Deep Play

  Play is an activity enjoyed for its own sake, while deep play is the ecstatic form of play, which is a fascinating hallmark of being human. (Ackerman) With my own experience, I state the definition of deep play as a kind of play that not only bring fun, but also express something deep inside the players.

  During most of my playtime, I just have fun—search the Internet, play games or do some sports without think deeply and express anything from my heart. However, when I played hide-and-seek, the common game which seems may not be consider as a deep play, I thought much more than the game itself and did a deep play.

  “Five, four, three, two, one …… I am coming!”

   I still remember that it was my first time to play hide-and –seek with my cousin, a five-years-old boy called Sam. I was a seeker and he was a hider.

  Actually, it was extremely easy for me to find him—he was hidden under the quilt and his back was like a little hill on the bed. Thus, I walked to the bed directly and opened the quilt quickly without any hesitation. I felt proud to be “clever” to find him while he looked a little bit embarrassed and upset. Looking at his bright eyes with depressiveness, I suddenly realized that I had made a mistake. I though of the days my parents played hide-and-seek with me when I was as young as my cousin at that time—

The top of the mountain is shrouded in fog, and I am all alone. My legs ache from the steep hike up, but pride swells in my chest. I’ve hiked 4.5 miles and gone up about 360 meters, mostly for the view, but despite my misty grey surroundings, I’m smiling ear to ear. The experience of walking all alone has given me the chance to really push my own boundaries, both physically and mentally. I set a challenging pace for myself, and spent the duration of the hike alone with my thoughts and the trees that surrounded me. 

“Everyone understands deep play. If I were in the park, having a transcendental experience, and a girl invited me to play beanbag toss, she might well get bored if I seemed clumsy and slow, because I was currently existing outside regular space and time—just as a dog playing fetch might get bored and go looking for better company. What I’m trying to say is that little girl looked like a Chihuahua to me during my rapturous experience and was totally harshing my deep play mellow. But why play deeply at all? Every element of the human saga requires play, from human life starting in medeas res to the final invocations to a muse or higher power, which you will often physically see in a deep play experience. We evolved through play. Literally. Deep play is the reason we still have wisdom teeth. Our culture thrives on deep play, still using it as currency in some parts of the world. Courtship includes high theater, rituals, and ceremonies of deep play; foremost among those ceremonies is the all-important awkward breakfast conversation. Ideas are playful reverberations of the mind. Language is a playing with words until they can impersonate physical objects and abstract ideas.”

-Ackerman

On Friday, I had a doctor’s appointment. Before seeing my doctor, a nurse asked me to take off my shoes so that she could weigh me. This made me very nervous. Still, I took off my shoes and got onto the scale. When she read aloud the amount I weighed, I was not surprised, but I was terrified. I had lost ten pounds since I came to Bryn Mawr. Walking back from the doctor’s appointment, I thought a great deal about the weight loss. It was not a good sign. To be very clear, I do not have any sort of eating disorder. I have lost weight because I get very absorbed in any and all activities I partake in. If I am reading, writing, watching TV, knitting etc. I will often forget to go to lunch, drink some water, sleep, or even go to the bathroom. In the past, friends and family have been able to break me out of the trances I get into while I’m working. But, at Bryn Mawr, I have to be much more independent. I realized, while walking back, that I needed to take better care of myself.

A summer trip to Mattituck was one of the biggest treats in my young life.  The transition from the stiflingly Manhattan heat to the breeze of Long Island was the perfect escape.  My mother and I made these trips fairly often to visit my Grandfather.  I craved for the beach year round and when June finally came, I was ecstatic.  One particular midsummer day, the three of us took a highly anticipated beach day.  Unlike any we’d taken before, no cars were parked in the lot and no umbrellas perched in the sand.  We had the beach entirely to ourselves.  We swam and soaked in the sun nearly all day and as the sun began to set we strolled up and down the shore.  The three of us walked shoeless and freely until we stumbled upon a collection of shells covered in paint and glitter.  He immediately told me that a mermaid who was decorating her “dishes” and must have leapt into the sea once she saw us approaching and left these behind. 

“Only take one,” he advised “or she’ll be very upset”.

It is special. Different from other trips, the journey to Tibet is so unforgettable that even now, the experience is still vivid in my head. Normally, I visited and played in different tourist attractions when travelling; however, when I went to Tibet, my family decided to visit the schools there which are incredibly remote with limited teachers and outmoded equipment.

After hours of rough car rides, we finally reached the school gate almost at noon. Putting on sunglasses and scarves, we got off the car. The scene in front of us shocked me: students were studying on the bare playground with eyes hardly open in the scorching sunlight. The principal and teacher warmly welcomed us, the children cheering loud for the books and stationery we brought to them. When our short visit came to an end, the teacher squeezed into crowd with four pieces of white silk (named Hada in Tibetan for greeting guests) raised to chest and a shy smile on his sun-burnt face.

we discussed the idea of power feminism when we lined up and talked about bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody. I'm still having a hard time fully grasping the concept of it, power has always had a very patriarchal connotation. Someone in a position of power has the right to monitor and regulate what you do. Does buying into this idea of power and control mean buying into the patriarchy? bell hooks discussed the idea that when women want what men have, they are feeding the patriarchy and subscribing to that standard. The idea of power feminism seems to take a negative spin on what feminism boils down to. 

This quotation is taken from E.B. White's classic Here Is New York, rendered into beautiful, colorful typography by Debbie Millman. It says more poetically (and much more positively) what George Simmel "said" to us several months ago: that we cultivate a blasé outlook when we are in the city, because we can't cope with all
the stimulus...

It was an upward spiral. Not just for my emotions, but the building I was in. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is a cylindrical art haven that has the viewer walk up in large spirals to different rooms full of beautiful art. There can be similarities drawn towards the spiral staircase in the Vatican, both in design and spiritual experience. I started my journey, but did not know where it would take me.

The lobby was a little bit crowded, full of people waiting to start their artistic expeditions. Though I was with my family, I knew that this was something I wanted to experience by myself. As I made my way up the first tier, I read the sign that said that the Impressionist painting section was coming up. I paused, took out my headphones, plugged them into my iPod, and began to play Claude Debussy’s beautiful piano pieces. Clair de Lune, Danse Bohémienne, Pagodes – the music these artists were all inspired by. I felt ready to enter the room. I could see how Impressionism worked: the paintings reflected how the music sounded, one small part didn’t seem like much, but altogether it harmonized perfectly.

One of the many events Mark and I thought about sending y’all to this semester (and passed over, in favor of other attractions…) was the current exhibit @ the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis. I went to see it this afternoon, really enjoyed it, and thought you might as well (@ least obliquely, and electronically, if not in person).

There’s lots of Duchamp and other Dadaists (which should make us feel right @ home!); Léger was inspired by the “shock of the surprise effect” in their raucous staged events. Léger said that the “task of modern art” was not to simply represent modern life, but to "equal" it; he imagined “color liberated from representation.” There’s lots of motion in these paintings (and Mark, you’ll be interested in particular in a “cine-poem” Léger co-created, “The end of the world filmed by the angel of Notre Dame”--it sounds as though it anticipated Wim Wenders’ work, which you like so much).