Dear Zsa Zsa,
I want to play.
Play has some extremely different and heavy connotations in different lexicons. I'm not sure how many of those I'm excluding, but I do know I have a general meaning in mind that has something like a core to it.
Let me contrast play to creative activity as a first approximation. Play is not primarily directed toward producing something, even its own effects. It is for its own sake. Creative activity, as I'm using the concept here, produces something and is directed toward that production. Here's one place where the boundary becomes blurry, and where I get into trouble. What I do for play can become a creative activity. The effect of play can turn into an object for appropriation and production -- in a word, work. This happens gradually.
In fact, my so-called career as a so-called philosophy instructor is due to play becoming creative activity becoming work. I count my entry into this biz as the afternoon I spent quite innocently getting TREMENDOUSLY PISSED OFF AT IMMANUEL KANT, and developing a set of questions about the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that took three class sessions for the professor to address (thanks, Dr. Pressler). That was when, for lack of a better expression, I started taking this play seriously.
I have a tendency to that, it seems. Playing the guitar became something I took very seriously for a while, and I started teaching myself finger-picking and practicing until my hands were exhausted. Somewhere along the way, I fixated on the notion that I would play gigs, in front of other human beings. I was always thinking of playing as practicing for these future gigs. It became a chore. I didn't get very far before Ménière's Disease stopped me, and that might be lucky for me in a way, because, in the moments that I can play, I am no longer able to sustain the same degree of self-criticism. I know it's not feasible for me ever to play any gig. I'm fortunate when I get to play at all.
In short, a major problem I have is turning play into work. Some of my models of play require virtuoso skill, which you can only acquire with a ton of practice - i.e., work. (Practice is more or less breaking down playthings into pieces and then rebuilding them, over and over again. I am Hegelian to my bones.*)
I know, for instance, that I play with words as much as I do because I already have a lot of skill developed, through endless iterations. This is my secret as an academic writer, too. While many of my friends and colleagues complain about the pain and suffering of writing, I never do. Whenever it doesn't feel like fun, I don't bother. I write a lot, I take very little of it very seriously, and even when I present it as a "product" of my "work," I (try to) suppress a giggle.
A major effect of play would seem to be joy. The giggles I suppress when I bring something I've written into a class are not because I'm so impressed with my own jokes (although they are brilliant), but because writing it was so damn much fun that I want to laugh out loud. I want to infect everyone with that enjoyment.
I know that part of what I'm doing is showing off while I play. Showing off might be ego-gratification on some level, and to that extent enter into a psycho-economy of symbolic exchange. Like the child at play, I often write things as though to shout "Look at me!" But notice the ambiguity of this shout: it is about "me," but is also a call to join in, if only as an observer. (Perhaps the adult called by the child counts as a kind of incomplete or incapable child, and the child notices that the adult's play is so attenuated they can only participate by observing.) Whether or not my writing floats your boat, you might still be able to appreciate that it floats mine.
When I write in that free, joyful, giggle-inducing way, I am a Thelonious Monk song, and nothing can harm me, not even failure, because play is fail-safe. It can be started and stopped. It can be given life or death. But as long as it is, it can't fail to be play.
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* G.W.F. Hegel wrote in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences that the most intelligent thing a child can do with their toys is to break them. I have always thought that was not only one of his keenest insights, and funniest lines, but also one of the best expressions of the heart of Hegel's philosophy. I'd love some day to write a commentary on Hegel and call it something like Broken Toys
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