Analogies of game and play, life and death
[ by Charles Cameron — no trump — a situation in which no suit is designated as trump ]
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There are at least three major analogies for life to be found within life itself: dreams, games, and plays — and in each case, there’s the possibility of an infinite regression, of dreams within dreams, games within games, and plays within plays.
Shakespeare has the play within a play motif down nicety, but it traces back if I’m not mistaken to Plotinus, if not before. There’s that favorite remark of mine in the Enneads:
Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his graver doings alike, he is but at play; to handle austere matters austerely is reserved for the thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to their own frivolous Nature. Anyone that joins in their trifling and so comes to look on life with their eyes must understand that by lending himself to such idleness he has laid aside his own character. If Socrates himself takes part in the trifling, he trifles in the outer Socrates.
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We can move from theater to dream with almost suspicious ease via Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose play La Vida es Sueño plays (in what is more a “game” sense than a “theatrical” one) with the idea of life as a dream — the idea embodied in his play’s very title.
Indeed, as the translator Michael Kidd suggests in his Introduction to the play:
To emphasize the illusory nature of this existence, the Spanish Baroque relied on three central metaphors: life as art, life as theater, and, most important for Calderón, life as a dream.
Here, then, is the heart of Calderón:
We live in such an exceptional world that living is no more than dreaming; and experience teaches me that he who lives dreams what he is until waking. The king dreams that he’s king, and he lives under this deception commanding, planning, and governing; and his acclaim, which he receives on loan, is scribbled in the wind and turned to ashes by death. What grave misfortune! To think that anyone should wish to govern knowing that he will awaken in the sleep of death! The rich man dreams of more riches, which only bring him more worries; the poor man dreams that he suffers in misery and poverty; the man who improves his lot dreams; the man who toils and petitions dreams; the man who insults and offends dreams. And in this world, in short, everyone dreams what he is although no one realizes it. I dream that I’m here, weighed down by these chains, and I’ve dreamt that I found myself in more flattering circumstances. What is life? A frenzy. What is life? A vain hope, a shadow, a fiction. The greatest good is fleeting, for all life is a dream and even dreams are but dreams.
And for recursion — an earlier translator of those lines about anyone who might “wish to govern knowing that he will awaken in the sleep of death” renders them thus:
Who would wish a crown to take,
Seeing that he must awake
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