Baseball, Superego, Dad, and Field of Dreams

su·per·e·go (su´per-ęgo, -čgo) noun

plural su·per·e·gos

In Freudian theory, the division of the psyche that is formed through the internalization of moral standards of parents and society, and censors and restrains the ego. Mostly unconscious, it is composed of the ego ideal and the conscience.

Fear. It is the feeling, the emotion that has dominated my life. As a child, I was afraid of the other children. As an adolescent, I developed a fear of women, of their sex, of its power. I developed a fear of men, of their structures, their totems, their fists and taunts. I ran away from it all. I chose the quiet seclusion of hiding combined with a tendency to lash out, to attack with my sharp wit. My fear was the source of my strength. I learned that to deny, to refuse, to ignore held a certain power. It was my only power.

I felt safe as a child. Every year on Easter Sunday, our baskets were only half filled with candy. The other half was baseball cards. I would tear open the wax packs and smell the gum, that weird baseball gum that would make you choke if you breathed in the sugar. That would cut your cheek when you bit into it. That didn't taste very good, but felt good. I still dream of the triumph of six pieces of that hard gum in my mouth, mixed with blood.

My dad was a salesman. When he came home there were baseball cards. I remember loving the cards long before loving the game. They were symbols, totems, like girls styling doll hair long before their own. I loved numbers. I was a math nerd first and foremost, and in third grade it wasn't yet a liability. The numbers of baseball seduced me. I started reading Baseball Digest and The Sporting News in the library. I took out books of sports anecdotes, trivia, anything to fuel my growing knowledge. My first obsession.

I would wander the toy section dreaming of Micronauts or Hot Wheels or Luke Skywalker. The baseballs and gloves were in sporting goods. Over by the fishhooks and guns. Where men shop. I though nothing about taking a toy off the shelf, but a glove or a bat required permission.

I played baseball, but my bookish ways did not translate well to the diamond. I was a fine outfielder with a decent arm, but I couldn't hit. I was afraid of the ball. I pulled away, took my eye off it. In the outfield, the ball fell from the sky or rolled to me. I might lose a ball in the sun, but there was always the option of duck and cover. My fear kept my bat on my shoulder. At the plate, I was impotent.

In the fall of 1980 my dad surprised my brother and I by taking us on a hunting trip. We were horrified. Here are the things that frightened me about that trip: Guns, the woods, my dad, talking to my dad, listening to my dad, the silence that weighed on us all during an activity, the men, the world of men. I could never figure out why he took us hunting. Recently, my brother told me this secret: His father was an avid outdoorsman, yet never shared it with his son. My father went to college for forestry and drank himself out two years later. I was born before he could reconsider his educational choices.

"Wasn't that the Cumberland game?"

"Who?"

"Cumberland," I said, my voice steadier. "222 to nothing."

It went on. I started answering every question. My father looked embarrassed, which usually filled me with fear, because it usually led to anger, but now it emboldened me. Then I asked a ridiculous question that only a kid would ask, and that was the end. My peer moment was over.

Catch was the most intimate thing my father and I did after he moved out. He would put it off until after we ate. He loved and feared it while I begged him to play almost all the time. He never lasted long. I see now that the intensity of it sapped his strength. The energy required of him simply wasn't there. The listening to the silence was too overwhelming. I was hurt every time we stopped and sat outside throwing the ball to myself as he went inside and lay down on the couch, exhausted.

In his book How We Play the Game, Richard Lipsky writes, "until very recently, the world of political and social institutions was exclusively male. In order to be successful in these worlds men were trained, in good Merriwell fashion, to control their emotions, and to strategically channel them into accepted areas - preferably away from public life" (97). I would suggest that men are still trained this way. Catch was as close as dad and I got to a hug for a long time. And talking baseball was the only talk that flowed. It was the only time I ever told him the truth. It was probably the only time he told me the truth either. When I was 16 he left. He moved to Nashville with his new wife and new teenage daughters. I forgot about sports for a while and concentrated on music and girls and friends. I started to grow up -to grow out - and I overcame some of my fears. But this limited weak courage was based on a soft shifting foundation of deception. And this deception magnified my deepest fears.

I lied all the time. To teachers, to guidance counselors, and especially my mom and dad. My mom would catch me sometimes, but she was weak and I learned soon after my dad left how to twist her words and play on her insecurities just like my father had. I honestly thought it was the way of the world. I was convinced in the deepest part of myself that they were all liars. My father cheated on my mother, my mother stayed out all night and we found the pot in the drawer. When Huck's teacher came in wearing that new sweater, I knew that integrity was a lie like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or God's love. Just a story to tell the kids to keep them innocent and ignorant.

I dreaded the day I "graduated" from high school. I was only grudgingly allowed to go through the ceremony at all by the administration. They were tired of my constant challenges, my brazen hatred. I proudly displayed my certificate of completion. "That's what they call diplomas now," I lied. I talked about my phantom college applications, my many ghostly acceptances. I talked about taking a year off with sweat on my brow. I knew that I could keep up these lies forever, because none of them cared enough to check except my mom. And she wouldn't do anything about it.

As I rode to UNH with my dad, I was unafraid. There were paperwork mix-ups in the world. You never got it? But I sent it! I got a letter in the mail! In chemistry class, I got a C on my final project by handing in a blank floppy disc. In English I plagiarized a book on Thoreau into a suspicious D. I lost it, but I thought for sure YOU would have a copy! What is wrong with you people?

It blew up. The UNH admissions office had apparently seen things like this before. They called my bluff and called Merrimack High. I stood there as my father heard that I never graduated. I stood there as he heard my actual grade point average. My class rank in the bottom 20%. I hurt my father that day. I hurt him.

Baseball is unambiguous. The integrity of the game is held in such high regard that one cannot imagine cheating. It happens, of course. A player corks his bat; a pitcher rubs Vaseline from his chest on the ball. But the game takes place between the lines, and the sharp distinctions - whose turn at bat, fair or foul, out or safe - mock the complexities of life. Here there is the home team, the good, versus them. If we don't win it's a shame. In many ways baseball is similar to organized religion in that sense. It's easy to know the right thing to do on Sunday in the pews. But Saturday nights in the bar things aren't so clear.

Baseball and religion collide in the novel Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. This book, later made into the film Field of Dreams is the Holy Scripture of baseball theologians. In researching this paper I found more articles about Field of Dreams in peer reviewed journals than I did about any other aspect of the game. Briefly, the book and film concern an Iowa farmer who never made peace with his father and whose farm is failing. He is commanded by a voice from the heavens to build a ballpark ("If you build it they will come") in his fields. Old ballplayers come back from the dead, his dad comes back with them, and by playing catch with his father, all is forgiven. People come from all around to see the game, and the farm is saved. This is truly a religious miracle. English Instructor Timothy Lord's article, "Hegel, Marx, and Shoeless Joe: Religious Ideology In Kinsella's Baseball Fantasy," says, In Shoeless Joe, then, baseball truly does replace religion as "the opium of the people." Analogous to Marx's conception of religion, baseball dulls Ray's responses to fundamental injustices and oppressions within society, making it seem as if practical action to bring about social change is futile and the only refuge must be found in a higher spiritual realm where material problems are rooted...Marx stresses the need for "practical activity" to bring about humane revolutionary change, maintaining that "material force can only be overthrown by material force." Religion, however, the other side of practical activity, "is the sigh of the oppressed creature," a creature without the means of material force. In the case of Ray in the claws of corporate land barons, he rejects practical activities a means of battling against the material forces opposing him. Instead, he retreats to the realm of theory, thought, and the unfolding of an elaborate providential plan that is analogous to Hegel's unfolding of absolute spirit. (48)

It begs the question: Why? Why doesn't Ray ignore the voices in his head and fight to save his farm? Why doesn't he stand up for his way of life? Why escape into fantasy, into baseball as religion?

I believe the answer is that baseball is a belief for those with no beliefs. It is a religion with no salvation except victory, and that victory is always fleeting. There is joy and suffering in baseball, as in religion. But there is no higher purpose. I love the Red Sox, and I can tell you why they are morally superior to the Yankees. BUT THEY AREN'T. It's all bullshit. Religion is powerful because it lifts men to their greatest selves, makes them more like God. Baseball is a diversion. No game has ever lifted man higher; no sporting victory has ever brought grace. It is a false idol, a golden calf.

In his essay, Dragons, Delinquents, and Destiny, psychotherapist Wolfgang Lederer brings it all together. Why I lie to my father. Why we don't believe in anything. Why baseball has become our church, our salvation.

The further maturation of the superego during adolescence is equally important, and a failure of father at that time can be equally damaging...If he was the source of a sense of security, then his sickness or death, introjected along with his total image, produces an inner and lasting sense of insecurity. If he was the arbiter of right and wrong, then his corruption produces confusion and despair. "One of the deepest conflicts in life is the hate for a parent who served as the model and the executor of the conscience but who (in some form) was found trying to 'get away with' the very transgressions which the child can no longer tolerate in himself." Such a failure of the model adult ...produces the impression that becoming and being adult is neither desirable nor safe. With nothing but corruption and danger ahead, there is then nothing ahead that one could look forward to, that one could grow up to: there is then no future" (56-57)

I feel powerless almost all the time, unless someone is praising me or touching my penis. I ache with pain and sadness and loss. For years I couldn't figure out why. Why do I lie all the time? Why am I still so frightened of the important things? Lederer talks about the "sans-identity" type.

"They act out, but against themselves...accompanied by a good deal of introspective soul searching. This introspection, carried out with sensitivity and intelligence, offers them from time to time the greatest reality-intensity they are capable of. The material and social world around them seems unreal - at least in the present...during their adolescence, something died within them and the world died with it...I feel it will always turn out that the thing which died within them during their teens was the image of their father as a strong protective, admirable man, and with it died the corresponding qualities of the superego. In consequence, they lack a sense of their own present or future effectiveness, and feel weak and defenseless...he has a strong fear of death and a detached view of religion - both connected with the feeling that the forces of fate (the superego) are not protecting him" (61,63)

So it has become. I turn away from my destiny, from my conscience, because of this defect. But while it seems sad, it is not. Because I finally know. I know why, and I know there is a way out. Because Lederer, God love him, includes a cure. It's not easy, but it is possible. I was starting to believe that my life would never exist. Now I believe that this is not the end of my life. I am alive. I am. I exist. I have the capacity to improve the world. Praying for a base hit or screaming on the home team is a pleasant diversion. But I believe that it is time to help Ray save his farm, and his neighbor's farm, and all the farms. To paraphrase Kinsella, if I build me, I will be.