Child's Play, Shallow Play

Risk-taking behaviours often reflect ambivalent ways of calling for the help of one’s close friends and family – those who count. It is an ultimate means of finding meaning and a system of values; and it is a sign of the adolescent’s active resistance and his attempts to find his place in the world again. It contrasts with the far more insidious risk of depression and the radical collapse of meaning. In spite of the suffering it engenders, risk-taking nevertheless has a positive side, fostering independence in adolescents and a search for reference points, it leads to a better self-image and is a means of developing one’s identity. It is nonetheless painful in terms of its possible repercussions: injuries, death or addiction. But let us not forget that the suffering is upstream, perpetuated by a complex relation between a society, a family structure and a life history. Paradoxically, for some young people who are suffering, the risk is rather that they will remain immured in their world-weariness, with a potentially radical outcome (i.e. suicide). The turbulence caused by risk-taking behaviours illustrates a determination to be rid of one’s suffering and to fight on so that life can, at last, be lived” http://bod.sagepub.com/content/10/1/1.abstract --> DEEP PLAY must start with play. Play starts with the child. Play is meaningful to children. What we do often seems meaningless to them. What they do seems meaningless to us from a practical stand point of “what” they are actually doing when they play. But what they are doing when they play is meaning-making. See, they are MAKING it up. Children feel very seriously about play, we just fail to see how serious the things they do are because we think in terms of outcome or productivity. Play is not a cause and effect thing but stands outside of that world. Play is a process without beginning or end. Children know intuitively that “we are what we pretend to be”. At best we can grasp “we are what we think we are”. Both are the same, but the second one is easier to misconstrue. As adults, we must make meaning out of what we pretend to be that runs contrary to what people think we are. Training play in childhood is not for surviving in those roles they pretend, such as a mom or firefighter, it is to grasp the world we collide with when living in one we create. Playing mom and growing up to be a mom; that is just boring. Being a parent is not boring but what a waste it would be to think the purpose of playing mom at 6 years old was training for being a mom later on. NOT necessary. But it IS training and we must look at what it is good for; what we can retroactively harness from all the training we did. Child’s play is real play. But play grows up and real play in and adult is not going to look like children playing. Grown up play is not child play if it is merely about seeking pleasure or having fun because children are not seeking pleasurable experiences in their life for they are full time players. They have an instinct to have fun and seek pleasure as a fish in the boat needs water. It’s the oxygen of their true spirit. As adults we must force them to do other things, not because it’s not possible for them to have it their way, that logic misses a deeper purpose, but because they are not equipped to consciously navigate the world as full time players, in a system that refuses their reality. To live like a child, truly, means failing to understand the degree to which people do not accept this or why there is nothing childlike in your play as an adult unless you engage the world as a playground. Recess wasn’t the proper place to play, it was a training ground for playing out in the world. This is where depth comes in. The deep. “Game we’re playing is life”. If we took children seriously they’d be mocking the world. They play with our serious objects and mock us. We must do likewise. Play is fun because it is not in the world we support. Why do we support a world that is not about fun? Our fun must be dangerous. To live by this conviction, understand that to live “irresponsibly, intentionally, with conviction and purpose, is an incredibly difficult accomplishment. It comes down to either the hero or the coward. It means risking everything. What is freedom? How can we possibly be free if, once reaching adulthood, cannot choose to be the pirate, or hobo, or wanderer, and cannot do so because such roles are seen as occupied only by people who do it out of ill necessity. People who just can’t seem to take on proper roles and gravitate toward certain zones and spaces that we can’t seem to get rid of or control. And that’s a clue! The first pirates and bohemians and hobos carved those spaces out with great sacrifices. Resisting adults in pursuit of autonomy. Pirates, like children, could be wicked, but being one doesn’t make you so. Being a politician is a different story. Halloween. We dress up as characters. Archetypes. We only allow to exist or be acceptable in our imaginary time. But people once played pirate full time. And hobo. The value of being one evades us. We might be mocking or disgracing them except they exist to mock us so the joke is on us once again. And yet we do insult them in neglecting the huge sacrifices they made for us and that I will talk more about in the radical imagination. People wouldn’t like it if we played our grandfathers during World War 2 on Halloween, acting silly about something so grave. But then again, soldiers don’t seem like much fun. Pirates were fun. We know because of literature and because we have preserved them in our imaginary. In doing so we have failed to convey convincingly that the pirate is bad and does not belong in this world. We love the pirate we just want to keep them where we are safe, not from them but from ourselves. The pirate captured our imagination because they were real, for one, but also because they mocked the rulers of our world. They defied them all the way to the gallows (citation). They mocked our way of life insisting we were the ones playing at some stupid game. When they stood face to face we were both playing a game only theirs was dangerous to our own as it seemed to possess too much of that thing they call “romance” as opposed to our “reality”, and the pirates risked everything knowing it would spell game-over sooner than later. They played for keeps. If we recognize that virtual divide then a pirate does not get carried away with their imagination. They get carried away with reality. We are the ones who got carried away with imagination and started getting serious to the point of ruining the game for everyone. Playing house is not only not fun anymore, it’s scary. --> I haven’t really dealt in writing with what the new mythologies means about kids. I should probably have more to say about this but I don’t want to say too much because first, that is a sensitive area, and second, despite my increasing boldness with dealing with children in a way that reflects I believe with all my soul the things I say and that the way I live is true, children are until whatever uncertain age eligible to engage their existence and the context they call “life” from that vantage point that reveals exposes disguises etc in a way that can and certainly will contribute essential insights. Still, the meaning/import must be revealed to them somehow so that they can follow it back to its source. I cannot tell them the tags I give them are “anarchist war tags” but there must be something. One way is thru stories such as The Dreams. I must for them create a language and semiotic exchange that points at the approaching hyphens and points at the adults and the world they are moving toward in a way that causes them to question “why?” So many young stars not yet aware of how gravity works or what it can do. Squeezing trite amounts of light from megabytes of matter they contain. Where is their sun? Where are the supernovas that will leave them mute with desire to achieve that supreme light? That light that frees gravity from time when it leaves it behind? TRAINS: The adult with the t-shirt “Still plays with trains”. The crowd at trainfest. The girl standing between me and the police officer. --> What children love most at school is recess, not what comes before or after. And when you finally learn that playing is freedom you stop teaching children and you start learning from them; you watch the children circling the playground joyously playing what you once believed were merely games and then you pick a single child running in circles around the playground and you realize, that’s your world and, if you believe it, that’s your heart, circling heaven like moon. Meaning-making is Process and abides by a logic very different from ‘a process’. --> But the divide of romance versus reality is inside as well as out, and we might fail to grasp that meaning-making is our responsibility-that meaning is made by challenging the divide and that challenging it is what we trained for when we played as children. You must live to play, but playing cannot just mock their world, it must mock your own. For you share with them the conviction that fiction and fact, imagination and materiality, romance and reality, are two separate things. You cannot help it for this complicity is your original sin. --> For children play is serious and deep an meaning-making is done so purely and instinctively that it’s too fleeting to perceive that any good comes from games and so we think it’s merely good because children are innocent and we like to see them happy, even if by things so silly. But for an adult to truly play like a child they must accomplish what a child accomplishes when they play, and this has little to do with “what” they seem to be doing and everything to do with the freedom with which they inhabit space and engage place around them. It has to do with one definition of process versus another. Objects and circumstances are not meaningful on their own. Meaning is made in the process of engagement with them. The definition of “play” in child’s play is an entirely different thing than “play” in adult play. Play is to a child what deep play is to adult; playing adult (cooking, mommy) is to children what playing like children is to adults ; they are entertaining the way watching an animated movie can be simultaneously entertaining to adults and children. Deep play is when adults are daring to engage life in what are meaningless or purposeless ways. This is why we love pirates, and hoboes, and mystic wanderers and gypsies. They are the children who’s playground was a training ground, and who, in playing there trained so that one day they might play in the larger playground of the world, where the stakes are high and the bell that ends the game is for them, as far as they are concerned, the bell that ends their world. It’s not what they taught you in school but what you taught yourself outside in play that holds the key to your freedom. This is what meaning-making with freight trains is all about.