LAUNCH ANGLE

A. Bartlett Giamatti (7th MLB commissioner): "Baseball breaks your heart. It's designed to break your heart."

With a new book, Klobberland, coming out in October, I describe the trajectory of my work.

Book 1: A book of meditations on baseball, a game that says something deep about the fundamental nature of reality.
Book 2: The story of one man’s uncensored encounter with that fundamental reality, and the suffering that can result from a lack of awareness of one’s relationship to it.
Book 3: An attempt to describe that fundamental reality directly through a creation myth. What it turned into was a critique of the prevailing myths and stories of our culture, which do everything they can to hide this fundamental reality from the world.
 
Book 1: The Art of War and Baseball – in the words of the commissioner A. Bartlet Giamatti (late 80s) “baseball breaks your heart. It’s designed to break your heart.” – And so is life. This can discourage the best of us. We believe we find no pleasure in the all-too-frequent valleys of the game. We become easily disinterested in the vicissitudes of sport. We can’t buy-in to the struggle, the habitual failure of a .250 batting average. But this brokenness of heart can also have the opposite effect, keeping us in an endless illusion of belief, that tomorrow will finally bring the win that will make one a champion, and end the need to continue the game at all. Both of these responses betray the game. One runs while another wishes its end. And then there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. And it’s only when we live well with that “nothing” that we find the eternal, we see “nothing,” not as worthless, but like the Rubin’s Vase, coming into focus before our eyes. Although this nothingness is the ungraspable component of the universe, when we have the courage to reduce ourselves towards it, we can see it uniquely cloaked in the state of being a game. Not in endless wins or losses, not in belief or disbelief, but in that joy of suspended disbelief, the state where we know it’s all a game, and we know it’s here to break our heart, but we choose to participate anyway. Through cold or intense heat, and sometimes, in a warm green field, in the sun.

Book 2: Hologram Heroes – Johnny is affected by a physical brokenness. The most prominent actor in the play of Johnny’s life is his amputated hand, a phantom, a present absence that can fulfill or destroy. “Hologram heroes” is his reference to hologram baseball cards – reflecting the power that the stories we tell ourselves have to create the prevailing myths and heroes which outline the enjoyment or despair of our current state.

Book 3: Klobberland, is a mythic journey beyond belief and identity that reveals what emerges when the stories fall away and the brokenness that remains paves the way for the mystery of the self to break through.