The Game of Entropy

A 1952 New York Giants team signed baseball

The game of entropy is instituted, interrogated, and articulated through the materials it instantiates phenomenologically and leaves behind. It is a game of time as fundamental force, through which gravitational fields and exertions are admixed to form one suprasubstantial, supraordinate organism and force.

The articulate signed baseball through century and half century is a perfect instrument of instantiation of the character of time and being through form as in the aging of the literal flesh of the body outside of the thermonuclear container of the metabolism. The aging of horsehide provides the field for etching the script of the remainder of the fading body of the 1952 New York Giants team — immortalized in the black pen sigil which stands in for each laboring metabolic body which formed the organization of the ballclub proper.

Critical is the use of horsehide and leather and wood in America’s ballgame as tools of the trade which acquire age like wine and whiskey in the barrel of time: substantial natural materials of weather and skin of the cosmological instantiation of form through genetics. Oak, cow, horse: the conversion of chlorophyll and the body of blood into beakers which show the work of time in natural materials against the force of life and death as in coursing veins and roots and stems — removed and articulated in a taxidermy of life through which time can act supraordinately in a preservational, bottled force.

No longer requiring life to substantiate, fat, and flow the organism, horsehide acquires a new life, a separate cultural life in the body of the baseball. And as such, it acquires a different time bound status; critically maintaining the cave art sigil of the collective human signature of the metabolically and neurologically organizing body of the regulatory American ballgame — a form of flesh in stone; stone in flesh — which allows for critical persistence of mankind and a total correlative cultural nature through cross species collective recombination.

I began my institutional intellectual career at the Smithsonian American History museum archiving, categorizing, and identifying these baseballs — matching signatures to epochs of the great game; inspecting the hide and grain of these transsubstantiated, sacramental bodies. The game of baseball is a game of death; critically aggregated sacrificial nature converted into a field and stage for the great game of entropy to unfold: the play of time and energy and dispersion through the catch and dive; the Cracker Jack and the beer and the hot dog. A grand metabolism using the repurposed flesh of creation and human metabolic reproduction in a container of ceaseless, endless waste in the name of spectacle; metabolizing through nervous system regulation the transformation of American industrial modernity into a dreamstate of dredging up prehistoric energy from the earth; converting it into smokestack, metropolitan flashing neon cinemas of desire, death, dream.

Humanity is a dream dying through culture; culture allows it to die through the slow grave of translation through the slowing of acceptable media as in the symbol. Symbolic mediation is the transmutation of the real materials and realpolitik of life into an aperture which allows mankind to touch death but only touch death to a degree of distance which allows for collective function and slow metabolic and entropic downturn; downgrade as a normative, regulated condition of the recurrence of symbolic mediation as in the establishment of a neurological everyday.

Baseball is this — America’s critical aperture for the Sphinxian sine wave of existential birth and death; the unfolding of measures of interrogation into the sacred thermonuclear flame of life by proximal relation and experience and internalization as in the realization of that which is and impels all life; mankind as in regulatory structures which are mediating and titrating fields of aggregating and dispersing energy — as in the apple and the digestive system.

Acquired, in the cultural taste, is the aesthetic beauty of metabolized time — the beauty of persistence by and through conversion which produces strange alchemies of civilizational and local; even individual methods of titrating acceptable metabolic time as in confrontations with death and the thermonuclear, entropic foundations of pseudo-closed systems of body, life, organism, civilization, earth, star in the face of the heat death of the universe as in progressive downregulated dispersion of critical heat and energy as in the creation and establishment of the field of space-time proper: the instantiation of cooling forms which pass the thermonuclear life force energy of the cosmos down through scalar translations.

This leaves us with mankind’s conversion of horsehide into a ball with a wound cork and rubber center, wool, yarn. Converted metaphysical scale revelation of Earth; the sedimental crusts; the iron and nickel core. Mankind is always working with intimations of scalar unity, as in the internet — extensions of the primary neural network of the thermonuclear downscaling cosmos as in galactic organizations of star systems; veins of heat, light, and transference.

This ball is a field of play; retroactively, a metabolic sigil, a still flaming, still hot core which radiates the death of play; the degradation of a thermal epoch of space-time which remains no longer in metabolizing human genetic forms as timebound entropic half-lives, but the sigils and converted forms of nature they leave behind as signatures in the field — as in the ancient caves. These signatures are death culture just as they are the genetic ancestry which persists through generations — grandchildren; great-grandchildren — who carry these converted and converting signatures across branching lineages and genealogies.

America carves name, hand, face, hieroglyph not on cave but on horsehide; chemical silver gelatin photographic paper; cardboard. Loose, surviving industrial technologies accommodating, accordingly, the exponential reproduction of the human species held aloft by its technologies and grids of agriculture and energetic distribution. A plasticine culture — fulfillment of the Pleistocene; epoch of survival titrated by blood temperature and starvation; early articulating evolutionary forms without sustainable agricultural and domesticating grids to sustain and form fields of grounded communal life. The horse that carried the nomadic warrior across hitherto unparsed plains; terrain — became the horse digested by the furnace of lithium modernity.

The baseball as cave wall is an age old tradition reinterpreted by chemical, mechanical, atomic modernity. No longer is the cave a cave, nor a horse a horse — instead, fitting with the native tradition of the American continent, the horse is perpetually repurposed; broken down into parts which honor and preserve and redistribute the entire integrity of the horse itself. This ethos of cosmic unity is an ethos of coming energetic conservative articulation of principle itself — a principle which observes latent and active energetic movement and potential within all things: articulated unto and as conversion into alternate, new, emergent forms. This is precisely the philosophical, cosmological revolution of coal at a civilizational scale. It is a rearticulation of the potentialities of transformation hidden within the seemingly opaque, veiled; mundane.

Industrial, digital, and technological modernity is not simply the foundation of new forms, mechanisms; methods. It is a resurrection of the presumed latent, dead, invisible, unarticulated: from within the heart of physical, instantiated, cooled nature. It is the long-tail awakening of emergent consciousness into and toward active instantiation and re-instantiation of life, energy, and potential — the pulling of ore, heat, and light from the grounds of the cosmological earth, air, wind, and light. And as such, it is a rearticulation of the fundamental powers of creation through discovery of that which is, from within that which seems.