A Space In Time: More on "The Box"

Herein hacked:
 THE POETICS OF SPACE , by Gaston Bachelard
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004L6207K/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=1535523722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0807064734&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0BZHMHDJ40Z2XW3VCAC5
'' ''
Playset Corners.
That most sordid and forgotten of all tiny toy soldier accessory havens, the corner of the carton, deserves to be examined. To find stuff  in one's playset box corner is undoubtedly far from a meager expression. The corner of that playset box  is a haven that ensures us MANY of the things we prize most highly - at least for a time - comprise the quality of immobility. When we recall the hours we have spent with our figures, buildings, terrain, accessories, in play, we remember above all NOISE, the NOISE of our thoughts. Consciousness of being at play in one's THOUGHTS, then, produces a sense of immobility, and this, in turn, radiates permanence. I am at play again; I occupy every CORNER of the space where I was. This is a great feeling. But nowhere can it be better appreciated than in emptying out that playset box and finding, in a corner of that box, that long-thought-lost object of childhood longing ... A good playset  may well incite a desire to live in it. We feel that we should like to live there, between the very lines of the litho'd corrugated box art drawing.

 Miniature.

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing and boxing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in playsets. Platonic dialectics of large and small (Old and Young?)do not suffice for me to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of PLAYSET thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience PLAY in what is large in what is small. The figures, vehicles, accessories, terrain, whether plastic or tin, are not only born in a cauldron of mass-production, protected by the colorful  corrugated carton until set up under the Christmas Tree, then the bedroom, then the CORNER of the yard .... but also reborn in CURRENT MEMORY ...  A set found again (perhaps at a toy show, or ebay) is the generator of vital heat. How many of us, once we had opened the playset, discarded the box?! In childhood company, we restrain our innocent mania for disposing of the box(!)  in order to make room in the closet, under the bed .... And what thoughts we have, what daydreams, when we see that box again. Values become engulfed in miniature, and the playset causes us to dream. Reader, study the classic playsets in detail, and you will see how details increase a set's stature ("play value") - even after many years .... The playset  is one of the refuges of the greatness that is childhood. The BOX of that set deploys to the dimensions of the universe. Once more, large is contained in small. Each corner immobilizes the world.  To have experienced PLAYSETTING detaches me from the surrounding world, and helps me to resist dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere. The old sound effects of our playsetting days seem so mechanically jerky that we no longer have ears subtle enough to hear the passage of time. Consider the kid next door. He lay down behind the shell-shooting machine gun to enlarge the sky - to get a line of sight. Consider the now ubiquitous toy soldier show. There, I was shown an entire carton of still brown-bagged treasures in the cold, cardboard divided far-out realms of the Moon Base. I seem to hear a young playseteer  making explosion sounds. It is I!

8. Intimate Immensity.

Carl Sagan did not keep a close eye on his use of the word BILLIONS. Whenever a toy or a plaything, a thought or a daydream is touched by memory, this word becomes useless to him who collects (there are only SO MANY cream MATT DILLONS out there). The playset collector must have "a vast amount of leisure", not to mention DEEP POCKETS to derive benefit from his soothing daydreams. Playsetting is encouraged by "the vast silence of the gentry." Certain childhood dreams are finite places "on the vast canvas of memory." "Vast" is a word that is pronounced, never only read, never only seen in the objects to which it is attached in a Rick Eber ad in PLAYSET MAGAZINE. It is one of the words that a collector always speaks softly while he is thinking it. The word "VAST" evokes calm, peace and serenity: a night in Eber's room at OTSN ...

David Foster Wallace: Playset Imagi Mod

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F8296-B0D0-B086-B6A350F4F59FD1F7.html

Excerpted and adapted from above. Some of us have very happy childhoods extended into hard-working, focused adulthoods because we continue in childlike fashion, at will, to think and play.

 

 

DFW: I had a clerk  at the F.W. Woolworth I liked who used to say a good toy's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

I guess a big part of any good playsets’ purpose then is to give the Inner Child, who like all of us sometimes gets sort of marooned in our own skull, to give  imaginative access to other selves - preferably small, plastic selves..

Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is playing, part of what we humans come to toys for is an experience of enjoying (and that includes suffering) necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "interpretation" of life in miniature - filtered of course by an individual's exposure to homelife, media, school, etc.... Does this make sense?

We all play alone in the real world; true empathy’s possible in miniature. But if a playset can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own enjoyment. The HOBBY is born!  This is nourishing, redemptive; we become (as at OTSN) less alone inside.

It might just be that simple. But now realize that some playsets, based as they are on TV and popular film and most kinds of "low" art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—sell and are to their makers lucrative precisely because toymakers recognize that Inner Children prefer 100 percent nostalgic pleasure to the more "adult" reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas "serious" playsets (witness Barzso's upcoming "Battle on Lexington Green"), which are not primarily about getting money out of you, are more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to play and think hard to access their pleasures - the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s not hard for toy and playset collectors on limited budgets, especially those of us  been raised to expect toys to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure cheap, to collect and display and, yes, 'play with'  and appreciate serious (read: historical; more expensive) playsets. They're THAT  good. The problem isn’t that today’s serious collector is "broke"; I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art mass-produced classic playset culture’s trained it to be sort of stuck in the past: lazy and childish in their expectations. The key word is "childish". Here's where collectors get crazy about, say, a stapled-shut Marx "Custer's last Stand". But it makes trying to engage today’s collectors both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

'

Wallace, of course, needed toys . . .