Baseball and Melancholy

One thing about Cubs fans is that we never really do expect to win. I mean, we can have a great season, with a terrific record, and go on to blow it in the division playoffs, even if we've beaten the opposing team several times during the regular season. Or we get a little further into things and some fan catches the wrong ball and it's all over.

This year would have been a great one for winning the World Series, though: the hundredth anniversary of the last time the Cubs became the champs.

But perhaps not winning is what helps makes Cubs fans who they are, as if a certain post-season sadness were part of our character. After all, we've still got Wrigley Field, and the ivy, and one of the best in-park experiences in baseball. As traditional baseball parks drop off the map, to be replaced by bigger and "better" ones with sky boxes for rich folk, Wrigley remains staunchly American. Everyman's ballpark. You can still mark the seasons by the condition of the ivy on the brick wall.

I miss that ivy. Some of it (from a cutting) grew on a wall behind our flat on Seminary, only a block and a half from the Field. Among my fondest Chicago memories is puttering around in my garden while a game was going on, listening to the announcements and the cheering (or groaning) crowd, and Harry Caray leading the fans in "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh inning stretch. But that ivy really is a phenological marker. In the spring, at the beginning of the season, the outfield wall looks really scraggly, before it leafs out. And at the end of the season (which has been, more often than not, the end of the season at Wrigley), the barest hint of color starts to tinge the edges of the leaves. After everybody's gone home for the year, the ivy looks like the photo at the beginning of this post.

Perhaps the reason why baseball is the only sport I truly love is that it's laced with metaphor, and tied to place. In a World Series without a favorite team, I'll inevitably root for whichever team I've seen play, in a place where I've lived--southern California, Philadelphia, Chicago. Even Texas, if it ever comes to that. For me it's not a real summer without at least one game, and I've learned to live with the Rangers, just as I've more or less learned to live on the prairie. This year we went to the last Sunday home game, against the Angels, who beat the home team soundly. We sat just a few rows behind the visiting dugout, and I even managed to get some decent photos with my iPhone.

When George Carlin died, last June, in the middle of baseball season, the first clip I got online to watch was his hilarious take on the differences between football and baseball. Long after I forget which seven words we can't say on TV, I'll remember this bit.



And now summer has come and gone, and the Cubs are out of contention, and so are the Angels (one of my childhood favorite teams; I graduated from high school near Anaheim), and along with the equinox and yesterday's cold front, fall is making itself official. I won't be as interested as I thought I'd be in the outcome of the World Series this year. But as the playoffs wind down and the contenders are resolved, I'll get into the spirit despite the fact that I really don't care who wins. It's the game that's important, after all, and getting home, safe. And, of course, there's always next year.

Photos: Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata), the species that grows at Wrigley, by John Delano; Cubs Win by L. B. Jacob, both from Wikimedia Commons. Angels fans celebrating a couple of runs on September 22, at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas.

Poem in October

Now that the throes of finals grading are behind me (at least for another eleven weeks), I've had a little time to reflect on seasonal changes--something I like to do around equinoxes and solstices, but had to postpone because of the usual end-of-quarter mishegoss. This time of year usually finds me fraught with homesickness, and so I've used a wonderful autumn photo of the Sierras near my Dad's home town to open this post.

In my continuing effort to mark the seasons in this place, and to develop some enduring level of affection for the suburbanized prairie, I wandered my increasingly disheveled property this morning. The equinox occurred late last month, with little fanfare. No "weather" (which, in North Texas, means that it's been pleasant--dry, cool, relatively ozone-free), no catastrophes since Ike. It was actually Gustav who turned the season around for us, and brought us out of summer. We got little from Ike, but it kept things cool. At any rate, it's now fall, the flowers are fading, and the seasonal turn needs marking.

This is the time of year, too, that always brings poetry to mind--especially poetry of place. And since my daughter is well into her "thirtieth year to heaven" (she turns 30 next June), I thought of Poem in October by Dylan Thomas, whose unfailing ability to evoke his physical environment also came to mind as I strolled around in the back yard. Our landscapes have little in common, but there are moments at which our worlds touch briefly and then carom away from one another:

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

No hills here, and the day is already fair, and if the weather turns around it'll bring welcome rain, but there are blackbirds (a cacophony of them this morning: grackles, cowbirds, starlings, and even--for reasons I don't understand at all--a redwing). Fading summer is palpable in the garden, where the tomato vines have fruited again and there will be a few peppers, but the plants themselves are wan and scraggly. I've had to water twice this week to keep them from giving up the ghost. The barred owls have made themselves known again, but in the distance now--not like spring, when they're making porn movies in the trees outside my windows.

Leaves are beginning to drift down on the little patio Beloved Spouse recently constructed between the study window and the potting shed. I've moved a couple of chairs there, and our ice chest, and might get a pot or two of seasonal posies to brighten it up. Eventually it'll have alyssum growing around it, and I'll add a cafe table, and maybe even an arbor to cover it. With grapes, perhaps. Some day.

During October, Beloved Spouse and I also celebrate his birthday, and the anniversary of Sputnik (both events took place in October, 1957). I remember my father's saying to me after the launch was announced, "Some day those things will be all over the sky." Sure enough, by the time I was a teenager, my grandmother and I would sit outside her house on a clear night and watch satellites go by--sometimes two or three on an evening. Of course, here, only thirty miles north of Dallas (the route to which is lined with suburbs) with the usual combination of city lights and haze, it's hard enough to see stars, let alone satellites.

Add to all of this the coming of the Jewish New Year, and a sense of renewal, newness, beginnings and starting over. The Worm Ouroboros that swallows its own tail; the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Many Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur the way Gentiles celebrate December 31, only with more ritual and seriousness. But this is a harvest festival, and the celebration of first fruits as much as a renewal. We make account of our errors and strive for betterment, and we enjoy the harvest of pears (and, in alternate years, pecans).

I went out on my own front porch in the middle of September to see the Harvest moon rising hugely, but my favorite full moon happens this month: the Hunter's moon, when the trees have lost a lot of their leaves already, and it's easier to see rising. One of the projects I have on the back burner is to photograph the full moon each month for a year. I meant to start with the Harvest moon, but end-of-quarter distractions made me forget, so it'll have to wait until the fourteenth, when I'll probably think of Dylan Thomas again, and remember other bits of the poem, and relish the season, and mark the moment:

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

But now I've got to go work on pear conserve, and sweep the squirrel-borne detritus (half-munched bits of immature pecans everywhere) off the driveway so I can stop tracking pecan shells and guts into the house every time I come back inside. And then it's back to work on prep for the fall quarter: a new batch of students (180 or so of them), and a course I haven't taught in a year (Visual Anthropology) to keep things interesting.

Photo credits: A lovely shot of Norman Clyde Peak's northeast face in autumn, seen from Big Pine Creek, by Justin Johnsen via Wikimedia Commons. The last Rose of Sharon in my garden, and the last few tomatoes, still green.

The Universe and Everything

This week marks the lighting of the fire (as it were) under the Large Hadron Collider on the border between France and Switzerland. I have mixed feelings about this event for several reasons.

First of all, it could have been us, here in North Texas, whacking atoms together and discovering all manner of stuff about the origins of the universe. Back in the 90s, the Super-conducting Super Collider was being built just south of Dallas (in the town of Waxahachie, which, rather ironically, sports even more nineteenth-century houses than McKinney does). But the gummint (the Clinton administration and Congress, to be specific) pulled the plug when it looked like the budget would exceed 12 billion bucks. (Now that's an earmark. But I'm not convinced it was pork.)

In one sense, this is one more example of how short-sighted we tend to be as a nation, and one of the problems with the kind of immediate-results capitalism we practice. If it's not going to show a profit in six months, we ain't doin' it. Long-term investment is for old fogeys and ivory tower intellectuals. Bring on the day-traders and the stock-market gamblers (and the sub-prime mortgage racketeers), but don't invest in the future unless somebody guarantees that it will lead to big bucks, real soon. Don't ever do anything purely for the sake of science or understanding.

Of course, we don't teach science properly in schools, either, which is why we couldn't get anybody fired up about the Collider and its potential for answering all manner of questions about the beginnings of life, the universe, and everything (the answers probably being somewhat more complex than "42"). I'm pretty sure I'm the only person I know with a picture of the guts of the LHC displayed on my desktop as wallpaper. And I really don't know squat about physics.

But I know enough to maintain some trust that these guys know what they're doing. I hung around with a number of Nobel-prize-winner-spawn at Penn (in addition to the fact that my former father-in-law edited Physical Review Letters and I saw a lot of high-powered physicists in action), and these guys knew their stuff. They were, even back in the seventies, talking about what we might learn from developing an instrument that could smack particles together at enormous speeds and create--what?

Here was the problem, to me: uncertainty. And I don't mean in Heisenberg's sense. I mean in the sense of "are we really wise enough to pull this off without destroying life as we know it?" Human beings are capable of magnificent flashes of intellectual power; but we can also be almost irretrievably stupid. We are capable of inventing all manner of ways to heal the sick, but we also have more ways of killing each other off than are necessary by any stretch of the imagination. So how do we know that these guys--who are now running atoms around a racetrack in order to make them collide at impossible speeds--know what they're doing?

Well, we don't. But I, for one, trust them. I don't equate this with faith, because faith doesn't require evidence, just belief. I don't believe that the LHC physicists and engineers know what they're doing; I simply trust them on the basis of their academic and professional credentials. Not only that, there are about 80 countries involved in the development of these projects--indicating that we're perfectly capable of working together to answer important, fundamental questions.

Perhaps I'm willing to cut them some slack (I am, after all, known for my critical stance regarding most technologies) because what they're doing is just so bloody cool. As a life-long science fiction buff, I've always been disappointed that we've done so little about getting out and exploring the universe. But now we're doing that--right here on Planet Earth.

If what's going on is unclear, I highly recommend the short video available on the CERN website, which focuses on the ALICE experiment now being undertaken. A longer film featuring physicist Brian Cox (with only one accent to deal with) is available from TED. Also recommended: an article from Seed magazine on "Why a Large Hadron Collider?" The irrepressible Stephen Hawking also talks about the project on BBC--and I have little trouble feeling comfortable with his assessments, since he's probably the smartest guy on the planet.

A couple of good blogs to look at for debunking predictions of catastrophe and dispelling fears of the apocalypse: New Scientist's Short Sharp Blog entry, and this one from The Biologista.

For the naysayers who are still afraid of doomsday, you can check in at this website for reassurance: http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

This morning, once again, I woke up in the known universe; so things seem to be going well so far.

September 27 update: Well, things haven't gone as well as expected. CERN announced on September 18 that the LHC would be offline for the rest of the year, due to electrical problems. For the full story see this article in Wired online.

Photo: The CMS silicon tracking detector, which measures the three-dimensional positions of charged particles as they travel through it, allowing measurement of their momentum; a diagram of the major experiments. Both courtesy CERN.