jeu . . . what if…
Life Skills or Real Rules for Playing a Court Game
Tennis – is derived from the French verb, tenir, to hold. I will hold you here in play and goodwill;
Court Etiquette – this is our court, our realm for now; I will enter our court in the spirit of play, not war;
Play – is the dance of life and the rhythm of tennis; I willingly suspend myself to/in the spirit of play with you;
Competing – I will com-pete with you, never against you;
Serving – I will receive your service and I will serve to you. I am in your service and you are in mine. We are each, in this game, stewards of serving and receiving service;
Rallying – I will send the ball over the net to the best of my ability and expect the same of you in return;
Love – love means never having to be zero; take your ad/vantage and I will take mine; deuce is our equality;
Rules – were made for the guidance of wise people and the blind obedience of fools; I will extend you the benefit of all doubt in all rules of our court;
Jeu – we make our game; it does not make or define or rule us.
What if…what if games could be transformed by attitudes? And, aren’t games/sport/play altered, impacted, heightened, ruined every day in every way by the attitudes we bring to those apparently trvial (not work, for most of us, but the toy-world universe of children and professional athletes) activities. Some years ago, I was asked to re-write the rules of tennis such that participants entering the court-space would have the option of shaping their attitudes by ‘rules’ that overtly created the landscape of mutually respectful human behaviour on a court. My ‘rules’ precede the picture of the tennis court above. By far the most elegant piece of play description, using tennis as its backdrop is Sir John Betjeman’s 1941 poem, A Subaltern’s Love Song, the first two verses of which are:
Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn
The metre or rhythm or pattern of beats (stressed and unstressed syllables) is genius – in each line of all 11 verses of the poem, the meter is a kind of poka-ta-poka-ta poka-ta or sound of a tennis ball being rallied in tennis match. The poem has virtually nothing to do with tennis and yet tennis infuses meaning into the longing of the junior military officer (subaltern is a British term) for his ‘love.’ In literary terms comparing two vastly different objects – tennis and love, in this case – is called a conceit or imaginary conceit. My own view is that there is not a single human emotion that has not been played out and felt in the arenas of sport, the conventions of games, and the realm of play – perhaps my imaginative conceitedness. We shape play and games by our attitude/s, the one/s we bring to those activities.
Jeu or game in French has so many connotations and such varied implications. We play games – games emphasizing some form of competition (euchre, chess, most sports); games that stress luck (lotteries, gambling); games of make-believe (role-playing, charades); games of vertigo or dizziness, (riding roller coasters, even taking hallucinogenic drugs). And of course, there are cross-overs in these categories. For example, luck plays a role in sport; however, that kind of luck might just be a perception. As golfer Jack Nicklaus said to a particularly vocal critic who accused him of being so lucky in his shots, “you know, the more I practice, the luckier I seem to get.” To play – a game, or just to play – is to be in an attitude or approach…in an awareness of play-fulness. Play is elemental; it cannot be defined and there is no synonym for play except in its theatrical sense. To be ‘at play’ is a feeling, an attitude, a deliberate choice we make freely, often separately from ‘real’ life enterprises, with an uncertainty of outcome, rules that are overt or understood, and in some kind of let’s pretend kind of way.
While very academic, I appreciate, my point is to describe something we take for granted and is so fundamental in our daily lives. As historian Johan Huizinga pointed out, ‘play is anterior and superior to culture.’ That is, without play, there is no culture. Surely in sexual activity, fore-play is play – and I’ll just leave that assertion for readers to ponder. It is not just children who play nor is play merely a frivolous activity. For example, in my view, one can be at-work and still in an attitude of play, spontaneously enjoying the work activity fully in the spirit or attitude of play. A piano player might well be paid for performing her or his music and yet be so engrossed in playing, the remuneration is inconsequential to the pianist’s ability to be play-ful. As a professor, I was afforded incredible privilege to be at-play in teaching students; I could role-play, prod playfully with questions, find ways to make learning fun, play devil’s advocate, taunt, and interact with students for the sheer jollification of engagement.
Very likely, there is no such thing as pure play. Furthermore, the element of play can be diminished and/or distorted such that play seems to get sucked out of the activity. For example, when winning becomes paramount, the justification for almost any type of behaviour in otherwise play-nuanced activities, then those activities lose the play quality. And so, we see cheating in things like sport; taking drugs for performance enhancement. Curiously, the behaviour or attitude that cannot be tolerated in play is the dis-believer – someone who won’t enter and/or doesn’t realize the the conventions of the playing field, the game, the arena, or even the make-believe world of children at play. Step, even inadvertently, on the known boundaries of a child’s fort in the sand; during a game of basketball, grab a ladder to facilitate putting the ball in the basket. Both mock the spirit of play and suck the play-spirit out of the activities. Sport is an institutionalized game that can have play qualities, again, dependent on the attitudes of sport players. Just by virtue of entering the playing field (court, arena etc), athletes willingly suspend themselves to unnecessary obstacles. For example, why not use a ladder to put a basketball in a basket? Running 110 metres over hurdles is a very inefficient way, logically, to run a race. Supposedly, soccer became North American football when one player in a game long ago, picked up the ball and ran with it, a far more efficient way to get the ball to the goal line:
Rugby School commemorative stone extolling William Webb Ellis’s exploit in changing soccer to rugby
And so I rumble with semantics and terms and ruminate often about the meanings inherent in play and games. I tumble home to the myriad feelings and attitudes I have taken from and brought to games and play in my life. My jeu, my game-ness, my joy in playing or being at-play is boundless; there is no limit to human imagination and when we imagine, when we ‘what-if,’ we live…we play.
