Play is Serious Business

Dispatch #41: It’s disruptive. It’s expansive. The government knows it. The cops know it.

Hi friend,

Earlier this week Ilana Glazer made a post on Instagram about women’s pleasure whose caption read “Fascists hate being in their bodies. Make some time today to take pleasure being in yours✨”

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Two weeks ago I took a free online workshop guided by Vanessa Micale exploring care strategies for “Nervous Systems for People Who Create With Words.” Micale quoted cartoonist & teacher Lynda Barry: “When I started teaching at the university [...] I could pick out the grad students just by the way they walked in the room, you know? These are people that are at the top of their game. They've already shown that they want to work. [...] Why is it acceptable that they're all miserable? I was trying to figure out what the misery was. Then I thought, it is this laser focus on getting one particular thing done. This feeling that unless you're working on it at all times, things are going to be bad. That kind of focus doesn't set the conditions for insight or discovery. It's like somebody yelling: ‘Relax! Relax!’ It's never going to work.” [All bold emphasis is my own.] Lynda Barry & Ilana Glazer are on the same team: Team Pleasure.

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In that same somatic-focused workshop Micale shared a quote from Emily Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking The Stress Cycle: “When you drop out of task focused attention and into neutral, your "resting" brain is not doing nothing – far from it... running in the background of your awareness is what neuroscientists called the ‘default mode network,’ a collection of linked brain areas that function as a kind of low-grade dreaming.” There it is. I suddenly found a phrase for where I go when I create. When I sit down to write I am not involving “laser focus” nor am I shouting “Relax! Relax!” at myself. So what am I doing? I’m resting, yet awake. I’m low-grade dreaming.

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I have worked with hundreds (maybe thousands!) of students & no matter their age – 17 or 70 – it is very clear that because I’m engaging with their creative self I’m also engaging with their child self. I am quickly able to notice whether they can give themselves spaciousness in their efforts & “mistakes” or whether they are strict & punishing. Often, to pour awareness on any internal rigidity & self-flagellation, I ask them: “Was your child self allowed to play?” From as early as I can remember, my parents gave me a tremendous gift. They let me be when I played. They didn’t hover or correct or suggest I use red paint instead of green. They didn’t hyper-emphasize “good job” or “bad job.” They created conditions where I could freely & privately explore. The more students I work with the more I see how rare my parents’ disposition. Often my process with students is one of reclamation. They get to say to their child self: “I’m here to cherish & protect your creative playground. It’s safe now. Heck, it’s even fun. Go on, honey. Play.”

Merve Ozaslan | Xiaohua Zhao | Claude Cahun | ESPN

After a recent soccer injury to my quad I started dipping into Yoga With Adriene’s vast catalogue. Adriene & her dog Benji have been guiding my mornings. I’ve been shocked that even the gentlest yoga practice started only a few weeks ago has transformed how I feel in my body. When I’m reaching for a bowl on a high shelf, when I’m walking Odyssey & when I’m cross-legged on the couch watching a movie with Angel I can hear Adriene softly coaxing me to notice my “shape” (what others might call a “pose”). How do I feel? What is “yummy”? What is “crunchy”?

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As our country rapidly slides toward fascism I’m gathering tools, I’m building my Pleasure Squad. Glazer says fight fascism by being pleasurefully in your body. Barry suggests to put down the laser beam, soften, & question capitalism’s fetish for productivity & miserableness. Nagoski invites us to take seriously low-grade dreaming. Adriene coaxes us to notice, even in the smallest of gestures, such as placing the palms together over the heart, how you move. This weekend when I rearranged the furniture in our studio I reached on my knees beneath a table, chin to rug, for a power chord & noticed I was in a familiar shape, “threading a needle,” the way Adriene teaches it. I am always in a shape, I notice. Whether it is “wrong” or “right,” “messy” or “beautiful,” “clumsy” or “athletic” is not the point. I am always in a shape.

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You’ll notice that cops don’t play. Last week plainclothes officers arrested Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, & preemptively & firmly told him to stop resisting arrest. A voice can be heard off camera saying, “He’s not resisting.” Cops, a direct arm of the state, are in the business of control & control is the opposite of play. Their voices & bodies reflect this. It’s not that I want cops to play. I’m suggesting that a profession where plasticity & openness is not a part of the job description should not be a job at all, that it inherently dehumanizes all bodies. Even doctors, whose profession requires meeting life-&-death circumstances with precision & seriousness, are (at best) agile & dexterous thinkers open to new science capsizing old science. Doctors are often researchers, professors, or writers bringing their field’s concepts to life. Life is an important word here. While the government & its armed officers purport a protection of life it’s reported that “An estimated 250,000 civilian injuries are caused by law enforcement officers annually”¹ & more than 1000 people are killed by law enforcement in the U.S. each year.² Our government is obsessed with regulating whose bodies are real, important, & valuable so trans bodies, immigrant bodies, Palestinian bodies, & bodies with uteruses are all explicitly up for debate. But how can a body be debated? There it is. Whole, it speaks for itself.

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“Play is the highest form of research,” said our world’s most profound scientist Albert Einstein. He understood that play is our birthright, our most elevated portal toward knowing. Play is not extraneous or frivolous. Play is how we know.

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Authoritarianism can be defined as “the belief that people must obey completely & not be allowed freedom to act as they wish.”³ Play is inherently anti-authoritarian.

Authoritarianism is “characterized by highly concentrated & centralized government power maintained by political repression & the exclusion of potential or supposed challengers by armed force. It uses political parties & mass organizations to mobilize people around the goals of the regime.”⁴ Play requires expression, for the power dynamics of its actors to fluctuate. Its very means are mystery, bafflement, & the uncertain.

Authoritarianism “favors & enforces strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom. It shows a lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others.” Its synonyms include: domineering, dictatorial.

Play courts joy. Play disobeys. It wouldn’t be play without some level of rebellion. Play moves toward knowing by not knowing. Play is somatic. Play is how the body laughs.

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Psychiatrist Stuart Brown says, “Play is spontaneous behavior that has no clear-cut goal & does not conform to a stereotypical pattern. The purpose of play is simply play itself; it appears to be pleasurable."

Play is anti-tyranny. It moves like rain down a window: with threads of endless possibility, under no orders, spontaneous & everfresh.

Rob Brezny writes, “In a study of 26 convicted murderers, Psychiatrist Stuart Brown discovered that as children, most of them had suffered either ‘from the absence of play or abnormal play like bullying, sadism, extreme teasing, or cruelty to animals.’ Brown's work explores the biological roots of play: ‘New and exciting studies of the brain, evolution, & animal behavior,’ [Brown] writes,” suggest that play may be as important to life—for us and other animals—as sleeping and dreaming."⁵

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"Approfondement is a French word that means 'playing easily in the deep,” writes Tom Robbins. Who in your life has this skill? Who do you know that plays easily in the deep, that crawls the psyche’s sea floor with finesse? Do you know any cop that does this? Writers? Scientists? Friends? Parents? When do you feel you are playing easily in the deep?

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When was the last time you played on a playground? Are playgrounds reserved for childhood? Would swinging on a swing be “a waste of time”? Do you, as an adult, have a space like a playground? Where is it? What is your creative playground? Where do you go to freely explore & fling yourself high?

Excerpt from Be/Hold: A Friendship Book written & illustrated by Shira Erlichman

Elena & I are eight years old making up a board game. We create the board, the moving pieces, the rules. It is colorful. We have constructed a world of our own. We can teach this world to others. To know we can do this is almost more important than having done it. Play has given us the confidence to be “imagineers” – people who devise & implement a new or highly imaginative concept or technology. Elena & I often invent & create. When we are together we invite a third presence in: play. Play is as real as us. Play is the technology we use to test & trust each other.

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Elena & I are nine years old under one red blanket. The sunlight sifts through the threads. We kick our legs out & pull the covers slowly all the way up to our faces. We pretend we are being born. This is a way to say (without saying) We are twins. This is a way to say I love you, my sister. Of course this doesn’t have to be said with a game. Yet when it is, it is somehow richer than words.

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Can you name some simple experiences of play from your childhood? Who was there? What did you do? How did it help you? What did you learn? What did you unlearn?

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I text myself strategies, questions, practices. I aim for pleasure. I aim for joy. I aim for softening, for the smallest gestures. I aim to make art briefly, between rooms.

APOIAN

Robbie Shown

Shira at Prospect Park with polaroid camera in hand

Why speak of play when you can immerse yourself in it? In Surreal Life is holding a flash sale where if you sign up with a friend you both get to take ISL for only $250 each! Get in on it with your own Elena & rack up some dopamine-drenched, joyous experiences of play! I’ll see you there.

Don’t let anyone tell you play is idle or foolish or unnecessary. Play is serious business. It’s disruptive. It’s expansive. The government knows it. The cops know it. Find someone who can really play, who can frolic easily in the deep, who challenges convention, find a master of low-grade dreaming & you’ll have found an embodied human, a feeler, a rebel, an imagineer - someone who is nothing short of a revolutionary.

With maple syrup,

1. U.S. Data on Police Shootings and Violence, University of Illinois Chicago

2. Number of people killed by police in the United States from 2013 to 2024, Statista

3. Authoritarianism, Dictionary

4. Authoritarianism, Wikipedia

5. "Animals at Play," Stuart L. Brown