I’ve been thinking a lot about Huizinga’s discussion of play and language, which he seems to especially consider in his discussion of poetry: “Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it…poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter” (119).
So, if, as he argues, “[a]ll poetry is born of play” (129), I wonder if we can extend this line of thinking to prose and other forms of articulation as well, since it seems to me that the Huizinga’s privileging of poetry here could potentially limit our understanding of how playful other forms of writing and communication might be. How, too, might the intersection of play and language affect the way we teach such things, and how might our understanding of this be complicated by the fact that Huizinga also wonders how this form of play fares in (his) contemporary society: “How far is the play-quality of poetry preserved when civilization grows more complicated?” (129).
I’ve also been thinking about the fact that Huizinga extends this interrogation of the current state of play in the final chapter, since he wonders “how much of the play spirit is still alive in our own day and generation and the world at large” (173). Or, to put this another way, Huizinga posits the following questions: “To what extent does the civilization we live in still develop in play-forms? How far does the play-spirit dominate the lives of those who share that civilization? The 19th century, we observed, had lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages. Has this leeway been made up or has it increased?” (195).
I know we talked about this a bit last week, but I’m still wondering how play has continued to evolve, especially when we think about how our technologies expand the ways we might engage with play. And, in thinking about the ways we played in class last week when we played Johann Sebastian Joust, I also wonder how technology affects the way we think about the manner in which the body engages in play.