Player Playfully Playful Play

How appropriate that this word should duck and dodge clear definition. That it should spread itself so generously to different (but definite) milieus. One can play an instrument, a game, or a sport. One can simply play. Performance is play, in a dramatic sense. As is imitation (which Plato insists is one and the same). Play should be pleasurable, according to most encyclopedias and theorists, and yet, from my own experience, I would attest this is not always the case.

The challenge is to locate (and then to articulate) the commonality, the shared aspects of all play forms.

Spencer claims play as the outlet for superfluous energy. Lazarus, as the recuperation after the fatigue of real life. Wundt capitalizes on the "unconscious imitation or purposeful action" of play. Freud defines play as "motoric hallucination" (which I would interpret as simple wish-fulfillment).

My favorite conjecture as far as the word "play" goes, comes from Schiller. In his famous letters, Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen , Schiller places the individual between two worlds: the world of the senses (physical reality) and the world of the will (the instinct for form). In other words: the world of the body and the world of the mind. Schiller deems play as the harmonious phenomenon banding these two worlds. Play gives expression and life to both.

This is no small thing. According to Schiller, play is the superglue that holds our experience of reality intact. It is perhaps appropriate to refer to the well-known metaphor for life--life as the great drama, the great play. "Take off your masks!" my very anxious and tortured teenage poetry laments, but in lieu of these considerations, is that possible?

So then, is everything illusion?

Is everything play?

Play certainly revels in the illusionary, in the pretend. Even the word "recreation," a more basic and specific synonym for "play" breaks down into the re- and -create, the plane of illusion, the performance.

So let's stop and regroup. According to some of these big head philosophers and psychiatrists, reality--I mean real reality--is fractured between that which we can see, measure, pick up and handle, and that which is imagined, thought, conceptualized, etc; and if it weren't for play, we'd be ourselves, fractured, split between two different worlds.

Play, illusion or not, is the healing element. It is the great Neosporin, the great band-aid, the great . . . (and now I've lost myself in my own metaphors) . . . Play heals one world with the other. In Art and the Artist , Otto Rank makes a particularly pertinent comment: "I believe, however, that everything that is consoling in life--that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense--can only be illusional . . ." (pg. 100). How bleak, but at the same time, how interesting.

So, the pleasure made possible by play is its ability to free us from "real life" (that fractured existence!). It allows us to step out of that cacophonic struggle into a realm of illusion where symbol is reality, where there are "inconsequential" wins and losses, role playing, and the like.

No wonder play works to liberate such a flood of creative energy.

I haven't begun to touch on the more negative associations with play. The promiscuous "player," the heaviness of illusion, the exhausting and sometimes mean-spirited "games people play". But that's what this entire publication is about, touching the places where one semi-cohesive introduction cannot. And once again, we arrive at the end of another conclusion-less introduction, which, I suppose is the point. To start but not to stop. You see, I've come to find ends (as therapeutically sound as they may seem) quite out of touch with reality.