Scribbles from the noosphere pt 1

My intention is to tell

of bodies changed

to different forms…

The heavens and all below them,

The Earth and her creatures,

All change

And we, part of creation,

Also must suffer change.

– Ovid

‘Metamorphosis.’

(In Kegan, 1982)

And we shall know them by their deeds passed?

Many of the most interesting changes in living things have been largely discontinuous with past evolution, and therefore did not necessarily take place through a gradual process of natural selection. Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere)

From Gebser: The Ever Preset Origin

Do we really have any clear answers about the way that children come to know the world? It seems to me that there are fundamental questions about children childhood and child play that remain largely unanswered, perhaps because of the sheer vastness of the questions themselves, or perhaps because they cannot be answered in a language that fits within our rational means of ordering the world.

James Hillman has proposed that there is a third driving force for life that exists alongside, within, and beyond the deterministic arguments of natural selection and the subtle reductionism of social conditioning theory (the so called  ‘nature/ nurture debate’). It points to an individual expression of a force inherent in the human character, and indeed all of life…

Henri Bergson (1907) was one of the first to propose that evolution is ‘creative’ and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. L’évolution créatrice is upheld by a constant vital force that animates life and fundamentally connects mind and body, an idea opposing the dualism of René Descartes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

Where does this ‘vital force’ come from in humans? How might it be expressed? A few words from Perry and Gordon might point us in the right direction. and guess what they say:

“Play… is more than simply a behaviour; rather there is a deeper motivation serving biological and existential purposes…We suggest, as a distinct playwork definition, that the Ludido, the play drive, could be seen precisely as the active agency of an evolving consciousness – such a description is closer to the definitions out of Eastern psychologies and traditions, the lila principle – in what we call a ‘field’ or psychic, ludic ecology.”

(Else and Sturrock: The Colorado Paper)

Of course, this is all a bit of a moonage daydream, isn’t it?

I myself have no academic pedigree, but what 20 years in playwork has taught me, again and again, is that extraordinary things happen in charged moments. Stepping sideways in metaphor, there is considerable speculation in evolutionary biology that sentient life began in just such a manner – within a rich ocean of possibility, a strike by a bolt from the turbulent heavens…

These charged moments need not always be so dramatic. Bernard Berenson shares with Edith Cobb a potent memory of quiet inner transfiguration:

“As I look back on fully seventy years of awareness and recall the greatest moments of happiness they were for the most part when I lost myself all but completely in some instant of perfect harmony… In childhood… this ecstasy overtook me when I was happy out of doors. Was I five or six? … It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the Lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember – I need not recall – that I clambered up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.” [italics added]

Bernard Berenson

In recent postings and other recent work I have becoming increasingly fascinated with how we as adults direct our own ludic attention; how we come to understand these charged moments. That said, I have very little interest in the discussions that exist on  ‘adult play’ – I will leave that to the Pat Kanes, Gwen Gordons and Sean Hargens of this world. As a playworker, what interests me more is the way I and others interpret that which we are experiencing as it plays through us, and how in turn we participate in the play of things, or choose not to. This feels muc more alive than th more alive and vital than attempting to ossify this process in what are often dry and abstract terms. The naming of play is, in the psycholudic model of playwork theory, not something we can ever achieve or even need to be playing with at all – it is a distraction from the real dance; akin to naming an atom rather than paying heed to the vast interplay of form and light that exists as potentialities down at the subatomic level.

Any appreciation of the ludic must be informed by a wide appreciation of all that is at play within the experiential realm, taking in notions that are poetic and mythopoeic as well as the more expected scientific and quasi-scientific forms. Only with an artistic and aesthetic appreciation of the ludic balancing scientific rhetoric will we avoid being reduced to an ‘operations’ related understanding of play, or to prioritising human need for development and growth over the broader relationship that all lifeforms hold within the biosphere and the subtle, invisible symbiosis that exists at the myriad levels of the creative impulse.

We have failed to successfully communicate in this way as a field so far. Our preoccupation with having playwork recognised as a profession, rather than a disposition, has all-too-often situated us within a narrow band of human endevour – the techno-economic sphere – rather than allowing us to explore the territory that we are immersed within in a broader language that can operate beyond the ‘misplaced concreteness’ of professional constructs.

We have to know and share the charged moments. if the balance of our professional lives tips too far in the direction of abstraction, we in some way lose the essence of playfulness that we are supposed to be advocates for.

To follow: beyond thought, science and self: noosphere as a responsive ludic ecology

(and if that as a title doesn’t sound pretentious, Ed, I don’t know what does…)

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