Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

Author:James Carse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1986-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

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If in the culture into which we are born there are always persons who will urge us to theatricalize our lives by supplying us with a repeatable past, there will also be persons (possibly the same ones) in whose presence we learn to prepare ourselves for surprise. It is in the presence of such persons that we first recognize ourselves as the geniuses we are.

These persons do not give us our genius or produce it in us. In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play.

I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center—that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response.

The opposite of touching is moving. You move me by pressing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared. It is a staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself. I can be moved to tears by skilled performances and heart-rending newspaper accounts, or moved to passion by political manifestos and narratives of heroic achievement—but in each case I am moved according to a formula or design to which the actor or agent is immune. When actors bring themselves to tears by their performance, and not as their performance, they have failed their craft; they have become theatrically inept.

This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be.

When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. (The unpredictability of this phenomenon is reflected in our reference to the insane as “touched.”)

We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched through our veils.

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