the rules and regulations, the costumes and uniforms, and the stages and stadiums that create the conditions for the fullest possible expression of self and of being.

That’s what I’ve got. I hope you enjoyed this one, and I’ll catch you on the next one.