After reading David B. Hart’s essay on baseball, A Perfect Game, Adam Omelianchuk attended a game—and remembered the game is less than perfect than described:
There was much to be thankful for and Hart’s mediations swept over me as if the perfect Platonic Forms were bleeding into the material world from the pitcher’s mound.
And it did not take longer than five innings to be disabused of this frilly nonsense.
One of the things that has always troubled me about the Platonic Forms is that they only seem to be invoked to explain beautiful things. Their changelessness, their perfection, their timelessness are naturally thought to comport with the beautiful. Ugliness is thought to be a distinct feature of the finite world that fails conform to the perfection of the Forms. But it seems just as plausible to imagine Forms of horror, for they leave evidence of their ugliness that goes beyond the mere frailty of nature. Baseball seems to point to this reality.
If Dante had known of baseball he would have included it in one of the many circles hell. Souls under the wrath of God would be subject to watching their home team get two quick outs and the away team drive in four straight runs off of a couple of walks and four singles. We might be tempted to say this somehow fits into the game’s greatness, but there is no evidence to support this banal notion when one observes how this tortured process comes about.
July 26th, 2010 | 3:45 pm
But he’s wrong about Plato – there ARE forms of horror. Jung devoted much of his career and writing to establishing this fact. Melville was obsessed with the notion, and wrote about it extensively in “Moby-Dick”. Near the end of Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” he remarks, “Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” You can also find echoes of the thought in Milton, Blake, and the book of Job. Milton describes hell as “… a universe of death, which God created evil; for evil only good… [where] nature breeds perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, abominable, unutterable; and worse than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceiv’d, gorgons, hydras, and chimaeras dire.” He insinuates that these “ideas” of horror are the prototypes for all the monsters of our human myths. Blake designed a very famous series of watercolor paintings for the book of Job, and one of the last paintings illustrates God’s oration on Behemoth and Leviathan. God stands at the top of the painting, pointing discretely down, and down at the bottom dwell monsters. In this he depicted the concept implicit in the book of Job itself that there are strange, inhuman creatures in the mind of God, and that we cannot fathom Him in His complexity and fullness. Nature itself breeds testament to this. My point here is not to start an argument about whether or not all these poets and painters were right in their assessment of unearthly things, but to demonstrate that Plato’s doctrine of the Forms has been interpreted by many great people, throughout time, as applying not only to that which is beautiful, but to horrors unspeakable as well.