Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is a standalone piece about the relationship between play and entertaining ideas we instinctively reject. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
A few days ago I was reading Vanessa de Olivera Machado’s Hospicing Modernity, a book I’d reccommend to just about everyone. The book invited me to go on a walk and reflect on a story told by an Indigenous elder1. I walked to a park near my home and, as I was leaving the park, I had a flash of insight. Within moments of this insight I felt a magpie swoop, get tangled in my hair, and dig one of its claws into my forehead (whether the clawing was an attack, or an effort to escape my hair, I’m not sure). Conscious of drawing attention to myself, I silently ducked and tried to swat it away, only to see it coast languidly in front of me, land about two metres away and cock one eye directly towards me. I paused and we regarded each other for a moment before it hopped away.
When I got home, I found myself bleeding from a spot exactly halfway between my two eyes, slightly above the browline — the same spot where Hindus put their bindis. For the chakra-inclined, it was basically my third eye. Sometimes syncronicity knocks, and at other times it busts down the door. In spite of all my rational-logical protestations, some part of my limbic system couldn’t help but declare this series of events a sign.
An insight, an attack from an intelligent animal2, and bleeding from the third eye. To lather on the symbolism a little thicker, one of de Olivera Machado’s earlier exercises was to reflect on experiences where animals had been teachers to us. When I first did the exercise, I struggled to think of anything. I could only think of spying on a Marabou Stork in Tanzania—a monstrous scavenger bird—guzzling garbage and faeces. The lesson from the Marabou Stork was real yet largely intellectual, as if I had read it in a book rather than witnessed it with my own eyes. The stork served as a sorry, pessimistic metaphor for the quality of being able to compost other people’s garbage. The magpie’s lesson, which I am still disentangling, seems a little less intellectual though no more subtle.
At this point, I must declare that I share the guilty liberal fondness for Indigenous ways of seeing and knowing. Indigenous ideas of responsibility, accountability, connection and kinship seem urgent, relevant and true to this present moment. However, my neocortex always seems to raise a palm (like a stop sign) when the dance moves out of step with the logical and the rational. Animals, the logical-rational mind reckons, cannot be teachers. We can use our experiences with animals as metaphors—as I did with the Marabou Stork—but the mind should go no further than this, lest it tip into mythic absurdity. Nobody wants to wind up on the floor, limbs akimbo, hearing cosmic messages in the rattling of a broken airconditioner.
And yet—the mind does go further than this. If the rational-logical mind drops the guard for a moment, the irrational and the mythic come rushing in. Look at all of the mythical language that hard-headed economists use to describe the stock market (markets are literally3 infused with animal spirits—bulls and bears), or the kind of mythopoetic hand-waving that people do after a breakup ("I just knew it was time" or "It wasn't meant to be."). If we treat our minds as naturally plural and a bit muddled, we find that the mythic and the rational are capable of existing quite nicely, breaking bread and perhaps even figuring out things each couldn’t figure out alone. We do, after all, speak of entertaining ideas. When the mythic and the irrational come knocking, can we not at least entertain them?
What I want to propose here is that play enables us a kind of belief-without-believing, an ability to entertain positions we do not hold (or fully hold). Ideas beyond our current sensibility can be invited in like house guests, given an opportunity to speak, and then be kindly asked to leave or stay based on how we feel about them. In my late teens and early twenties, knee deep in Dawkins and Hitchens at their most spitting and trite, mythic guests couldn’t even make it to the front door without my mind letting loose the hounds of science and reason. In this state of mind I couldn’t possibly learn from a magpie or a stork. As I grow older and softer, I find myself more able to learn in strange ways. My house has become a little more welcoming.
During the initial COVID-19 lockdown, I was on a Zoom call with a few other self-identified ‘changemakers.’ One changemaker, a shamanic practitioner who worked in environmental education, was lamenting that the initial lockdowns were a key moment where we needed to learn from nature—and yet lockdowns made it impossible for her to continue to work with school students. Before lockdowns, she would take students to a nearby lake and ask them to share what the lake was telling them. Most students, reflexively self-conscious of appearing silly in front of their peers, would dutifully point out that lakes cannot talk. Girls would stare at their feet, and boys would snicker.
The shamanic practitioner, however, found a trick to open these students up. She would simply rephrase the question: “Imagine if you could hear the lake speaking. What kind of things might it be telling you?” The students, miraculously, began to open up. They expressed that they lake might say “I’m sick,” or “Please stop throwing rubbish in me,” or “If I get sick, you might catch my illness.” The students visibly softened (dropped shoulders, hands out of pockets, more gesticulation) and, for a moment, were able to understand the harms done to nature in non-human terms.
To play in this way requires a truce and a lowering of the drawbridge. We must be willing to momentarily drop the logical-rational defenses that prevent creative perspective-taking. This kind of play enables us to encounter perspectives we cannot yet fully understand or inhabit and, in so doing, this participation invites a kind of transformation. We discover that we do not need to really believe a lake has agency—at least, agency as we think of it—in order to feel a kind of empathy towards it and responsibility for it. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Our mental homes can accommodate many guests, including animals and lakes.
The remarkable thing here is how the rational-logical mind is incredibly vigilant of losing purchase, losing total dominance over the doors of perception. The idea that an animal might teach us cannot even be entertained, let alone welcomed and given a seat at the table. The logical-rational mind’s defensiveness reveals it not as a protector, but as a fragile tyrant, with a white-knuckled hold over what kinds of thoughts and experiences are considered acceptable. Play permits the tyrant to relax their grip just a moment (only the jester can really speak to the king). If animals could teach us, what might they be saying? If you’d had animal teachers in the past, what lessons might you have missed? If you’re not ready to think of the behaviour of animals as encoded messages from some metabolic bio-intelligence, at least consider them invitations to play. I think—well, I like to think—that’s why the magpie held my gaze for a moment.
You might ask, at this point: Does he really believe animals can teach us? My answer would be that belief isn’t that important. We rarely believe what we think we believe.
I visited the same park this morning to read a few more chapters of Hospicing Modernity. I looked up at one moment, having been engrossed for some time, to find a duck had chosen to sit six feet in front of me, directly in my eye-line. As we made eye contact, the pupil facing towards me slowly fluttered shut and it took rest. Deeper play permits more subtle teachings.
Available here under Creative Commons licensing. It is a Cree story about the four stages of life, publicly shared by an elder named John Crier.
There are a few reasons I chose a magpie as the image for this blog — the most obvious is they’re very playful birds.
Literally-not-literally-kinda-literally. Don’t take my use of the word “literal,” too literally here.