PRELUDE: THE COSMIC SETUP

The Big Picture

My dissertation will focus on lila, cosmic play, play at its most archetypal level—how the universe plays—which seems to be bricolage, forming and reforming and transforming in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. This is the essence of cosmic play, to cut to the chase, or as Goethe so poetically put it: “formation, transformation, / Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation.” Jung quoted this passage from Faust II, Act I in a letter to Freud regarding his exploration of unconscious fantasy, noting “This is the matrix of the mind, as the little great-grandfather correctly saw. I hope something good comes out of it” (Freud & Jung, 1974, p. 431).

I, too, hope that something good comes out of it. Now that I have given you a very big picture look at the subject matter, I need to explain several other things before we explore the dissertation together. First how did we get here, second what’s the problem with (defining) play, third what is the mission or purpose of this dissertation, fourth why is it written or presented this way and last, how is the website organized.

How Did We Actually Get Here?
Mission Impossible?
To Boldly Go… But What’s in It for Me?
“To Dream the Impossible Dream”
A Look at the Layout

How did We Actually Get Here?

It all began oddly enough with Victor Turner and the White Rabbit, well actually Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” (Slick, 2003, CD) I had first read a paragraph about play from Turner’s (1988) 1983 article “Body Brain and Culture” from his 1988 book, The Anthropology of Performance, in Marion Woodman’s (1985) book, The Pregnant Virgin for a class in Depth Psychology and Cultural issues. Synchronistically, I wrote a paper for that class using the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” as part of the theme. The paper was called ironically enough “Out of My Mind.” It was this very same article and book, along with Grof’s (2000a) Psychology of the Future that I took with me to India in 2001 for my first fieldwork project, and the rest is history.

In a nutshell, Turner (1988) says that play is dangerous. It may subvert left/right hemispheric switching. Like a trickster, play breaks taboos and is liminal, existing betwixt and between. Play mimics, mocks, and teases. It is a meta-language and a form of meta-communication. Play is a transcendent potpourri of incongruous elements where both hemispheres intermingle. Play is educative, and speaks to us “as-if,” in the subjunctive mood. Play is an example of the transcendent function, the union of opposites; which can change our perceptions and perhaps even the world. Play is a paradox.

Like play, my dissertation will be educative, playful, and break rules. It will be examining liminal creations of the entertainment industry, which is itself liminal, using the liminal land of the Internet as its location. I will say more about this as we go along, but back to the dangerous part. One of the dangers is that play is elusive (which comes from the ludere the Latin word for play). It is also allusive [see popup].

Play provides more questions than answers. In a section entitled “What is play, What is playing,” after asking a whole paragraph of questions about play, Scheckner (2002) notes: "These questions do not exhaust what can be asked. There are more questions than can be answered—and this is a significant aspect of the whole “problem” of play and playing. The etymology of the English word “play” extends outward into the realms of law and religion and includes allusions to risk and danger” (p. 81).

Play has been the focus of much serious study, and yet it is very difficult to define, although many have tried. [link to pop-up play definitions]. Many have also tried to categorize play, and that, too, has proved problematic. So it seems that we are left with an impossible task.

Mission Impossible?

When I think of the task of defining play, the song “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” from The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965) comes to mind:

How do you solve a problem like Maria? / How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? / How do you find a word that means Maria? / A flibbertigibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!

Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her / Many a thing she ought to understand / But how do you make her stay / And listen to all you say / How do you keep a wave upon the sand?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? / How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

When I'm with her I'm confused / Out of focus and bemused / And I never know exactly where I am / Unpredictable as weather / She's as flighty as a feather,

She's a darling! She's a demon! She's a lamb!

She'd outpester any pest / Drive a hornet from its nest / She could throw a whirling dervish out of whirl / She is gentle! She is wild! / She's a riddle! She's a child! / She's a headache! She's an angel! / She's a girl! (Wise, 1965)

One thing that most play researchers agree on is that play is hard to define. Play is elusive, hard to pin down, defies definition, and ultimately cannot be confined to categories. To capture play's indefinable nature, I wrote my own little song, with apologies to Nat King Cole (1994) and his synchronistic 1964 song "Unforgettable":

Undefinable, that's what you are
Undefinable though near or far
Like a siren song that sings to me
How the thought of you does things to me
Never before has something been more

Undefinable in every way
And forever more, that's how you'll stay
That's why, dear play, it's so believable
That something so undefinable
Could be so unconfinable, too

Allusive in every way
And forever more, that's how you'll stay
That's why, dear play, though this is profusive,
you could remain so very elusive
not to mention inconclusive, too.

Although play eludes definition, we seem to know play when we see it. Stephen Miller (1973), in an article entitled “Means, Ends, and Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play,” discusses this elusiveness. According to S. Miller, in describing people watching animals play, three things stood out:

First, individuals feel very definite about whether and when an animal is playing. Second, there is remarkable unanimity in the crowd about recognizing play . . . third, when the same people are pressed to define what they mean by “play;” they often first say “it didn’t look like it was for real” or “they looked like they were enjoying themselves, like children,” but then retract and say it was very complicated but they couldn’t pin it down or give any criteria. (p. 88)

Given this inability to define play, what are we to do? How do we approach this slippery subject, that is intuitively grasped but not easily articulated? I propose to do what S. Miller did and look for patterns. First though, we need to know about galumphing, a term that S. Miller uses to describe one of the motifs of play. He first uses the term in articulating the “often exaggerated or ‘uneconomic’” baboon play, which “involve[s] much flailing, and bobbing, exaggeration, and indirect ineffective action” (p. 89). Galumphing seems to be present in much human play as well, where a “deliberate complication” (Piaget) of activity occurs, with a lack of streamlined or task oriented efficiency. Galumphing is S. Miller’s shorthand for “patterned, voluntary, elaboration or complication of process, where the pattern is not under the dominant control of goals” (p. 92). S. Miller says that play is a galumphant activity, where the means are not directly tied to the ends; in play the means rule, they are given greater sway, than in non-play activity. Yet, S. Miller notes “play is not a means without the end; it is a crooked line to the end; it circumnavigates obstacles put there by the player, or voluntarily acceded to by him (p. 93). S. Miller further explains:

Play is a context, or what Bateson (1956) calls a “frame.” It is a mode of organization of behavior—one way of fitting pieces of activity together . . . . Play can be distinguished by the way ends and means are handled, and by who handles them. Play involves a relative autonomy of means. Ends are not obliterated, but they don’t, as in some other modes of organization, determine the means. Furthermore this state of affairs implies a degree of autonomy of the actor who manipulates the process at his disposal, which makes for freedom to assume roles otherwise unreal. Finally, means are elaborated by a psychological process that we have thus far referred to as “galumphing”—in general, the voluntary placing of obstacles in ones path. (p. 92)

Because my dissertation is about play it is fitting that the dissertation itself would share some of these characteristics. As we will see along the way, it is definitely galumphant, it is uneconomical and indirect; a crooked line to the end, or as Peter Falk, playing Vince in the Inlaws (Hiller, 1979) would say “Serpentine, Sheldon, Serpentine.” The dissertation involves “deliberate complication” in its attempt to show the process and patterns of cosmic play, and it keeps circling around the central death-rebirth theme.

Since I have decided to look at cosmic play, lila— how the universe plays, which is play at its most archetypal level, I am not going to play the game of other play researchers. Like Stephen Miller, I will be focusing on different patterns of this cosmic play. By looking at Big “P” play, along the way we can possibly learn things about little “p” play that others have so scrupulously studied. In exploring the Cosmic Game, we will be looking at cosmic play’s patterns, the leitmotifs of play if you will.

A leitmotif is “a clearly defined theme or musical idea, representing or symbolizing a person, object, idea, etc. which returns in its original or an altered form at appropriate points in a dramatic (mainly operatic) work” (Boynick, 1996, online) http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/g_leitmotif.html. Although Richard Wagner was the most well-known composer to use leitmotifs, Hollywood uses them all the time as well; two of the most famous leitmotifs are Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra theme for the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, (Kubrick, 1968) and “The Force” theme in the Star Wars (Lucas, 1977 onwards) movies. These themes become associated with different characters, events, etcetera. and can be used to signal what is to come or to add richness. Leitmotifs allow the composer to both tell a story without words, and also to add extra dimensions to the story. Many times these leitmotifs are unconscious. Leitmotifs are very versatile, they can reveal or reinforce the character’s identity, as well as salient plot themes, and can reinforce or establish historical time periods. Leitmotifs can also identify a character without them having to be present. For example, Downie and Lefford (2005, online) notes that in Wagner, Fafner the dragon, is conveyed almost entirely through music. Thus "leitmotifs can infuse unseen entities with actuality” (Downie & Lefford, 2005).

So now that we know what we are going to be looking at—lila or cosmic play—we need to be clear on what the mission of this dissertation is: who it is meant for and why it is being written. As you can tell already, this is not your usual dissertation, so I need to mention a few things about the way the dissertation is written, before we go on to actually discuss the “cosmic setup”—the organization of the dissertation as web site itself.

To Boldly Go… But What’s in it for Me?

You may be asking yourself at this point, why should I bother reading this? What’s in it for me? Why does the Cosmic Game matter, and who cares about its patterns? The Cosmic Game matters, because it is the way the universe plays, and because we are a part of the universe, we also play in this way. By learning about how the universe plays, we can be more effective in our own lives. The crazy thing is, that no one ever told us that we were playing a game, let alone what the game was or how to play it. We have no choice in the matter however, we are indeed homo ludens (man the player) as Huizinga (1944/1955) argued after all, and this deep play that Geertz (1976) described can be very serious and dangerous, but play we must.

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