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Playing For Time - importance of recreation in society

Ecologist, The, May, 2001 by Jay Griffiths

JAY GRIFFITHS SAYS THAT WESTERN SOCIETY'S FEAR OF IDLENESS IS PART OF OUR MODERN MALAISE.

LET US PLAY. Against the grey backdrop of a jobbing sky, play is the rainbow. Play is freedom, is creation, is energy, is wicked flirtatiousness, is the helplessly laughing, the leglessly laddered, the god of Things Which Brimmeth Over, the pint down the pub, the resplendently unnecessary and the one-too-many which make the whole damn thing worthwhile.

Play is harvest, is abundance, is generosity; the harvest of pleasure after work, the excess and the gusto, the more-than-enough, the gifts, the spirit of exchange. To play a game is, in German 'ein Spiel spielen,' and the spilling-over abundance of play is mirrored in that brimming-over phrase; spill it, spiel it twice just for fun.

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Take some examples. In a huge harvest-ready field in Oxfordshire the world's biggest maze was made in a maize field. The pun was intentional; a play on words for a play on earth; a happy jeu d'esprit and a play on the spirit of harvest. Take the word 'giggling.' A one-word harvest of play's superfluity, its liquid, lovely over-indulgence, it has g's to spare, (g: the funniest consonant. You want proof? Gnu. Gneed I say more?) and it fills the gaps with 'I' -- the quickest, wittiest, trippiest and lightest-hearted of all the vowels. Sheer play.

A sense of play -- serious play -- in Indian mythology, is the deepest energy in creation. As Vandana Shiva describes it: 'All existence arises from the play of creation and destruction. The manifestation of this energy is called Nature -- Prakriti... Prakriti is also called Lalitha, the Player, because 'lila' or play, as free spontaneous activity, is her nature.' Aristotle said 'Nature requires us not only to be able to work well but also to idle well'. Jung remarked: 'Civilisations at their most complete moments always brought out in man his instinct to play and made it more inventive.' Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens -- Mankind at Play, argues that culture itself' arises in the form of play'.

Traditionally, many indigenous peoples do not have a designated word for work, and do not work for more than four hours a day: the length of time Bertrand Russell suggested in In Praise of Idleness, reducing both overemployment and underemployment. He also argues that 'there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous'. Leisure, by contrast, 'is essential to civilisation'. The play ethic is far more, well, ethical than the work ethic.

Westernised society, (urbanised, denatured and ferociously work-orientated) is scared of this pan-playism, frightened of its subversive, anarchic, liberated nature, Play is considered to be a puerility to be passed ('playtime' is not for grownups), a subject to be studied (there is a Professor of Leisure Studies at Pennsylvania State University) or a religious problem to be solved (idle hands making work for the devil). 'Leisure' is promoted, but only as commodity, from that paradoxical beast the 'leisure industry'. Free leisure, free play, is ignored, since it doesn't contribute to any GNP. (In Bhutan, in the late 70s, the king coined the phrase 'Gross National Happiness' to emphasise that Bhutan would not be bullied into measuring wealth in purely materialist terms.)

The battle between the work ethic and the play ethic is a vivid example of the 'politics of time'. It was Britain which started it; Britain which first decreed that 'British' time, GMT, be made a single, universal time and Britain which made this mono-time the first global export, one time imposed on all the diversity of Times across the world. And it was Britain which first pounded out the Time-values of Punctuality, Efficiency and Hard Labour.

Britain once had its days of cakes and ale, and a week which began with a day off: honouring 'St Monday' -- effectively the patron saint of hangovers. And Britain once had a year decked with carnival; days of unbridled play but with serious purpose, for carnival is a political animal, reversing the established status quo; in medieval and Tudor times, the directors of carnival were the 'Lords of Misrule' whose buffoonery levelled the usual lords of rule. Festival time, traditionally, bound communities together and were rites of commonality, in three senses; customs of the common people, customs sited on common land, and customs marking common time.

But these customs disappeared, up and down the country, as a result of one thing: enclosures. The rites of commoners disappeared when the rights to the commons were taken away. Before enclosures, festivals were vigorously convivial; they were 'offlicence' times, drunken, licentious and rude, from midsummer ales to apple-tree wassailing, to May Day's liaisons.

And the Victorian middle classes hated it. Just as land had been literally fenced off and enclosed, so the playful spirit of carnival-time was metaphorically enclosed, repressed and fenced in by Victorian morality; no drinking, no bawdiness, no sex. The common - very vulgar - character of festival was increasingly outlawed so the mean spirit of enclosure suppressed the broad, unenclosed, unfettered, unbounded exuberance of the vulgar at large; the spirit of serious play was crushed.

Playing For Time - importance of recreation in society

Ecologist, The, May, 2001 by Jay Griffiths

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