Every time I start to get on board with Huizinga, this issue of play as divorced from ordinary life comes up and I get lost again. I can’t get a fix on what he considers ordinary; in so much of the text here, he’s using word play, riddles, and rhymes to talk about education and proliferation of information, certainly ordinary topics if ever there were any, even if that information is draped in dreams, riddles, and imagery. In Play and Poetry, what we’re seeing is history, much as we’re seeing religion and codes in Playing and Knowing, and with Mythopoeisis, I’m almost there with him, as these ideas come together in notions of created worlds, beings, and tales to explain the world around us. But it just doesn’t jibe with my sense of play and I’m finding it so hard to wrap my mind around. Yes, it’s imaginative, but that’s our perspective, from a perspective of “knowing” about things (like diseases and their causes, for instance). Earlier people were trying desperately to find a sense of order in their universe. Is that play? Perhaps; when we play plenty of games, we look for order (sorting things, cataloguing, collecting information). And perhaps that tendency to dream answers is play. I’m talking myself out of my argument as I type it. But when I’m reading the text, it’s so difficult for me to take things their creators thought as very serious, even essential, and label them “play” — and I very much believe in the power of play!

I’m all in on play in philosophy, though, so long as we call them headache-inducing forms of play….