Silly Games to Save the World: Excerpts
Dot, Spot, To and Fro,
Round, and Up, and Out You Go
Silly Games To Save The World was one of those thrice-in-a-lifetime books I couldn’t help but write. It was 2020, I was all alone, I was really done in. I started thinking more deeply about poetry, psychology, philosophy, politics – and half a lifetime making up games: card games, parlour games, drinking games, all peaceful, all thoughtful, all seeking perspective, all silly in the ancient senses: helpless, happy, innocent, holy. Along came Substack, a platform that allows one to write episodically, knowing and not knowing yet, keeping one eye on the news. So I made Silly Games To Save The World. The world got worse, new wars broke out, the climate crumbled, my mother passed away. I both didn’t know and did know these things as I wrote on: I felt I walked in step with time. I posted chapters every two weeks from midsummer to New Year’s Eve, and on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I finished and went drinking at the William The Fourth. What follows are seven excerpts, one from each stage of this traditional English skipping-rhyme: Dot, Spot, To and Fro, Round, and Up, and Out You Go.
DOT
Dumbshow
This is a game for everyone.
No one can avoid it, it’s a game of life.
A dumbshow in early English theatre is a short wordless mime enacted beforehand, to show in miniature what’s about to happen. A trailer that tells everything, a grand spoiler alert. Forgive me if you knew that already. I’ll always explain when I’m not certain everyone knows, because this is a book for everyone.
I have made a dumbshow for life, a good life, not a perfect life, no such thing, but the shape of a life you would hope for. Dumbshow is not a game you win or lose, it’s a game you begin and end. The winner is the player who enjoys it the most. I call it a game because it has arbitrary rules, which it’s pointless to break, and because anyone can play. Because it’s peaceable, it means well, and no ill can come of it, I call it a game. I call it a silly game. All my games are silly. Wait till I tell you what that word’s been through.
*
You need a decent space, you need at least three people – seven or twelve would be cool, you could have a whole class – you need a door that shuts and opens, possibly some chairs, and you might like to have a cake. That’s starting to sound like a decent life already.
Dumbshow is a game of Seven States, based on a traditional English skipping rhyme:
Dot, Spot, To and Fro;
Round, and Up, and Out you go…
In Dumbshow you are born and change and grow and live a life. It can take up to an hour, it doesn’t have to. You pass through seven States. You may want to pick a captain to call the changes between these parts. Or do it by agreement, or just see what happens.
Look, it’s not a traditional English skipping rhyme, I made it up.
Or rather it came to me in a dream, fully-formed, one morning about seven years ago. I was speaking it as I woke. I wasn’t used to mysteries like that in those days, so I sat up and wrote it down. I could see, looking back, how the words had formed, I’m a poet. But I hadn’t consciously formed them.
In the seven years since that morning, the planet went on dying from the poisons of our kind, the whole world came down with a disease, democracies began to teeter, tyrannies grew confident, technology advanced without a clue and lies spread everywhere.
Moreover I turned sixty and my grandchild was born. I felt the need of new thinking, a secular philosophy, an agnostic form of hope I might share in this stricken age, and it began with that curious little rhyme that welled up inside me one morning. So it may not be traditional, but it is English and it is a playground rhyme you can skip to, so: find a rope, take one end – I’ve got the other – and let’s start the thing turning and turning again in a whole new English playground.
SPOT
What Happened To Poetry
Nothing happened to poetry, there’s no breaking news on that front. I haven’t made any for a while; I’m doing this instead. I mean it to matter in this book, though this book is not on poetry. My book On Poetry is a dozen years old and I have a dozen years’ worth of more to say, as we all should have, given the way the world turned. I’ll have to bring in dead poets from time to time, because we can’t look away from where the best English gleams from the deep, but the live ones can look after themselves, now their banners are raised and they’re in the fight. Don’t lend me your telescope, General; do lend me your hipflask.
Insofar as I explore the form, I’m interested in those new to it, my students, your students, all students, you, of whatever age or gender or origin or nature. I want to talk about how poetry is come to. About what it’s come to, what’s become or becoming of it. And because of my book’s stated objective – wherever the tongue bides in relation to the cheek – the art of poetry seems to me the best metaphor for humanity making a mark on light. Why?
First: anyone can do it. Not anyone can do it well but anyone can do it. And the action of pen or pencil on sheet, tablet, cave-wall or white space is a primal action which serves as a symbol for all human ripples on the river of time. Turning pixels dark on a screen is not as pure as the physical marking of parchment or paper, in that the existence of pixels and screens is underwritten by the billionaire corporations that make and sell you the equipment. This isn’t a political point, except in passing, it’s about objective fact and the nature of the Dot. Nor am I saying stop using technology to write, I’m using it now. I’m speaking theoretically, where games form their holy innocent silly rules.
There’s a second advantage, which embraces the obvious other medium where poetry dwells: sound. Within the frame of what’s useful to say, which is a very broad spectrum of communicable thought or feeling – though it does have edges beyond which lies oblivion – words are common material. Only English words, I concede in my case, but in that realm they can symbolize agreed meaningful discourse. To begin a poem with an English word, written or said (within the scope of that language) represents a commitment to common understanding that is not shared by a first note or brush-stroke, because the interpretations of those are so dizzyingly wide and subjective, whatever wonders they may come to as they bloom.
TO
Noah
Active Imagination was referred to by its coiner Carl Gustav Jung as ‘a living, third thing’ created from the union of conscious and unconscious. This seems to me close to a definition of the best art of any kind, but what I care about most is the Key Stage One Maths of it. Any living third thing is always Rainbow, anything but one-versus-zero, and thereby escapes the dead hand of the Barcode, which is what we have to escape if we’re to save the world. I say we this time, because one of the ways to save the world will be to actually meet each other. That’s why on the day I end this book I will invite you to a pub.
And just so you know where to find the Barcode, and can evade it when you feel it coming, it signals itself with a silent instantaneous click: always the same. Rainbow makes moves with the infinite varieties of creak: never so.
*
As anyone who’d like to save the world would do, and I’m sure I’m not alone among you, I set up a Saturday Morning Games Club called, as it happens, Silly Games To Save The World. The lockdown had ended and pub gardens were opening. It felt like the world was being given a second chance – a Rainbow moment – Noah, Do Look Up! There’s a band of coloured light in the sky! And it’s your turn to name it! Meanwhile your saved seasick animals are making their third things.
I opened my Club and nobody came. Then I remembered to invite some folks and some former students actually showed. Because many years ago I taught poetry for an autumn term in an English village. The memoir I wrote about that was called Drinks With Dead Poets. I’m not precisely clear when the events described in it happened.
Then again I did know lots of dead poets, I was mentored by one, I sailed in the apprentice ship for the whole of the time our adult lives overlapped: ‘Now an apprentice washes his cheeks /with salt water and sunlight…’ I wrote to him, quoting his ‘Sea-Chantey,’ when he won a great prize. That was the only telegram I ever sent.
And the living students became old friends. I was quite fond of one who wore a black suede jacket – or felt? not sure – no one has her numbers anyway.
FRO
A Yellow Pearl
Somewhere inside this story dwells the heart of human belief. Mine, at any rate, and it’s my mercury, my sulphur, my salt, so there. Human belief is what I call agnosticism or atheism these days. Human belief is older than religious belief. To which I say dur, another word that fills a hole, religious belief is a human belief, but human belief is so often rendered as non-belief or agnosticism or atheism that this obvious fact requires an airing. To summarize, human belief is the belief that belief in God or gods is something humans thought up themselves. It’s a presence of belief, not an absence. It’s worthy of the dignity of any belief.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, in her book Alchemy, tries to understand the mysterious rituals of Ancient Egyptian mummification, and by extension the practices around death, decay and springtime resurrection in virtually all religions. The symbolic element in Egyptian rituals was the regrowth of corn. At funerals, corn was placed inside the folds of the mummy and sprinkled with water, so that when it began to sprout it would mean the dead had resurrected in the afterlife. They had resurrected because in their mummified – we’d say dead – form, they yet contained all the elements of eternal life.
Von Franz ponders specifically on why the Egyptians thought the dead needed to be reassembled in order to be resurrected. She thought that ‘to understand what these people had in mind one must first of all be extremely naïve, and follow a naïve thought.’
The ancient Egyptian in her example is plunged into grief because the thing he knew as father or mother or kith or kin is dead. He turns to alchemy, because he thinks that if he can work out the basic matter of which the dead thing is composed, then the dead thing can be remade. Only the god or gods know the secret to remaking it. He thinks the basic ingredients are immortal and cannot be dissolved any further – which is a good guess at the atom before the atom comes to light – and so the Egyptian alchemist sets to work in search of the secrets of composition.
Alchemy probably originated with the Egyptians. One theory for the origin of the word alchemy – and hence the word chemistry – derives from Khem, meaning the black, which is to say fertile, lands around the Nile, which is to say Egypt. So far so strange: everything in ancient alchemy is murky and cryptic and disputed and delirious, but what is unmistakably happening here with mummification rituals is a profound emotion – grief – driving earnest experiment, in an ultimate quest for consolation. Let’s see what blooms around this deep impulsion.
Von Franz uses an experience from her childhood in the Swiss countryside to illuminate. When she was about ten she was often ill and kept home from school. She was bored, so at the back of the hen house:
I established what I called my laboratory. I had once read that amber was formed by resin falling into sea water and solidifying after many years. So I thought I would make amber. Promptly, in my fantasy, amber became a yellow pearl, and I thought I would make a round yellow pearl of amber.
The determined little girl climbed her father’s fir trees to collect resin, and filched salt and iodine from the bathroom to mix something close to seawater. She thought the amber would need to be pure in order to produce a proper yellow pearl, so she started heating the substance to get rid of the bits and dead insects in it. As the resin melted, she began to feel sorry for it. She talked to it, and ultimately prayed to it, begging it not to be angry because at the end of all this it would be turned into a lovely yellow pearl. In short, she humanized, animated, bestowed life upon, consoled, everything she touched.
In the account Von Franz mentions more than once the sheer loneliness of going about her dogged task, and this combination of the rational and fantastical in her childlike thinking, the intense focus of solitude and the filling of that lonely space with the feelings of the substances, is not only as pure a depiction of alchemy – ancient, medieval, metaphorical, me now – as one could imagine, it also sounds, as Von Franz observes, remarkably like Active Imagination, where the Conscious and Unconscious meet.
ROUND
Fortunately
The bell went at quarter to four and it was time to go home. Unfortunately we weren’t supposed to leave our desks because Mrs Dowdy said the bell was a signal to her and not to us.
Fortunately she wanted to go home too so we didn’t have long to wait.
Unfortunately I had to walk home alone that day as the friend I usually walked home with was off school ill.
Fortunately it wasn’t very far to walk and normally took about ten minutes.
Unfortunately it took longer that day.
Fortunately three boys called Sharp, Poole and Hammond came up to me and said they’d decided to walk me home.
Unfortunately they weren’t friends of mine, they were two years older than me and I was a bit scared of them.
Fortunately my mother taught at the school so I never expected anything bad to happen.
Unfortunately my mother taught at the school so I never expected anything bad to happen.
Fortunately Sharp and Hammond were being quite friendly so I felt it would be all right.
Unfortunately Hammond was only pretending to be friendly, and he did that thing of putting his arm around my shoulder as if we were good mates, and speaking friendly things as we walked along, but then suddenly placing his leg in front of mine so I’d fall over it, which I did and they all laughed.
Fortunately we lived in Ebenezer Howard’s utopian new town Welwyn Garden City, founded in 1920, so there were green verges everywhere and I fell down upon grass rather than tarmac or concrete.
Unfortunately Poole was even less friendly than Hammond, and couldn’t be bothered to play a trick on me, instead he threw a stone at me from about five yards and it hit me on the side of my head.
Fortunately it didn’t hit me in the eye.
Unfortunately I was bleeding and it hurt.
Fortunately Poole went home, as we were just passing his house.
Unfortunately that was still quite close to our house.
Fortunately Sharp wasn’t pretending to be friendly, he was actually being friendly, and he saw me safely to my front door on Handside Lane, a good deed I’ve never forgotten. My favourite line in all the language is said by the character Good Deeds to Everyman when he’s about to go into the grave: ‘Fear not: I will speak for thee.’
*
Fortunately Unfortunately was the earliest game I remember our mother teaching us, though the above is all true except the boys’ names. The surname of the boy who saw me home was actually Scott. Note to young parents who think their little children might be turning into storytellers: Play Fortunately Unfortunately.
*
The thing about being a middle child of three is you feel kind of protected. Obviously second sons don’t come out of fairytales all that well, as (a) we learn nothing from our elder sibling’s schoolboy error, (b) we get whatever the Test or Quest is wrong in some novel way, prior to (c) our younger sibling acing it and getting the whole kingdom.
But unfortunately and fortunately life isn’t a fairytale. Deep into middle age I still recognize two distinct pulses in the heart when a new fact swims into view: either a sense of needing to boast to the elder that I know it, or a sense of needing to tell the younger so he knows it. Neither brother ever needed this, it’s just a pulse that glows sometimes.
It’s thinking in two directions at once. Helpful for a playwright. Not helpful, essential. A bright middleborn among siblings thinks both of younger and older – it’s like this for these, oh but it’s like that for those – and of course it could be rich-poor, neighbour-stranger, insider-outsider, everyone till it could picture the world. Do you have the slightest idea how many people that is?
*
‘I have reached the point in my book which represents my own point in life,’ goes Glyn a few pages ago. And now I’ve passed it and have reached the point in my book where I’m writing beyond my experience. The fellow to whom these things happened is leaving me behind.
I’m not an old man. ‘Word I was in my life alone,’ Frost writes in ‘Bereft’, and yes I’m bereaved today but I sure as shit am not bereft. The next line of ‘Bereft’ – the last line of ‘Bereft’ – is ‘Word I had no one left but God.’ Well I don’t have Him either but I sure as shit am not alone. Meet sure, the word that begins to reverse its meaning the more times you say it. I’m sure. Yes I’m sure. No I really am sure! As opposed to other words, which just start leaking all sense.
But I’m not an old man, or not a very old man. I’m a bereaved alchemist at work in my cave by the water, watching the candlelight scribble its shadows on the walls. If Sulphur is the charring of these pixels with my story, and Mercury the things I thought, can’t unthink and have to hang somewhere like the sprinkled stars – I read today they just found a solar system where all six planets are the same size, how ours would have looked if it hadn’t been wrought in chaos! – well, then Salt is the creature at work right now, the residue, at four-thirty in the morning, reading the planetary news, watching those two lights below the bridge on the Regents Canal, green now, red soon, the creature who sees the end of the book in sight if not the end of much else – I’m working hard on my teaching, I’m going to train in psychotherapy, I’m on the Foundation course, I’m going to make an Advent Calendar! – that creature who wants a drink on the last afternoon of ‘twenty twenty-three’ and had better book that table soon.
UP
Botanical Monograph
Freud's 'Botanical Monograph' dream reached me in the form of an award-winning documentary I found on YouTube. It seeks to understand the dream and its analysis through the insights of the Lacanian disciple Serge Leclaire, but why I find it fascinating has little to do with Freud, or dreams, or psychoanalysis, or Leclaire, or Lacan.
About halfway, the narrator fastens upon what I think is a brilliant insight of Leclaire’s regarding key words in the dream and the associations Freud made as noted above. That a series of key elements, the German words for rip up, snatch from, travel or voyage, give a name to, and bite, that is to say reissen, entreissen, reisen, heissen, beissen – all – well, you can see what the fuck they all do.
But in the Lacanian space no one can ever hear you rhyme. The words are, of course, called signifiers. The narrator keeps referring to the five words as signifiers, and nowhere are the words rhyme or poetry mentioned. Indeed, when I put the words Freud, Lacan, Leclaire, dream, botanical and rhyme into a search engine, the results all came back with this familiar adornment:
Missing: rhyme | Show results with: rhyme
Well I shall show results with rhyme. The documentary goes on exploring theories of psychoanalysis, Freud’s life-history, the structuralist, text-based perspectives of Lacan and Leclaire, the dream is a vehicle for the transmission of a signifier etc, while all I could think was – what about the implications of this for poetry? For all those who won’t rhyme because they mustn’t, or can’t because they won’t, or don’t because they can’t (possibly that’s a circle rather than a Venn diagram)…
This is not an argument for rhyme. Poetry should rhyme when it needs to. It’s an argument against the idiocy of disusing or rejecting it. There has been a century-long tendency in parts of English-language poetry to repress song, as if the universality and antiquity of it somehow militates against the precious individual freedom of the modern mind. I return to Joseph Brodsky: ‘In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.’
Now explain to me why you won’t make any music.
OUT YOU GO
Salt
It’s the morning of New Year’s Eve now, my book is nearly done.
I wrote five thousand words every two weeks for the last half of this year. I’ve not gone back or revised a word, only typos or for grammar. I could not foresee in this book, I scarcely planned a thing and I won’t alter what I’ve said. This way I feel like I walked in step with time. At the outset of my third age, as a grandfather, a teacher, someday I hope a healer, I walked in step with time.
There were horrors in the world, shame in the country, my willow tree was cut down, my mother departed.
No one knows this time but us. So I’ve offered my philosophy, my skipping-rhyme, my story; all the treasured coins I’ve chanced on in the filth. I learned more, thought more, new light lit my path.
My silly games won’t save the world, at least they haven’t yet, then again the day’s not over. But I hope you know what I mean by the phrase. It was just a club, but I’m keeping it going.
I’m going to post this fourteenth say, and then, at one o’clock, I’m going to the William IV on Shepherdess Walk to spend the afternoon. In real life I’m doing that. Whether that be alone or in company or a crowd, I am too delighted to mind. All three are beautiful ways to be. All I am is delighted to step from these pages and return to life. You’ll be welcome if you come by. I’m the one with a Sunday paper and a deck of cards.
Photo Credit: Sarah Putnam
Born in Welwyn Garden City, England in 1962, Glyn Maxwell is a poet, playwright, librettist and teacher. All his poetry collections have been shortlisted for the major UK poetry prizes, most recently the T. S. Eliot Prize for How The Hell Are You. His latest, The Big Calls, is a protest against recent UK government. Glyn was mentored for many years by Derek Walcott, who taught him at BU in the 1980s; he edited Walcott’s Collected Poems in 2015. Several of Glyn’s plays have been staged in the UK and USA, notably Liberty at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008. He has written new English libretti for The Magic Flute (2017) and The Flying Dutchman (2023) and for several new operas. Last year Glyn followed up his popular guidebook On Poetry (2012) with an exploration of psychology, philosophy, politics and poetry entitled Silly Games To Save The World, which is available to read for free on his Substack of the same name. During ten years in the USA (1997-2006) he taught at Amherst, Princeton, Columbia, NYU and the New School, and was Poetry Editor of the New Republic. He is Head of Studies on the Writing Poetry MA at London’s Poetry School.