Weird essays in wonderful forms (Essay Club / Friday, August 29th)

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A club meeting about hermit crab essays. (Or, How do we generate energy through play and limitation?)

Notes on Play

The artistic process is fun. The greatest artists of all time had a knack for playfulness, for seeing the life inside of things. Too much seriousness creates art with a message but rarely creates great art.” (John Paul Lederach)

"I see deep play everywhere, expressed in infinite ways. It captures, for me, a quality of attention that is unexpected in adult life, and which we barely even recognise in children. That's because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavours. But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn't matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It's an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow …" (Katherine May)

and

Notes on Play

"Limitation is vital. . . . Artists by nature crave freedom, so the principle that the structure/setting relationship restricts creative choices may stir the rebel in you. With a closer look, however, you’ll see that this relationship couldn’t be more positive. The constraint that setting imposes on story design doesn’t inhibit creativity; it inspires it.” (Robert McKee)

"In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed." (Henri Matisse)