breathing in and out in out etc it occurred to me that:
Play in children is about discovering and extending relationships to the
world and to other people, physical and linguistic abilities etc, and may
be contemplative or absolutely the reverse: it is, in any number of ways,
a method of exploring a child's realities. It's usually characterised by
the most serious attention to the mundane, which to a child is of course
not at all mundane. I don't mean anything cute by this - it seems to me
that play, in the sense I mean here, a serious and attentive exploration
of reality freed in fundamental ways from prior or external expectations,
is the reverse of decadent and not inappropriate to art. Perhaps what is
sometimes called play isn't playful at all.
Decadence seems to imply some earlier, ideal time when all was ruddy
apples, when those same ruddy apples are nourished on the rot... but yes,
certainly certain impulses become etiolated husks with less internal
vitality to resist hardening external dogmas, and then they are not much
use since they are incapable of responsiveness to whatever it is that
generates impulse in the first place. Someone said (I forget who, but I
remember it was a woman) that a philosophy is dead when it spends its
entire energy either defending or defining itself. Now, _that's_
decadence.
Best
Alison
Alison Croggon
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3015
Australia
Masthead Online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home Page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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