Savage Park : A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die (9780544303294)

by Fusselman, Amy

  In class, I walked across the wire with my hands resting lightly on PP’s shoulders.

  We took our time. It was easy; we glided. It was like riding on the shoulders of a giant crow.

  I left class quickly, alone, and ran down to the subway, where I sat on the gray plastic seat like a giant devotional candle, with the rope of the wick hanging down my back and the flame dancing on top of my head.

  3

  What There Is to See

  | 1 |

  I was wandering around the kids’ section of Muji, the giant Japanese clothing/home/design store, where Frank and the boys and I had followed Yelena one morning.

  I was looking at toys. In particular, I was agonizing over whether to buy one of several unusual sets of blocks. Each set had the shapes needed to construct a specific world-famous landmark, and I was leaning, like the Tower of Pisa (which was, sadly, not represented), toward the Taj Mahal.

  I was pushing Mick, who was asleep in the stroller. Frank was wandering around somewhere with King. I was relatively free.

  I had been browsing around for a while when I realized that I had lost track of Yelena. We had entered the kids’ section together; where had she gone? I circled around the entire section again and found her, sitting on the floor, her legs in a wide V, next to a display of toddler clothing. She was surrounded by art materials she had just bought: a beautiful colored-pencil set and several blank sketchpads. She was cutting some paper out of one of the books with brand-new red scissors.

  Chuck was exploring some toys nearby. Gen, Yelena and R’s one-year-old, was out with his babysitter.

  R was not around. He was having a medical procedure done that day.

  Yelena was sitting on the floor of the Muji store making an illustrated book for R.

  She spent at least forty-five minutes sitting there. I even left Mick sleeping in the stroller next to her for a few minutes and went to get a café au lait in the Muji-aurant.

  At the time, I did not think much about what she was doing, beyond that it was a little odd that she was sitting in the middle of the store and that it was nice that she was making something for R.

  But making something wasn’t all she was doing. She was also taking something. She walked into a giant, anonymous department store and turned it into her very own personal daycare center/art studio. She left that capitalist mecca with something she took the time—the space!—to sit down and make, using the store’s art supplies (which she paid for) and using the store’s shiny display objects (which she did not) as distractions to keep her four-year-old (to say nothing of her four tiresome guests) occupied.

  She went into a humongous store, paid for a small number of art supplies, and stole time and space.

  It was action as architecture: a fantastic, creative, political act.

  I didn’t see it then.

  | 2 |

  We did not, in fact, return to Savage Park on that trip. There were too many other things to do, places to go. But the rest of the trip was, in a sense, a denouement. I spent the remainder of our time in Japan, and, really, months after that, waiting to go back to Savage Park alone.

  How and when I could do that, I didn’t know, but it was there, an inkling: everywhere else I went in Japan, I believed, somehow, in the face of all good sense and the reality of my family life, that time and space, alone and apart, in Savage Park was a possibility that was waiting for me.

  | 3 |

  On our second and final day of class, right before our last trek across the wire, Philippe Petit gave us a wirewalking demonstration.

  It was a relief to sit and watch him and not have to do anything scary and physical. We arranged ourselves in a line on the floor, parallel to the wire, and looked up at him.

  PP stood on the platform, holding his balancing pole.

  He stepped on the wire. I watched his body change with that step. His back suddenly had a different quality to it, as if someone had plugged his spine into an unseen power source, and it was now glowing, neon orange.

  Frank and Mick, Hanegi Playpark

  He bounced up and down on the wire, gracefully and lightly, like a ballerina performing entrechats.

  You must remember that this was a miracle: He was not a dancer en pointe. He was a solid, middle-aged man standing on a seven-eighths-of-an-inch-wide cable seven feet in the air holding a twenty-foot-long pole. Yet he did this Tinker Bell spring not once, not twice, but several times before proceeding forward.

  He had told us he was going to show us a procession of his signature movements; his vocabulary of the wire, so to speak.

  When I see an artist on a high wire, I imagine his idea is to emphasize his lightness; to twirl, for example, a little paper parasol above his head. PP says bah to that. The images he has created for the wire are remarkably grounded: a field laborer walking home after a day’s work; lying down and taking a rest, practically a nap, on the wire; kneeling; and saluting the sky.

  This last one in particular seemed to me a hallmark of his mastery. He understands that, even wildly, spectacularly alone, soaring beyond where any reasonable man would ever go, he is not, as the kids say, all that; he is no Icarus. There is always the awareness in his work that there is more. As singular and solitary as his art is, his entire body of work gestures toward something greater. The fact that he is artist-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine makes perfect sense, although his work is not explicitly religious in any way.

  When class was over, I ventured to ask him about that little bounce I had seen him do when he first stepped on the wire: What was that?

  He was busily clearing his notes from the table, where he had set them for the day. He did not look at me as he explained that it was his way of saying hello to the wire, his wanting to feel it, and it was also, he said, making eye contact with me for just a second: joy.

  After all his years of practice, three hours a day, every day, after all that self-discipline, that insane amount of rigor and tenacity. I thought: Amazing. The man still plays.

  | 4 |

  On the day before we left, Yelena gave us a gift. Frank and I had just gotten up and were sitting around on the still-reclining red-and-yellow couches with our coffees in hand when she announced that she was planning to take all four boys back to the Junk Playground for the day so that Frank and I could go to a love hotel.

  We looked at her.

  Yes, yes, she told us—love hotels are perfectly clean, they’re respectable, you will have fun, you will have a great time. Some have microphones!

  We looked at each other.

  You know, for karaoke!

  We all laughed.

  Yelena gave us directions to a street where there were a bunch of them.

  Go ahead, she said.

  We went.

  | 5 |

  A very good resource for someone who is interested in going to a playpark and picking up a hammer and nails and pounding away at scraps of crap to make something is the work of the nineteenth-century British writer John Ruskin.

  I tripped over the following line in Ruskin’s On Art and Life, a contemporary repackaging of two of his essays, “The Nature of Gothic” and “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy.”

  In this passage, he offers a moving plea for allowing men—in particular, the men who built the Gothic cathedrals of the age—to be, as he says, “fully men” and not mere tools of the architect; to be allowed to use their imaginations in their work, to be allowed to make mistakes.

  He wrote:

  Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try and do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

  In this, written more than a hundred and
fifty years ago, he articulated why my modern-day love of Savage Park was so immediate. It wasn’t just that the children were flying in the air there, it wasn’t just that they were making insanely great structures, it wasn’t just that the playpark hut was a junk lover’s dream. It was because the place existed at all for just this reason: this full and complete allowance of a self, including all the ineptness, failure, and possibility of death, because it is understood that only with this allowance do we have the capacity to be great.

  A place to sit and rest, Hanegi Playpark

  When I went back a year later, I stood in Savage Park alone and considered it: the four-year-old boys swinging hammers into tree stumps, bending nails sideways into wood scraps, for no reason, necessarily; or for fun; or for the purpose of making something interesting; or for the sheer delight of feeling the force.

  I didn’t know it then, as I stood there surrounded by foreign people and foreign language, that this was not a new and exotic topography or that Ruskin, an Englishman, had, in his way, mapped this landscape more than a century earlier when he listed the six characteristics of Gothic architecture, and the first, above all others, above changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundancy, was savageness.

  | 6 |

  Frank and I walked holding hands, like buddied-up children on a field trip, into the practically funereal black-marble entrance of the love hotel, where we, somehow, with gestures and pointing and displays of money, negotiated with the fishy lady behind the Plexiglas window for a stay of three hours.

  We knew we had done this when she pushed a key through the slot.

  Frank held the key as we went up the elevator and down the hall to the room with a number on the door that matched the number on the key.

  Frank put the key in the lock and opened the door.

  We walked into the room, where there was, of course, a bed, made up nicely with bright, white linens, and a bathroom with an exceptionally—even for Japan—outfitted toilet, a toilet that, like the finest toddler-princess toilets available here, played tinkly music when you put your bare bottom on its pink seat and peed.

  And there was also a box near the headboard of the bed that functioned as a shelf. At a fine American hotel, you might expect to see in it a shiny magazine—the World of Interiors, say—rolled up carefully so that it might be unrolled and gazed at. But here, instead of a rolled-up magazine to contemplate, there were two sparkly silver microphones to hold, two microphones resting in two matte silver cylinders that were built into the box, two microphones sitting like beer cans in their cozies, and there were cords from the mikes that disappeared into the box so that a human voice that had, perhaps tentatively, made the leap between human lips and microphone head could, from there, be snaked farther through the microphone cord, to the place behind the box and below the bed, and from there even farther, to the giant TV hanging on the wall across from the bed, so that the human voice that went into the microphone quietly and alone could come out of the sound system loud and layered on top of and around and under another human voice, a voice that was singing a song that was recorded elsewhere, long ago, a song that, through the miracle of global sound distribution, was now so well known that people all over the world, even the ones who don’t speak the language, know this song, know Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” and everyone could sing this song with Michael Jackson here, in this time- and space-bending capsule of a room, even though Michael Jackson was not technically here in this room, or even in a body on earth anymore.

  Frank and I and no one else were on the white plain of the bed together.

  When we consider space and our human place in it, we use the wrong sense. We use our eyes. We look at things. This is ridiculous.

  Space belongs to the ears, to hearing, to the ebb and flow of invisible waves, to music, to speech, to yelling, to singing, to gasping, to silence.

  Space is born in the ears and detected in the ears and entered and exited through the moist, circular portal of the ears. Most of us come into space hearing; in the womb, our eyes closed, we are hearing. Many of us die hearing; some say it is the last sense to go.

  When I am in a love hotel, not fully understanding where I am, with my husband doing this old activity that continues to mystify and amaze me, I am not seeing. I am not even sure I am touching, smelling, or tasting. I am being touched. I am listening. I am listening to something beyond the sounds of myself, my husband, and the room.

  I am listening so that it becomes a way of exploring. I am listening my way into an invisible palace, where each room is more wondrous than the last, and in each room I am coming closer to the one room, which is secret, where there is majesty, where entering and leaving space is fully possible.

  Frank and I lay together on the bed, the microphones lying silently in their silver cozies overhead like mummies in their tombs.

  We got up and got dressed.

  Eventually Frank said, “Ready?” By which he meant, “Shall we go?”

  | 7 |

  I came back from our trip to Japan and began reading about play; I was trying to make sense of Hanegi Playpark. I was thinking that if I understood how the word play is defined in the United States, I would understand why we make playgrounds here that look the way they do.

  Girls playing, Hanegi PlayparkKOJI TAKIGUCHI

  I read for a while. What I found in reading is that play has been viewed primarily as an activity and that one of the primary goals in writing about this activity has been to explain its function.

  My favorite writer on the topic was probably Roger Caillois, whose seminal book on play, Man, Play, and Games (1961), does not attempt to define the reason behind play so much as trace its slippery territory.

  Play is free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and make-believe, he wrote. Yet he also added, brilliantly, “The structures of play and reality are often identical, but the respective activities that they subsume are not reducible to each other in time or place. They always take place in domains that are incompatible.”

  Play, as Caillois saw it, might completely mimic reality, but it was not reality. It was a reality twin.

  | 8 |

  I remember being with Yelena and her boys at another aquarium she took us to, Tokyo Sea Life Park. This was near the end of the trip, but my jet lag was still intense.

  We were sitting in a small amphitheater in the lowest level of the aquarium, looking at the shark tank. There was a lounge area there with vending machines so that one could sit comfortably and watch the sharks’ spectacular zooms while lazily drinking bottled water and chomping dried fish crackers.

  I sat there with Mick, who had his head in my lap and who was also beginning to fade.

  I wanted, more than anything, to sleep, and I was acutely aware of the fact that I could not, and I also could not, I felt, just say this, because I was a guest. (I would realize on my second trip to Japan how very Japanese this thinking was when I went to a dinner with a dozen new Japanese friends and watched two twentysomething guests who had been out all night partying the night before sit at the table with their bobbing heads propped up in their hands as they dozed, preferring to do that rather than go home, and everyone else at the table understanding this, that being present but asleep was preferable to admitting exhaustion and being absent, and so ignored their sleeping and did not comment as their heads lolled precariously over their paper-umbrella’d drinks.)

  Sitting upright there with Mick, dying to collapse, I was chafing at the perceived constraints of my guest status when Yelena, a playmaker who knows a thing or two about theater and what is possible there, walked over and sat down beside us in the amphitheater stands.

  She looked around genially and said, “Wouldn’t this be a nice place to take a nap?” And then she lay down and closed her eyes, as if this were something we could actually do.

  I was galled by this. What was her understanding of her place in the world, I harrumphed, that she thought th
at what amounted to a public park bench, this one with passersby showing their terrifying teeth, was a safe place to enter the murky, vulnerable state of sleep?

  But as soon as I asked the question, I knew: she thought the street was an appropriate place to get married; she thought a department store was an appropriate place to make art; she conducted herself, in some respects, like a homeless person, not because she was homeless but because she was always at home, and this was a quality I admired her for immensely.

  | 9 |

  Play is not something that we do; it is something that we are. It is the state of consciousness that we are born with, and it gradually diminishes in power as we age, until, as adults, we generally find that we are able to enter and exit this state with ease only if we have practiced.

  Slide, Hanegi Playpark

  Our adult relationship to play may vary widely. We may choose never to play; we may never realize that the option to play is open to us; we may take shortcuts in the form of drugs or alcohol to enter a simulacrum of the play state; or we may discover that we want to, and can, play all the time, even when we are supposedly working.