What street games did you play?

When I was in high school, my brother and I and our neighbours played a game of stickball that went like this.

1. Batter stands on our front steps, pitcher stands at the foot of our path on the sidewalk and the fielder’s stand across the street in front of Mr. Diltz’s place.


2. Pitcher pitches, batter bats. Batter runs down the path, across the sidewalk, off the curb, across the street and gets to the sewer grate on the other side to be safe.


3. If the batter reaches home (“a double”), one run is scored.


4. If the batter eaches the base only, he comes back and hits again, driving the ghost runner home.


5. Home run scores if the ball lands on Mr. Diltz’s lawn


6. Out is the ball hits Diltz’s house. And you have to apologize.


7. Batter’s rotate and the one with the highest score by supper time wins.

In true Canadian fashion, we played with a sawed-off hockey stick and a dead tennis ball. We played in the languid days of summer from the time that the leaves came out on the maples to the deep red fall, when the base was hidden in a logjam of autumnal detritus. We played in the afternoons, after school or in the weekend evenings after we had watched the Blue Jays game and eaten supper. We played for nothing but the pure joy of stroking that dead ball high into the towering maple trees and running like the wind while the fielders timed their catches as the ball ricocheted to the ground.

Great catch from wood s lot, which further elucidates my blogging poetics:

I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way�in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. So you then have a small amount of material and you accumulate things, and it grows, and one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before. That’s how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you.

— W.G. Sebald, The Meaning of Coincidence, an interview published online by The New Yorker

Tecumseh

On May 9, 1813 Fort Meigs was beseiged by Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet.

Tecumseh was a Shawnee and a resister. His goal was the unity of all the tribes in the midwest against the American incursion on their lands. He held sellouts in great disdain, angry at the “chiefs” who had sold land to Americans. He fought on the British side in the War of 1812, but was killed in 1813 when the British withdrew their forces during the Battle of the Thames and left him to face the Americans alone in hand to hand combat with a broken leg and two loaded muskets to “have a last shot.”

The commander of the American force that killed him was an old rival, William Harrison, the Governor of the Indiana Territory. He was a fierce proponent of American expansion and incursion into the Northwest Territory. Tecumseh seemed to live his life as if to lay waste to Harrison’s firmest convictions.

In a speech to Harrison three years before that final battle he said:

You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?

The same promises were given to the Shawnee one time. It was at Fort Finney, where some of my people were forced to make a treaty. Flags were given to my people, and they were told they were now the children of the Americans. We were told, if any white people mean to harm you, hold up these flags and you will then be safe from all danger. We did this in good faith. But what happened? Our beloved chief Moluntha stood with the American flag in front of him and that very peace treaty in his hand, but his head was chopped by an American officer, and that American Officer was never punished.

Brother, after such bitter events, can you blame me for placing little confidence in the promises of Americans? That happened before the Treaty of Greenville. When they buried the tomahawk at Greenville, the Americans said they were our new fathers, not the British anymore, and would treat us well. Since that treaty, here is how the Americans have treated us well: They have killed many Shawnee, many Winnebagoes, many Miamis, many Delawares, and have taken land from them. When they killed them, no American ever was punished, not one.

It is you, the Americans, by such bad deeds, who push the men to do mischief. You do not want unity among tribes, and you destroy it. You try to make differences between them. We, their leaders, wish them to unite and consider their land the common property of all, but you try to keep them from this. You separate the tribes and deal with them that way, one by one, and advise them not to come into this union. Your states have set an example of forming a union among all the Fires, why should you censure the Indians for following that example?

Other Tecumseh speeches:

• Words of Fire (annoying embedded MIDI warning)


• Tecumseh’s teaching


• Speech to the Osages in 1811

XXIX
Your notebook was washed ashore,
But it was hardly
The last change
In the first realm of paradise
Where Love
Dreams of the way Beauty
in all her languages says
The work of the world is peace.

— Jim Cohn, from “Treasures for Heaven”

More ruminations drawing together blogging for beauty and blogging for peace.

Where is Raed ? has an update from Salam Pax. Lots of first hand reporting about life during the bombardment of Baghdad and in “post-war” Iraq. In honour of the updates, I point you to Walt Whitman’s “Respondez” which starts:

RESPONDEZ! Respondez!
(The war is completed�the price is paid�the title is settled beyond recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?

And continues, rather scornfully:

Let nothing but copies at second hand be permitted to exist upon the earth!
Let the earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be mention’d the name of God!
Let there be no God!
Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!
Let judges and criminals be transposed! let the prison-keepers be put in prison! let those that were prisoners take the keys! (Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?)
Let the slaves be masters! let the masters become slaves!
Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!
Let the Asiatic, the African, the European, the American, and the Australian, go armed against the murderous stealthiness of each other! let them sleep armed! let none believe in good will!
Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! let such be scorn’d and derided off from the earth!

Go read the whole thing.