Teammates--for in the brotherhood of senior softball we are all teammates, no matter what uniform we wear, Hot Shots or Classics or Old Timers--on this stormy day we gather
under our oversized golf umbrellas with their perky red and white, blue and white, green and white panels vibrant beneath the low charcoal cumulonimbus clouds here in the Edmonds Memorial Cemetery where so many of our forebears are laid, in this rare June
air--for all air is rare we've learned with age to understand, no one more so than the man we lay to rest today, Tommy Thompson, who played with his nose plugged into a bottle of oxygen nestled into a pack on his back-- needles of rain paradiddling our shields
and clanging rim shots on Tommy's casket as it waits to be lowered into the ground, banging the drums rapidly, the rat-tat-tatting forcing me to stentor my voice, as water puddles on the clay-based ragged turf beneath our feet and creeps up the edges
of our shoes, to celebrate the life and play of our prophet, our taciturn Tommy, the epitome of homo ludens.
For life, our evolved intelligence tells us, is absurd, and we are absurdly condemned by that selfsame intelligence to try to make
it surd, to attune ourselves to an atonal universe incapable of caring or not caring whose unkeyed melodic and harmonic and rhythmic inflections reverberate ambiguously, the inferred music of its spheres inaudible, the vibrating strings of the M-theorists
ditto, detected background cosmic radiation from the Big Bang undecipherable static. Entropy, not purpose, is intrinsic to the universe. Meaning is willfully superimposed by us. Plato and Pythagoras may have guessed right. All may be
number, beautiful number, and abstract ideas may be the reality notioned by branes. The universe is mechanistic, but its laws are abstractions. Water is water only by virtue of number: two molecules of hydrogen, one of oxygen. Card games
are a hierarchical competition of numbers, the cards themselves merely a mnemonic to help our limited memories keep track of values and sequence of play. Language and music are an ordering of sounds and silences that produce meaning and feeling.
And we ourselves, teammates, are number, an arrangement of atoms into cells in brains that, mysteriously, have self-consciousness. Emerging from and operating under the laws of physics and biology, our brains have become capable of understanding some
of those laws and have become "us." Incomprehensibly, through the activity of uncomprehending neurons, we comprehend. We have an abstract self that grows out of but is not independent of our bodies. The self is not a soul that exists apart
from or transcends or outlives the body, the self emanates from the brain and is wholly dependent upon it. It dies when the brain dies. But while alive, the self, conscious and intelligent, yearns. It yearns to know, it yearns to do.
It yearns to act rationally, it yearns to act authentically. It yearns to understand itself and the universe. It yearns to explore and exploit the universe. It yearns to express itself. It yearns to replicate itself. And, yes,
it yearns to survive. It yearns to be immortal. It yearns in spite of its recognition that its yearning is absurd in a universe of quantum indeterminacy where matter and energy are both wave-like and particle-like, where evolution depends on random
genetic mutations, where position and momentum are subject to Heisenbergian uncertainties in the midst of the overarching stark certainty of entropy. You and I, teammates, can't help yearning to improvise a tune in harmony with our selves. While
the universe vibrates, dances, in super symmetry, we, anyone, someone, no one, yearn to dance and sing in concert with our own vibrations. "Trust thyself," Emerson said, "Every heart vibrates to that iron string." Now, teammates, I know what you,
glad and big like Tommy, are thinking: "There is some shit I will not eat. I'm not taking that entropy crap. I'm not taking that Darwin crap. I'm not taking that indeterminacy crap. I'm not living and dying for nothing. Life is
not absurd. A sufficient number of events in the Bible have been verified to validate what the heart intuitively knows: life has intrinsic meaning. The music of the cosmos is not atonal. Meaning is not for the nonce. It is
fixed and eternal. God created the world and man and sent his Son to be crucified to pay for man's sins, that whosoever would believe in Him would have eternal life. I accept Christ as my savior. He atoned for me and I am at one with
Him, in tune, in harmony, beamed up. There is an interconnection between what's inside of me and what's outside of me. The boundaries of my self, my soul, are porous and diffuse. I flow into the universe, it flows into me. I utter truth
in the face of the falsehood of meaninglessness. Woe comes to him who, stupidly or willfully, fails to get square with the Lord. Delight comes to him who does not waiver but ever stands forth for the Lord." And, teammates, I have no
doubt that Tommy would say that too, 6' 2" Tommy, 220-pound Tommy, Tommy with the flowing shoulder-length gray-streaked hair and the full gray beard, long enough at the chin to knot into it, in a forward-facing mini-ponytail, that distinctive silver
ring he sported, Tommy who launched drives into gaps and bravely took balls off his beefy chest at the hot corner with that oxygen pack on his back, coping with the COPD caused by years of smoking Camels, Tommy sucking it up, each of his inspirations an inspiration
for us, Tommy who went to church every Sunday unless he was at a softball tournament, who read his Bible every day, who closed his eyes in silent prayer before he tore into that cheeseburger with onions that he purchased at the concession stand between
games, Tommy who had given up a need to control, Tommy who sought to control his attitude, not nature, Tommy who gained control by not seeking control, Tommy for whom free will and determinism were perfectly compatible, Tommy who prayed for events to happen
as he wanted them to but who also wanted them to happen as they did happen, that being God's prerogative and plan, all glory to God, Tommy cultivating grace and gratitude, Tommy happy as could be by being willing to be happy as he was, Tommy transcending himself,
connected with truth, with God, flush with the Holy Spirit. But teammates, on this I hope we can agree, as we hear that rolling thunder to the southwest near Richmond Beach and reflexively hunker lower in anticipation of additional bursting clouds
blowing our way: in the realm of the ludic, it matters not whether you are a believer or an atheist, a Christian or an existentialist. It matters only that you are a player. For just as play is the seed of culture, intrinsically motivated children
absorbed in means, not ends, in process, not results, incidentally, accidentally, learning social skills and values in the flow of their invented games, it is also the blooming treasured outcome of culture, we aged in our second, even third, childhoods finally
free again to play for the sake of playing, our re-creation entirely unserious but intensely absorbing , a self-chosen, self-directed, authentic pursuit of a sublime Gestalt, an act of self-exaltation in which we pass from our solid, stolid state to an ethereal
vapor state before condensing again into that kind of solid form that we other solid forms huddle in the wet to inter today. Whether we live on after our lump of clay is lumped with the clay, or whether we don't, while we are here, let us play.
Let us create leagues and teams, let us keep standings, let us don colorful uniforms, and let us grab bats and balls and gloves and make a world for ourselves within the agreed-upon pleasing geometric constraints of chalked lines on fenced-in green outfield
grass and red infield dirt, square white bases angled 65' apart like the points of a diamond, and within the legalistic constraint of the rules of the American Softball Association. And let us try, each batter, to the best of their creative ability,
to journey from home and return safely to home, evading Scylla and Charybdis and Circe, and, each defender, to rub out the wily voyagers, each of us on either side chiming in to create the rhythm of the game.
Ah, teammates, I'm sure that Tommy knew
nothing about Zen. He was Western to the core. But more so than any of us, on the diamond Tommy had the proprioceptive awareness of a Zen archer, a Zen surfer, adaptively attuned to affordances, absolutely present, factoring in the position of
the sun, the speed and direction of the wind, the inning, the score, the number of outs, and the whereabouts of baserunners, reading the stance of the batter, his grip, two-handed or overlapping, the angle of his bat, the trajectory and location of the pitch,
noting the presence or absence of a leg kick, the timing of the swing, early, late, or on the dot, the dominance of top hand or bottom hand, and also the angle of the swing, anticipating, flowing, seizing his opportunities. In motion, no matter what
his arms and legs might be doing, he was always centered, balanced, true. The big man was pure grace. Teammates, I admit that in the field, moving for a ball, I lack at times that precious sense of where I am. My center fails to hold.
Confused by the anarchy of my loose limbs and the cloudiness of my deteriorating vision, I lose focus, I may bobble a ball or throw it weakly or wildly off legs that are askew. But Tommy, in spite of his girth and that pack on his back, could always
bend at the knees while his feet slide-stepped or crossed-over, could watch the ball into his glove, his hands quickly and gently receptive of even the hard half-volley suddenly at his feet or the smash down the line that he snared backhanded, shrugging the
ball up as he smoothly crow-hopped and, without reflecting, without trying, actually, arrow a throw to the appropriate base. He and his glove were one, he and the ball became one, a union of perception and action, intention and realization, such was
his total immersion in process. And at the plate, he and the bat too were one, his composite Mikan Freak merely an extension of feet and legs and core and arms and hands, his stance comfortable and ever so slightly open, his weight shifted to his
right hip yet stably balanced, the Freak pulled back and cocked toward the pitcher, back leg and front side thus spring-loaded, his relaxed overlapping grip a natural burl that the bat seemed to grow out of, his eyes on the ball as it leaves the pitcher's
hand, an alert but self-effacing automatism, passive as the pitch rises then begins its descent, initiating his leg kick, winding his hips, not directing the swing, waiting for the swing to take him by surprise at that supreme instant when the ball is most
vulnerable to being maximally re-directed, then with violent equanimity, his head still, his eyes communing with the bottom half of the dropping ball, driving off his back foot, unwinding his hips, transferring his weight to his front foot, swinging around
his spine, his lead arm pulling the lagging bat through, allowing it to reach peak acceleration at the point of contact, his lashing wrists releasing all his stored-up energy and launching the ball in a long parabola deep into the gap in right-center or left-center,
letting go of the Freak with his right hand, his shoulders at last opening up, his head turning for balance, his eyes following the arc of the ball, and continuing the momentum of the swing with his left hand in an extended follow-through that only ends when
the bat taps him on the back. And which do we prefer, in our ways of looking at the batter? The beauty of inflections, or the beauty of innuendoes? Tommy swinging, or Tommy just after, tracking the gorgeous flight of the ball? Both,
I'd say.
Now, teammates, having noticed that the two representatives from Beck's Tribute Center standing by in their black raincoats and black fedoras, as decorous and disciplined a pair of undertakers as one could ask for, have for some time been shuffling
their feet and twiddling their fig-leafed fingers, and that family members and assorted friends are eyeing in alarm the water level climbing up their shoes, I will jump quickly to my peroration. He was autotelic, teammates. Immersed in play
for its own sake. Rebelling against meaninglessness. Vibrating, animating unlived lines, wringing a music of his own from them. That was Tommy, right up to the myocardial infarction that ended his life last week. What more, other than
more of it, could you ask of life? Lost in the supreme fiction of the ludic, autonomous, unmotivated by fears or hopes, threats or rewards. Shrugging off his few fielding errors, his rare mistimed swings of the bat. Quietly ecstatic, joyfully
settled. Taking pleasure in what he did best, inexpressively reveling in Funktionslust. Ah, teammates, if only. You and I, alas, are heterotelic. We get rattled. Extraneous thoughts intrude. We choke.
We lose our rhythm. Angst is the very ground of our being. We can never completely trust ourselves. Our hearts quaver timorously rather than vibrate vigorously. We can never be pure and ingenuous like Tommy. Yet, absurdly,
we are condemned to yearn to be so, to continue playing softball into our 80s, to keep striving for the unattainable bliss of becoming inseparable from our song, our dance, our swing, and in this Sisyphean endeavor to be like Tommy, teammates, we rebels must
imagine ourselves happy.