Have you ever thought about human affairs as games? Imagine you can play games with our serious stuff like work, politics or science, but also with some less serious stuff like food and love. This is exactly what the Yugoslav poet, Vasko Popa (1922-1991), who still has a large following around the world, has done in his collection of poems called Games (some published by Penguin in 1969). Popa’s message was visionary. Games are the symbol of the human folly. We become less human when we consciously renounce creativity, common sense, and other elements of our nature that make us human – beings who can never become gods, but we need gods to save us from the temptations of our own folly. After the mindless futuristic games of Hide-and-seek, The wedding, The rose thieves, The seducer, Leapfrog, and others, we come out defeated, but unaware of the defeat. Yet we blindly believe in our victories as long as the world exists – this does not even work for the gods in Greek mythology.
Mankind is just coming out of a new mindless game, with the conviction that after two months of self-imposed and insane hibernation, it has won another victory. I am tempted to briefly get into Popa’s skin and call our last game The virus, or perhaps The game of folly, without pretence to imitate Popa the poet. I intend to present Popa’s epilogue of all games, and then play a little with the meanings of victory and defeat in the present context.
After play, by Vasko Popa
(Penguin 1969, translated by Anne Pennington)
At last the hands clutch at the stomach
Lest the stomach burst with laughing
But there is no stomach
One hand just manages to lift itself
To wipe the cold sweat from the forehead
There’s no forehead either
The other hand reaches to the heart
Lest the heart leap out of the breast
There isn’t heart either
Both hands drop
Idle drop into the lap
There’s no lap either
On the one hand now the rain is falling
From the other grass is growing
What more should I say
Popa is a ruthless critic of the human folly. Silly games will always take away our vital collective body parts: stomach, head, heart and lap. Let’s analyse how we lost each of these parts in The game of folly played in the spring of 2020 by the majority of mankind.
The stomach likes food, but it also likes laughter. For Popa, laughter is the symbol of creativity. There is no difference between the creativity of science, art, or humour. The game of folly shows that we lost the sense of creativity – we closed our minds. While searching for the solution for the new viral infection, we become single-minded – “If we all think alike, no one is thinking.” We ignored creative quantitative thinkers, such as a Nobel-prize winning chemist, Michael Levitt, who in February and March, showed that the viral infection is not growing exponentially, by looking at the data coming from China, and concluded that the lockdown is not necessary. It is enough to wash hands, wear masks, and practice a form of a reasonable social distancing. We also ignored Sunetra Gupta, a respected epidemiologist from Oxford, who argued that the virus has been longer with us than we think. We already had some immunity against it.
Instead, we trusted a model from the Imperial College London, full of flaws, that prompted the government to push the UK into a forced hibernation – nothing of the sort happened in our history before. Both Levitt and Gupta think that lockdown caused more harm than good. It wrongly assumed a maximum death rate (half a million in the UK), in the absence of the lockdown. Many hospitals were effectively closed for desperate oncological, cardiovascular, urological and other patients, to save those infected with the virus. Yet the London Nightingale hospital, constructed only for the infected, is empty and now gathering dust. Goodbye creativity, welcome to the world of single-minded groupthink!
The second part of the collective body we lost in The game of folly is the head. Science aims to listen to as many reasonable opinions as possible. And then discard those that do not pass the practical test. The founders of the Royal Society are turning in their graves. The motto Nullius in Verba (Believe no one’s word) that neatly symbolizes the purpose of science, has been blatantly violated. The Imperial College’s model, accepted as the most trusted one by the British government, and also trusted by many other governments in the world including that of the US, is not a scientific document because it did not pass the peer-review process established in 1665. The model, without a proper peer-review, remains an internal document, with a weight, not greater than the weight we associate with an undergraduate project.
Has the capitalist world of the anthropocene, proud to call itself the intellectual child of the enlightenment, suddenly become the dogmatic world of communism? Are there Marxes, Lenins, or Stalins of capitalism? These are the questions for satirists, who will without any doubt examine the folly of 2020 in great detail and make us laugh in years to come.
How have we lost the organ that makes us what we should be – transient but humble beings struggling to understand the world – the heart? I will not repeat myself and accuse politicking, from Alaska to Australia. Politicking whose mission is to lie to humanity by inventing anthropocentric fairy tales. Let’s focus on the instinct for survival. Instead of joining together in finding a sensible solution for the new infection, and by doing so help the world, the two leading economies, the US and China, blame each other and slowly but surely head towards a new Cold War. The collateral damage of the new Cold War will be the heart of humanity. After our heart suffers the damage, we will need capable cardiac surgeons who are not there. Or maybe some other experts to construct us a new heart, better than the old one.
And finally, when the hands drop anticipating they will fall into a lap – a symbol of refuge – and the lap is gone, we know The game of folly is over. At the end of it, the economic massacre awaits us – millions of people without the opportunity to feed themselves and their families. But global humanity has no head. We will be told that an economic massacre is the only option. In other words, the humanity will suffer if world billionaires, from philanthropists to real thieves, lose the few billions they gained by hard work sacrificing time they could devote to their families. It is as if they have not already bought all the respirators of the world and installed them in one of the many rooms, which are becoming the last symbol of primitivism dropped out of a comic story.
Despite everything, Popa’s After play can be read as an optimistic message to humanity. The story continues. After the loss of the collective stomach, head, heart, and lap, we must rely on ourselves to build a better world on the ruins of the old. Michael Levitt is an optimist. But his optimism has one condition. It is time for baby boomers and their spiritual children to come down from the world stage and take many teachers with them. The time has come for new and young people, who, with the help of sages of the Popa’s caliber, may begin to create a new world, hopefully, better than the old one.
Perhaps, ironically we can get a glimpse of the new world view that beckons as a consequence of the very folly we have created. The worldwide lockdown with its deathly silence and stillness of cities and darkness of the night skies are opening up our minds. Maybe we are being forced to experience the same world that was seen by our most primitive ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. They certainly lived in a far more sustainable and ecologically harmonious world than we do at present. The brilliant starry skies that greeted them night after night would surely have served as a constant reminder of a cosmic connection. Perhaps the bizarre events facing humanity today will restore our long lost instinctive links to the cosmos.
The last paragraph was written by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe
