Play Games (Part 2)
Back On The Boards
Play Games (Part 2)
Back On The Boards
In theater jargon “back on the boards” means back on stage. There was a time when stages were made of boards. The kind we learned to count. Remember?
Thanks for your well wishes, I’m nearly fully recovered from the latest viral attack. Norovirus (not Novo, spelling aside, I couldn’t type straight) was no fun. It wasn’t, thankfully, nearly the drama of Covid Christmas. Upshot: I’m cool.
We left off with:
The entire first chapter of Finite And Infinite Games reads:
“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
Chapter 7 in its entirety.
“Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. Infinite players regard wins and loses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.”
All of Chapter 101 reads:
“THERE IS BUT ONE INFINITE GAME.”
If you’ve let that much rain gently down on you, and fully felt your Gene Kelly moments, that will have done the lions share of the work.
There is, as promised, a valuable book (quite available) to read and reread. No need to unduly belabor it here. For now, a few pieces will go a long way.
Chapter 14 starts with:
“Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, the enter into all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully.”
Not to beat a dead horse (looks dead to me, is there a veterinarian in the house?) ACTING HUMAN calls for PLAY. When we live life alive we live playfully.
To enjoy clear perspective on the primary nature of the game we’re engaged in allows us authenticity. The shorthand definition of ‘authentic’ is that which remains when we cut the bullshit.
Take our identities, please.
Identity is a game we play. Some of us play it as a finite game. Beginning and end. Boundaries. Birth to death. Rules like “she who dies with the most stuff wins.” Accumulation. Awards Points scored. Point is, there are winners and losers. It has a beginning and end. There are agreed upon rules.
Other contestants may rank at the conclusion of the game. There’s one winner.
BIG PROBLEM FOR ME: There’s an Olympic Silver Medal story that belongs right here. It’s incredible. Truly. Happened in a Newhouse class. Ask in comments if you want to hear it. Moving along..
Final Score?
Who gets an obituary in the New York Times? Not everybody. Only those who ‘win’ or ‘rank high,’ according to the editors of the obituary section. When you die, read the New York Times to see how you’ve ranked. If you get copious word count and a photograph you’ve WON!
Fewer words, no photo? Oh well, at least you’ve made it in. No mean feat.
It’s all online now. In days of yore, if eager to see a review, one had to rush to a Time Square adjacent newsstand at around midnight to grab a sure to stain your hands with ink copy from a first drop of the morning edition. Dem wuz da daze. Quaint, right?
Getting the life and death info, for a you or your show, was tough back then. Now it’s easy shmeazsy. A few key strokes - voila!
Carse writes that we can only play a finite game if we are free to play it or not. No force allowed.
Back To Language
How much force amounts to force? Methinks coercion counts. Can we see ample coercion as force? If so, how much coercion amounts to ample?
“A different language is a different vision of life.” ~Federico Fellini
Depending on perspective - ‘vision of life’ - we may feel forced (amply coerced?) to find, for example, a suitable kind of employment in order to conform to expectations attending a particular set of life circumstances. To live life in a story as it appears in a given moment.
Note: Appearances rarely/never tell the whole story.
Stories often deceive while they, nevertheless, compel action. Stories, alive and ever changing, wield power.
Stories generate trajectory and momentum, they underlie ALL play.
ACTING HUMAN practice shows us, with patience and perseverance, how self and story emerge simultaneously and in close relationship.
ACTING HUMAN shows us how we can create story and create self emergent with visions of the whole in our cosmic imagination.
Take My Life, Please
A case study in suitable employment and appearances.
I’ve long ago lost count of the number of young people who have coaxed me to tell them how to get into show-business. Slightly older people, too. The latter crowd includes a handful of doctors, and a bigger handful of lawyers. I kid you not.
Specifically, they all want to know the details of how I did it, thinking that somewhere in my story they would find the magic key. The key that unlocks the golden door to all they have ever wanted. Of course, they had a ssurface view of their wants and assumed I was keeping the key a secret.
They were, the younger ones, desperate to know how they could get to the part where their name would appear in the credits of a primetime television show. ‘Producer’ loomed large in their shiny eyes.
Not one wanted to hear that first they would have to spend their childhoods and early adulthood learning to play the trumpet.
First: it sounded like nonsense.
Second: they had no interest in playing the trumpet.
Third: it was a quagmire. Even if they were game to tangle with the brass beast, early childhood years were well under the bridge for them.
Very soon I grew tired of scrambling their minds for my perverse amusement and cut to the chase.
Everyone does it in a unique and unpredictable way.
As has been repeated here many times, life and uncertainty are inextricably entwined. Embrace uncertainty. Fighting it, needing to know what happens next, will kill aliveness in life.
The arrow that pierced the bullseye of big time show- business, studio and network deals, office suites replete with private bathrooms and kitchens, swimming pools, big-ish houses, wretched excess of wide variety, although not nearly as wretched or wide as many in my social and business circle, was a lack of desire to get into showoff show-business in the first place.
There had been flashes, like my Frankie Avalon musings. Such flashing intrusions, by this time, were extremely rare.
My strategy? Pent-up demand. A fluke. Not a well plotted and preconceived strategy.
For the record: most often, desire works when followed hard with assiduous, persistent action, and little, if any, aversion to risk. I had seen several patterns work for many ambitious kids. I could and did share tidbits, down to specific instructions on how to use the phone. Who to call, how often, what to say, and how to say it.
Nowadays, the ‘biz’ is in fierce transition. I’m deep in ‘don’t know’ territory. It’s a brand new ballgame day to day. Hard to know, moment to moment, what, if anything amounts to show-business. Maybe everything?
There is TikTok.
In an earlier dispatch I outlined the steps that led me from trumpet playing, to theater, and eventually to Hollywood. That’s where you heard about Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. I never got near Annette, but I did do a bunch of business with her brother Joe while he was an actor’s agent at the then William Morris Office. (Another story that fits exquisitely here. One with geo-political consequences. Hmmm?)
Close but no cigar. (Cigars lead me to another story that would work gangbusters here. Involves Brando and Coppola. Hmmmm?)
My story nevertheless pertains to life vision, force, and conformity to standards.
There came a time when I thought making ‘real’ money was a good idea. This thought popped to mind as a ‘family’ to support was on the horizon. Visions of a well fed baby and a happy wife/mother gave rise to responsible husband/father identity.
I’d dabbled in Hollywood for a few years, to support my theater habit, and the Hollywood it held little appeal. I did, however, along the way make well placed friends that had long encouraged me to play ‘seriously.’ They urged me to come pick up my share of the gelt (there’s another story that belongs here, hmmmm?). Apparently it was littering the street awaiting my arrival.
All I needed to do was carry my ass to LA bend over and pick it up.
‘Bend over’ arose in this instant from a subconscious writing impulse. Zero preconceived thought. I sense a pattern that I promise to contemplate. It may change the way I do these dispatches. Stay tuned.
Good morning, Los Angeles. Welcome to Tinseltown!
In relatively short order, one giant step at a time, I was on my way from ’nobody,’ a clear identity in La La Land, to ‘somebody’ moving back and forth from A to B lists. Excelent to very good lists for moving to and fro. Hollywood unabashedly traffics in identities and status. Who takes your call? Where you park? Your table. Shared with whom? In which restaurant? The signals can give you vertigo or a rash.
Momentum developed (physics), the force of my unfolding ‘success’ story drove me. I was along for the ride. I did have meetings to take, writing to do, production tasks and delivery promises to keep. AND, relationships to ‘manage.’ It’s a job.
All the driving I had to do was in a BIG Mercedes (another story - hmmmm?) from studio lot to studio lot, and from Network offices to other Network offices. Oops, almost left out terrific restaurants to other terrific restaurants. Oh, how the fat get fatter.
While I understood that there were mostly finite games played in the course of Hollywood life, and that most of the players involved were all about the win, I remained an infinite player. I was, at the end of every Hollywood day, a kid trumpet player from the Bronx who was steeped in melodies and harmonies that lingered. Sounds that sounded eternally.
I practiced the trumpet. If you vibrate everyday for years and years, pretty soon, no matter what ‘visions’ take center stage in your mind and life, inside and out, you vibrate.
While an understanding of distinctions is most useful; a practiced facility to move up and back between distinctions with buoyant ease in a world of artificial divisions is essential - finite/infinite/finite/infinite. This practiced facility when combined with a 'sense' of the dynamic resonance that sets up in the tensions between terms and the states induced present as resonant expressions of source. As we sense these vital tensions, we feel fertile and profound possibilities, calls to action - ‘stuff’ for use in daily life lived alive, even if it’s not the kind of ‘stuff’ that makes it into your New York Times obituary.
“The Universe is the game of the self which plays hide and seek forever and ever.” ~Alan Watts
Until Part 3,
Lights Up!