This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 24, 2011 - About 20 years ago, I co-authored a small and playfully ridiculous cartoon book called "A Fan's Guide to Baseball Fever: The Official Medical Reference." It has served me well over the years, not because it successfully inoculated me from suffering baseball fever, but because it gave me a clearer idea of what I suffered periodically when the St. Louis Cardinals got on a roll or friends of mine in San Francisco, where I now live, fell into a similar swoon.
At the time the book was published, my cousin, John Levis, a lifelong resident of St. Louis, managed to get a copy of it to then President George H.W. Bush, who wrote me one of his famous little personal notes. He concluded his warm comments with the salutation, "Long live the Fever!" Now, 20 years later, his son's old team, the Texas Rangers, comes to St. Louis to share with us this year's version of the Fever.
This brings me to the latest chapter of my lifelong romance with St. Louis and baseball. It begins with a book I'd been working on for the past few years called "Psyche and the City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern Metropolis." Nineteen cities from around the world, including London, Paris, Shanghai, New York, Berlin, Mexico City, Cairo and others are included in this volume. It explores what makes each of these great cities unique and soulful.
As I was working on the various contributions, I realized that none of the otherwise gifted and insightful authors had a thing to say about sports and the soul of their cities -- or more specifically baseball and the soul of the city. I asked my publisher if I could add an "afterword" to the book in which I could talk about soul, baseball and St. Louis. How can anyone write about "soul and the city" and not mention its sports teams?
Now seems the right time to share some of my reflections on this topic as a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst who thinks about such esoteric things as the collective unconscious, symbols of the Self and, of all things, baseball and St. Louis.
Mystical Oneness
I will start with a very strange term: Uroboric mysticism.
Uroboric mysticism is a state of being in which one is unconsciously identified with the whole. The whole can be the family, the clan, the tribe or, in our case, the city and its baseball team. Often such states of tribal mystical identity are symbolized in animal form -- such as the Cardinal and its gaudy coloring, an image now gleaming across television sets around the nation and the world.
The Cardinal red signifies to those of us who participate in its mystery the experience of oneness between ourselves, our souls, our baseball team and our city. We are part of, and belong to, a whole that is for a moment blessed, just as the players on this year's team claim over and over again that they belong to a whole that is much greater than any of its single parts, even if that part is Albert Pujols.
Although I have lived in San Francisco for 40 years, I still identify passionately as a Cardinals fan and often refer to St. Louis as the "swamp I grew up in" -- partly because of my memory growing up in the sweltering heat and humidity, partly because of the embracing canopy of glorious Midwestern trees, and mostly with a feeling of deep affection rather than negative engulfment that one might easily associate to the word "swamp."
The St. Louis swamp I grew up in was good and nourishing; and I felt without thinking that I was part of its containing whole. In Uroboric mysticism, All is One and one is part of all. I write about my personal experience in the belief that most St. Louisans and every Cardinals fan can give their own version of the same experience.
Calling St. Louis "the swamp I grew up in" has been my attempt to describe an early childhood feeling about St. Louis that persists to this day. "The swamp I grew up in" names a primal, preverbal sense that what is inside of me and outside of me is all part of the same thing, all made of the same stuff that I inhabit and that inhabits me -- the very air I breathe and the natural habitat that I "swim" in.
The people, the streets, the trees, the houses, the buildings, the river, the sky, the weather -- all are continuous with one another and participate in the same being. Walt Whitman, the bard of the American soul, said it best and most succinctly in "Leaves of Grass": "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars."
When I meet someone who hails from St. Louis, I believe that I can "see" St. Louisness in his or her skin. What I "see" in their skin is not skin deep; it is the very essence of shared being. We originated in the same swampy "stuff." They are part of me. I am part of them. We are part of St. Louis.
Soul Dreams and Sports
Citizens dream large when it comes to their aspirations for their cities. And often those dreams revolve around sports teams as the carrier of the city soul. Just as personal soul is often known through our lively connection to instinctual life, our collective soul can come to life in the sports stadiums that provide the communal space for sharing an instinctual part of our human nature as embodied in competitive games. Linking the themes of mystical oneness and sports teams as carrier of the city soul, I want to tell you about my Cardinals origins -- knowing that every Cardinals fan has an "origin story."
I first experienced a sense of mystical oneness with the soul of St. Louis at a hot dog stand directly across from the old Sportsman's Park where the St. Louis Cardinals played baseball many decades ago. Poor vision disqualified my father from enlisting in the regular armed forces. Instead, he served on the city's rationing board during World War II, apportioning food supplies and provisions for the populace.
Coupled with his lifelong love for baseball, my father believed that rooting for the home team was good for morale during the difficult war years. Through his position on the ration board, my dad made sure that the stand had plenty of hot dogs for every baseball game throughout the war. My father was essentially a modest man, and this is one of the few accomplishments I ever heard him brag about.
As a result of his ability to procure a steady supply of hot dogs for the stand during the war years, my father and I were greeted like royalty when he took me to my first Cardinals game in 1950, when I was 8. Even that long after the war, the owner's warm expression of his enduring gratitude to my father made me feel that we were an essential part of the city.
In a very real sense, my young soul, the soul of my father and the soul of the city all met that day at that hot dog stand for 8-year-old me. Soul does not need a fancy restaurant, a grand hotel or a fine museum to find itself
Most proud cities in the world have their team or teams that carry the soul dreams of their citizens. Most recently, New Orleans experienced profound soul renewal through the Super Bowl football victory of their beloved "Aints," who overnight became "Saints."
In St. Louis, no sports team has generated more reverent affection, devoted concern, or knowledgeable passion among its fans than the Cardinals. Indeed, St. Louis Cardinals fans are often identified by sports commentators as the "best baseball fans" in America, which worries me, because the fans might actually come to believe this good press and become too proud. If nothing else, sports teaches the soulful art of humility, even in an era when consumerism, hype, astronomical players' salaries and the inflated cost of tickets mock everything that is down to earth about the game.
If you want to learn something about the soul of a city and its inhabitants, ask the natives about their sports teams. Bart Giamatti, former president of Yale and seventh commissioner of Major League Baseball, put it this way in "Take Time for Paradise": "Baseball is the song of homecoming that America sings to herself." Giametti tells us that the ballplayer's goal of scoring a run by rounding the bases to come "home" mirrors the oldest tale of Western civilization, Ulysses' long journey to return home to Ithaca.
It is not a stretch of the imagination to think of today's ballpark in exactly the same way that the Greeks sang of their sacred meeting sites as the place to which the citizens "march, and rejoice in the dance and song ... and sing as we come to a stand at thy well-fenced altar."
The ballpark is the modern "well-fenced altar" where the citizens of St. Louis and many other cities sing the anthem of their homecoming.
Heroes and Tradition
Finally, I want to focus on two heroes of St. Louis to highlight the positive values that baseball can bring to psyche and soul in the city. It is fitting that one hero is Stan "The Man" Musial and the other is Albert Pujols. Musial truly is beloved among citizens of St. Louis for the virtues he embodies, and Pujols is carving out a place for himself in that fine tradition.
The fact that Stan Musial hit five home runs in one afternoon doubleheader didn't hurt his ascendency to local godhood -- a miraculous event I witnessed in the same Sportsman's Park across from the hot dog stand.
But Musial is remembered for much more than his slugging ability or his spectacular lifetime batting average of .331. And together, Musial and Pujols represent the continuity of what is most highly valued and symbolic of St. Louis' soul values from the 20th century and into the 21st. Their lineage has created a remarkable pair of noble citizens in St. Louis, one old, the other young.
The two are part of a tradition that epitomizes what St. Louis has honored most in its Self-image: excellence in one's craft; decency and fair play in life and in the game; solid consistency in performance over time; gentlemanliness that is far more than public persona and goes to the very heart of one's character; and finally, a spirit of generosity that extends itself to family, neighbors, community and strangers.
Add to those qualities honor and loyalty to others and to the city -- all of these qualities add up to what is most highly valued in this quintessentially Midwestern city.
When I asked my old St. Louis friend, the fine sculptor Harry Weber, if I could use a photo of one of his Stan Musial sculptures in the "afterword" I wrote for "Psyche and the City," he gave me several images to choose from. The one I chose turned out to be Stan Musial's favorite, too, because it features Stan the Man not as a slugger but as a fatherly mentor humanly relating to a young boy. It speaks to the soul value of the city of St. Louis at its best.
Only rarely do Uroboric mysticism, sports and the values of its heroes join hands in one's experience of the soul of a city. A major sporting event, such as hosting the Olympics, a Soccer World Cup or the World Series of baseball, can throw a city into an altered experience of itself when soul, individual citizen and community come together for a deep celebration of Self and City.
However, not every day is the World Cup, World Series or Super Bowl of life, and the intermingling qualities of soul and city are usually much more subtly embodied in one's day-to-day life, contributing to what makes being part of a city or from a city so important to our sense of ourselves as being whole.
Thomas Singer lives in San Francisco.