The lost art of leisure

The dance of creation

Cornelia Cook

The most basic spontaneous activity is play. Recreation means re-creation, says the senior lecturer in English at Queen Mary College in the University of London. Workaholics and slouchers should realise what they are missing.

PLAY is vital to leisure. We often think of leisure as a state of receptiveness to a gift. But that can seem static or passive. In leisure as play, we give of ourselves. Play - from a Middle Dutch word which means "dance" - is gratuitous giving; we give ourselves over to the game, the poem. We are re-created in it: the dancer is the dance.

Play takes people outside themselves. When the Greeks in the Iliad come to mourn Patroclus' death, they honour their fallen companion by directing attention outward from personal grief to action. They play games, and play them hard - chariot races, running races, wrestling, javelin throwing, archery, boxing - and although every game has a winner, all the prizes end up being shared. Death becomes incorporated in the renewed communal life of play. These warriors even laugh in the midst of great grief; they cannot resist the comic figure of the runner Aias, tripped up by Athene in a pile of ox-dung, spitting it out and cursing his bad luck: "At this the crowd laughed at him, full of glee."

This element of surprise is an essential part of play. Young beings play - children, puppies or lambs - but so do fountains. Musicians play, as do sportsmen and women, and actors play parts in a re-created reality called a "play".

There is risk in play. The word suggests gambling as well as gambolling, fight as well as delight. Just as children push boundaries and get rough, the mature mind, too, breaches limits in play. Edmund Burke spoke of the "delicate and refined play of the imagination". Certain art forms aim to capture what we call the "play" (both display and active encounter) of light and shade in nature. And the same is true of words: language takes life from the expected and unexpected ways words can combine, oppose, substitute, echo or relate to each other.

The key is an element of surprise combined with constancy, of risk engulfed in faith. The fountain which seems so constant re-creates itself every second; the essence of puppiness is the unpredictability of recognisably puppy-like behaviour. The constancy may be both within and beyond the changing actor. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw the play of light which coloured nature with its ever-varying "dapple" as the working of God.

"Creative" writing is essentially playful because it surprises: it makes something unexpected or says something in an unexpected way. This is how poetry gratifies and astounds. Sacramental language is the apex and epitome of this tendency: it effects a re-creation, through words or signs. The Eucharist happened not during a Temple ritual but when the disciples were at rest and recreation in the semi-formal context of a Passover meal. There the language of blessing becomes the language of foretelling and of remembering; there the play between the seen and unseen is made miraculous.

Other sacramental moments, too, involve surprising - and different - elements of play. The miracle worked by Christ at Cana centres on the quality and quantity of good wine - not the religious ritual with its vows, but that part of the wedding which is recreational and celebratory. In the gospel of Matthew, Christ ordains Peter and establishes the Church with a play on words: "Thou art Peter and upon this rock…"

Recreation is necessary for re-creation. The new creation emerges from those moments of relaxation and discovery when "heart speaks to heart" or shared employment becomes play, or language can release itself from utilitarian concerns and become the vehicle for something which transcends.

The God of the Old Testament rejoiced in making a large and playful creation. Shakespeare's Cleopatra sees that her Antony's greatness is not least great playfulness: "his delights", she says, "were dolphin-like". Like the work-shy lilies of the Gospel, Wordsworth's dancing daffodils were playing in the breeze before the pathetic poet arrived to see them "laughing". Just as Hopkins's Lord "plays" in "men's faces" and the dapple of nature, nature's play allows us to see and "consider" abundant divine love.

There are, in turn, forms of play that offer prayer and praise to the divine. King David, a man "cunning in playing", sang both to his father's sheep and to the blundering old King Saul. When the ark of God is brought back to Jerusalem, "David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals". But bringing the ark into the city, he "danced before the Lord with all his might". David's wife is appalled at his loss of dignity when she watches "King David leaping and dancing before the Lord" in an embarrassingly skimpy garment. David replies that he is giving himself to the Lord who has chosen him king: "Therefore will I play before the Lord" (2 Sam 6:21). It seems that selflessly to worship, this great ruler has to unmake himself as king and recreate himself, in both senses. To be simply a part of worshipful creation, he must simply play.

In the New Testament we are urged to become as children - which must mean, surely, that we regain the ability to play, to give the self with generosity and pleasure. In this giving is the harmony of trust and adventurousness which creates the climate for re-creation. In this climate people might write poetry or hit golf balls bravely, not worrying about someone's opinion or reaction. In this climate creativeness is not a making to order but a surrender to surprise. Elizabeth Jennings wrote:
My poems move from feelings not yet known
And when a poem is written I can feel
A flash, a moment's peace.

To be faithful is to surprise oneself in faith. To enjoy yourself is to be at one with a very precious piece of creation, to become more at ease with your God-given self.

Play, in fact, is a foretaste of heaven, like the new Jerusalem envisaged by the prophet Zechariah, where "the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets" (8:5).

I like to think so because in this world I like to play. I work in a place of scholarship and it does not surprise me in the least that Greek etymology makes this a leisure centre. It is indeed a gift to be able to wallow in the fabulous play of language and ideas in literature and in young people's conversation.

I recently went to a school speech day - one of those summer institutions like cricket, punting, Ascot and haymaking that absolutely requires a fine day and responds with a gorgeous outbreak of hats. The students were about to begin a summer vacation. Some would then proceed to the illustrious careers their prizes augured. But for now it seemed to me supremely important that in leaving childhood behind they did not walk away from the pleasures and consolations of play. The message I had for the young people - for I was the speaker - was to use their coming vacation guiltlessly as an interval for re-creation. And as for the older ones among us who may take ourselves too seriously, maybe we should forgive ourselves the potential for vulgarity and play a bit.