ENDLESS GAME
What is play if not theatrical staging? Putting reality aside for a moment, inventing other places, other rules, changing identities, as in role-playing games, those second lives where we swap our miserable selves for splendid avatars.
Games were one of mankind’s first abstractions, an allegory of our life courses as a training ground for strategizing, giving us the illusion of controlling our fate, perhaps even transcending it. Games symbolize the antagonism between the living, it wants a winner, but allows for revenge.
If the universe is the creation of the divine which plays to know itself, then we are participants in this never-ending adventure. Each time our soul takes on a new body, we return to the arena to play a new game that will only end when we die.
It’s the field of experience, where we receive physical, geographical and character attributes, we learn, we have allies and enemies, we know victories and defeats, we rebel and take on challenges. Are we just pawns during our passage on earth? Is the game rigged, or do we have the power to push back the limits and change the rules?
The game’s space is also one of dreams. It’s the realm of our imagination, of which we are still the lords, where we let in whatever enchants us most, where haunting memories sometimes visit us. Children, precarious magicians and relentless dreamers, still have access to spaces to which we have lost the key.
And that’s exactly what art is, a medium that gives us back the keys to the kingdom, an extraordinary game, that allows us to build new worlds, to try and change the rules of the game.
