IT'S THE HAVING, NOT THE KEEPING

Cour de Rohan (1922)
Photo by Eugène Atget

Heraclitus famously asserted that we can never step in the same river twice, for the river is constantly changing and so are we.  In short, everything is transitory, and no experience, however beautiful or transformational, can ever be truly replicated.  All that remains is the memory, but that alone, as the poet Jack Gilbert reminds us, may be more than enough.

                                        THE LOST HOTELS OF PARIS
                                                       By Jack Gilbert

                                   The Lord gives everything and charges
                                   by taking it back.  What a bargain.
                                   Like being young for a while.  We are
                                   allowed to visit hearts of women,
                                   to go into their bodies so we feel
                                   no longer alone.  We are permitted
                                   romantic love with its bounty and half-life
                                   of two years.  It is right to mourn
                                   for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
                                   when we used to be.  My mansard looking
                                   down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
                                   and me listening to the bell at night.
                                   Venice is no more.  The best Greek islands
                                   have drowned in acceleration.  But it's the having,
                                   not the keeping that is the treasure.
                                   Ginsburg came to my house one afternoon
                                   and said he was giving up poetry
                                   because it told lies, that language distorts.
                                   I agreed, but asked what we have
                                   that gets it right even that much.
                                   We look up at the stars and they are
                                   not there.  We see the memory
                                   of when they were, once upon a time.
                                   And that too is more than enough.

PLAY AS A PATHWAY

"Play is the poetry of the human being."
Jean Paul Sartre

Play has fascinating dynamics; start the process and you never know where it will lead.  In my last posting, for example, I played with the format, design, and color of my blog to illustrate the possibilities of changing the ways in which we both see things and create  things. That posting prompted my friend, Bonnie, over at The Original Art Studio, to create several word games, using an interesting tool named Wordle.  Each word game presents  colorfully scrambled words that can be unscrambled by the reader to discover a wonderful quote of great wisdom.

These little word puzzles have already introduced us to the wisdom of Jung, Nietzsche, Twain, and Buddha.  On top of this, we have been introduced to the creative possibilities of Wordle, which, incidentally, was used to create the header to this posting.

The point that I am making is simply this:  Play can be so much more that just a venue for fun.  It can be a pathway to wisdom, which is critical to our growth as individuals; it can be a pathway to improvisation, which has always been a key to human survival and evolution; it can be a pathway to creativity, which is the wellspring from which all art and innovation emerges; and it can be a pathway to the spiritual realm, where we can discover our place in the great mystery of things.

Listen to what others have said and you will see that play is not only fun and useful in our lives -- it is necessary!

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.  The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."

Carl Jung 

"Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways not one could foresee.  Play has always been the mainstream of culture."

Italo Calvino


"Play is the exultation of the possible."

Martin Buber

"There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile."

Edward Hoagland 

"It's a happy talent to know how to play."

Emerson 

"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play."

Abraham Maslow

"What work I have done I have done because it has been play."

Mark Twain 

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."

Plato 

"The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion.  He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."

Buddha

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." 

Heraclitus

"Play is the highest form of research."

"We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential.  Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys."

Albert Einstein

"The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."

C. K. Chesterton

"I played with an idea, and grew willful;
 tossed it into the air; transformed it;
 let it escape and recaptured it;
 made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox."

Oscar Wilde

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing."

George Bernard Shaw

"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf."

Rabindranath Tagore

This is a photograph that I took in Obidos, Portugal.
It reminds me of the constant need to play with the colors, shapes, and forms of life.
It reminds me of the need for variety --
diagonals to contrast with verticals and horizontals,
soft forms to contrast with the hard forms,
low intensity to contrast with high intensity,
warm colors to contrast with cool colors --
in life as in art.