Perpetual Baseball

McMurphy in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is normal, but his normalcy borders on madness because he has an innocent and fierce wind in the soul that blows where it will. He has enough discipline and reason to set his sails and steer his ship, but he obeys no law except the imperative to be born again with each new tug of the universe on his mast. He is a new Christ admitted to an evil world for a new crucifixion. He is insane because his humanity violates the rules of the rigged game. He is judged a social misfit because he will not sit down and quietly obey his enemies like a vegetable. He has the stiff, self-reliant hardness of a Ty Cobb. He is ready to steal any base in any ball game at any time against any team. Yet he is a new cowboy, not the old sort, usually on a horse above the ground with the glamour and god-like detachment of the sun. The old cowboys got off their horses mostly to punish now and then a few wild western men who disobeyed the law. Randall McMurphy is against any law that cannot prove on the spot its necessity by showing a man some new possibility for life. Like Achelous, the Greek river God, who turned himself from a man back to a river in order to squirt away from the grip of Hercules during a wrestling contest, McMurphy is a new cowboy because he has his eye on not just what is possible. He is not just ready to steal bases. The law allows that. He is ready to try to go all the way home at any moment. His boldness will send him off and running from first base for the plate on just a base hit like Enos Slaughter who scored from first base on a base hit to win the 1946 World Series. He is as innocent as Jesus, as self-reliant as Ty Cobb, and as bold as Enos Slaughter. He is too dangerous to be let out of the mental hospital. He has to be specialized, one way or another, so that he learns to live only according to predetermined models of behavior. Experts in the necessary laws of behavior must operate on him. He must be forced to stand passively touching a base and not be allowed to run freely around the bases.

   Perpetual Baseball is Part 4 of Daniel McNeill’s book on the metaphysical meanings in baseball as expressions of American culture, The Theater of the Impossible. The book is for sale at his author’s page. www.amazon.com/author/graceisall. Read the whole of Part 4, Perpetual Baseball, at: www.usoftheworld.com/culture