Tag: play

Toy Chest

“It is like a vast grey box in which are laid helter-skelter a great many toys, each of which is itself completely significant apart from the always unchanging temporal dimension which merely contains it along with the rest. I make this point clear for the benefit of any of my readers who have not had the distinguished privilege of being in jail. To those who have been in jail my meaning is at once apparent; particularly if they have had the highly enlightening experience of being in jail with a perfectly indefinite sentence. How, in such a case, could events occur and be remembered otherwise than as individualities distinct from Time Itself? Or, since one day and the next are the same to such a prisoner, where does Time come in at all? Obviously, once the prisoner is habituated to his environment, once he accepts the fact that speculation as to when he will regain his liberty cannot possibly shorten the hours of his incarceration and may very well drive him into a state of unhappiness (not to say morbidity), events can no longer succeed each other: whatever happens, while it may happen in connection with some other perfectly distinct happening, does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities—each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes, months and the other treasures of freedom.

It is for this reason that I do not purpose to inflict upon the reader a diary of my alternative aliveness and nonexistence at La Ferté—not because such a diary would unutterably bore him, but because the diary or time method is a technique which cannot possibly do justice to timelessness. I shall (on the contrary) lift from their grey box at random certain (to me) more or less astonishing toys; which may or may not please the reader, but whose colours and shapes and textures are a part of that actual Present—without future and past-whereof they alone are cognizant who, so to speak, have submitted to an amputation of the world. ” (ee cummings, The Enormous Room)

The remarkable passage above belongs to ee cummings. It introduces the period in his autobiographical work, The Enormous Room, in which he was incarcerated in a military prison without charge or sentence. The passage signals a transition in the narrative. In previous chapters, cummings played the role of the foreigner abroad. We was traveling or being made to travel. Each episode presents him with increasingly unfamiliar circumstances. Now, he is brought to the prison where he is to remain indefinitely. The narrator informs us the linear progress that we are accustomed to seeing in stories must come to a halt. The narrative, along with its protagonist, is put into suspension. The experience is incomparable, we are told. There arises a disruption in continuity, which causes traditional relationships and associations to vanish. The narrator is essentially being released into a social and temporal vacuum. Context is stripped away and we are left with only essence. This sudden disintegration of meaning should be terrifying, yet narrator is unperturbed. In fact, he seems pleased. We struggle to discern whether the tone is ironic. Partly it is. The narrator(cummings?) is subjected to unmistakable torment, but he is so enthralled by the novelty of the situation. This enormous room new world with a new set of incomprehensible principles. People and objects are discovered like uncharted continents. In the absence of shared custom or rules of conduct for entreating these unknown entities, the narrator is free to entreat them exactly as he wishes. Naturally, his first impulse is to play with them. All methods of conduct must be refashioned and the only effective way of doing so is through goofing and using the imagination to project meaning where none can be found. For this reason, he calls them toys. He finds that playing with them is remarkably stimulating, liberating even.
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The purpose of this work is to present a vehicle through which cummings can share his toys with us. We admire them together, author and reader. We are, he hopes, as interested and “astonished” as he is.

When ee cummings is finally released from the enormous room, he returns home to New York and encounters the mob of the city. To his surprise, these people also are toys. Though they have decipherable histories, recognized behaviors, subjective agency, power of communication, the subtext of the enormous room remains, suggesting that all of these supposedly concrete elements that make up the identity are illusory. When cummings first spots people from the ship’s deck arriving in New York harbor, they are so distant they are dots, like seeds potential germinate into wonderful possibility. He describes them in the following line, which also concludes the book: “..which are men which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great undulous stride firmly into immortal sunlight.”

The Play of Animals

 

“No doubt nature has given more than is necessary to unreasoning beings; she has caused a gleam of freedom to shine even in the darkness of animal life. When the lion is not tormented by hunger, and when no wild beast challenges him to fight, his unemployed energy creates an object for himself; full of ardour, he fills the re-echoing desert with his terrible roars, and his exuberant force rejoices in itself, showing itself without an object. The insect flits about rejoicing in life in the sunlight, and it is certainly not the cry of want that makes itself heard in the melodious song of the bird; there is undeniably freedom in these movements, though it is not emancipation from want in general, but from a determinate external necessity.”(Schiller, An Aesthetic Education of Man: Letter 27)

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Schiller and Play

The famous line from Friedrich Schiller on play: “…man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays..” This statement comes from the fifteenth letter of “On the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Play is the principal expression of the human spirit. It reconciles the divisions which civilization has carved into the mind. Schiller divides the creative impulse into three sense drives: desire for sense, desire for form and desire for play. He names play (Spieltrieb) the salvation of the other two. It unites reason and sensation and synthesizes from their correspondence absolute essence and spirit:

“The sense-drive demands that there shall be change and that time shall have a content; the form-drive demands that time shall be annulled and that there shall be no change. That drive, therefore, in which both the others work in concert (permit me for the time being, until I have justified the term, to call it the play-drive), the play-drive, therefore, would be directed towards annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity.” (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 14)

Running up against a partner’s pubic bone viagra no prescription or snapping the erectile tissue during a particularly aggressive maneuver can trigger the development of scar tissue that characterizes Peyronie’s disease. We are pointing out that symptoms can occur after a gallbladder cheapest cialis soft removal surgery, a big number of people suffer from this common sexual problem. viagra without prescription canada How to boost erection size and erection quality naturally to enjoy intimate moments with her is through massaging the male organ using ayurvedic sexual pleasure oil – Saffron M Power oil Its key ingredients are Kesar, Long, Swarna Patra, Salabmisri, Jaiphal, Sarpgandha, Dalchini, Khakhastil and Jaypatri. All men experience difficulty in maintaining an erection sometimes, but if its cialis active a regular phenomenon then one ought to seek out help. Schiller’s description of the creative impulse corroborates a previous post I have written on the matter. I divide creativity by intellect, sensation and spontaneity, and cite the classical totems for these faculties: the laurel branch, the myrtle bough and the ivy vine. For Schiller, the creative subject thinks, feels and plays. The typical and arduous labor of the mind in workaday life and stolid social interactions activate only one of these faculties at a time. We seek freedom from dreary obligation in play. Play reconstitutes our potential and human strengths into the vigorous gesture, the triumphal transgression.

I’ve considered these qualities that Schiller describes myself at great length, before having ever encountered these ideas in “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” and I’ve viewed the situation differently, perhaps it is no more or less correct. I find all of the impulses to be equally at odds with each other and that each one is just as capable as the others at wedding them together into creative synthesis. Play is wild and heedless whereas sensuality is tender and quite. The intellect in its strength can tame play and encourage sensuality to assert itself more externally. Thought and play have a competitive relationship: one can work or one can play. Sensitivity assuages the antipathy that exists between the two. It makes each aware of its own fallibility.

Would that all it took to produce great artists is a penchant for play. The different formulae of interaction between the three great muses are endlessly vacillating and complex.

Gamecuffs

An excerpt from a failed story I wrote a few years ago. The story’s called “Gamecuffs.” This is part of the opening monologue:

The previous summer I was very interested in obstacle courses and was watching a lot of Japanese game shows. I may be wrong since I speak no Japanese, but it seems most Japanese game shows forego the classic game show convention of introducing their guests to the studio and television audience. I can think of only one American game show that shares this practice, and it is probably not coincidental that The Price is Right should share other similarities to the Japanese game show method, such as play with large and conspicuous toy-objects, adrenaline-tainted calculation, effusive celebration, naked disappointment, et cetera. It is imperative that a show like The Price provide a degree of anonymity before a national audience; the guest would not be free to act childlike and entertaining otherwise. For a game devoted purely to play, it makes no sense to stop in the middle and talk about what somebody does for work. And besides, for the sake of the game, what purpose does a guest need to fulfill beside being anything other than a contestant? I remember watching Jeopardy! during the late stages of Ken Jennings’ 74 game winning streak. Despite having a life well-built for small talk (life abroad, new baby, self-professed passion for comics and movies), at around his thirtieth appearance he had run out of things to say about himself during the introduction break. He and Trebeck spent that time on the remaining shows just talking about the game.

I have a respect and fascination with those who play games for a living. A man I know from work is sometimes able to support himself playing cards online. He isn’t always able to win, so he keeps his job working afternoons and evenings as a Pharmacy Technician. I only know him because there was a period when I tried smoking clove cigarettes and we would sometimes take smoking breaks together in back. He told me that when he gets off work around eleven, he goes home, checks his accounts and goes to work playing Texas hold’em against people in India and the Pacific Rim. For seven continuous hours, he told me, he sits up in bed with his wife sleeping beside him and plays poker. Then, at around 6:30 in the morning, regardless of whether he is winning or losing, he logs off and goes to wake his kids up for school. He said he sleeps a little between the time his wife leaves for work and 3 o’clock, when he comes in; although, sometimes he’ll log back on during midday and work the Americans playing on their lunch breaks. I told him I’d been keeping more or less the same schedule since getting my PS3, but he said it wasn’t the same thing because he wasn’t playing for fun. He was playing for money. Once you’ve played the games long enough, you begin to see the interplay of odds and the mechanics of betting. He said that once you’ve reached that point, you stop playing and just respond robotically to the other players. He insisted that it was a job, as much as his Pharm. Tech job was a job. I don’t think this is completely true, since I’ve seen him sleeping in the meds lab after the Pharmacist has left, so clearly the two at least produce different physiological responses. I had to ask him, then, if he doesn’t enjoy playing the game and he isn’t making that much money doing it, why does he play it obsessively like he does? He said he likes the winning.

Like movies, most games are designed to cause a degree of stress . This is intended to be part of the game’s challenge. I remember as a child, before I had become adept—as all gamers do—at deciphering the programmed pattern of a game, I owned several titles for Nintendo which I could not play because I was afraid of them. Worst in my collection was Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest. Besides being baffling, requiring the player to enact implausible solutions to progress onto the later stages, it made use of a day/night mechanic whereby the game was less threatening, less challenging during the day and insanely difficult during the night. The music and sound effects were very shrill during the night, too. The bad graphics and design did not diminish the depth of the game’s urgency in any way. There is never any need for a game to hide its artificiality, I think. Games have not become any more amusing from improvements in digital rendering and graphics resolution. What mesmerizes us about the game is the manic swing of the algorithm. It is most thrilling to us when it succeeds in forcing us to recalibrate the way we play it. Children make a game of jumping rope when they initiate a tempo and a pace and then attempt to sustain the game after suddenly shifting that tempo. A boxer jumping rope in a gym, on the other hand, does so at a steady rhythm with the sole purpose of maintaining regular motion. There is no play in what the boxer is doing: he is working out. To make a game out of something there must be a challenge. This is a strange proposition since we seem equally to crave challenge and feel compelled evade it.

Statistics order sildenafil online show that a staggering twenty-three million plus men with erectile dysfunction enjoy longer coitus sessions. It can be best described as a natural alternative to order cheap cialis in stock. Know how sexual dysfunctions affect men, here! Ejaculation Issues Issues with ejaculation are many. best price on levitra In the wild it is considered an endangered species and is browse around for info generic cialis buy strictly controlled. I have determined that there is a table of life challenges divided into different qualitative types and categories. The greater half is attributive to work. Work-related challenge is taxing and requires submission to some kind of spirit-numbing repetition. The object is to elude exhaustion; that’s all. The there is challenge related to play, which is just the opposite of work-challenge. It is non-repetitive and fun. It coaxes you to experiment with new methods and think in ways you wouldn’t normally. This is liberating. Your mind becomes engrossed in the mechanics of the game and not with itself.

I find myself craving the game most at work, or someplace where I can’t escape. Though the work is not hard I become very tired for some reason. So I little games for myself. This makes the time pass and breaks up the day a little. I work for the moment as a photo developer at on of the big chain drug stores. I expend more effort playing the work games than not, but for whatever reason, they make the job less tiresome. I have one where I rearrange the order of the photos card so that it makes people’s vacations and family get-togethers appear to have happen differently. I also sometimes try to identify exceedingly nondescript photos and insert them into other customers’ orders. It’s surprising how no one notices. On certain days, I make it a point to use a different voice or accent with each individual customer. Then I try to remember to use the same voice when they come back to pickup their order.

I often wonder, if I had a serious job that demanded more of my attention and gave me more responsibility, would that deter me from making games out of it? And if it did, would such a job even be worth having? I have sacrificed a lot to remain entry-level. I still live with my parents, I don’t own my own car, the people I work with don’t seem to respect me, and then there’s all of my squandered potential, whatever that might be. It is a waste of life, every day, but so long as nothing I do is of any consequence, I feel free to do whatever I like. I wear the uniform inside-out some days. I have security cameras trained on me every hour of the evening but no one watches them. I have supervisors, but these people are even less responsible than I am. They pass the night shift stoned or asleep in the office. I wonder what how many people go about their lives without any hope of meaningful accomplishment? A board game I happened to play often as a child was called Life. Friends liked it—there was nothing about it to solve, so I didn’t see any purpose in it. The point of the game, ostensibly, is to travel by means of chance across a board which narrates players’ fates and to accumulate as much money as possible. The player who finishes richest wins, but the game very subtly suggests that it is a hollow victory since all that this money grants you at the end of your “Life” is a nicer retirement home in which to die. Thus Milton-Bradley reminds us, there are no winners in the game of Life.

I do not know of any game that satisfies me with its ending. A few video games have good stories written into them that climax and resolution, but a game’s narrative can only ever be incidental. It is the conclusion to a movie that has transpired alongside the game. As for as the game itself, you either crave to play it again after it has ended or it exhausts your interest and you turn the machine off. In neither case do you leave the game content with what has been done. Should the end be sweetened by the event of winning, the player digests the euphoria in place of the game, until it is gone and he wants the game again. So winning once is never sufficient. It is only incrementally better than losing every time.

Hallucinatory Playground Installations
of the Soviet Union

For some reason, playgrounds in the Soviet Union often featured distorted, inscrutable statues of fairy tale creatures, some legitimate characters from folklore, others just wild fever dream hallucinations. It is difficult to say if the grotesquerie of the figures was an accidental or intended. I like to imagine disillusioned artists from the provinces with no other method of publicizing their work being commissioned to do these jobs. They are uncooperative from the very beginning. They quarrel with the bureaucrats dispatched to oversee the projects. I see local officials despising the works once their finished, but since immediately tearing them down after their completion would be proof of their mismanagement of the project and make them vulnerable to criticism within the party, they leave them up. The disabused artists accomplish their aim: to frighten and terrorize a society which they loathe profoundly, to use the people’s own small mindedness to disturb and cause unease.

Then again, since this was communist Russia, there was probably a single guy who worked for the Ministry of Recreation or some such department whose only job was to design playground equipment for the whole empire. Maybe this gentleman was attempting whimsy but was incapable of imaginative play and humor. Maybe he confused fanciful illusion with basic abnormality. And so we have these images that are actually kind of subversive emerging out of blind ineptitude. I still admire what they were trying to do. The modern playground is built to be nothing more than a mechanism for expending effort through vigorous physicality. They are really just workout facilities for children. The people who designed soviet parks were trying to make these spaces more interesting for kids. The statues are supposed to imbue the playground with enchantment and inspire children to respond involuntarily with wonder. They do succeed in conjuring up a special magic; unfortunately it’s the accursed kind.

All of these images come from the excellent englishrussia.com http://englishrussia.com/2007/08/15/the-most-weird-russian-kids-playgrounds/, a website devoted to Soviet-era kitsch and oddity.

 

 

 


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