seconds: note six point sevenfive

6 and 3quarters

In the course of what I lightly call writing my book some amusing playful resistant twists occur. I was writing about repetition as a method of being playful. The first draft got deleted by mistake. I slightly unnerved. The second draft seemed to miss the point. So did the third. I noticed that the playfulness entered through slight variations that occurred when I repeated something. I had done that in writing the chapter over and over again.

I stopped on the point and stacked rocks on the old fishing pier pilings. I liked how a few rocks could form a stone cap. A series of stone caps were conversing with each other; they observed the waves and the coming and going of the tidal water. I played. There are still some pieces of metal from a previous game I played of metal placing. Along the route home I collected a few beer cans as a civic duty and ended up spilling some liquid on my bag and sweater. Played washing bags and rags to get rid of the smell, though back in the yard I discovered a neighbor had dropped off a shredder from the hospice thrift shop across the border. I was very confused, and thought someone else had brought it, as it was already in my kitchen, when I met him at the door. I came from the back yard and had just moments before been at the kitchen door myself, as apparently had he. He insisted he had bought it for me, as I had asked him. What also confused me was that I had asked him if he had one. And he said he hadn’t.


Play doesn’t happen as an imagined activity; it is happening all the time as it unfolds. It is the work of my eye and my hands, stacking or weaving or placing something in relation to something else. And my goal without doubt is to save the planet bit by bit by recycling everything we throw away, turning it into something that is reexamined, recycled into something that amuses, until it can be reused for something else.

seconds: note six

From within comes resistance to being told anything. Two paths cross. “No, I won’t.” and “No, no, no.” How odd to write this and sense the familiarity with how a friend reacted to an exercise I suggested in a previous draft. Here it is, her response coming at me from within. I know this stance. It isn’t playful, but can be played with. I see so many of us still as youngsters pouting and all but stamping our feet, saying I won’t play with you. What I am not saying is that you are hurting my feelings.

The first path has to do with presentation of a request. I have to slip it by my judging mind. See if in some way you would like to do this sometime. When it fits somewhere in your plans or your activities, try it. Feelings are hurt, but then there’s not wanting to miss the out.

The second path is like running up against a solid wall of opposition. I will not and never will. In this position something has to dissolve and be transformed. The entire play universe recreates itself. To do this I imagine throwing myself down on the floor as if to tantrum. I do just that, on the carpet. It seems melodramatic and surprisingly a little fun. I end up looking at the dust and cobwebs under the bed. I play dead. After I play dead a partially reconstructed universe forms.

Right now, between reading in several books and jotting down these thoughts, I give up, and play dead. It might last a while. I can sense the resistance to the project of living my life and am curious to discover any path of return to engage my playful nature.

Even the tone of my writing voice seems distant and disengaged. Am I lecturing myself? Some separation settles in and that calls forth the tantrum.

This is the very nature of it. I am not remembering a time like this. I am experiencing it right now. And in a way I am resisting it even in describing it.

This is when the event jumps up from the page and takes over and shuts the reflection down. Hey, I’m really not playing. I am not. You can observe all you want, the transformation won’t occur, the playground is closed, period. Go take a nap.

seconds: note five

I HOPE this is working… Ahh, self-doubt, now there is something to play with.

I WAKE at five and get up. I write in my journal until half past and link small sharks to eavesdropping. I am looking for a playful approach in and out of self-doubting. Is dissatisfaction a component of self-doubt? Or is self doubt some creeping dissatisfaction?

I WRITE with the (desntist’s) dentist’s office pen. The pharmaceutical company’s pen ran out of ink yesterday, it had covered many pages and possibly several months, scrawling on both (dies0 sides of a continent. I sometimes think of pens as having greater meaning than convenient writing implements. The pen being mightier than the sword, we hope; it is a souvenir of the time spent writing. It bears no responsibility for the content, but with a little rummaging, it can be drawn into the story. It came from somewhere. It had placement value as someone in the advertising world says. With the question of big pharma’s influence on the prescribing practices of physicians, it has weight. That pen had a nice weight that made it a good writing companion. In some ways the writing was spoken, the pen standing in for a listener. It never speaks, but takes note. It might make an odd mark under my influence. And it can refuse to go on, as it did yesterday, running out of ink amid a flurry of discomfort. It can be almost like a little receiver. And then as I write on the computer, I am writing to whom through what? The keyboard is some modified souvenir pen.

SO WHERE are the small sharks? They are in the water swimming around unseen and not threatening the swimmers on the surface. The small sharks were with an expansive school of small fish. I can see turmoil, fish swimming deep below. And can we hear the sharks evoking fear? Are they pens or swords? And even if I can’t eavesdrop on them, I can eavesdrop on conversations about them. I can learn day by day that it wasn’t Jeff who saw them, nor was it Arthur, but Tuko. She swam earlier. She’s more elusive. Her placement on the beach requires intentional tracking. She’s also an artist and a neighbor. Ah, artist is where the doubt dwells. Call yourself an artist and the pen stops writing. What did you say? The whole conversation pivots. If several were eavesdropping the room gets silent. Perhaps she will converse with me about small sharks, or about sharks and eavesdropping or about something entirely different that will lead my creative thread to some satisfactory pass toward further creative constructions.

SO WHAT about writing earlier in the morning like this? Will that allow me to have my say about something that interests me that I can carry around during the day and bring out as I meet people at the beach? Here, this is what I’ve been thinking about. What have you been thinking about? It isn’t for everyone. Some people will feel silenced by the perceived complexity of my thoughts. I am prone to scatter. I am also prone to collecting those pieces. Is it complicated? Mostly like an overheard conversation, it is banal. Misheard conversations might be an angle to pursue.

AND HERE are the first birds, I wondered for several weeks how early the birds start. They splice their voices into the frog medley. If they ate the frogs they could be the small sharks among the school of fish. It is at least a quarter hour before sunrise when they start. It is the cardinals first and then will come the doves. I guess I have been awake several mornings. Ask me later and I might not be so sure. Hear the doves? Doves

seconds: note four and a half

While driving across country this spring I initially stopped at every, and then when that was too frequent, every other rest stop. Somewhere in Minnesota stopping put me on the shore of a lake in the Mississippi river where muscles grew prolifically. It became the center of the shell button industry, which subsequently vanished when the shells were over-harvested and buttons could be made of other materials. Do these old buttons have something to do with that experience?

I found an old red World War II ration token in the bunch of buttons, and a scissor sharpener, and an old hem stripper.

Two summers ago driving across the country and wanting to make a souvenir of my trip, I stopped in Zanesville, Ohio. Outside of town I met a guy selling tokens of lots of things, including UPA blue and red ration tokens like this one I found in the button tin. I hadn’t seen them before and had asked what they were. I bought a few other things with local significance. Now another one of these tokens appears in a mess of buttons. Would I have known what it was or taken the time to find out? Why does that matter? I don’t know yet. It has an evocative power that informs a stubborn attachment to matter.


The truth is that I still don’t know what the button collection is about: the old buttons with their threads still attached and their discoloration and their shades of off-white. Someone over time buttoned those buttons into buttonholes. And unbuttoned them and lived and played and laughed and cried, and most of them came from shells and maybe one of them came from a lake formed in the Mississippi river in Minnesota, part of an industry that formed and developed and disappeared. A trace remains on a sign in a rest stop parking lot. I like knowing about this


I am drawn to write this text on a surface; perhaps, the interior of a container of buttons.

seconds: note four

Play seems to depend on open unstructured time. I can’t say I am going to play for a set amount of time. Usually I just go out to play without a clear idea of where I am going or what I am going to do. I need some kind of extra time to fit the next piece into the puzzle. When I sat in the corner chair and my mother proposed activities, I rejected them. Then after a while I got up and left to go do something. Mom brought me to a threshold. Thinking about it now, the sound of her voice and her presence may have been what I needed.

Thinking isn’t what is going on in the interim; I’ll tentatively call it rearranging.

Regard it as a stance of the inner mind that is sensitive to a myriad of possibilities and doesn’t arrive at a decision by making them, in the sense that we are trained to think.

(I don’t really know what I am going to do. This is some other way way of knowing; it is not exactly making a decision. When I am attuned to it, in my play (worrls) world, the flow of ideas and the impulses to complete actions happen like riding a wave. You get on one and then ride it and it takes you some (whenre) where where you ride the next wave.)

If you want to be open to what comes next, you have to get out of the way, and you have to stop proposing choices based on a list of likely scenarios. Maybe the improbable is about to occur. You can propose, and I do sometimes, but it doesn’t seem playful. Be sensitive to which activity opens a space. Then let wonder and some other sense of order take over. This can sound passive to an activity-minded individual, though I experience a swirl of activity unfolding. This part of the universe is anything but passive. We are the activity, even, if it is hours yesterday sorting old buttons.

With those buttons is it their age that catches my attention? Is it their history as a form of value? For me they evoke game tokens. Does everyone have an image of a button jar or box?

seconds: note three point three three three

WHERE did I write, “I’m backwards. I’m backwards.” The speaker was the youngest Burnstyn child. Mom would know his name. Did I like the sound of his delight or was it being told the story that framed my attention and the adults laughing? had he been playing like this before we came? He was in the driveway of their new house. It was my first visit and I was not yet seven.
I want to use that for an explanation for how to read the blog, which of course starts at the current entry and moves back to where I started. I look at my dozen postings and think how awkward. We come to everything backwards. We join in now and then construct back to some point that serves as a beginning and then feel like we are moving forward. How do we manage this? Is it like turning everything on our retina upside down? How many ways of playing are really partially incomplete alterations of perception?
Is there some button to push that reverses what is there?
What is it about buttons and the notion of pushing something to set it into motion? Buttons are attachments; they join layers of fabric. They are a catch. If I don’t do more writing will I have things to post and if I just post a page a day after what period of time will I have said everything I want to say about playing? I guess I’ll find out.
There's the wobble. I'm backwards.

seconds: note three

Play alters my sense of time. In play I accept a layering of time as experience unfolds. Of course, I could reorder these vignettes and place them in chronological order, but that is not my experience of play. Even if everything in my life happened along an ordered time line, the layers of my experience draw from disordered time. The advantage we each have is that we can, if we choose, draw on any developmental milestone we already have accomplished. This allows a type of creative flexibility. We can approach a set belief and alter it. We can explore fluid truths. This includes regressing back to a time when we hadn’t learned something yet.

I am reminded of my elementary school self. “I don’t need to know that yet,” was what I told my parents when they tried to teach me something about what we were learning in school. And please don’t ask me when or how I learned read. I was raised on a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read; and to this day I think that book was more about can’t reading.

Now I like to read as many as seven books at once. I discovered that the chaos of several stories layered together often produced unexpected connections among the stories or the plots, or the characters, or the authors, or the settings. This makes me sense the flexibility of truth. When I first heard a Greek Myth retold from the perspective of a victim, supporting a completely different sense of what had occurred, I was spell bound. This revealed the flexibility of truth. Both sides from their perspective were faithful to their truth; and these truths were completely contradictory. How amazing a discovery, truth was not unitary. It formed and reformed around perspective and background. Truth had playful qualities.