Out of place

Helena loves picnics.  The mere idea of eating outside -- even if it is just some raisins as a break from a tiring time at the playground -- sends her into paroxysms of enthusiasm.  "Picnic!  Picnic!"  Over the last couple of days, even when there is no food to be found, she plays picnic on the porch or at the park, excited to eat far from her high-chair and the family dinner table.

Another of her favorite games is "slide on daddy's chair."  Several years ago, I got a great knock-off of the famous chaise-lounge by Le Corbusier, "Machine for Relaxing #2"(a splendidly silly name for a very comfortable chair), but since Helena discovered it, the piece of furniture is no longer mine.  It has become her slide, and that of all of her toys.  She climbs onto the chair, says "Scared, scared!" in an all-too-real voice (not unlike the way she screams of the top of the huge slide in the park before she rushes down it), and then drops head-first toward the floor, where she catches herself on her hands.

These two games seem completely unconnected, but they have something important in common: an activity out of place.  Eating at the table is just eating... but eating in the park is play.  Sliding in the playground is just fun, but sliding in the house is both make-believe and fun.

Clearly, play is much more than just putting things in new and unexpected contexts, but it is one important kind of play.  The miracle of Bill Watterson's Calvinball, for instance, is that anything can be imported into the game: rackets and nets and flags and balls and pretty much any rule one can imagine.  Calvin and Hobbes is so funny (and Calvin and Hobbes fight so much) because of the creative anarchy of this kind of play: there are no rules about where things should be or what one should do with them.  A tennis racket can be used in tag, and a high-modernist piece of furniture can be used as a slide for a baby.



It's not all that different with adult play.  When I designed this house, I loved using mixing bowls as sinks and ball valves as faucets.  Jacques Derrida always insisted that his philosophical method was a form of play... and what he really did was take ideas out of context, mix them around a bit, and then show that they weren't as clear and simple as everyone had thought.  Useful as poststructuralist philosophy or child's play, but mostly just fun.