A Hypothetical Journal Entry on a Playful “New Story”
1 Jan. 2050
As I approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of earning my doctorate, I look forward to a bright and playful retirement by reflecting upon the same characteristic prospects at this, my culminating degree’s, beginning. Little did I know how impactful this truly life -nay, world– changing research on play would be.
I recall pleasant surprise by, both, play’s initial, striking appearances and the flawless translation of playful theories into widely applicable practices. The first appearances of play proved striking for active mentions in two major tomes of intellectual and cultural history, Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. This pleasant intrigue continued through my coursework in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I happened upon numerous paths through which to explore play as a philosophical -and suitably academic- pursuit. As my dissertation coalesced through avenues for embracing play and the spirit of the child to help us navigate change in a world of perpetual flux, I discovered and cultivated friendships with opportune ‘play-mates.’ These occurrences proved beyond a reasonable doubt that David Abram’s pitch that we need “strategic allies,” or friends in influential places, was not only true but that we were our own allies; in fact, we embraced our role as players on a collective team in a game of pluralistic livelihood.
Aptly capturing our multifaceted approach as ‘friends of play’ and ‘friends in play,” we became ‘playmates for progress,’ first academically, then more universally, rendering play a veritable liturgical narrative. Together, with our shared interests and optimism yet varying fortes, we would help shape the future in part by reclaiming the past, in a remarkably romantic spirit. Indeed, as iconic ‘romantic’ William Wordsworth once lamented, every “original” author faced “the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed,” we faced the challenge of reclaiming the spirit of the Child from its pejorative connotations toward creating a palatable taste for play among adults and the otherwise ‘serious.’[i] We concocted a flavor for a childlike disposition after the fashion of Wordsworth and other romantic poets and philosophers, including Mary Wollstonecraft and J.C. Friedrich von Schiller, and reintroduced play through characteristic qualities once considered sweet but left to stagnate and sour to ‘mature’ tongues. These qualities, collected by play pioneers Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens and Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper, included wonder, awe, curiosity, and humble reverence, all in metaphorical relation to the stature of the child.
We successfully distinguished between the pejorative sense of childishness from the productive applications with the nuance childlikeness; we built a comprehensive historiography from a variety of disciplinary sources proving that humanity has been preparing for such a reclamation of play for a long while; and we implemented various strategies for harnessing the childlike disposition toward a playful approach to life, including a humble spirit welcoming to new knowledge, an egalitarian team-player social structure toward other players in the infinite game of life, and the essential voluntary component that served as an open-ended invitation to engage without coercively pressuring anyone to comply.
One especially notable framing of this project involved borrowing the power of narrative via story and myth. Many notable academic figures provided compelling uses for stories which was the only framework we needed to launch the world into a “choose your own adventure” caliber novel, in which the ‘readers’ were not mere passive observers. Mathematical cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme articulated the significance of “storying” the history of the universe by introducing narrative to cosmology and, thus, properly orienting the human from within an overarching story, for science. Swimme and Thomas Berry, both individually and collectively, advocated the role of narrative in shifting the scientific paradigm, which not only illustrated our agency as co-authors of our story, but its ongoing, unfinished nature, even to this day, nearly a quarter-century later. These perspectives elegantly supplemented the early works on game theory for mathematics and economics as advocated by Eric Berne, M.D., and professor emeritus James P. Carse.
Psychiatrist Berne introduced another branch of the sciences to game definitions and Carse, especially, augmented Swimme and Berry’s storying paradigm by helping us frame life in terms our veritable philosophical patriarch, Plato, would approve of – yet not in the post-modern pejorative colloquial of ‘patriarchy’ we might presume. Plato, in the amply antiquated Laws, advocated a “worthy” or “noble” life was one lived according to playfulness, which Carse, later but perhaps unbeknownst, echoed as the “infinite game.”[ii] Buckminster Fuller, the so-called “inventor of the future,” inadvertently augmented this infinite play with his mid-twentieth century conception for saving the world by recalibrating our relationship with economics, the aptly dubbed, “world game.”[iii] This Platonically “worthy” game of life truly became worldly, akin to Taylor’s description that “civilization is the game we play together.”[iv] We learned to embrace the strengths of play to reassess our roots, re-story our position in, and conception of, history, and reasserted ourselves as the active, philosophical progeny we were always meant to embody and become in playful perpetuity. Through play and becoming “playful revolutionaries” in the full sense Taylor seems to have meant it, we learned to successfully embrace a world hallmarked by pluralism.
Indeed, we “got our story straight” as Swimme and Berry long advocated and inspiring social activist Suzanne Taylor expounded. The latter’s activism provided the long-missing ingredient that created the necessary traction to gain the attention of the world at large: money. A essay contest for Changing the World gained public attention and further engaged the lay public, spreading awareness beyond academia. Our new story, like all stories, fostered empathy on a new caliber, cultivating perspectives for sight and insight other than our narrow and, often, myopic own. This included transcending a practice we’d not yet named: adulteration. Indeed, adulterated information often lost the story quality in its boiled-down form. Somewhat to our great surprise, our story of play effectively appealed to adults and children, alike. As (Jemma) Rowan Deer aptly noted in quoting George Marshall, “stories perform a fundamental cognitive function; people may hold information…but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories.”[v] Participation in narrative supplied the necessary catalyst to maintain a story’s integrity, even if we were a bit appalled at the initial impetus in monetary currency.
What helped effect the change, the growing disinterest in capitalist practices was a new focus on language. The language specific to stories proved conducive to our playful efforts by pointing us to the importance of play-like language. In his work The Ever-Present Origin, advocating a cumulative ‘integral’ structure of consciousness, Jean Gebser posited “investigations of language will be a predominant source for insight.”[vi] Insightful, indeed! Language, as it turned out, offered hope in the ever-unfolding quality of our collective story through the revisitation to, and reclamation of, magic. Just as stories prove compelling for embedding of meaning for adults and children, alike, the magical quality proved equally -if strikingly- captivating. Philosopher, linguist, and poet Gebser not only suggested language as the “most potent weapon” toward effecting a group consciousness, he identified it as “authentic spell-casting.”[vii] Language, after all, operates like an incantation, which did not pass under Deer’s radar for animism and story. Deer described how poetic authors as Virginia Woolf demonstrate a ready capacity for “attunement to the wild force of rhythm and the animism of the non-human world more generally.”[viii] Empathy was just one manifestation of this trans-linguistic magic.
Through storying and living, or participating, our words we came to embrace “eco-poetics” a branch of poetry and literature aiming to revive “the old human habit of weaving word to world,” or “helpfully troubl[ing] the dichotomy” between nature and the human by reasserting the active role of the environment.[ix] Nature, the earth, we finally learned, is not a mere resource to tap and exhaust, it is our home; it is the place in which we are embedded, but it is, too, an agency, a valid player and not a mere ‘field’ upon which we play without consequence. Ecological poetry offered an eco-po-ethics for us to participate our ethics, playfully and aesthetically. Not only did neologisms and cooperative arts-and-semantics projects visualize how to break down the false bifurcation between nature and humans, but helped facilitate an entire popular culture movement through which many and varied persons engaged in this truly global endeavor to save the world. We learned to play ‘civilization,’ interpreting its ‘seriousness’ a new way, more interactively and cross-culturally, and invented a truly pluralistic game. Theoretical efforts increasingly translated into popular praxis and saving the world became, in large measure, saving ourselves; we incorporated play into nearly all aspects of our lives revivifying our liveliness. Indeed, we reclaimed our agency we had falsely deferred to some alleged supernatural ‘savior;’ we became our own saviors because we once again became infinite players.
Through the word play of poetry, which “is a form of action,” even a “pleasure activism,” we learned “a way of ‘doing things with words’.”[x] For we learned, akin to language’s universally accessible quality, that play is a nearly universal, certainly cross-species, language, especially for its bodily component that bypasses the intricacies of grammar that often led to mistranslations. Play proved so translatable, in fact, that an increasingly popular story recounted by Stuart Brown, M.D., attested play’s capacity to short-circuit a primal drive for survival. An emaciated polar bear approached a campsite in the arctic, much to the dismay of the camper; yet, upon a play bow invitation by a sled pup, rather than devouring the camper or the unsuspecting canines, the bear not only reciprocated but returned for a week to continue the play![xi] This not only attests to play’s deep evolutionary significance and cross-species translation, but an equally primal sense of trust – trust that the play invitation would succeed. We humans trusted this impulse in kind and implemented play invitations into our social and political lives, initiating humility and egalitarianism in various ways, most purely in the smile and handshake. The sheer successes of playful encounters in semantics, epistemology, politics and ecological concerns, and the rough-and-tumble wild, all prove play is evolutionarily deeper and therefore more powerful than our superficial prejudices and uncooperative exclusivist practices.
It is truly wonderful to reflect upon how the once rather isolated circles of academics translated into a playful, pluralist praxis at large, in society, in cultures, and in life, overall. We Playmates of Progress, or “pops” of hope, light, and color in a monochrome gradient world, truly sought and succeeded in reclaiming an essential component of our individual and collective past, in the inner and archetypal Child respectively, proving both Bellah’s and Taylor’s pitch that “nothing is ever lost” and “there is no such thing as irreparable loss.” Like a true liturgy, we effectively performed how rituals and narratives truly are rooted in a participatory culture and an evolution of play.[xii] By embracing our playful and childlike roots, we redefined what it means to be human; we saved ourselves and the world by salvaging play.
[i] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971), 44; Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021), 24; italics added.
[ii] Plato, Laws, as quoted in Robert N. Bellah in Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 110; James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986), 23, 26.
[iii] Alec Nevala-Lee, Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Harper Collins, 2022).
[iv] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007), 142.
[v] Taylor, A Secular Age, 146.
[vi] Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 4.
[vii] Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, 6.
[viii] (Jemma) Rowan Deer, Radical Animism: Reading For the End of the World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 3.
[ix] Scott Knickerbocker, EcoPoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 1, 3-4.
[x] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 29; Sam Mickey, in “EcoPoetics” class, PARP 6152, Fall 2022, CIIS.
[xi] Account provided in Stuart Brown, M.D., Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Penguin, 2009).
[xii] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 13, 88, 267, 489, 501, 512; Taylor, A Secular Age, 125.