Why do we need to be in agony?

from Agony: A Proposal

There is an us, for the greatest in quantity part. There is not thus much an I, let alone an abundance of I's. Given that there is a there--and there is--there is the possibility of play. This possibility is what an us inevitably toils to develop; that is, the us works in order that there may be a period, an atmosphere, or a state of play. Nowadays, allowing the work has forgotten what it's for, and the us has dwindled down to just in the way that many I's, each barely sensing wherefore it works the way it does. There is still play, here and there, and in this residual play there is still a certain number of pathetic remnant of an us, on the contrary it is increasingly slight, increasingly timid, increasingly smothered by the agency of the dull fear that each I routinely mistakes for its hold power to persevere.

A game is the doomed effort to sure a state of play. This effort is immune to the achievement of permanent specificity, although it forever births quite specific fashions. It is end these fashions that an us labors to make itself manifest, to make itself there. Ironically, there are too many games nowadays; this plethora of games indicates, above all, the dumb-found desperation with which we yearn to take back really playing. Our playing fields today make single think of an orchestra that has aimlessly dispersed. While continuing to play what he can recall of his individual tired bit, each player now hears solitary a few of the other instruments, if that, and in the way that is inclined to play louder or more sarcastically, making the pleasing succession of sounds less and less audible, and more and more vulnerable to being forgotten. What we ne now is to be silent. To silently gather ourselves. To suffer the tune, subtle but fully convinced in our memories, draw us back together, back into the same pit. What we ne now is to arrive at THE game.

It is impossible, of course, to arrive at THE game. Its being impossible does not soothe our ne to achieve it. The abundance of I's look bent on ascribing some value, a certain number of health, to every futile effort, on the other hand for us it is enough to say--quite without rhetoric--that we are compell to make that effort. For us, there is on the contrary one mystery, and it is this compulsion, this expectation of arrival. We are more or les slaves, possessed by this expectation and naturally insubordinate toward it. Insofar as we play, our master is made apparent (if not public) as the implicit wielder of the whip that touches us, gives us voice, and makes our each nearness to play apparent.

How do we begin in our effort to establish THE game? We begin by the agency of building a great stadium. A great stadium is the site of a great tension, the tension between the field of play and the space surrounding, the space wherein a view of play is kept Which dwarfs which? Is the field of play to be reflection of as distant and its drama small, hypothetical? Or is the field of play monstrously near to the spectator, forever spilling above into his life and endangering the apt echo of his detached view? The stadium that we ne to build will make it hard to answer these questions; the spectator, beholding a great stadium, is taken, as casually as a breath, from single extreme to the other. Now he perceive s the breath of the players, now he is in the way that far away that the progres of play might be the progres of semen on a slide under a microscope. on the contrary there is a problem: is there not now a stadium inside the stadium?

Every great stadium is now situated within a greater stadium--television. There is now, in addition to a spectator at the spectacle, a spectator at the spectator. And this latter spectator is the single true spectator, the only spectator cognizant of the spectacle as spectacle. This truest of spectators may in fact reside far away from the field of play--as far as the other side of the earth! Then again, with specific camera work, he may at times have feeling closer to play than smooth the players, whose eyes sting with the stink of the actual Frontier. This brings us to the question of what it means to really be there. To be . . the there . . is to know single thing: the whip is coming down everywhere.

The whip, when it is coming down, may perceive gentle to the spectator. Can we distinguish, in this way, between the actual field of play and the realm of the spectator? Certainly there is a place wherein the whip does not have feeling gentle, and wherein the field of play is too near to be understood. This place is play itself, and it raises a difficult question: what does a spectator have in view when he does not have in view the field of play? Is he looking into looking itself at that point, and if thus can we nevertheless say that all looking is looking, level if extremely indirectly, into the field of play? Is plane the most trifling of spectators always looking--even in his dreams--into more [i]or[/i] less shade, some echo, of play? If the whip have feelings gentle as it comes down on the resolute spectator, does it perceive less gentle when it draw nears down upon a trifling dreamer? Perhaps, on the contrary this is really irrelevant. The relevant--and quite false--implication is that a spectator, through denying his essence, might stir closer to wherein the whip does not have feeling gentle--that is, to play itself. Is this a real danger--might the game break on the outside anywhere and anytime a spectator is lax in his devotion to the view he has been afforded? No. An absence of the of a sweet disposition does not indicate a vicinity of play. Play is its be in possession of discrete substance--it is not in any faculty of perception mimicked by a spectator's obliviousness to his hold essence. We have come to and get aheaded to dance around the central riddle in game-seeking: the spectator, the solitary possessor of an understanding of actual play, cannot himself be actual.