Hello Friends; I'm signing back in for the third installment of my five part spontaneous essay on American Football as an American War Game. I realize I'm on my last day of blogging, but I'm hopeful that Stacey will keep my account open so I can make the last could of posts.
REVELATION OF A CAT TOY: To begin to understand how the game of American football is a war game, and a uniquely American one at that, I think we must back up the wagon. Back it up out of the enormous frontal portions of the human brain entirely. Back it into those portions of the brain we share more intimately with our other mammalian friends....
Friends, do you have a cat? A dog? A rat? A ferret? If you do, if you have an animal living under your roof, or under the roof of a small, house-like structure in your back yard, chances are that at some point you've looked into the mirror of that animal's activities and seen something familiar. I don't mean just eating and defecating, those lowest of common denominators. I mean the loftier parts of our being: how we love, how we obey, how we rebel, even how we dream. I'll give you an example: recently, my fiance's cat Puck was sleeping on a kitchen chair. The windows were open; it was about 11 am. Outside, a neighborhood dog ttook up barking. Yip! Ip! Ip! Now Puck often hears this dog, and he pays it no mind. He's no genius; he's not going to invent clothing, or typography, or the wheel, or electricity, but he's smart enough to understand that the dog is outside, and that he is inside. On this occasion, though, the dog started barking, and Puck, without waking up, started howling that deep spooky frightening howl that cat's howl before a fight. After about five seconds, he woke himself up, leapt off the chair, and in a raging frightened puffed-up claws-out confusion bristled around for the next minute or so, still howling, looking for a dog that needed a slap. I just gaped; in the way a ringing alarm clock enters a human dream, and creates a dream where you are pressing every button on your dream alarm clock but still not turning it off, that dog had entered the dreams of a sleeping cat. The barking had entered Puck's giant ears, and the image of a dog had appeared in his little mind....Amazing.
At play, which is what I'm interested in this five part spontaneous essay, you can likewise observe that an animal's imagination functions a lot like ours do. I once co-owned an unusually playful grey tabby named Charlie; that cat was a great teacher; Charlie would slap around individually-wrapped life-savers, roll AA batteries across the floor, and run around with all manner of tiny stuffed things in his mouth. He'd drop them in the corners of the apartment, where they couldn't get away, and then slap them about in a frenzied glee. What you learn, watching a cat slap around a leaf is the following. It does not slap the leaf around because it is a leaf. It isn't thinking, "Leaf, I'm going to get you!" When a cat interacts with a leaf AS a leaf, it's typically by chewing your plants and then yakking indigestible fronds on your floor. At play, it's entirely different. The cat slaps the leaf because the leaf, once in motion, resembles something alive and antic. When the cat's imagination is added to the leaf, the leaf becomes more than itself. It becomes what it resembles in motion - a huge edible bug, a mouse with a tail. In reality, it has become something capable of preparing a cat to get an big edible bug or a mouse: a toy.
Toys are objects that require imagination. I think that counts as a true statement. When the imagination is added to an object, it becomes a toy. It become something else in the mind, something more than itself, something more real or more serious than itself...A microwave is a microwave to an adult. It's a serious enough object. It has its purpose and its place. You put your frozen dinner in there, and in just five minutes it rotates that lasagna to a creepy perfection. To a pair of children, though, playing on the floor of a kitchen, that microwave could be a cave, high on a cliff, in which an 8-inch action figure must make the decision to jump, ala Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, to reach safety (a mixing bowl full of water). The microwave becomes a toy. Rather, the "play world," which has flowed outwards from the designed toy - the action figure, the object that invites the child's imagination - has grown to include and transform the microwave into something more "serious" than a microwave. A cave high on a cliff that must be jumped out of is more serious than a microwave waiting to be turned on.
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Often, when engaged by a player, the toy becomes in the mind what it physically resembles. A toy mouse, for instance, will become a real mouse in the mind of a playing cat. A stuffed duck will become a "real duck" in the mind of a hound dog. If you watch three-year olds play at cooking in brightly colored plastic kitchens, you see something similar. They use "play" spatulas to play at putting plastic meat patties on plastic buns, and they play at eating them; they pick up a play phone, and they cock their shoulders and clamp the phone to their ears as they work some plastic strips of bacon in a plastic skillet. At play, the stakes are necessarily lower, as was pointed out earlier. The flames are not real. There is no real crisis on the telephone. But the imagination has entered a hollow plastic fake telephone. The imagination has cooked one side of the bacon so that it now must be flipped. The imagination elevates in seriousness.
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Regarding that grey tabbie Charlie, of course my former girlfriend and I bought him every variety of toy in the pet-shop, just to see him flip and jump and scramble. On the packaging of these toys, the copy printed on the cardboard hang-tag always congratulated you for being a good pet owner by saying something to the effect of: "This here tiny stuffed rat-fur covered mouse encourages stalking and pouncing, activities necessary for a cat to survive in the wild." They'd say: "This sequined, feathered bird/fish on a string will unleash the WILD cat in your house cat." No matter the prose, (and I'm obviously being silly), always there were the same several messages. There was the one that I mentioned at the end of my first post: all animals play at activities that are necessary for their survival. There was also an insinuation that a certain happiness was impossible without regularly engaging in play. All animals play at activities that are necessary for their survival, however, is the message I'd like to probe a little with. We can take that message in hand like a walking stick, and use it to help us get to a real understanding of American Football.
We humans, being animals, play at activities that are necessary for our survival. We understand that. We also understand that the activities necessary for human survival have changed over the millenia and change still. In fact, our survival actitivies are an aspect of humanity that is always and perhaps will always be in flux. Ten thousand years ago in the Ohio River Valley, the mound-building natives played at a game called by anthropoligists chun-kee. In the game of chun-kee, attendants rolled earthenware discs, and competitors threw spears at these discs. With those same spears, they fished the tributary rivers and defended themselves in time of war. The elements of the game symbolized the realer activities necessary for survival: proficiency in one would lead to proficiency in the other in the most direct of ways.
Fast forward 10,000 years, and the ability to fish, hunt, and defend one's self with a stone-tipped spear is no longer a necessary survival activity in the region. And yet, fellow human, how do you think it would feel to throw a spear and hit a rolling clay disc thirty feet away? Can you imagine it? Anyone who's thrown a dart into bullseye, or shot a bb gun into a plastic milk-jug full of water, or even successfully tossed a wad of paper into a waste-basket can safely imagine it would be satisfying. If the rolling disc shattered on impact like a clay pigeon or like the target plates that ice hockey players shoot at in All-Star competitions, that'd be even better. If Andy Dalton, Matt Ryan, Carson Palmer, and the Manning Brothers were at a backyard BBQ in 2014, and there were an opportunity to throw spears at moving clay discs competitively, would they sieze that opportunity? Do you think they'd maybe throw a wager on it? Do you think they'd find it fun? Of course they would. The fact that current sporting fellows would probably enjoy chun-kee just as much as a stone-age Ohio Valley hunter brings up something interesting about the activities of play, something that makes them unique in the field of human actitivies.
PLAY MULTIPLIES: Living in a society that consists of so many, varied, and specific activities, living in a society that requires so many mental and physical capacities, our play as humans is by now almost boundless: we play at cooking, play at house, play at forms of playing (as in a football video game), play at putting together wholes out of many smaller pieces, (model airplanes that prepare us for IKEA adulthoods), play at following instructions, play at communicating visually, play at having memory (remember Simon?), play at having patience, play at hiding, play at seeking, play at being articulate, play at arguing in a serious way (high school debaters make great litigaters), play at touching an iPhone, etc. As the tasks needed for human survival have changed over the centuries, new kinds of play have emerged out of the new activities. Take video games, for instance. In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, if we throw the content of the games out of the equation, what do video games play at? Umm....well, they play at activities we need to be citizens of this new "post-print" epistemological world. Like it or not, we live in a world of interactive screens. It has become necessary in 21st century America that we be able to analyze swiftly the visual contents of these screens. We must be able to identify which glowing speck we control by a corresponding movement of our fingers on a touch-pad or mouse; we must be able to move our arrow or avatar around accurately, clicking, double-clicking, click-and-holding. We also must be able to interact with screens by touching them. I sit on the subway, with a moleskine or a book, doing my old left-to-right, top-to-bottom, turn-the-page routine, and I peer over at a teenager playing an EA-Sports FIFA Soccer game on his giant Samsung tween-pad phone. Watching his thumbs working all over it, I think to myself, that teenager is probably better at text-messaging than I am. He is better at swiping, zooming, taking pictures, and sharing cat-videos because he plays at touching his phone accurately, and he is getting better at it with each successive game.
But what's interesting at our play activities is as follows: when new activities requiring new skill-sets enter our civilization, they tend to kick older skill-sets out of the human experience. Goodbye, we have said, to the steam-engine repairman, the telegraph operator, the master of the astrolabe. Where our games and sports are concerned, however, the new play activities don't displace the old play actitivites. The old play activities don't go out of fashion as play activities, I mean. With certain pre-steam-power, pre-electric staples, like sailing and horseback riding, the preservation occurs in the upper classes, because the equipment is expensive and a form of status. (Two things that have never ever been cheap in the whole course of human history are horses and sailboats....) But there are many, many, many examples of the older survival activities preserved as pure sport. Take long-distance running. Over the course of human history, our ingenious tribe has developed many different media to move bodies long distances that are faster and more efficient than our own, original (unmediated) two feet. We have broken the wills of horses and climbed atop them; we've invented bicycles that via a glorious mechanical advantage, product of so many machines, translate the same calories into many many more miles at a much higher speed. We have trains; we have cars with internal combustion gasoline engines; we have planes. Yet a certain humans still, for sport, run 26.2 miles with their two feet. Why is that? Why do we still throw javelins when we no longer hunt with spears? Why do we pole-vault? Are we going to be laying siege like it's the 4th century by vaulting over enemies' walls at any point soon?
My favorite book of Vergil's Aeneid, Book V, offers a great demonstration of the way sports lives on. Oh, fans of epic poetry, all 2,000 of you, don't sleep on Book V of the Aeneid! Sandwiched between two much more famous episodes, Book IV's Dido debacle and Book VI's adventures in the underworld, Book V showcases Vergil at his best as a poet. And what really brings it out of him are sports. To briefly synopsize what leads up to the Aenied's games: Aeneas sails woodenly away from Carthage and a suicidally heartbroken Dido. Dido, after trying to "eternally sunshine" Aeneas out of her mind by burning everything associated with him, climbs onto the pyre herself; Aeneas can't get to Italy due to the weather, which is to say, the gods; he and his men wash up on the island of Sicily; he meets an old Trojan crony, and realizes it's the anniversary of his father's death. To honor that anniversary, he proposes eight days of sacrificial offerings, followed by a day of all everyone's favorite Trojan games.
Aeneas' men compete in a boat race, a running race, a boxing match, and an archery competition in that order. What is amazing is all of these competitive activities are still currently actitivites that humans compete in. We still race rowboats. It's called "crew," and if you pull hard and in rhythm with your fellows, it can help you get into an Ivy League school. While I've never seen crew except for a few times on television, (there was a Family Ties episode in England that involved rowing), but the race in the Aeneid unfolds according to the same dramatic imperatives of one boat nosing ahead, then then other. In the foot-race Vergil writes, it's a classic cross-country sob-story of a dangerous course intervening to trip up a sure winner. While slipping on grass slick with the blood of a sacrificed bull, as poor Nisus did, isn't likely to happen at your typical high school cross-country meet, the emotions of Nisus afterwards are contemporary.. The winners pass him, and he balks at the prizes given to second-place finisher, Salius.
Then Nisus: "If such awards go to the losers
and you console the fallen, what fit prize
will come to me, whose merit had won first crown
if I, like Salius, had not had bad luck?"
As he spoke, he pointed to his face and limbs
all foul with muck.
Of course the boxing match is primally brutal, and the caestus, or boxing thong, bears as much in common with a modern boxing glove as a helmet does to a helmet topped with a spike. I mean the caestus is like a set of brass knuckles; it doesn't dampen the impact of the fist, allowing for more punches and a longer fight; instead, it turns the fist into an amplified, "mediated" weapon. "Men stood amazed: the skins were seven hides thick / and stiff with insewn lumps of iron and lead." But the figures of the fighters are familiar. The nimble, young, and arrogant Dares is a style of fighter we've seen before. His opponent, the big, old, slow, fresh-out-of-retirement Entellus is also a fighter we know. It's one of the paradigmatic boxing match-ups, and it's of interest to note that in the Roman imagination, or at least in the imagination of a Roman poet named Publius Vergilius Maro, old Entelles triumphs....The overall point though, is ultimately simple. Play activities, and yes, even something like boxing is a play activity, tend to preserved in human culture even as survival activities change.
Alright Friends, I'm going to shovel some food in my mouth; I promise I will post again within the next three hours. I've got miles to go before I sleep. I'm way away from the points I set out to make, but I've still got about 4,000 words in me tonight to make them....
