Sixteen fragments on friendship and play

Abstract

I. In one retelling of creation, God creates humans not once, but twice. In the first story of creation, these humans (both male and female) are said to be conjured in God’s image. They are told to fill the earth and subdue it. In contrast, having finished His work, God rests. In the second story of creation, God forms man from dust and breathes life into what He fashions. Later, God subdivides His creation to save the man from being alone. The two humans are thus both a part of each other, but separate from one another: ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’. They are an excess or luxury in an otherwise economic and purposeful system. Everything is in its place and nothing could be elsewhere. There is divine order. Childlike and innocent, these second humans are left to be together and to play in the Garden. We all know they were heading for a fall – there is trickery in the Garden . . . II. In one of the stories about the beginning, the fruit of two trees are forbidden to the humans: ‘the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. The serpent ‘more crafty than any beast of the field’ isn’t lying when it speaks about the nature of the fruit of the first tree. Having eaten from it, the humans are banished lest they eat from the second tree that would give them immortality. God can bear no equals – and He sets a hierarchy between himself and humans, and between the man and woman. After the Garden, humans are thrown back on to each other. Friendship with God does not seem possible. God is unitary and complete; the humans are multiple and forever unfinished. No longer childlike and innocent, they are to toil and suffer. They are left to contemplate each other and their own lack of purpose and necessity (it is their pathway to friendship and play). III. Abraham is an exceptional human being as he is said to be the friend of God. Outside of monotheism, humans find themselves as both the playthings and the playmates of the gods. Friendship is found in invention, transgression, trickery, and treachery. It is found in the interplay of humans and gods, and every creature and being both mythical and mundane. Such a world is open and dynamic. It is a woven patchwork of disparate pieces and contradictions (ontologically, spatially, temporally). In such a world that is both unfinished and unfinishable, friendship and play, in all their myriad varieties, can flourish. IV. Exposing humans as the murderers of God, Nietzsche’s Madman exhorts us to contemplate the sacred games we shall have to invent to be worthy of the deed. He asks whether we shall have to become gods even to seem worthy of the deed. The crime precipitates nihilism: this condition is kaleidoscopic. Once again humans are free to play; humans are free to forge new forms of