CHAPTER 9: PARTING SHOTS

Down, down, down, would this dissertation never come to an end? Well, it finally has, and all that is left to do, is to leave with a few “parting shots.” We have been analyzing as we have gone along—in the last section of each chapter and in the running conversations. We have seen how we can play with these concepts, and how what we have seen in the “reel” world can apply in the real world. So here in the "Parting Shots" chapter, we will take a look at the overarching themes that we have been dealing with.

Now that we have experienced the wonderland that the "Cosmic Game" reveals, in the different aspects of the "Kaleidoscope of Culture," we will wrap it all up, in a kind of post “Cosmic Game” show as it were, and debrief with the assistance of Rick O’Shea [RO] and Tele Sphoros [TS]. Rick O'Shea is a tennis ball who wears a tam-o-shanter and Tele Sphoros is the hooded dwarf that Jung carved on the center of his Bollingen stone.

In Spiritual Universe, Fred Alan Wolf (1999) mentions that ancient writers wrote in a more theatrical fashion, “often inventing fictional characters to flesh out their abstract concepts” (p. 272). Like Wolf, who ends his book in this way, I will do the same, and will borrow this technique of ancient forebears, letting let our fictional friends have the last word on cosmic play. First, Rick and Tele will talk about bricolage, and then give an overview of the big themes that played out during the dissertation. As the mood hits them, they will also mention difficulties or limitations and areas for future study. So without further ado, here they are:

Parting Shots Play by Play
Limitations and Difficulties
Future Study
Wrapping It Up

Parting Shots Play by Play

RO: Well, Tele, it's all over but the shouting. We have had quite a time of it. I for one am a bit dizzy, since we have been going in circles quite a lot, that is, when we weren’t bouncing around from link to link or taking some tangent. Both of which I might add are playful, when you think of it.

TS: You’re right, Rick, but there has been a method in all of this madness, which we will get to in a few moments. First, why don’t we discuss where we have been so that you can put all the pieces into place?

RO: Okay. I know that we have been looking at cosmic play–the way the universe plays, through this whole endeavor. Play, at this most cosmic level, it seems is the death-rebirth process–the eternal return. So, I guess that’s why we have been returning to it so often, seeing how it plays out in culture, the cosmos, and in the different cultural pieces of the "Kaleidoscope of Culture." These different chapters about the cultural works have opened up worlds where we explained concepts, got a deeper understanding in our analysis, and saw how they might apply to us. Pretty hermeneutic it seems to me, maybe that’s another reason for all of this circling around.

In these chapters, the world at the times in which the cultural pieces both premiered and portrayed were described, opening up those worlds to people who weren’t around at the time. Within the worlds of the works themselves, other worlds opened up, such as the world revealed by Roxie’s reveries in Chicago (Marshall, 2002); the imaginal worlds in Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964) – the adventure into art and the imaginal pilgrimage; not to mention the different lands contained within Disneyland and the attractions themselves, where people can actually enter a real three-dimensional imaginal world.

TS: What I think is important about that, is that these works have power to transform us. Victor Turner was right, when he said that entertainment, being liminal, had transformative possibilities. V. Turner (1982b) in defining entertainment notes:

Entertainment! That’s a key word. Literally, it means to hold between, from the OF entre between and tenir, to hold. That is it can be construed as the making of liminality, the betwixt and between state. Webster gives it both playful and serious valences, for it can mean (1) “to keep the interest of and give pleasure to; to divert; amuse,” or (2) “to allow oneself to think about; have in mind; consider.” (p. 121)

That’s what we have been doing here, being entertained by these entertainments as we entertain their ludic lessons! Although we have said these next things before, I think they bear repeating. V. Turner also notes that: “it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or ‘ludic’ recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence” (p. 28). We have also been looking liminally at these liminal things. In Dramas Fields and Metaphors, V. Turner (1974), referring to the less serious genres of the modern arts, including entertainment, writes that they have:

had greater potential for changing the ways men relate to one another and the content of their relationships. Their influence has been more insidious. Because they are outside the arenas of direct industrial production, because they constitute the “liminoid” analogues of liminal processes and phenomena . . . . To be either their agents or their audience is an optional activity– the absence of obligation or constraint from external norms imports to them a pleasurable quality which enables them all the more readily to be absorbed by individual consciousness. Pleasure thus becomes a serious mater in the context of innovative change. (p.16)

RO: How true. Movies and play can be truly transformative. Remember in the "Cosmic Game" chapter, where we mentioned the movie WarGames (Badham, 1983)? They taught the computer not to cause “Global Thermonuclear War” not through reason or by trying to destroy it, but by playing a game, a child’s game, with it. The only way to stop the messed up game that the computer was playing (which, it turns out, was really not a game) was through another game. This is similar to our situation, but with a twist, we think what we’re doing is real, but it’s only an illusion, and perhaps we can awaken to the illusory nature of reality, through play and entertainment. By the way, Matthew Broderick in WarGames was a bricoleur, he used things at hand to help get himself out of sticky situations. Entertainment might just be a “back door” into the system to let us fix it, as the games were in WarGames.

TS: Gosh, Rick, that was quite a little tangent that you took, no wonder your name is Rick O’Shea, it reflects your nature. Let’s not forget that we also saw this cosmic death-rebirth pattern in the "Cosmic Game" chapter, with the myth of Shiva’s dice game. And in a little while, we'll recap many places where it plays out.

RO: I’m sure glad that we had Grof’s cartography of the psyche for the journey, it really helped to put all of these things in perspective. You know that Briggs and Peat (1989), in their book Turbulent Mirror, said that “maps simplify reality in order to emphasize certain points, and that

maps are imaginative pictures which allow thought to bring into focus aspects of reality that might otherwise be lost in details. With a good map we can appreciate some features of a reality that we could otherwise miss, and we can explore this reality in a way that would otherwise be actually impossible without the map. (pp. 31-32)

TS: Yes, thanks to Grof's cartography, we got to play around more easily without getting lost, and we saw how some of the different themes of what I could call “little ‘p’ play” fit into the cosmic scheme of things. Remember, that was in the "Interlude." Maps are useful, because if we know where we are, we know what to expect, and then we can make better choices.

RO: First, we looked at how the gods play, because lets face it, the rest are fractals. Van Eenwky (1997) explains that

anything that reflects archetypal themes demonstrates self similarity and scale invariance as well. Jung believed that the psyche has an “inborn disposition to produce parallel though-formations, or rather identical psychic structures common to all.” . . . . Archetypes, as “the deposits of the constantly repeated experience of humanity . . . [have] a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas . . . recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions,” produce symbolic images that are remarkable [sic] consistent across time and space . . . .

Self similarity across scale is so extensive in archetypal dynamics that when it occurs we can assume that an archetype is at work. This—perhaps the primary—activity of archetypes makes recognition possible. In fact, the “re” parts of words like recognition, representation, reaction, recapitulation and recollection is based on the Latin for the kind of movement that occurs in words like “again.” If archetypes lead us to perceive what we need to know for survival, repetition makes it possible to recognize it and point it out (represent) it to others. (p. 117)

TS: So, you see, all of this going around in circles is to be expected. After all we are dealing with the eternal re-turn, which we saw is actually "the archetype of archetypal dynamics" as Van Eenwyk (1997) explains (p. 114). Like Bohm’s “Fishtank TV” in the Cosmic Game chapter, all of this circling enables us to see different views of things, to see the pattern from different perspectives. Jung wrote in a similarly circular fashion, you know.

RO: Nietzsche wrote that the “straight way lieth” so I’m, glad we decided to meander and take different tangents as we circled around this central theme of the "Cosmic Game," the forming, reforming, and transforming of elements into ever new combinations.

TS: Now that we’re on the subject of new combinations, I’d like to reiterate a couple of things about fractals. As we saw, fractal dynamics occur during liminal phases, and incongruent things are often put together, which help cultures to renew themselves. By having an “as if” subjunctive sensibility at these times, these cultures could play around and rearrange their worlds. V. Turner (1988) remarks:

Just as the subjunctive mood of a verb is used to express supposition, desire, hypothesis, or possibility, rather than stating actual facts, so do liminality and the phenomena of liminality dissolve all factual and commonsense systems into their components and “play” with them in ways never found in nature or in custom at least at the level of direct perception. (p. 25)

We have been doing this through the "Kaleidoscope of Culture," playing around with the different archetypal aspects of play through the liminal genre of entertainment. V. Turner (1988) observes that “a problem which is staged in liminal surrounds ‘entertains’ rather than threatens (p. 41). He also explains:

genres of cultural performance are not simple mirrors but magical mirrors of social reality; they exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, re-color, even deliberately falsify, chronicled events . . . . Myerhoff (1980) has written “they nevertheless together constitute the plural “self knowledge” of a group . . . . Cultural performances are reflexive in the sense of showing ourselves to ourselves. They are also capable of being reflexive, arousing consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves. As heroes in our own dramas, we are made self-aware, conscious of our consciousness. At once actor and audience, we may then come into the fullness of our human capability—and perhaps human desire—to watch ourselves and enjoy knowing that we know. (p. 42)

So, entertainment serves to help us create consciousness, which is the object of the Cosmic Game.

RO: What you just said reminds me of something Jung (1931/1969) said:

If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. (p. 379, para. 737)

So, although we think of entertainment as something silly and trivial, we might want to reconsider this view in light of what Turner, Myerhoff, and Jung have had to say, and as we have tried to demonstrate here. But now, getting back to fractals, I also remember with fractals, that smaller levels are reflections of the larger level, and that different levels can reveal different parts of the pattern, and so there is repetition with a difference. Thus, it’s a good thing that we started off at the cosmic level and saw this eternal return pattern at play in the "Cosmic Game" chapter, so that in the "Kaleidoscope of Culture" we could see the different aspects in the other levels, such as in culture, and in the cultural creations, as well as in the heavens.

Continued on page 2