Don't despair of us females, Paul. I've been busy dealing with actual chaos--e.g., untangling a Slinky toy from my daughter's hair, trying to remove blue crayon marks from our white (what were we thinking?) carpet, rounding up escapees from the unauthorized pillbug farm my kid started in her sock drawer the other day, etc. I'll try to take a closer look at your essay soon.
Tim, I must confess that an awful lot of my sonnets resemble clobbered mammoths.
Tim's Andrew Duncan quotation about experimental writing and play reminded me of this:
"Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in baby baboons, chimps, gorillas, dolphins, children--and also in young communities and civilizations. Galpumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity...We galumph when we hop instead of walk, when we take the scenic route instead of the efficient one, when we play a game whose rules demand that we handicap our powers, when we are interested in means rather than ends...Galumphing is when we voluntarily create obstacles in our path and then enjoy overcoming them. In the higher animals and in humans, it is of supreme evolutionary value."--Stephen Nachmanovitch, author of
Free Play
A few more quotations on play from Gary Krane's
Simple Fun for Busy People:
<bl>[*]"We are most human when we are at play." --Frederich Schiller[*]"Genius is childhood recaptured."--Charles Baudelaire[*]"In our play we reveal what kind of people we are."--Ovid[*]"Play is the fount of creativity."--Stephen Nachmanovitch (see above)[*]"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play
is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood."--Fred Rogers[*]"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."--T.S. Eliot[*]"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes."--Marcel Proust[*]"We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."--Anonymous[*]"God is the poetic genius in each of us."--William Blake
</bl>
I tried to teach my child with books:
He gave me only puzzled looks.
I tried to teach my child with words:
They passed above his head, unheard.
Despairingly, I turned aside.
"How shall I teach this child?" I cried.
Into my hand he put the key.
"Come," he said, "and play with me."
--Anonymous
Okay, now I'm really off topic, but what the hey? These were fun, weren't they? Let's all lighten up a little!
Julie Stoner
[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited September 17, 2003).]