{"id":10359,"date":"2025-03-29T15:26:46","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T19:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/on-play-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-03-29T15:26:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T19:26:46","slug":"on-play-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/on-play-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"On Play \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"On<\/a><\/p>\n

The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird<\/a>?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same). <\/p>\n

Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn\u2019t create \u2014 it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of \u201ccombinatory play,\u201d<\/a> that Baudelaire turned to the season of play in his definition of genius<\/a> as \u201cnothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because pure play liberates us from any notion of winning or losing and therefore liberates us from \u201cthe prisons we choose to live inside,\u201d<\/a> those in power have always tried to undermine the value of play. Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, derided play as an irrational and therefore unnecessary activity in which \u201cthe marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.\u201d <\/p>\n

What you lose, of course, is yourself \u2014 that is the fundamental experience of flow<\/a> characteristic of all true play and all creative work \u2014 and in so unselfing, you find the moment, you find the universe, you find wonder. <\/p>\n

\"Down<\/a>
One of Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s lost illustrations for Alice in Wonderland<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the spring of 1933, partway in time between Bentham and Ackerman, the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga<\/strong> (December 7, 1872\u2013February 1, 1945) took the podium at Leyden University to deliver his annual address as a rector. It startled all in attendance with its central insight nothing less than countercultural in a world still recovering from its first great war and already hurtling toward another: that \u201ccivilization arises and unfolds in and as play.\u201d <\/p>\n

This would become the backbone of Huizinga\u2019s visionary 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). Animated by questions \u201chovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy,\u201d it went on to inspire everything from board games to mobile architecture to the magic circle concept of virtual worlds, and to influence generations of thinkers as sundry as Eric Berne (who cited Huizinga in his revolutionary 1964 book Games People Play<\/em><\/a>), Richard Powers<\/a> (who built the cathedral of his excellent novel Playground<\/em> upon Huizinga\u2019s foundation), and Thomas Merton<\/a> (who underlined<\/a> passages on nearly every page of his copy).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While his Austrian contemporary Otto Rank was pleading for \u201cthe recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life,\u201d<\/a> Huizinga considers play \u2014 \u201ca well-defined quality of action which is different from \u2018ordinary\u2019 life\u201d \u2014 as evidence that our lives are animated by something beyond mind and beyond matter:<\/p>\n

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The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play. <\/p>\n

But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind<\/em> breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Remi Charlip from My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat<\/em><\/a> by Sandol Stoddard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This may be why evolutionary theory \u2014 which is an explanatory framework based on reason: adaptation as cause and effect \u2014 has so far failed to explain why nature gave us play, as unnecessary and as hallowing as any act of grace:<\/p>\n

\n

In this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Play presents itself to us\u2026 as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives. As a regularly recurring relaxation, however, it becomes the accompaniment, the complement, in fact an integral part of life in general. It adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual \u2014 as a life function \u2014 and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art from Kenny\u2019s Window<\/em><\/a> \u2014 Maurice Sendak\u2019s forgotten philosophical first children\u2019s book<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Play is so compelling in part because it \u201clies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly,\u201d free from the binaries of right and wrong that bind our ordinary lives. This is Huizinga\u2019s most daring axiom: While the traditional view holds that moral development \u2014 the annealing of our rights and wrongs \u2014 is how societies advance, he argues that play is the true sculptor of civilization: <\/p>\n

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Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up<\/em><\/a> by John Miller<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And yet for all this theorizing, Huizinga concedes that the role and riddle of play is a \u201cquestion that eludes and deludes us to the end, in a lasting silence.\u201d Nearly a century after him, Diane Ackerman turned that silence into song with her lyrical defense of \u201cdeep play\u201d<\/a> as that vital \u201ccombination of clarity, wild enthusiasm, saturation in the moment, and wonder\u201d that makes life more alive.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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