Playing with a player

A couple of nights ago, Helena Iara did not want to go to sleep.  It was about nine PM, when she usually starts to calm down and prepare for bed, but she only wanted to play.  "Brincar, Papai, brincar!" she insisted (Play, Daddy, play).  Since Helena sometimes categorizes her books as toys, I proposed that she "play" by reading them with me.  "No, no!" she declared, pointing to a ball and some stuffed animals.  "Brincar com brincador!" (Play with the player!).

 Who is the player?  Helena, one would expect, but that's not what she said.  The toys are the players, the active agents.  Books, unlike balls and stuffed toys, just don't cut it as "brincadores."

I wrote last week about how Helena attributes intentionality to inanimate things as a way to explain the failure of success of cause and effect.  Here, again, we see how children see "things" as "people" -- toys and balls have their own perspective on the world, their own interests and desires.  They are capable of playing.  At first, this seems like a truly alien and even wrong-headed (childish?) idea, but I don't think it's really wrong.  Anyone who has ever played a sport seriously knows that the ball has a mind of its own: this is even true of soccer, where the ball is perfectly round (think of the polemics that emerge at the beginning of a new world cup when players get to use a new ball for the first time), and even more in football or rugby.  In other sports, we see something similar: car drivers and bikers treat their vehicles as living subjects; skiers and surfers know that snow and waves are temperamental, often angry, other times gentle.

Above and beyond that, a child needs a toy in order to play.  In some way, there has to be an other in the picture, even when that other is a little stuffed thing, a rock, a bunch of sticks.  There is something powerful in that other, even when I invent it.

So as much as I tried, Helena would not accept a book as a "player", as a real toy.  Stories didn't have quite the right kind of otherness for the fun she was looking for.