Vulpine Inclinations

Baseball isn't the most popular sport in the U.S., not now or in the 90s when DS9 aired, though it was the most popular in country's history at some point and that popularity has embedded itself in the American vernacular and given the sport itself such a sheen of nostalgia that most Americans have convinced themselves that it's a sport of the midwest, of the country and cornfields, of an idyllic past. The most americana-elegiac film ever made, Field of Dreams, features not just the spirits of old baseball stars from past ages, but the spirits of baseball's greatest villains, the 1919 Chicago White Sox who threw games in a gambling scandal that disgraced the franchise: in the film, in the fields of Iowa, they were cleansed of their sins against the game and allowed to play again. It's a powerfully sentimental mythic treatment of the sport, when the MLB was declining in popularity especially in comparison to the NFL or NBA. But the pastoral elegy is a false history--baseball's origins are in the urban, in the working class neighborhoods of industrial cities of the northeast, and it was spread to other parts of the country mostly during the Civil War among Union camps. But the prime image that people conjure regarding the game is one of pastorality, history, and nostalgia, all of which is also helped along by the fact that baseball is a summer sport and a slow-moving one at that. The play of baseball, composed of long stretches of tension followed by quick bursts of action, not timed, will go as long as needed, ends up being figuratively linked with the cultural-feel of the game, as a past-time now passed into an idyllic mythic past.

Inserting this particular game into a story about a man consistently reckoning with his relationship to a place of beyond-causality, who is ultimately consumed by this place and forced to abandon the material of time as he was built to understand it, characterizes Sisko with an underlying structure of elegiac reflection. As a character, he, frequently enough, engages with traditional knowledges and practices, sometimes with a sheen of nostalgic yearning, mostly with an ethic of celebration and respect. He cooks and passes down his particular subculture's food, he builds a starship based on ancient Bajoran epistemes in a rhetorically decolonizing effort, his favorite game is one that has technically died out. He also is sometimes angled in his personal relationships towards the past: reaching emotionally for his dead wife; his closest friend being a re-version of an old friend from his youth (Dax); being wrenched away from a love-interest by the nature of an established system trying to maintain. He's centered as the voice of a primary speculative ethic in an episode surrounding a nostalgic-futurism, a mid-twentieth century speculative fictive frame of imagining grand explorations for any and all people in a time where half the U.S. was living in an apartheid state: the character is in many small character-detail ways and large narrative-theme ways a character of historical reflection and temporal consideration.

The narrative conclusion for the character is to, in a way, leave behind this depth of signifying through temporal matter. At the end of his story, the wormhole-people he had so reached out to and explained himself to through baseball, a nostalgia, who had confronted him with the lived-reality of grief, another form of yearning for the past, fully claimed him and he entered entirely into the space where time was such that everything that characterized him up until that point had to be redefined on a fundamental-matter level. The story-end for Sisko was a full subsumption of the self. Narratively, it can be argued, because it's Sisko and because he is characterized the way he is throughout the series, because from the very first episode his character is set up in a friction through which he is frequently prompted to handle and/or solve time itself, the story claims that Sisko was uniquely positioned to be the figure so subsumed and changed. He both had to have the rich-causality (a growing temporal and creative son, a new love with progressive thought and movement, a new child still in the process of becoming, a traditional and nostalgic bend to him, a lifelong interest in a forgotten game) and he had to leave exactly all of this in order to materially change the outcome of an existential fight for his pluralistic civilization. It's a competing tension resolved by the fact of leaving causal understanding.

One can read that by the end of season 6, start of season 7, Sisko's character is fully committed to rewriting the depth of his temporal significance. He lost the first re-version of his friend Dax, a character whose specific relationship with time both reifies Sisko's and challenges it, and meets the second re-version of the "old man", and, in a sense, this change represents the tension at the center of Sisko both losing everything and gaining everything, reformed at a fundamental matter level, by the end of the series. Sisko's religious posture in-narrative for the Bajoran people becomes more and more substantive to his lived-reality and the expression of his person. He becomes the messenger, the "emissary", the wing-footed carrier of temporal significance, handing over the character-specific and narratively-thematic composition of himself over to the people beyond the threshold of causality. It's not so much that he leaves anything behind but that he takes with him every rich temporal aspect in order to satisfy the story-tension of a place with swapped-time-and-space existing without enough narrative weight: to the imagination of the audience, the wormhole nexus, where conscious beings live and affect the cosmos beyond them, is an impossible/improbable place. To solve it, the character who has been its agent and, in equal depth, the agent of the changing, historical reality outside its bounds, must enter it and claim its episteme and affect for the whole story.

Sisko leaves behind but also, through his substance, carries: his son whose in-narrative power is storytelling, a wife who is associated with building and futuristic progressive hope, an old friend of constant death and rebirth and memory, another friend of equal pluralistic leadership to whom he also leaves his baseball.

As episode one demonstrates, baseball has no place outside of causality so of course the object Sisko can't take with him is the ball itself. But due to how Sisko's presence has manifested in the story, many times referenced through that object, Kira picking up the baseball at the end of the series is the still-presence of Sisko and thus a portrayal of how Sisko has remade himself to be both atemporal and omni-manifest. Baseball, the forgotten sport of the past, can only be played now by the characters because Sisko sank himself into it and swallowed its temporal reality and put that substance into a position where future-and-past are right-and-left. He reformed the mythic nostalgic yearning of the sport into the memory of his self and into the metaphor of his self and life as he entered into a differently-woven plane of reality. No longer occupying one point in time, Sisko has presenced baseball and himself and made a game of temporality and looking-back and myth-making simultaneously a way of speculation and futurism and progressive-movement by forcing the game's cause-and-consequence across the threshold of linearity through the matter and narrative-nature of his being.