Why do people cling to the known, even when the known brings misery and confusion? Why are they so uncreative, so stiff, so boring? Why do people prefer contention or withdrawal over real cooperation? Why are people addicted to thinking — and to the means to obliterate thought? Why do they prefer passive consumption and narcotic forgetfulness to passion, action and conscious awareness? Why are they terrified of loss, death and the unknown? Why are you?
No doubt answers have sprung into your mind, but answers are the problem here, even right answers. The solution to all these ‘whys’ is in the what of your own experience, but how can an essay give that to you?
Let’s play some games.
Four Games
Here are four games to help you understand your mind, and the world it creates and sustains. Please play each one after I’ve described it, and do your best to play well. It’s best to play them with others, ideally with children, but, if you can master self-ridicule, they’re just as instructive alone. Pretend — I know they’re a bit silly — but it’s very important to pretend that each one matters.
The first game is called ‘Saying What Things Are’. All you have to do is point at things and say what they are. Point at the chair and say ‘chair’, then point at the table and say ‘table’, then point at the door and say ‘door’, and so on. Play ‘Saying What Things Are’ until you understand it, from your own experience. If you are older than three, it shouldn’t take too long.
After that, play ‘Saying What Things Were’.1 In this game you have to point at things and say what the thing you pointed at before was. So you’ll point at the chair and say nothing, then you’ll point at the table and say ‘chair’, then point at the door and say ‘table’, then point at the window and say ‘door’, and so on. Play that one for a bit, till you get the hang of it.
Now play the third game, which is very similar Saying What Things Were. It’s called ‘Saying What Things Will Be’. In this game you have to point at things and then name the next thing you’re going to point at. So, firstly, you’ll point at the chair (while planning where you’ll go after that), and say ‘table’, then you’ll point at the table and say ‘door’, and so on.
The fourth and last game is called ‘Saying What Things Are Not’. In this game, you have to point at things and name any other object in the universe (the real universe or the imagined one) except what you are pointing at. So, point at the chair and say, for example, ‘banana’, then point at the table and say ‘tree’, then point at the door and say ‘my mother’, then point at the window and say ‘the square root of two’, and so on. Once again, keep going until you get a sense of how to play it well (even if you’re not much good at it) from your own experience.
Did you play the games? Please do. This is not a theoretical activity. If you didn’t play them, stop reading, if you can, and do so now, or stop and get whoever you are in the room with to play them with you, or wait until you are alone and can behave oddly, without feeling like a pillock. It’s much better to have an audience, because this raises the stakes, but in any case, put some welly in, try to play well — particularly for the last one. That way, when you come back what I have to say about the games will be true in your experience.
Good. Now what you will have found is that the first three games are a lot easier than the fourth one. If you are a bit of a braggart you might claim the contrary — teenagers often do — but what tends to happen is that people deal with the difficulty of ‘Saying What Things Are Not’ by employing tricks. Techniques. They might, for example, categorise, and list fruit, say, or animals; or they might just say the same word over and over again. Or they might take the opposite tack and take a long, lonnng time over each answer, until they’ve come up with something sufficiently ‘creative’ — and yet, never quite ‘creative’ enough. In most cases there will be a sense of unease, of not doing as well as they feel they should. They might claim victory, but something inside will tell them they could have done much better.
But what is more interesting is not so much what people do when they play ‘Saying What Things Are Not’, but how they go about it. First of all, many people will try. They will make an effort to succeed. They will do their best to ‘be creative’ or to ‘do well’. But this won’t work. The effort will make them tense, stressed and anxious, which will guarantee that they do badly. Realising or intuiting this, many people will, particularly if there is an audience, go in small.
You can see such a strategy in action in a classroom when you ask a child without much confidence to come to the front of the class and speak. The body will rise reluctantly, shrink as it nears the front, the voice box will tighten, long pauses, big sighs perhaps… All this is an attempt to instil, in one’s audience, low expectations. Then, nobody can complain they were deceived when they witness a poor performance. When — because it will be poor. If you go in small, nothing big will emerge. If you go in knowing you will do badly (or fearing you will do badly, or trying to do well, which all amount to the same thing), you will, as you well know, do badly.
So how can you do well? I’ll show you. Play the last game once more, but this time do four things. Firstly, go in big. Stand up, throw your shoulders back, take some deep breaths, and then, with great confidence and boldness — but not with shouty aggression — point at things and say what they are not. Secondly, play under the assumption of infallibility; knowing (or pretending to know) that whatever you say is fine — even if you repeat yourself or get tongue tied. You are the king of this world, and therefore you cannot make a mistake. Thirdly, ditch the past. Every time you point at something new and speak, point at something new. Cut yourself off completely from whatever just happened, half a second ago, by attending fully to the new object. If you say something and then your brain says ‘that was stupid, boring, I failed…’ let go of immediately and say what the next thing is not. Fourthly, obey the body. Let your mouth say a sound — it will — and then ‘follow’ it into a word.
If you follow these instructions, you’ll probably find (probably, we’ll get to why you still might have difficulties later) that your second performance of ‘Saying What Things Are Not’ was far better than the first one. But why? And why is ‘Saying What Things Are Not’ so difficult in the first place? If you think about it, it’s strange that it should be difficult to play such a game well, when you cannot possibly give a wrong answer, and when the number of right answers is, literally, infinite. Why should it be that the brain freezes? Why should it be stressful? Take a few minutes to consider this question before I tell you.
Got yourself an answer? Okay, the answer is that there is no answer, by which I mean there is no definable reason why you cannot Say What Things Are Not well — nor is there any definable answer to why you ‘just know’ when you’re playing well (or when someone else is); why, when some players name what things are not, we lean in and laugh, and when others play we shrink back and tense up. The mind finds this most unsatisfying. It wants answers. It wants to know why such and such a thing is such and such a way, and how it can be changed into such and such a different thing. It’s not interested in the primal, awful what of the solution, because it cannot perceive what things are not.
This, to begin with a ‘why’ that the mind can easily grasp, is what makes the first three games, ‘Saying What Things Are’, ‘Saying What Things Were’ and ‘Saying What Things Will Be,’ so much easier. Because, for these games, there is a definable explanation why you cannot find the answer, and a definable strategy for how to play well. For these three ‘closed games’, in other words, you can use tricks and techniques to play well, whereas for the ‘open game’ of ‘Saying What Things Are Not’, something else seems to be required.
To put this another way, for the first three games ‘playing well’ is determined by a measurable outcome, while for the fourth game, ‘well’ means something radically different, something that transcends both objectivity (impersonal fact) and subjectivity (personal whim). The temptation, for those who give a low-quality performance in the fourth game is to redefine success as subjective whim, to assert that because there is no objectively high-quality answer, one’s own answers must therefore be high quality. But this doesn’t cut it. No matter how forcefully a poor player might assert himself, his audience knows when he’s playing badly, and he knows it too. This tempts him to take the opposite tack and declare the whole game is subjectively low quality (‘stupid’, ‘childish’) or that it depends on an objective technical skill that he doesn’t — and shouldn’t be expected to — have, like being able to read Latin or bench 200 kg.
The fact that success in closed games is radically different to that in open games, in that the latter transcends objectivity and subjectivity, explains why learning and cheating in closed games is radically different to learning and cheating in open games. If, for example, you wanted to do extremely well at ‘Saying What Things Were’ you might practice every day, until you could point and name at an inhuman velocity. Or if you wished to cheat at ‘Saying What Things Will Be’ you might write out all your choices before the game and hide the paper under the table, or you might use technology; a secret earpiece perhaps, connected to AI, that broadcast the answers into your awareness. But how can you prepare for ‘Saying What Things Are Not’? You can’t. It’s impossible. And how can you cheat? Again, there is no way (even the hidden paper and earpiece would not work; we’d still feel you weren’t doing very well) except to forcefully assert that you had done ever so well when we all know the truth.
But we’ll come back to all this. First, here’s another question for you. Which of these games is more like life? Again, think for yourself, before I explain.
Open and Closed Games
School is a closed game. To do well there you need to be good at saying what things are, were or will be. You need to be good at finding definable, measurable answers. Likewise at work, particularly in large corporations and institutions. All sports are closed games too — including activities like high-diving and figure skating which depend on subjective assessment — as are all video games — including so-called ‘open world’ games like Minecraft and The Sims. Science and technological progress are, essentially, closed games, as is artistic success, particularly on the screen. Social media? A closed game. Lifestyle apps? Closed games. Money? Finance? Savings and investment? All closed games. Politics too, particularly democratic politics. And warfare, obviously. Even religion, insofar as it is an institution with commandments, paths, ‘pillars of faith’ and so on, is a closed game. Even getting around is a closed game, using the tube, driving to work or walking through the city.
This explains how AI can, or will soon be able to do all these things so well, and how we can do them without being able to consciously recall the experience; because the measuring and assessing autopilot, a kind of internal AI, does them for us. It also explains why so many people complain of having bad memories, because they’ve been spending their lives playing closed games — or rather because their minds have been playing one kind of closed game (idly thinking, fantasising, doomscrolling) while AI and the autopilot have been taking their bodies round the ring road, into the screen, into the office, through the meetings, out to the pub, back round the ring road, back into the screen, and back to bed…
Relationships are closed games too, or most of them are; particularly, and obviously, those based on sexual gratification, on crime, on business, on sport and on mutual addiction, but for most of us our interactions with our family, our friends and our neighbours are closed games too. There’s a measurable outcome you try to achieve — gratification, prestige, power, security and so on — and there are techniques for achieving it. Certainly, gaps open up in the game, when something else pours through, and, certainly, we never speak about the secret game we’re playing for our lives, but it’s there, isn’t it?
Learning and cheating in all these games follows the same kind of principle as it does for Saying What Things Are, Saying What Things Were and Saying What Things Will Be. Generally speaking, the more you practice, the better you get, and if you can’t get better you can manipulate the rules, circumvent them or just ignore them to win. This is why school — along with all self-help and how-to guides — focuses entirely on technical competence, on learning to be a better person or, in some cases, how to ‘game’ whatever system you are in and win using brute force, or technology, or with some kind of technical ‘hack’. To survive in the world, you must be adept at a range of closed games, which is why school focuses entirely on technical competence and why, as long as you don’t get caught, you get rewarded for cheating. Yes, open games feature at school — art, drama, psychology, philosophy and so on — but these are taught — and, crucially, assessed — as closed games too. Either your painting meets objective criteria, or there are no criteria and anything goes.
Thus, the answer to the question, which kind of game — closed or open — is more like life, receives only one answer in all the schools of the world, the same answer as it receives in all the offices of the world, and all the factories, and all the laboratories, and all the churches (and temples and mosques), and all the farms, and all the television stations, and all the publishing houses, and all the hospitals, and all the courts, and all the lecture halls, and all the clubs, and all the councils, senates and houses of parliament. The whole world is playing one game, a closed game, and you must learn to play it well, or to cheat, or you will be destroyed.
Individuals in the various institutions of the world might claim otherwise, and there is much disagreement over the details, but the outcome is the same. The only thing that matters in life is doing well at (or cheating at) closed games, and so, ipso facto, these games are most like life. Open games are, at best, a kind of entertainment, a frill. Good for some special people, ‘talented’ artists, children or madmen, or good for your spare time, when you’ve go nothing better to do, but open games don’t apply to the ‘real world’, as evidenced by the fact that one can live one’s entire life very comfortably, while being not just incompetent at open games, but without ever having played one.
So much for closed games. Where, if open games are more like life, does one play those? Where is skill at finding answers when there is no answer — no ‘correct’ answer, that is, one determined by a measurable standard — rewarded? Where in life is success a question that everyone ‘knows’, and yet nobody can quite say how or why they know? Where are technique, planning and learning, ultimately, useless? In what kind of situation is it impossible to cheat, or only possible to cheat by claiming that the game itself doesn’t matter, or that there is no such thing as excellence or brilliance, or that only special people can do well at them? Naturally, if the reader has lived his or her entire life without ever having played such a game, it will be all but impossible to recognise their existence — the existence, if you will, of what is not — or to see them apart from what is, or was, or will be. Nevertheless, here is a brief list of open games in life.
Firstly, all forms of true improvisation are open games — indeed, ‘Saying What Things Are Not’ is itself a game used to learn live, unscripted, improvised theatre. Jamming is a form of improvisation as well, as are noodling, doodling, sketching and playing with ideas on a blank page, as are all art forms built thereon, which amounts to… all art. Theoretically, it is possible to write a great song or story by naming what things are, were or will be, but actually this turns out to be impossible. It might seem like one can learn how to write a great love song — because they also demand great, ‘closed’ technique — or somehow cheat one out — because charlatanism is lavishly rewarded — but as anyone knows who has ever actually written a timeless melody, it cannot be done, because the improvised source of every creative gesture is completely open and amounts to saying what things are not.
Similarly, on paper, it seems that conversation is a closed game — there are rules, grammars, even a few tricks and techniques for speaking well — but any closed aspects follow from the essence of conversation, which is completely, some might say alarmingly, open. The same goes for making love — and for all the do or die aspects of courtship — as well as for all the most profound challenges of long-term partnership. Living well in the wild is an open game too, as is competently working with hand tools, and all low-fi subsistence activities, such as hunting, farming and building one’s shelter — impossible without closed-game knowledge, to be sure, but this follows from open-game awareness. Throwing oneself into an entirely new situation, with new people, is also, essentially, an open game, as is, more simply, spending the day without knowing what you’re going to do, or where you’re going to go.
The fact that these activities are all open games, along with the fact that self takes them to be closed (or can only perceive the closed aspects to them), explains why most people are bores in conversation, unable to really listen, or really speak, clumsy suitors (without ‘game’), inept lovers, afraid of travel — real travel that is, actually living among foreign people — afraid doing anything radically new, afraid of real uncertainty, unable to sing, dance, draw, play a musical instrument, write or act very well, unable to make anything to a high standard, awkward, bored and lost in the wild, and terrified of death. It also explains why people get agitated when their routines are disrupted, an agitation that turns to irritation and then anger. Most people are existentially terrified of open games and play them badly, half-heartedly, or rearrange their environments so that only the closed aspects of them can prevail.
This further explains why so many people live and behave as they do, why they keep to the same topics in conversation (food, sport, news) and why, instead of participating in a real, open dialogue, they play the compulsive (closed) game of exchanging likes and dislikes; why they avoid love and love-making like the plague and promiscuously fuck around, or play it safe in homosexual relations, or live alone, or accept a closed sexless, friendship in lieu of an open lover; why they are addicted to pornography (including misery porn, outrage porn, nostalgia porn, sentiment porn, violence porn, cute-cute porn and magical spirit porn) and narcotics (including shopping, gossip, social media, holidays, work and the spectacle); why, despite moaning about specific technologies, they are dependent on, and refuse to criticise, the technological system as a whole (preferring to entertain themselves with conspiracy theories); why, despite complaints that their lives are boring, or that nothing ever happens, they stick to the same routines, the same fun, the same work, the same towns, the same friends and the same enemies; why they avoid creative pursuits and crafts unless, and only unless, they can approach them as closed games; and why they are all, every last one of them, obsessed with obsessed with the three foundational means by which man lives without ever having to confront what things are not; money, technology and the institution.
Money allows man to never have to face what things are not. You do not need to love, you do not need to expose your heart to your fellows, you do not need to be creative, or to face the day without knowing what it will bring. There is no need to risk loss in an open game because, with money, you can buy a closed life in which power (‘success’) is guaranteed. Not just, in the case of the very wealthy, power over everyone on earth; nor even, the common-or-garden power of the middle-class over their employees, clients, patients and working-class servants; but everyone in a money economy can buy a limited kind of power over his environment, with which there is no possibility (much less the necessity) of having a direct, open, relationship; you must buy, via goods and services, the means to make even trivial changes to your surroundings. Living in a money system means there is no need to face the open game of taking care of your street, or your house, or making your clothes, or growing your food, of entertaining yourself, or of caring for your fellows; for someone else is paid, predictably, to do these things for you.
Technology, likewise, gives man power over troubling situations in which he might have to face what things are not. Open games that involve using your body to walk, to make things, to take care of others and to change your world, all these games become either unnecessary or impossible to play in a system dominated by cars, factories, drugs and power tools. Technology provides a perfectly closed environment in which only learning, and cheating, can possibly provide results. This doesn’t just apply to specific tools, like AI, which circumvent the need to consciously perceive and creatively think about what things are not, but to the whole technological system, which alienates man from the open system of his own life, outsourcing it to the vast, interconnected machine of society, which provides him with everything, as a measurable output,2 provided he can play the closed game of thinking and behaving — working and playing — like a machine. Those who cannot, who insist on approaching their work and place as open games, are automatically disciplined and punished until they get their minds right.
The third foundational closed-game that sustains self and world, alongside money and technology, is the institution. As with technology and money, the institution allows man to ‘cleanly’ manage his environment, reducing it to a matrix of rational data points which can be — the goal of hyper-organised existence —measured, classified and controlled. The institution turns the various open games of human life — raising children, making things, learning, healing, socialising — into closed games, administered via the rules, roles and procedures that frame institutional structures. The institution rewards both those who are capable of perceiving reality through an institutional lens, as well as anything — any ‘innovation’, ‘improvement’, or ‘upgrade’ — which improves the institution’s visible, manageable, rational ‘metrics’. These in turn prioritise the same legible representations, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop which floats further and further away from a reality that the institution is incapable of perceiving, until that reality—raising children, making things, learning, healing, socialising — is a shattered, ruined shell dominated by organisations radiant with shining representations of coherence, confidence and value.
Note that, despite all this horror, there is nothing wrong with closed games per se. Ultimately, the technical ability required to play closed games is a crucial component of everything we do in the world. Without such capacity we are helpless. Babies. The point here is that the technical ability closed games demand of us is not just radically different from the creative power open games ask for, but subordinate to it, which is why, without open play, closed games all become, as life in our world more than amply testifies, a miserable, pointless, humiliating slog which can only ever satisfy — and then only a small number of people, and for a short space of time — never really fulfil.
We can clarify the distinction between satisfaction and fulfilment by their relation to means and ends. In the open game, every move is primarily, and in extreme cases exclusively, a fulfilling end in itself; while in the closed game, every move is primarily, and in extreme cases exclusively, a means to an end. Living one’s existence playing extremely closed games, engaging with the world exclusively through money, technology and institution, thus turns every relationship on earth into one between punter, who pays with his money, perceives through his screen and works through his organisation, and whore, a means by which man can buy his vegetables, get his extension built, have his teeth straightened, run his factory and be taken round the islands of Greece without the slightest obligation to continue the relationship — fortunately, as it is founded on degradation — or to perceive it in anything but instrumental terms.
To sum up, life — life on earth — is an open game, and living — living in the world — is a closed game. Most people, having no experience of life, see no difference between the two. They believe that low-grade art, loveless coupledom, pornography, living a predictable, habitual life in a system run on money and run by machines; that this is ‘life’. They say things like ‘life is hard’ and ‘life is boring’ and ‘life is meaningless’ and ‘that’s life’, but what they mean is not that the open game of life is hard, boring, meaningless and brutally unfair, but that the closed game of living is. With almost no experience of playing open games well they cannot imagine that there is a real alternative to the painful, miserable, pointless and rigged game they play from youth — when they are conditioned into believing that all they need to do is win at living, and then they’ll be happy — to old age, when they realise that it was all a lie, that either they never played the game of life, or they played it badly, and gave up before they began.
So how do you play the game of life well? Or — easier to grasp — how do you play the open games that comprise life? Let’s return to Saying What Things Are Not. How do you play that well?
If you’ve had a few goes, and followed my four tips, and if, even for a moment, you found you were doing it well, you would have realised, in your own experience, two things. Firstly, that you were enjoying it. It was pleasurable, entertaining, ‘fun’. Not the ‘fun’ of closed games, which is the fun of getting some thing that you were struggling to obtain — again, not that there’s anything wrong with getting things, but here the experience itself is the ‘thing’, which provides a totally different kind of pleasure to closed-game fun. You’re not fighting towards a goal, noble as that goal may be; you are the goal, and in being that, you find you are happy, delighted, more yourself, regardless of what happens, regardless of what, in this case, you are saying.
Secondly, you will also have found that, even though it doesn’t matter, and even though there is no such thing as winning, and even though there is nothing to get, strange, interesting and funny things were coming out of your mouth. The creativity that eluded you by trying to ‘be creative’, the success you could not find because you were trying to succeed, the thing you could not get because you were trying to get it, suddenly it is here, and not just in the odd verbal formations — jaggery, carpet cleaner, Carol Vorderman, buttered parsnips — but in the surprising tone, balanced halfway between effort and surprise, and the delightful (if sometimes tortured) timing.
There’s something else though, something subtler, that you may not have been fully conscious of, that explains how you managed, even if for a moment, to Say What Things Are Not well. When strange and interesting things come out of your mouth, without stress or effort, you — the normal ‘you’ that lives your life — is not in charge. The mouth opens, a sound emerges — from where, who knows? — and this sound suggests a word, which you then say. The mouth goes woo - and that leads to ‘wooden horse’ or ‘woman’s handbag’ or perhaps just ‘woof!’ You didn’t choose ‘woo’, nor the word which it brought into being. You were the vehicle by which something else spoke.
Something Else
We are now getting to the heart of the matter. What is this ‘something else’? First of all, it is not, in the ordinary sense of the word, imagined. The thinking self has not called something new into being, pulled up some oddity from its memory banks or made an unusual combination from known elements. Rather, it has read or recited what something else has presented or suggested, something which is real, or, at least, already there. The lips formed the first sound, and there, before the mind’s eye — or rather, the mind’s ear — is the whole word. Thus, the faculty that Saying What Things Are Not calls on, is not thinking, nor seeing, but, that rarest of all skills, listening.
Listening is the foundation of all improvised art forms — which, as we have seen, essentially means all art. The paradigmatic example is jamming. As Jaki Liebezeit, one of the greatest drummers the world has heard, reminded his fellow musicians, ‘It’s not important what you play. It’s important what you hear.’ Hearing tells you what to play, just as it tells you what to write and how to act, which is why second-rate musicians, writers and actors are such poor listeners. Even painters, great ones that is, do not, first of all, describe the fact, what something literally is in space (which a machine — a camera — can do), but what the fact is ‘saying’, what it is telling him to do, in order to realise the quality of his subject. This is why William Blake wrote that ‘he who does not know truth at sight is unworthy of her notice,’ because an artist, any artist, who cannot ‘hear’ what his eyes are telling him, in the moment it rises before his awareness, does not deserve to discover the fact later.
Thus, the ‘something else’ that speaks through us has a kind of integrity or unity to it. If you play Saying What Things Are Not for long enough3 you’ll discover to your astonishment that there is a certain wholeness, a certain narrative, a certain subtle structure that, although you may have made subtle adjustments here and there to bring it out, could not possibly have been dreamt up or organised by the thing you call ‘you’. Later, reviewing your creative work, you’ll be unable to understand how you did it at all — a common experience among all great artists.
But still, what is it? This ‘something else’. In those creative activities that most resemble Saying What Things Are Not — speaking, telling stories, writing poems, singing improvised songs and so forth, activities which human beings have engaged in since the dawn of humanity — this ‘something else’ has usually, or historically, gone by the name of ‘God’, although that word explains very little, given that, along with the forms and qualities it represents, what it means varies so widely. Indeed, where some cultures give it a name, like Ame-no-Uzume, Jahweh, Calliope or Veles, along with a personality, a history (or myth) and all manner of attributes, some other cultures refuse to give it a name at all, or a personality, and refer to it a kind of spirit, or divine breath (such as ‘Pepo’ of the African Mbuti, ‘Fufaka’ of the Amazonian Ufaina, or ‘Pon’ of the Siberian Yukaghir). Some cultures even divest it of all supernatural or personal attributes, using ‘qualitatively neutral’ terms to refer to it, like ālayavijñāna, or the tao, or, in our case, ‘the unconscious,’ which, like ‘God’, is really just a gesture towards mystery, amounting to little more than ‘I don’t know’.
For in all cases, nobody actually able to Say What Things Are Not has ever considered inspiration, creativity or genius to be something which comes from the knowable self. Just as only those who have never been in love can assert that ‘love’ is ultimately selfish (or a ‘chemical’ or an ‘illusion’, or an ‘emotion’), and just as those who have never really lived can confidently assert that ‘life’ is a tedious slog (or a sacred gift), so those who have never really been inspired can assert that the power to Say What Things Are Not comes from ‘me’, from the me that succeeds at Saying What Things Are, Were or Will Be.
This explains the uniformity of character among people who only play closed games (or debased open games), and why such people are always selfish. Not in the trivial sense of ‘having a big ego’, or of making insensitive choices, but in the more profound sense of being essentially unaware of anything beyond the self, unable to sense out the quality of other people, unable to feel the aura of things, unable to detect the atmosphere of the room, and unable to surrender to the radical uncertainty of the moment. Such people emit a certain knowingness, tightness, closedness, blankness or abstracted tension. They are holding onto themselves, trapped within the little room of their habitual thoughts and, like everyone who has lived in the same place for too long, unable to detect the bad smell they give off.
Such selves are only able to imagine what Things Are Not, which gives the character of their creativity a strained, artificial, predictable nature, the absence of quality that ‘talentless’ artists, writers and musicians, those who play the closed game of official recognition or market success, exhibit — although ‘talent’ is a misleading term, being that ‘played out’ artists, still fully possessed of their ‘talent,’ can also manifest total absence of the ‘negative’ genius they once had, forced instead to feed entirely on their former greatness (or on that of others).
I say ‘negative’ in honour of John Keats’ famous expression, ‘negative capacity’, which refers to the power of superior minds to abide in ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’ without reaching, reflexively, for a definite explanation. The reader may have noticed for herself how swiftly, how amazingly rapidly, people answer perplexing questions, or dispose of them; and not just explicit questions, but even vague gestures towards mystery. Ask someone to look at a lovely tree, or observe how peaceful it is today, or how good it is to have legs and, more often than not, you’ll get a swift, ‘oh yes, marvellous,’ and that will be an end of it. Resting in the quality, or the mystery, is perceived as a threat.
The reader may also have noticed how rare it is for other people to perceive what things — such as the thing called ‘you’ — are not. They’ll notice your positive qualities, all the definable things about you, but what you don’t say, what you don’t do, or what quality there is to you that doesn’t reach definition simply doesn’t occur to them. Not through want of imagination, but through lack of conscious awareness, which prevents them from noticing, much less rejoicing in, what you or anything else in their experience does not present to their minds. Any art form which expresses such negative quality has no chance.
We also note in social situations the jarring tactlessness of the man or woman who is unable to see or say what is not. These tiresome bunglers inevitably bring their distinct, definable personalities to bear on the group, their subjective individuality and specialness, or their objective weight, their money, their fame,4 their accomplishments and whatnot. Such people relate all this to what they can understand of those around them, through the visible, legible attributes of their fellows, and what they hope to get, through argument perhaps, or through trying to get at the truth, or through confession. How we groan under all this weight, how the openness we seek together suffocates in such closed off rooms, how the end-in-itself of our sociability is strangled by the tedious fool who insists on submitting it to all the means they muster to shine, or survive, in it.
Thus, What Things Are Not, turns out to be What Things Really Are, as opposed to What Things Merely Are, which is not seen or heard, but seen or heard through. Then imagination can serve the extraordinary and delightful truth, rather than the ordinary objective fact or the tedious subjective whim. But this brings us to another barrier that stands between you and Something Else, that prevents you from Saying What Things Are Not (or what they Really Are), something which my four tips did not touch and which, consequently, may have stymied your best efforts at playing this open game — like so many others — well. I am of course referring to the biggest spoiler of all, emotion.
You will have noticed that is that it is next to impossible to speak well when you are distracted, over-excited, bored, anxious, depressed, desperate, afraid or otherwise emotionally distanced from the moment. Certainly you can — and in the end you must — step past the beast of emotion, and ignore its growls, but it is fiendishly difficult. Its voice, telling you that you don’t feel like playing, that it’s too difficult, that you’d rather be doing something you know how to do, is, compared to the whisper of something else, a deafening shout. What’s more — more troubling — is that its voice appears to be your voice.
This, the weight of self, is the greatest barrier to playing open games well, the enormous pressure of feeling that you have to do well. When asked to Say What Things Are Not, the first emotion that rises is fear; fear that you have to be imaginative, that you have to find the right answer, that you have to do well. Teachers the world over cripple their students with this appalling, inhuman burden.5 You have to paint the picture, you have to write the poem, you have to sing, you have to dance, you have to live; and if you cannot? Well then you are a failure. For what else is there, in your mind, that you can possibly rely on? God? Well that might be a nice idea, but we don’t actually want God in the classroom thank you very much. He’s not a good boy.
This morbid emphasis on the person of the student doesn’t just prevent children from enjoying the arts, but, in blocking up the source and spring of creativity, it also deprives them of their language, and, through their language, their culture, their society and even their own minds. We would instantly recognise the absurdity of trying to learn ballet in a classroom, or football through books, or music by studying scores, yet children are asked to seek meaning in the classroom, book and score of their own abstract selves. Schools do not create environments in which students can discover what they think through selfless, social speech, but turn nature on its head and force children to look for their tongues in the clouds, which is why they search the heavens when teacher calls their names out. Speech, as Karl Kraus noted, is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought — and therefore of culture. It is only through speech that we create and participate in living culture. A world in which children are compelled to look for themselves in their minds is thus one in which a society of prisoners sit silently in their cells or scream inarticulately through the bars.
Weighing children down with the intolerable burden of their own selves goes hand in hand with curtailing all forms of open play for them. The existential threat of freedom, justified on grounds of expediency, or as consideration for their safety, has all but annihilated the possibility of free play for children, who, even when they are not being policed by adults, herded into safe compounds, or compelled to play highly-structured closed games — such as sports and video games — are too agitated to know what to do with unstructured time, much less to actually take sudden left turns into unknown territory. Children are taught, from moment one, that unpredictable behaviour, the foundation of open play, is only ever permitted when it does not matter.
The world has no interest in freeing children of fear, or freeing anyone of any of the emotions consequent to it. Yes, too much emotion disturbs the smooth running of What Things Are, What They Were and What They Will Be, which is why the world both creates and honours ‘autists,’ and why it swiftly disposes of emotional wrecks; but it is not only possible to play closed games while under the influence of emotion, it is necessary. Emotion cuts off access to the unpredictable, which is why uncertainty makes people emotional, and why the world insists on constantly stimulating fear and desire. You must be in a state of perpetual outrage, craving, anxiety and dread, lest you tumble into a place that gives the world nothing; a place which has another name, besides God, Calliope and the Unconscious: Death.
Closed games can give you victory over everything but death. You can cheat everything and everyone in this world, but death. Money and technology buy power over everything, but death. Fear of open games is, ultimately, fear of death, the most open game of all, which no technique can outwit, no preparation can anticipate, no habit can tame, no training can ready you for, and no bank account, no matter how large, can forestall. You can’t buy your way out of death, you can’t fake your way through it, and you can’t learn how to face it. Death is the end of self-improvement. To face death is to face what Everything is Not. Your imagination cannot help you, your emotions just get in the way, as do your possessions, your knowledge and, unless you are very lucky, your friends, lovers and well-meaning relatives. The starkness of death is appalling, but not so appalling as that which confronts it; you!
The reason death is so horrifying — if you face it full on, that is — is because, when the time comes, when you die, you realise — and not as an idea, but as your actual experience — that you are closed, not just now, but in every now you’ve faced, closed off to the reality of life.
And the reason that death is so liberating — if you face it full on, that is — is because, when the time comes, when you are actually dying, you realise — not as an idea, but as reality itself — that you are open, not just now, but in every now you’ve ever faced openly.
Including this one.
Further Reading
A misnomer, but snappier than the more technically correct ‘Saying What The Thing Before Was’.
Not just his physical needs — his shelter, his food and so on — but all his psychological desires. To pick one example, man desires, in lieu of the power that mastery of open games gives him, the force which technology provides. He can build up his muscles with drugs, he can drive around in a large, powerful car and he can fill the air with his amplified noise — or, if he has a more refined nature, he can extend his dominion through the internet, build there an elegantly-designed citadel of efficiency and farm the energy of a million gig and factory workers (while assuaging his guilt with homegrown tomatoes, bicycles and learning the violin). In both cases, technology gives him what he fears to acquire through an open life.
Or rather, if you go beyond this game into ‘long-form improv’, creating scenes and even plays from nothing.
This is one of the most horrible afflictions of fame, that nobody can ignore its objective value when within a social setting. Free-flow of conversation becomes extremely difficult when a Famous Person is in the room.
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God.
Keith Johnstone, Impro