| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Play and Poetry |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Simon Vinkenoog |
Dear co-conspirators, I feel honoured and pleased, addressing you, grateful even to those who invited me. And, you might know: 'Gratitude is haven itself'. These words have been spoken by the English poet William Blake, the same one, who namesaked these conferences: 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite and holy.' How much fun Pieter Breughel de Oudere must have felt, painting his Children's Games in 1560: how much fun indeed to contemplate these gestures and movement, possibilities and potentialities collected therein. The fun of it made me think of D.H. Lawrence's poem A Sane Revolution, which suits this historical occasion perfectly, and hence I'll read it to you: A Sane Revolution If you make a revolution, make it for fun, don't make it in ghastly seriousness, don't do it in deadly earnest, do it for fun. Games people play. I see from the contexts of your interactive contributions, how wide the scope of this conference is. You must be well aware of the Attractions Joan Littlewood wanted to include in her Fun Palace; her wishes were expressed in the sixties and can easily be updated: Juke box information + Adult Toys + Star gazing + Science Gadgetry + News service + Tele-communication + Swank Promenades + Hide Aways + Dance Floors + Drink + Rallies + Battles of Flowers + Concerts + Learning Machines + Observation Decks + Nurseries + Music + Theatre Clownery + Instant Cinema + Fireworks + Recording Sessions + Kunst Dabbling + Gala Days & Nights + Genius Chat + Gossip Revues + Laboratories + Food + Ateliers – and, I would like to add: Poetry. Make it new. Make it a part of you. Let poetry imbue your creativity. Let poetry be your third eye to see, to really see, the Real Thing, life and life only. And once again I might remind you of Johan Huizinga's words in his Homo Ludens, the seventh chapter called Play and Poetry: 'While in the more highly organised forms of society religion, science, law, war and politics gradually lose touch with play, so prominent in the earlier phases, the function of the poet still remains fixed in the play-sphere where it was born. Poiesis, in fact, is a play function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it. These things have a very different physiognomy from the one they wear in 'ordinary life', and are bound by ties other than those of logic an causality. If a serious statement be defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter.' 'To understand poetry,' Huizinga continues, 'we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's. Nobody has grasped, or expressed, the primordial nature of poetry and its relation to pure play more clearly than Giambattista Vico, more that two hundred years ago. (...) Ancient civilisation is now being understood anew in the light of this fundamental unity of poetry, esoteric doctrine, wisdom and ritual. The first thing we have to do to gain such an understanding is to discard the idea that poetry has only an aesthetic function or can only be explained in terms of aesthetics. In any flourishing, living civilisation, above all in archaic cultures, poetry has a vital function that is both social and liturgical. All antique poetry is at one and the same time ritual, entertainment, artistry, riddlemaking, doctrine, persuasion, sorcery, soothsaying, prophecy, and competition.' Thank you, professor Huizinga. Poesy, so easy job, the Dutch Lucebert sighed. Child's play indeed, the boys and their toys. The contemporary Californian poet Lew Welch explains the current situation in his book How I work as a poet (Bolinas, 1973): Poetry is not a diversion, it can't be called upon to give solace, however heavy the time. We, who wish to call the Tribe to dance, who sing at tribal celebrations, calm the King (in good times), and then retire to our mountains, our gardens, or the hearth, must always yield to what the secrets of this art decide Especially in heavy times, this art decides there is nothing to do except perfectly accurate report of what we thought we saw. Or put it this way: If the Tribe refuses to dance, the Poet can only worry, watch, and warn. All together now, united in what Alexander Trocchi once called: the invisible insurrection of a million minds, a coup de monde, the earth has never witnessed before, a psychodrama on a planetary scale, in order to find out what it is all about... This is perfect. That is perfect. Perfect comes perfect. Take perfect from perfect, perfect remains. Aum aprendo. We all still learn from experience, whose disciples we are, from meeting like-minded people and antagonist alike. Aldous Huxley dictated his last essay, Shakespeare and Religion, on his deathbed to his wife Laura. It contains a statement to usher us into the millennium. 'Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of the reality in the one illusory part which our self-centred consciousness permits us to see. (...) We must continually be on our watch for ways in which to enlarge our consciousness. We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform and transfigure it. Too much wisdom is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter's wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time.' Time is Now! Keep it alive and kicking, don't kill it, don't let it slip by. Have a good time, in Mad Mastercity Amsterdam, make good friends, come back in spring when flowers blossom, stay alive and God bless you all! Make it Whole, make it one, make it New. Love you for what you do. You are the people. You are this season's people. It works if you work. Enjoy it. Have fun. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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