Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

One does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore prepared to change. It is possible to deal with growth only out of growth. True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children.

It is in the garden that we discover what travel truly is. We do not journey to a garden but by way of it. Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.

Since gardening is a way not of subduing the indifference of nature but of raising one’s own spontaneity to respond to the disregarding vagaries and unpredictabilities of nature, we do not look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look on ourselves as persons in passage.

Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, but travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them.

What is truly separated is distinct; it is unlike. “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust).

A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences, looks always for the merest changes in plant growth, or in the composition of the soil, the emerging populations of insects and earthworms.

A garden, a family, a classroom—any place of human gathering whatsoever—will offer no end of variations to be observed, each an arrow pointing toward yet more changes. But these observed changes are not theatrically amusing to genuine gardeners; they dramatically open themselves to a renewed future. So, too, with those who look everywhere for difference, who see the earth as source, who celebrate the genius in others, who are not prepared against but for surprise. “I have traveled far in Concord” (Thoreau).

European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust in their way; they made them superfluous by way of some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies. Strictly speaking, waste persons do not exist outside the boundaries of a society. They are not society’s enemies. One does not go to war against them, as one goes to war against another society. Waste persons do not constitute an alternative or threatening society; they constitute an unveiling culture. They are therefore “purged.” A society cleanses itself of them.

When society is unveiled, when we see that it is whatever we want it to be, that it is a species of culture with nothing necessary in it, by no means a phenomenon of nature or a manifestation of instinct, nature is no longer shaped and fitted into one or another set of societal goals.

We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other.

Nature offers no home. Although we become gardeners in response to its indifference, nature does nothing of itself to feed us. In Jewish and Islamic mythology God provided us with a garden but did not, indeed could not, do the gardening for us. It was only a garden because we could respond to it, because we could be responsible for it. Our responsibility lay in noting its variabilities and discrete features. We were to name the animals, separating one from the other. This garden was not a machine-like device automatically providing food for us. Neither were we machine-like, driven from without and destined from within. According to this myth, God did breathe life into us, but in order to continue living we had to do our own breathing.

A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences.

We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it.

I cannot give nature a voice in my script. I can not give others a voice in my script—without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.

The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human existence, disclose to the infinite player that natur...

A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

If I tell a story as a way of bracing up an argument or amusing an audience, I am not telling it for its own sake.

To tell a story for its own sake is to tell it for no other reason than that it is a story. Great stories have this feature: To listen to them and learn them is to become their narrators.

Our first response to hearing a story is the desire to tell it ourselves—the greater the st...

It is as though the story is itself seeking the occasion for its recurrence, making use of us as its agents. We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves; it is rathe...

Once I hear the story I enter into its own dimensionality. I inhabit its space at its time. I do not therefore understand the story in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms of the story.

As myths make individual experience possible, they also make collective experience possible. Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.

We tell myths for their own sake, because they are stories that insist on being stories—and insist on being told. We come to life at their touch.

When we look into a story to find its meaning, it is always a meaning we have brought with us to look at.

Myths are like magic trees in the garden of culture. They do not grow on but out of the silent earth of nature.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

The speech of New Yorkers resonates not because they talk like New Yorkers, but because when they talk we hear New York in their voice.

The resonance of myth collapses the apparent distinction between the story told by one person to another and the story of their telling and listening.

In your relating, and not repeating, the story of Muhammad, I am touched, and I respond from my genius. Something has begun. But in touching, you are also touched. Something has begun between us. Our relationship has opened forward dramatically. Since this drama emerged from the telling of the story of Muhammad, our story resonates with Muhammad’s, and Muhammad’s with ours.

It is a drama that contains an entire history of voices, sounding and resounding from a thousand sources in our culture.

For this reason myths are significantly unresolved—but unresolved in the way of an infinite game, having rules, or narrative structure, that allow any number of participants at any time to enter the drama without fixing its plot or bringing it to closure in a final scene.

In such stories much will be said about closure, or death, but their telling will always disclose the way death comes in the...

Indeed, myth is the highest form of our listening to each other, of offering a silence that makes the speech of the other possible. This is why listening is far more valued by religion than speaking. Fides ex auditu. Faith comes by listening, Paul said.

The myths that cannot be forgotten are those so resonant with the paradox of silence they become the source of our thinking, even our culture, and our civilization. These are the myths we can easily discover and name, but whose meanings continually elude us, myths whose conversion to truth never quite fills the bells of their resonance with the sand of metaphysical interpretation. These are often exceedingly simple stories.

All three of the West’s major religions consider themselves children of Abraham, though each has often understood to be itself the only and final family of the patriarch, an understanding always threatened by the resounding phrase: numbered as the stars of the heavens. This is the myth of a future that always has a future; there is no closure in it. It is a myth of horizon.

Those Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history, but they did not kill the myth. The emptied divinity whom they have made into an Instrument of Vengeance continues to return as the Man of Sorrows bringing with him his unfinished story, and restoring the voices of the silenced.