Sacred Play
Jesus didn’t laugh.
“The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest” - WIlliam James
“wisdom is often closely allied to humour… and it has its place: just not in the solemnities of ritual… James’s point is that religion prefers wisdom to cleverness… Our contemporary culture prefers cleverness to wisdom.” - McGilchrist, p 1221
I, in our high school football team’s yearly ritual (solemn) of throwing a piece of mesh jersey into a bon fire while uttering a goal we should solemnly strive for, said “have fun”. I like to think I took the solemn ritual as an opportunity to identify that we would work, train, practice together, ultimately to have fun. Fun could be seen as the ultimate end (flow) state of all our disciplined practice and work. It also did seem to contain a kernel of flippancy: “you guys are way too serious; this is a game where we throw a ball and run into one another.” But I did take it seriously, as seriously as anything, which is to say that a bit of not taking yourself too seriously is maybe aligned with the “religion” (binding together) of realizing you yourself are part of a bigger whole. There is something too serious and something too flippant.
I think Bogost and Foster-Wallace identify the too flippant as irony. But I had fun and I had it earnestly. Realizing we are all practicing to play a fun game and play it well doesn;t diminish its solemnity (how we are bound by it) nor its playful funness.
I’m not sure the boundary between sacred and profane matters so much. There is evil, and we can mix them up and shit on the altar so to speak. But maybe it goes back to disposition as opposed to
I wasn’t being entirely cynical when I suggested we treat having fun as a solemn sacred goal to achieve.
I know fans of pro sports teams also straddle the line between fun and solemn ritual.
“Trust depends on shared beliefs” (religion per se) I think if we all believed that fun is what we were doing and we would have the most fun if we came to practice early, diligently practiced to get better at the game, worked hard, then relaxed enough on game day to perform well, then we would be bound together (religiously) but also in fun.
“Contrary to what our intuition and our habits tell us, fun isn’t accessed through facility - by choosing to do exactly what we want or by taking the easy path instead of the difficult one. In fact, the deliberateness and respect that produce fun result from deep dives into subjects rather than superficial explorations of them.” - Bogost, Play Anything p 85
I guess parkour is about taking real things in the environment seriously, sometimes seriously as ramps when they were designed as seats, puzzles from benches, etc.
“The fool’s fun… requires devotion and enthusiasm.”
Bogost explains that we have fun when we take things seriously. Fun is also HOW we take things seriously…? Fun is about treating things as they are (football is a game we made up with rules and ways to get good at it and some room for creativity).
“Fun can only arise when we treat the things we do or make as exactly what they are "
imagination / fantasy
play / ironoia
human in the loop. betweenness of human musical notes makes the music