[ these notes are taken from the theories presented by James P. Carse in his book 'Finite and Infinite Games' and are hereby to be associated with the literature of the TAZ and Immediatism, by Hakim Bey earlier appended ]

I’ve canonized Carse and his teachings, for the sake of playful irony, which I’m certain won’t be lost on the author when he inevitably finds his way here and laughs his head off.

Carse’s own words are incomplete and demand our participation as infinite players. You really haven’t gotten the idea of Immediatism and Infinite Play at all if you don’t dive in and talk about this stuff.

As an incentive, and perhaps a form of ‘prize’, if you comment and refer to the verse you’re talking about and I can take your thoughts and paste them into the core document, provided they’re as insightful as the rest of what’s here.

Rules

(1:1) A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play.

(2:1) It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play. (6) Otherwise, Infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.

(3:1) Finite games have temporal boundaries, a precise beginning and end, as well as spacial and numerical boundaries. Persons are selected for finite play. We cannot play alone. In evey case, we must find an opponent.

(4:1). The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest, its people finely classified as to their eligibilities.

(5:1) There are many games we enter not expecting to win, but in which we nonetheless compete for highest possible ranking.

(6:1) There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. The time of an infinite world is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.

(8:1) It is by knowing what the rules are that we know what the finite game is. The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.

(9:1) The rules of a finite game must be pusblished prior to play and the players must agree to them before play begins. The agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules.

(9:1) There are no rules that require us to obey rules. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.

(10:1) Finite rules may not change during the course of finite play — else a different game is being played.

(10:2) The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game, and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. They are like the grammar of a living language always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse.

(11:1) Infinite rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play — such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material rsources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.

(11:2) Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

(12:1) Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. Oppressors acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed. No one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. THerefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

(13:1) We can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves. Self-veiling is present in all finite games. Some persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make their performance believable even to themselves. But we have always freely choen to face the world through a mask.

“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre)

(14:1) We are playful when we engage others at the level of chouce, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out. We are playful with each other when we relate as free persons.

(14:2) Everything that happens is of consequence.

(15:1) Finite play is theatrical. Infinite play is dramatic.

(16:1) It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning.

(17:1) To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

Winning

(18:1) What one wins in a finite game is a title.

(20:1) A finite game must always be won with a final move within the boundaries of the game that establishes the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal move results in the death of the opposing player as player.

(21:1) There are games in which the stakes do seem to be life and death.

(23:1) Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play. Infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. They do not play for their own life; they live for their own play.

(24:1) The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

Titles and Names

(25:1) Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning. When a person is known only by name we open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. It opens up our future.

(26:1) Titles point backward in time.

(27:1) The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition and to conform to their will. My power is determned by the amount of resistance I can displace within given spatial and temporal limits. The establishment of the limits makes it possible to know ho powerful I am in relation to others. Power is bestowed by an audience.

(28:1) If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as losers. To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power.

Power and Strength

(29:1) Power is a feature only of finite games. Infinite players look forward toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpreation. Where the finite player plays to be powerful, the infinite player plays with strength.

(29:2) Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

Evil

(30:1) Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence. Unheard silence is not the loss of the player’s voice, but the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reasons of their deafness or ignorance. There are silences that will never and can never be heard. There is much evil that remains beyond redemption.

(31:1) Evil is never intended as evil. All evil originates in the desire to eliminate evil. Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

(31:2)Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They do not attempt to eliminate evil in others. Evil is the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.

Freedom

(32:1) No one can play a game alone. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. We cannot relate to anyone who is not relating to us. Our social existence has an inescapably fluid character.

(32:2) Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.

(33:1) Infinite players are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place boundaries around our finite play.

Society

(33:2) Society is the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture is whatever we do with each other by undirected choice. Society remains entirely within our free choice in quite the same way that finite competition does, however strenuous or costly to the player, it never prevents the player from walking off the field of play.

(33:3)Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society.

(34:1) Society is a single finite game that includes any number of smaller games within its boundaries. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society.

(34:2)The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remmains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.

(35:1) Society has an established script. Deviations from the script are evident at once. Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions. Deviancy threatens entitlement.

Culture

(35:2) Culture is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture — anywhere and at any time. Living in the strength of their vision, infinite players eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.

(35:3) Deviancy is the very essence of culture. Great significance attaches to those variations that allow the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been — and therefore of all that we are. Culture resounds with the laughter of unexpected possibility.

Property

(36:1) One of the most effective means of self-persuasion and veiling available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all.

(36:2) The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. Titles are timeless, and so is the ownership of property.

(37:1) When we ask precisely how a society will go about preserving its citizens’ property, we can expect the reply that it will do so by the use of force.

(37:2) There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners. No force will establish this agreement.

(37:3) Only by free self-concealment can persons believe they obey the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it. The laws protecting their property will be effective only when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws. Property is theatrical.

(38:1) Property owners must be at considerable labor to sustain this structure.

(40:1) It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as performed.

Poetry

(41:1) Societies depend on their artists. If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.

(42:1) While societal thinkers may not overlook the importance of poesis (the storytellers, innovators, original thinkers, artists), or creative activity, neither may they underestimate its danger, for the poietai are the ones most likely to remember what has been forgotten.

(42:2) Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be supressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to braise the society’s heroes.

(42:3) Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it. In this sense, museams are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

(43:1) Culture is likely to break out in a society not when its poietai begin to voice a line contrary to that of the society, but when they begin to ignore all lines whatsoever and concern themselves with bringing the audience back into play — not competitive play, but play that affirms itself as play.

(43:2) Art used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.

(44:3) Art is never possession but always possibility. Nothing possessed can have the status of art. If art cannot become property, property is never art — as property. Property draws attention to titles, points backward toward a finished time. Art is dramatic opening always forward, beginning something that cannot be finished.

(44:4) One must be surprised by art.

(44:5) We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.

(44:6) Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for a surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

(44:7) Poets do not ‘fit’ because they do not take their ‘places’ seriously.

(45:1) A society is defined by its boundaries. A culture is defined by its horizon. A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted.

(45:2) A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. What limits vision is the incompleteness of that vision. One never reaches a horizon. Its location is always relative to the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon.

(45:3) To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number. Who lives horizonally is never somewhere, but always in passage.

(45:4) Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities. It is an effort to find visions that promised still more vision.

(46:5) Culture is not restricted by time and space.

(47:1) Culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other. A culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. A culture iss sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries. But it is a straetgy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.

War

(47:2) The manipulation of the government, the laws, the enforcement functions of a state either by persons within the society (through usupation or abuse of power) or by persons without (in other states) cannot in itself effect the decision of a people to be a people.

(47:3) A people, as a people, has nothing to defend, and nothing to attack. One cannot be free by opposing another. A people has no enemies.

(48:1) For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.

(48:2) Infinite players, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war ONLY without killing a single power.

(48:3) The strategy of infinite players is not to go meet enemies with power and violence, but with poiesis and vision. They do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision and surprise to engage the state and put its boundaries back into play. What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision and not what we are viewing that is limited.

(49:1) Poets can make it impossible to have a war — unless they tell stories that agree with the ‘general line’ established by the state. Poets who have no political line make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardiance that what seems necessary is only possible.

(49:2) A finite player believes those who are being led to reason cannot be aware of it. They must be led to it without choosing it. Their poets do not create, but deceive. True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets — that is, creators of all sorts — seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

Genius

(51 - entire)

I am the genius (generator, original source, creator) of myself, the poietes (Poiesis = creative activity. Poietes (pl. poietai) = creator ) who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels.

When I speak as the genius I am, I speak these words for the first time. To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in which case I am not saying them. To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of my words, to say them for the first, and last, time. Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.

When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.

Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play: You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. The words die with the sound. Spoken to me, your words become mine to do with as I please. As the genius of your words, you lose all authority over them. So too with thoughts. However you consider them your own, you cannot think the thoughts themselves, but only what they are about. You cannot think thoughts any more than you can act actions. If you do not truly speak the words that reside entirely in their own sound, neither can you think that which remains thought or can be translated back into thought. In thinking you cast thoughts beyond themselves, surrendering them to that which they cannot be.

The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear. Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relinquished to the other.

That does not mean that speech has come to nothing. On the contrary it has become speech that invites speech. When the genius of speech is abandoned, words are said not originally but repetitively. To repeat words, even our own, is to contain them in their own sound. Veiled speech is that spoken as though we have forgotten we are its originators.

To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision. It is a field of vision, however, that is recognized as a field of vision only when we see that it includes within itself the original centers of other fields of vision.

This does not mean that I can see what you see. On the contrary, it is because I cannot see what you see that I can see at all. The discovery that you are the unrepeatable center of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I am the center of my own.

(53:1) To be the genius of myself is not to bring myself into being. As the origin of myself I am not also the cause of myself, as though I were the product of my own action. But then neither am I the product of any other action. My birth and death are arbitrary points in an unbroken process.

(53:2)The genius in us knows the past is forever open to creative reinterpretation.

(54:1) Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are visible to others, there is a kind of anti-title that attaches to invisibility. To the degree that we are invisible we have a past that has condemned us to oblivion. It is as though we have somehow been over-looked, even forgotten, by our chosen audience. If it is the winners who are presently visible, it is the losers who are invisibly past.

(54:2) Unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.

(54:3) Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising what Nietzsche called the “faculty of oblivion,” not as a way of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgotten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten our freedom to play.

Looking and Seeing

(52:1) To look at something is to look at it within its limitations. I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other things. But things do not have their own limitations. Nothing limits itself.

(52:2) Targets of attention are not distinct from the environment, they are the environment. “Nature has no outline. Imagination has.” (Blake)

(52:3) If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Seeing does not disturb our looking at all. It places us in that territory as its genius, aware that our imagination does not create within its outlines but creates the outlines themselves. We learn to see the way we use limitations.

Touching

(55:1) There will be persons in whose presence we learn to prepare ourselves for surprise. It is in the presence of such persons that we first recognize ourselves as the geniuses we are.

(55:1) Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by another when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center — that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within — and whoever touches me is touched as well.

(56:1) The character of touching can be seen quite clearly in the way infinite players understand both healing and sexuality.

(56:2) If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also to respond as a whole person. To be whole is to be hale, or healthy. In sum, whoever is touched is healed. Healing restores me to play. When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised.

Finite Sexuality

(57:1) Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch. One cannot touch without touching sexually. Because sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression to the genius you are and to the genius of others who participate in that drama.

(57:2) Genuine sexual expression is at least as dangerous to society as genuine artistic expression.

(57:3) Sexual rebels, violators of the sexual taboos, do not weaken political and religious ideology but affirm it as the rules of finite play. It is convenient to think that sexual misfits violate the rules. The matter is subtler by far. Pornography is exciting only so far as it reveals something forbidden, something otherwise unseeable. Thus the mandatory hostility in it, the quality of shock and violence.

(57:4) Because sexuality is so rich in the mystery of origin, it becomes a region of human action deeply shaped by resentment, where participants play out a manifold strategy of hostile encounters. The players in finite sexuality not only require the offended resistance of those who refuse to join them in their play, they require the resistance of those who join them in their play.

(57:5) This is the plot of the classic pulp novel and of Hollywood romance: indifference girl won by ardent boy.

(57:6) The profound seriousness of such sexual play is seen in the unique nature of the prize that goes to the winner. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent. The seduced opponent is so displayed as to draw public attention to the seducer’s triumph. A double game can be played in which each is winner and loser, each an emblem for the other’s seductive power. Finite sexuality is a form of theater in whcih the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other.

(58:1) Society plays little or no role in either causing or preventing sexual tensions. On the contrary, society absorbs sexual tensions into all of its structures.

(58:2) The only true revolutionary act is not the overthrow of the father by the son — which only reinforces the existing patterns of resentment — but the restoration of genius to sexuality.

(59:1) Veiled/finite sexuality is oriented toward moments, outcomes, final scenes. It proceeds largely by deception, like all finite play. Sexual desires are usually not directly announced but concealed under a series of feints, gestures, styles of dress and showy behavior. Seductions are staged, scripted, costumed. In skillful seductions delays are employed, special circumstances and settings are arranged. Seductions are designed to ome to an end. Time runes out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition.

Infinite Sexuality

(60:1) Infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one’s own boundaries of play. Infinite players reocnigze choice in all aspects of sexuality. One can never say therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful — because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, but with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision.

(60:2) In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be a part of the play.

(61:1) There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play.

(62:1) Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no “private parts.” They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others

(62:2) The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching.

(62:3) The sexual engagement is a poiesis of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons they are. In doing so they expect to be transformed — and are transformed.

Worlds

(63:1) A finite game occurs within a world. The fact that it must be limited temporally, numerically and spatially means that there is something against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite game.

(64:1) Worlds exist in the form of audience. An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it. No one determines who an audience will be. No exercise of power can make a world. A world must be its own spontaenous source. The number of persons who join an audience is irrelevant. So is the time and space in which an audience occurs.

(64:2) When and where a world occurs, and whom it includes, is of no importance.

(64:3) We are players in search of a world as often as we are world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but no world lasts forever. (emphasis: Temporary Autonomous Zone)

(65:1) There is an indefinite number of worlds.

(66:1) I cannot be a finite player without being divided against myself.

(66:2)When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players. Each side of the conflict comes with its own partisan observers.

(66:3) We cannot become a world without being divided against ourselves.

Time

(67:1) For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free. The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player buts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

(68:1) The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic its time is time lived and not time viewed. As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.

(68:2) A moment is a beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. THere can be no such thing as an hour of time for the infinite player. THere can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.

(68:3) An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player’s way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of a moving toward a future which itself has a future.

(68:4)Infinite players cannot say how much time they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it. They are not concerned to determine when it is over, but only what comes of it.

Play

(69:1) Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiame, an object, of it. If the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but the possibility ahead of them.

(69:2) The essence of infinite play is the paradoxical engagement with temporality: “eternal birth.”

Nature

(70:1) Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” (Bacon)

(70:2) If nature does have a voice, then its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.

(71:1) By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker.

(71:2) To be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside from the process and comment on it “objectively” and “dispassionately,” without anything obstructing our view of these matters.

(71:3) There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it.

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” (Heisenberg)

Silence

(72:1) We are speaking now of no ordinary ignorance. It is not what we could have known but do not; it is unintelligibility itself: that which no mind can ever comprehend. Unveiled, aware of the insuperable limitation placed against all our looking, we come back to nature’s perfect silence. Now we can see that it is a silence so complete there is no way of knowing what it is silent about — if anything. What we learn from this silence is the unlikeness between nature and whatever we could think or say about it.

(72:2) Far from stupefying us, it provides an indispensible condition to the mind’s own originality.

(72:3) At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about.

(72:4) The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

(72:5) Our attempt to take control of nature, to be Master Player in our opposition to it, is an attempt to rid ourselves of language. It is the refusal to accept nature as “nature.” It is to deafen ourselves to metaphor, and to make nature into something so familiar it is essentially an extension of our willing and speaking.

(72:6) To kill is to impose a silence that remains a silence.

(73:1) No one can look in on an age without looking out of an age. There is no refuge outside history for such viewers any more than there is vantage outside nature.

(73:2) The mode of discourse appropriate to such self-aware history is not explanation, but narrative. Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible.

(73:3) Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inequiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

(73:4) If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

Explanation and Knowledge

(74:1) I can explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to patent inadequacies in your knowledge: discontinuities in the relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you cannot account for by any of the laws known to you. You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.

(74:2) Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant herarers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your own error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found in other finite play.

(74:3) I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think I do.

(74:4) Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to.

(74:5) Knowledge therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. It must stand in their way. It must be emlematic, pointing backward at its possessor’s competitive skill.

(74:6) So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous.

(75:1) Explanation must be oblivious to the silence of nature and in its success must impose silence on its listeners. Imposed silence is the first consequence of the Master Player’s triumph. The silence to which the losers pledge themselves is the silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say; nor have they an audience who would listen.

(75:2) The speech of a god can be so perfectly expressive of that god’s power that the god and its speech become identical. One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters to others what one has to say. To lose a contest is to become obedient; to become obedient is to lose one’s listeners. The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.

Infinite Speech

(76:1) Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefoer not about anything; it is always to someone.

(76:2) It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one’s vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.

(76:3) Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.

(77:1) Because it is address, attending always on the response of the addressed, infinite speech as the form of listening. Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which spech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.

(77:2) Infinite speakers present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Infinite speech forms a world about the other, for the sake of listening.

(77:3) A god can create a world only by listening.

(77:4) Where the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.

Storytelling

(78:1) Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed.

(78:2) The stories infinite players tell touch us. In their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly take the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

(78:3) Fate arises not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent.

(78:4) Great stories explore the drama of this deeper touching of one free person by another. They are therefore genuinely sexual dramas asounding us once more with the magic of origins.

(79:1) There is a risk here of supposing that because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also know what that narrative is. If I were to know the full story of my life I would then have translated it back into explanation.

(79:2) True storytellers do not know their own story. What they listen to in their poiesis is the disclosure that wherever there is closure there is the possibility of a new opening, that they do not die at the end, but in the course of play. Neither do they know anyone else’s story in its entirety.

(79:3) No one’s life, and no culture, can be known, as one would know a poeima, an object, but only learned, as one would learn poetry, a poiesis.

Nature (Part 2)

(81:1) A garden is grown by an energy which originates from within itself. No machine has been made, nor can one be made, that has the source of its spontaneity within itself.

(82:1) Just as nature has no outside, it has no inside. It is not divided within itself and cannot therefore be used for or against itself. There is no inherent opposition of the living and the nonliving within nature; neither is more or less natural than the other.

(82:2) We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given pattenrs of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.

(82:3) Nature’s source of movement is always from within itself; indeed it is itself.

(82:4) Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature — the degree to which nature’s indifference spontaneity seem to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control.

(83:5) The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

(83:6) Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.

(83:7) The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces.

(87:1) Indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden.

(87:2) Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

The Source

(88:1) Genuine travel has no destination.

(88:2) All travel is therefore change within the traveler, and it is for that reason that travelers are always somewhere else. To travel is to grow.

(88:3) Genuine travelers do not travel to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, btu travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them.

(88:4) A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences. They dramatically open themselves to a renewed future. So, too, with those who look everywhere for difference, who see the earth as source, who celebrate the genius in others, who are not prepared against but for surprise.

(92:1) We see nature as genius when we see as genius.

(92:2) We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source.

(93:1) The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. God did breathe life into us, but in order to continue living we had to do our own breathing.

(93:2) The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.

(93:3) We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius.

Myth

(94:1) Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.

(94:2) Explanations establish islands, even continents, of order and predictability. But these regions were first charted by adventurers whose lives are narratives of exploration and risk. They found them only by mythic journeys into the wayless open.

(94:3) Knowledge is what successful explanation has led to; the thinking that sent us forth, however, is pure story.

(94:4) A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

(95:1) Stories that have the enduring strength of myths reach through experience to touch the genius in each of us. But experience is the result of this generative touch, not its cause.

(95:2) If we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.

(95:3) As myths make individual experience possible, they also make collective experience possible. Whole civilizations rise from stories — and can rise from nothing else.

(96:1) A myths are told, they come to us already richly resonant. Their strength as stories lies in their ability to invite us into the drama. It is a drama that contains an entire history of voices, sounding and resounding from a thousand sources in our culture. For this reason myths are significantly unresolved — but unresolved in a the way of an infinite game, having rules, or narrative structure, that allow any number of participants at any time to enter the drama without fixing its plot or bringing it to a closure in a final scene.

(97:1) Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an author.

(97:2) Myth is the highest form of our listening to each other, of offering a silence that makes speech of the other possible. This is why listening is far more valued by religion than speaking. Faith comes by listening.

(98:1) Magesterial speech is amplified speech; it is speech that silences. Loudspeaking is a mode of command, and therefore a speech designed to bring itself to an end as completely and swiftly as possible. The amplified voice seeks obedient action on the part of its hearers and an immediate end to their speech. There is no possibility of conversation with a loudspeaker.

(99:1) The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere noise.

(99:2) The myth of the Buddha’s enlightenment has the smae paradox in it, the same provocation to explanation but with as little possibility of settling the matter. It is the story of a mere mortal, completely without divine aid, undertaking successfully a spiritual quest for release from all forms of bondage, including the need to report this release to others. The perfect unspeakability of this event has given rise to an immense flow of literature in scores of languages that shows no signs of abating.

(99:3) [The infinite player is] a god who listens by becoming one of us. A god ‘emptied’ of divinity, who gave up all privilege of commanding speech and ‘dwelt among us’ coming ‘not to be served, but to serve,’ ‘being all things to all persons.’

(99:4) They no doubt preferred a god of magisterial utterance, a theatrical likeness of their own finite designs. They did not expect an infinite listener who joyously took their unlikeness on himself, giving them their own voice through the silence of wonder, a healing and holy metaphor that leaves everything still to be said.

(100:1) No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone needs to hear.

(100:2) Who listens to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths about it.

(100:3) It is not necessary for infinite players to BE something. Titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter. Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.

(101:1) There is but one infinite game.