Quotes About Infinite play

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case-like the socialist realism of Soviet art.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.

There is, however, a familiar form of playfulness often associated with situations protected from consequence-where no matter what we do (within certain limits), nothing will come of it. This is not playing so much as playing at, a harmless disregard for social constraints. While this is by no means excluded from infinite play, it is not the same as infinite play.

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

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

Art that is 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.

The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, 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.

The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others. The paradox is precisely that they play only when others go on with the game. Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains unfinished. They are looking for the way time has exhausted itself, or will soon do so. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema of it.

If the goal of finite play is to win titles for their timelessness, and thus eternal life for oneself, the essence of infinite play is the paradoxical engagement with temporality that Meister Eckhart called "eternal birth.

Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn't disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and th e world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of play is desire…

The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous.

A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time - in our finite time - to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence.

Our life is like a movie directed by God which has no beginning and ending, just interval in which we have to play our whole role.