At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of consciousness folded unto itself, our becoming the most private, most significant work we have.
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) made public art of this private work, his poetry so eternal and universal precisely because it came from a place so personal. Animated at once by a profound existential loneliness and a deep feeling of connection to every atom, every person, and every blade of grass, he spent his life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass — the record of his becoming — always addressing the person in the reader, always owning the person in himself.
No one can acquire for another — not one,
Not one can grow for another — not one.
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him — it cannot fail.
Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself.
He distills this first and final truth of life in the closing stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — one of the greatest poems ever written, and one of the most perspectival takes on time. Insisting that you must abide “no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself,” he observes that at the end of life, we all invariably face…
…the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
A generation later, another of the world’s most original poets would come to compose the best manifesto I know for the courage to be yourself.
The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same).
Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of “combinatory play,” that Baudelaire turned to the season of play in his definition of genius as “nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”
Because pure play liberates us from any notion of winning or losing and therefore liberates us from “the prisons we choose to live inside,” those in power have always tried to undermine the value of play. Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, derided play as an irrational and therefore unnecessary activity in which “the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.”
What you lose, of course, is yourself — that is the fundamental experience of flow characteristic of all true play and all creative work — and in so unselfing, you find the moment, you find the universe, you find wonder.
In the spring of 1933, partway in time between Bentham and Ackerman, the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga (December 7, 1872–February 1, 1945) took the podium at Leyden University to deliver his annual address as a rector. It startled all in attendance with its central insight nothing less than countercultural in a world still recovering from its first great war and already hurtling toward another: that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”
This would become the backbone of Huizinga’s visionary 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (public library). Animated by questions “hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy,” it went on to inspire everything from board games to mobile architecture to the magic circle concept of virtual worlds, and to influence generations of thinkers as sundry as Eric Berne (who cited Huizinga in his revolutionary 1964 book Games People Play), Richard Powers (who built the cathedral of his excellent novel Playground upon Huizinga’s foundation), and Thomas Merton (who underlined passages on nearly every page of his copy).
The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.
This may be why evolutionary theory — which is an explanatory framework based on reason: adaptation as cause and effect — has so far failed to explain why nature gave us play, as unnecessary and as hallowing as any act of grace:
In this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun.
[…]
Play presents itself to us… as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives. As a regularly recurring relaxation, however, it becomes the accompaniment, the complement, in fact an integral part of life in general. It adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual — as a life function — and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.
Art from Kenny’s Window — Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical first children’s book
Play is so compelling in part because it “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly,” free from the binaries of right and wrong that bind our ordinary lives. This is Huizinga’s most daring axiom: While the traditional view holds that moral development — the annealing of our rights and wrongs — is how societies advance, he argues that play is the true sculptor of civilization:
Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.
And yet for all this theorizing, Huizinga concedes that the role and riddle of play is a “question that eludes and deludes us to the end, in a lasting silence.” Nearly a century after him, Diane Ackerman turned that silence into song with her lyrical defense of “deep play” as that vital “combination of clarity, wild enthusiasm, saturation in the moment, and wonder” that makes life more alive.
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”
We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art.
Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens when we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, our ancestors sought an organizing principle for the mystery, drawing celestial maps and creating elaborate cosmogonies with no knowledge of gravity and orbits, of galaxies and exoplanets. Our arts anticipated our equations and counterbalance them — science has only deepened our confusion with discoveries intimating that this entire universe might exist inside a black hole, that it might not be the only universe, that the thingness of everything in it may just be a hologram. It would, of course, be thrilling to confirm any of these theories. But for all the thrill of truth, it is at the intersection of mystery and meaning that we become most fully human and find the things that make us most alive: wonder, beauty, love.
Partway between ancient Tibetan astrological thangka, Maria Clara Eimmart’s 17th-century astronomical paintings, and Ella Harding Baker’s 19th-century solar system quilt, bearing echoes of Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, Drinkwater’s paintings and collages are coded cosmogonies of color, form, and feeling — orbits and planets, comets and meteor showers, dashed and dotted and arrowed, simple yet mysterious, elemental yet deeply human.
Emanating from them is the same transcendent bewilderment that prompted pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell to sigh in her diary:
We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.
When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists.
Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself fragile.
One of the cases he relays is that of a bright woman in her sixties called Mrs. S., whose right hemisphere was savaged by a massive stroke. Although it left her with “perfectly preserved intelligence — and humor,” it also left her living in only half the world:
She sometimes complains to the nurses that they have not put dessert or coffee on her tray. When they say, “But, Mrs. S., it is right there, on the left,” she seems not to understand what they say, and does not look to the left. If her head is gently turned, so that the dessert comes into sight, in the preserved right half of her visual field, she says, “Oh, there is it — it wasn’t there before.” She has totally lost the idea of “left,” with regard to both the world and her own body. Sometimes she complains that her portions are too small, but this is because she only eats from the right half of the plate — it does not occur to her that it has a left half as well. Sometimes, she will put on lipstick, and make up the right half of her face, leaving the left half completely neglected: it is almost impossible to treat these things, because her attention cannot be drawn to them and she has no conception that they are wrong. She knows it intellectually, and can understand, and laugh; but it is impossible for her to know it directly.
Termed hemi-inattention in the 1950s when it was first clinically described, this condition is now better known as hemispheric neglect or unilateral neglect. A year after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was published, the physician M. Marsel Mesulam captured its startling semireality in his book Principles of Behavioral Neurology:
When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form… Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there.
What makes neurological disorders so fascinating is that their abnormal physiology is often a microcosm of the psychological pitfalls of the healthy brain. Who hasn’t shuddered with a flash of aphasia, suddenly unable to retrieve the right word or formulate a thought into a coherent sentence when in shock or in awe or tired to the bone? Hemispheric neglect menaces our sense of reality with the intimation that we too may be missing entire regions of reality because our attention simply cannot be drawn to them.
Perhaps we too are living in the half room.
And how can it be otherwise, given we are creatures of emotional incompleteness capable of extraordinary willful blindness, going through our days half-aware of our own interior, the other half relegated to an unconscious which our dreams, if we remember them, and our therapy, if it is any good, hint at but which remains largely subterranean. How, then, can we expect to have a complete picture of anything or anyone else?
There is no half room more extreme than infatuation. In those delirious early stages of falling in love, we magnify the positive qualities of the beloved to a point of crystalline perfection, turning a willfully blind eye to their shortcomings, only to watch the shiny crystals slowly melt to reveal the rugged reality of the actual person — imperfect and half-available, for they too are half-opaque to themselves.
To come to love someone after being in love with them is to be willing to walk the full room from corner to corner across every diagonal, to run your fingers over the floorboards and love every splinter, to run your gaze over the ceiling and love every crack — not because you love the pain and the leakage, but because you love the totality of the person, that incalculable sum we call a soul.
Mrs. S., intelligent and determined, refused to let her condition shape her experience of reality and developed a simple, brilliant compensatory strategy: Each time she knew something was there but she could not find it, unable to look left and therefore to turn left, she would turn right and rotate 180 degrees until it came into view. Suddenly, the hospital food portions she felt were too small doubled to their full size and she felt sated.
The trick, of course, is to be intelligent enough and humble enough to recognize that you might be missing half of reality.
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