Disorganized Sports
As a driver, you choose where you are going (usually within the confines of paved roadways), when to get there (depending on traffic), and how stressed you wish to be over the process (all options available). But as a driver, your field of vision is drawn in: to a narrow strip of pavement ahead, to one or more sets of tail-lights, and to a small mirrored square of your traveled past.
As a passenger, you have the chance to give the world around you more attention. You get older, it is easy to become the driver, to get stuck doing the driving. It’s good to be a passenger sometimes, prying your fingers from the wheel, to relax for a time, and to open your eyes.
This morning’s bus ride from the North Shore to Boston gave me a whole hour to sit in half-lotus – an opening and grounding posture I don’t generally enjoy behind the wheel – and time to watch and think. Traffic is quiet this morning: have people left for the weekend already? Has the drizzly weather and yesterday’s horrific commute convinced them to take mass transit? Has the recent jump in fuel prices taught them a lesson in global commerce and middle-man profit margins?
Everything is part of everything else, so if you seed your mind with current affairs, and water the plant with some personal or planetary history, the smallest glance can lead you to a bigger picture.
On the rusting Tobin Bridge – another public works project waiting to be born, though the children of the Big Dig may hold off a few generations before they embark on another voyage of such Titanic proportion – on the rusting Tobin Bridge there is a view over Boston Harbor to the East, and to the docks to the West, where hundreds of plastic-wrapped automobiles wait to be delivered to dealerships, delivered to the parade of smoking oil use; and huge ocean-going freighters tie up to receive or deliver tons of materials which could not be airlifted at a profit. There is a circle of seagulls around a pickup truck parked near the water – someone with time and desire to feed them? There is a white arm of smoke reaching out of the factory stack, reaching out toward us, and blowing over the road. There are shoulder-to-shoulder commuters, sitting solitary or accompanied, with or without soundtrack, on their way into the city.
And over the edge of the bridge’s span, the housing developments of East Boston, squeezed between Bunker Hill and the harbor, covered here with graffiti, cracked there with age, huddled together unsuccessfully for warmth, filled with the imagined echo of a shout, or a gunshot, or the sound of silence between its stacked apartments.
There is a baseball diamond, a rough outline cluttered with crabgrass, a nod to a liberal ideal, which makes space for play even when the resources available for play are limited. There is grass; there is a backstop; while above, clogging the rising sun, the rushing or drugged traffic of the Tobin Bridge crawls by, and over the left field fence the majestic freighters elbow their way in through the narrows, towering above the project roofs, towers of capital or of capital-in-potential.
There is no one to be seen. The field is empty.
Natural play is child’s play, unstructured and following more basic rules of engagement. Baseball doesn’t happen naturally down there, nor in most places in the world, where King-of-the-Hill is king, or King-of-the-Hill look-alikes, where the rules are simple and understood, if unspoken. Natural play has a grace to it: there is no rulebook to memorize, the responses are clean if often unpleasant, and the results predictable if rarely egalitarian. And it goes on from daybreak to daybreak in the boardrooms and White Houses, offices and bedrooms, bar-rooms and tenements with a logic and purpose of Darwinian delight.
Where it gets interesting, though, is when enough waste has taken place on the Hill, enough useful hearts and minds have been pushed down to crumpled heaps at its feet, that another rule of Nature becomes clear, a higher Law: survival isn’t individual, and success is absolutely communal.
The imperfections of Democracy are not the failing of democratic principles, but an expected condition of any human effort: it’s organized sport at its best, where a few rules make for a far more interesting game, one which entertains more players and a bigger audience, and creates an arena where once only a playground hill stood. It attempts – with some reasonable degree of return – to make a venue whose halls echo with many voices, many kinds of voices, that the shout be stronger and fuller and more complete than any heard before.
If we take a back seat now and then, and look at where we live, and how we live, we might come to some interesting conclusions. We might (for example) see that the pristine bedroom community in which we live feels more than a little like the playground Hill, though most of the children stay away from the heights, eyeing them warily. Or we might (another example) find that the intense energies and restricted resources of our neighborhood were fruit of a tree ripe for harvest, belonged to a hundred or a thousand minds sharpened by need, hearts ready for a better idea. One might examine one’s own life and identify some underlying truths, core values, which were not evident in the sameness of one day to the next (where one was doing one’s own driving), and knowing that, notice others who shared those ideals, and wished to join together… somehow or other… to make a difference in how this infinitely short life played out.
A game without rules to play by… it always ends with most people pissed, a few people hurt, and a couple of people standing at the top of the hill, nervously alone.