Sacred Ping Pong
Sport: Ambassador of peace (Soviet Union 1970s)
Rumi: Come out of the circle of time into the circle of love.
I have taken up ping pong as my sole viable remaining sport in my 70s. It really was made for frustrated sedentary has-beens. I played real tennis till tennis elbow set in, but even the thought of lurching, run around asphalt (let alone falling) makes it easy to shift into a scaled-down version. The paddle weighs almost nothing, the ball nothing. You play for an hour without noticing the time. Unless you have bodily aches and pains making anything unpleasant. But even then, if they’re not too serious, you don’t notice the pain (e.g., sciatica) so much, you don’t suffer.
From the start, I told Marty, ‘let’s not bother scoring. Let’s just make every rally the best.’
It was rocky at the beginning. Cheap paddles. But never boring. Boring is doing something you don’t want to do, prostituting your time, or worse, when you prefer your tech virtual reality to real life. As low tech retirees, we didn’t have to worry on that count. We did improve. Indeed, I look forward to each journey out of my low tech virtual reality.
Ping pong praxis
We’re taught we must ‘keep score’, the goal is to ‘win’. But why must your other be your opponent? Our two rules: keep the ball in play, and keep the play interesting. Balance challenge vs stability, a controlled disequilibrium. After playing for four years, tactics and strategy have become apparent. Without the worry of being ‘out’, your range of shots increases dramatically. I love to hit deep, as if defying gravity, going to the limit. We volley for a change of pace and keep a collective score for fun. When the fire alarm went off one day, we transferred the game to a spot of green outside and volleyed. It turned out to be a delight to play on the grass and we had lots of friendly cheerleading.
Our hits are slower, looking for elegance, style. It’s beautiful to watch a ball bounce high and deep, it rises and rushes to greet your friendly paddle. Hitting wide or too deep is fine if it’s still returnable. It’s fun to rush around to hit a deep lob 20′ away to the distant table. Like launching a rocket to planet Earth from the asteroid belt. Landing smartly on a corner is like docking your craft to the space station.
Shots are often funny, crazy, flying away into the distance. We cause some consternation and more delight from passing residents in the common room. A good rally is like a game in itself. Both players win. The outsider shots are just more cardiovascular workout, and on soft vinyl, not hateful cement.
How to end a rally? Usually from a really bad shot into the ‘jungle’ (stacked chairs) or the Bermuda Triangle (meeting tables pushed together). If the rally has gone on for a while, I like to lob it and end with a volley at the net, a flourish, hoping to keep the volley going 3-4 times and even returning to rally mode. Volleys are fun and not so strenuous as in real tennis. I continue to be amazed at the strange things gravity and movement do.
Courtesy and laughter are the basic mode, the high you get from synergy, the 1 + 1 > 2, the connection, cooperation. The only competition is with yourself to push you to excel. All rallies are win-win.
So ping pong is praxis. Practical politics, skills enacted, embodied, realized, put into practice, in a nonalienated world, where you consciously build your life/ universe based on mutual agreement. ‘No force in ping pong.’
Boundaries?
Why artificially create boundaries? If I’m polite and not a nuisance, I can retrieve the ball from across the room between the feet of the mahjong players. (Very, very serious. They rarely crack a smile even as I reach in among their feet.) No need to put up a wall. It’s nice to visit and say hello, excuse myself if the ball lands on someone’s lap or head. An apology is like a free gift. No need for arms (except the real ones, to delicately retrieve an errant ball). You can go abroad, the ‘near abroad’ to play. The Soviet Union was a model that way. Ukrainians and Russians, Armenians and Azeris, Georgians and Abkhazians, lived in peaceful coexistence until the West finally succeeded in bring it down, proudly boasting of freedom and democracy.
It was a kind of planned (forced) gift economy (Spartan mass consumerism), and foundered on the impossibility of forcing people to be nice and not to compare apples (capitalism) and oranges (communism). There was no private property, infrastructure was public, and sport and games were central to Soviet life. It will be remembered for the thousands of top athletes, artists, and scientists it produced.
My translation: Russian and Ukrainian living in harmony before capitalism poisoned everything (1950s)
A hint of how a gift economy differs from our private property/ scarcity-based society. But force in general is a bad idea and the internally peaceful, borderless Soviet Union collapsed. Its story was better than ours (at least for socialists) but it wasn’t enough to undermine our very old, very powerful story of separation and scarcity.
Vita ludens
We play for fun and to bond. All life is (or should be) ludens, playful, leisurely, fun. Our cosmic motivation is curiosity, exploring limits, loosening inhibitions to creativity, creative dialogue with environment, reimagining the world, not enslaved to a preset end. The end emerges through process itself. Pause for a moment. That’s exactly what a new born infant is/ does. Is it still the way you live?
The value of play (of life!) is not so much the motor skills or problem-solving techniques it develops; what is learned is the ability to concentrate and focus attention unsparingly on the task at hand, without regard for limitations—no tiredness, no rushing, no need to abandon a hot idea in the middle to go on to something else. Untrammeled creativity that comes from within. Experience the unsparing focus of play as a feeling of timelessness. Entrainment. It undoes the artificial self/ other, mind/ body, in our Age of Separation. The task absorbs us, organic agents of the universe’s own creative process. Through us, the universe creates itself. Sacred ping pong.
No need for willpower to stay focused and overcome natural desires. In play we are natural desire manifest (if we get out of the automaton syndrome). There’s no useful goal. It’s not ‘youth is the time for play’, but ‘play keeps us youthful‘. When you impose arbitrary rules, limits, then our bodies/ minds suffer, harden (think: arteries hardening). Qualities of childhood play are the same as for creativity of the adult. We are the universe’s channel for play. Language, art, math, technology originated in play. Abstract language allows us to imagine, create, play with our inner reality. What might be.
But adult play is a pale imitation of children’s play. We play but in a game gone wrong, and can’t extricate ourselves. Our separation from nature, our puny Cartesian self-and-other is not how the real world works. Think: Play, a dance of energy and information. After a near-death experience, a person develops an unhurried, playful attitude to life, cherishing each moment.1
Nature ‘grew’ animals/ us. How can we conceive of the bizarre, the beautiful, all unrepeatable, millions of species as random? What an insult! But not pre-designed. The idea of a blueprint for the human eye (any eye) is ridiculous. The peacock (man) is a marvel of creativity. It is clearly not random but there is no invoker. It emerged spontaneously out of the creativity of Earth, nature, the universe, if you like, God’s creative inspiration. And that goes doubly for Man. The conscious self-aware human is the emergent whole mind-soul-body. No blueprint. Just trust mother nature.
I was born with my gifts latent. They emerged as I interacted with my environment and activated them to serve the purpose I have here, also an emergent property, something between me, God and nature. No central command dictating, just as there is no central command in the cell, where the ‘brain’ is the membrane, the interphase with the outside, the other. There is no central command in our brains.2 i.e., you are what others make of you, what ‘nature calls’ for, through life’s opportunities and the world’s needs. Darwin’s survival. Lamarck’s higher purpose which we must seek out, i.e., through humility, curiosity, not control. We think we are the master engineers, but you engineer nature at great peril. Nature is wondrously nonlinear. We are helplessly linear, and anything we do will have nonlinear, chaos-producing effects. When we try to impose our linear thinking, rigid rules, we defy nature’s laws and changeability. Natives intuit nature and only obey a law they can break.3
Quantum ping pong
Newton defined our enlightenment world as an impersonal one of force and time-space; his laws of motion – the laws of everything (until they weren’t). Ping pong thumbs its nose at this worldview. The virtually weightless ball defies gravity. My puny forehand can catapult the missile into deep outer-space. Time disappears when you are ‘in the flow’. Table tennis was invented in 1870s by colonial officers, then adopted by nouveau riche at home in imperial Britannia, as a post-prandial diversion. Not skipping a beat, in 1883, Slazenger filed a patent for a net for table tennis. ‘Ping pong’ was trademarked in 1901. Sigh. Greed, private property moved in on the backs of imperial playtime.
The problem was the ball. Clunky cricket or golf balls were too heavy. Technology to the rescue. Celluloid was used to make light, sturdy balls in the US, also in 1901, and ping pong never looked back. There are 300 million players around the world today. It is the sixth most popular game, and recognized as an Olympic sport in 1988. It is not so popular in the US. People are too spread out. Driving a car to play ping pong is, well, silly. Americans and globally, those who are part of our Newtonian worldview, like sports, but professional sports, like everything in capitalism, specialized, superstars, money-making. There’s no money in the masses playing ping pong for free. So we have spectator versions of all sports. Thank God ping pong doesn’t have much sex appeal, glamor, danger, so it is more or less forgotten, not coopted, poisoned.
Newton was stuck in separation mode: we are isolated automatons moving around independently in a random world. Along came Einstein and quantum physics and we find we are in an indeterminate world all connected. Our subduing of nature is a deception. Our tamed version of things makes them smaller, even dead, and disposable. We intuit this lack, but instead of rejecting the deception, we pile it on higher and deeper. More tech. Better TV to get the best experience. Lol. No longer do we sense the mystery of the unknown, but rather are left with a catalogue of the known, everything private property.
Ping pong is radical, revolutionary, anarchistic, animistic. We know deep down that private property is theft, and enjoy the sense of freedom when we enter the tireless, property-less primordial realm. Escape into the timeless, when no rules interrupt the flow, where the play creates beauty as it proceeds, like the Mandelbrot set, nonlinear evolutionary beauty which just is, unprovably beautiful.4
Rules ruin the flow except at the highest level of play when competition acts to heighten the beauty, mutual control (you have to hit brilliantly to stay alive, every moment a life/ death moment, martialing all skills at once). The only property, reality, is bat-ball-table. You are your partner merged with the ball in a dance. All are ‘commons’. We use our gifts and leave nature in the same primal state. The gift economy. The perfect sport. No infrastructure (you can volley anywhere, outdoors), almost no space, so no built-in physical limits that constrict, make expensive, tied to scarcity culture.
Left/ right hemispheres
Ping pong is a constant reminder that left-hemisphere rationality is just a superficial rationalization of real decision-making in the unconscious sympathetic (fight or flight) system. As my ace partner, Jason, prepares for a smash, I notice my paddle is already in position before I have a chance to think. To my surprise, I often scoop a deep shot to my backhand with my physical ‘back hand’ without any left brain instruction. Glimpses of another Eric. We are ruled by cold hard reason (but secretly function ‘without rhyme or reason’, marching to a different tune). Newtonian mass determined by forces acting on us (but constantly undermined by our irrational right hemisphere).
This is agriculture thinking. Nature is violent, stingy, we must extract as much as possible, save some, pay the master, lord for the privilege of being alive. The left hemisphere is the wrong place for vita ludens. That requires the heart for knowing and deciding. A beautiful rally you feel in the heart, not so much head, but the head respects, admires. It grudgingly admits the right hemisphere is, well, right, at least occasionally. It’s good to have a goal, especially if it’s creating beauty. Save the rational stuff for later.
No scoring, no force. Just skill, perfecting your skills, your goal – to create beauty. Force never works in ping pong (or in any social relation). A gentle tap at the right time and place is exquisite, a smash … boring. Smashes all look the same. Like Tolstoy’s bad marriages. The ball is very sensitive. You hear it scream in pain if you whack it too hard. ‘Good’ easily turns into ‘bad’, so pay attention! It is a loving relationship with the ball.
The universe you share with your partner has its dangers – the ‘jungle’ (of stacked chairs), the caves in the cliff face (shelves of library books, where the ball often retreats for a quick read up on organic chemistry or a kidney flush. Yew!). It plays hide&seek, launches into the sky, falling chicken-little style with a spectacular crash, scales peaks (ceiling speaker, piano). Saturnalia. An inverted parody of ‘out there’ ‘reality’. Overcome defeat with a string of beautiful, crazy shots. Collapse in laughter, the ‘high’ point of a good session.
In our post-Newtonian world, the observer is inseparable from the observed, so ‘is’ (I am isolated observer) is a lie. You are the ball, rushing over the net into the arms of your partner’s bat. Flying back in a ‘deadly’ beeline for your head. BAM! You’re dead! 
Each hit unique. Experiments not repeatable. The scientific method doesn’t work. The flash-bulb snapshot of the ball heading for your eyeballs, imprinted for every on your mind. The left hemisphere mostly taking a break, letting your ball return without any conscious willing. Time as a succession of infinitely brief instants, process (motion, acceleration), but NOT reduced to dead numbers. You, the ball and your partner are timeless.
The flash bulbs are rare moments, when a well aimed drive comes straight at you, you see the inner workings of your brain. Our rational brain automatically takes snapshots, objectifies, measures, compares, competes. The how is analyzed ‘post mortem’, but you’ll never fully understand the trajectory, the action, as it is nonlinear, full of feedback upon feedback. But that’s ok. It’s all a game. You can objectify, analyze, but the best players don’t need that. You can’t analyze joy, freedom.
The norm is a smooth left hemisphere film following a right hemisphere film script, where the real decisions are made to maintain the complex, balanced disequilibrium of life, always adjusting, hopefully alerting us to any runaway linear process undermining the whole and leading to collapse.
Child’s play
Do our adult games help there? It seems not. They are pushing all the wrong buttons: everyone isolated, dead automatons, half of whom are losers, taking Earth hostage as private property, with usury to accelerate the theft and destroy us all in war, famine and environmental collapse.
Time for a new game, a new story.
We need to leave behind this worldview of nature as cruel, of competition, zero-sum, as our way of life. We come into a world where everything, in the first place, your life, is a gift. How do you respond to a gift? Gratitude. And when it’s a really big gift, say your life, you are awed, humbled. How did those first good feelings become selfishness and arrogance? We all agree childhood should be a time of joy and play. Play is how we practice being adults.
So how did adults manage to bury play, turn it into passive spectator sports, competitive, dangerous, full of rich winners and poor losers? It must have something to do with this agriculture thinking, life as a zero-sum game which, if we include nature, becomes a negative sum game, where we ‘game’ nature, steal from nature and others and destroy both in the pursuit of lifeless gold.
This is a false view. The child knows the world is one of abundance. It is only as rules pile up, and his range of play limited and channeled into competitive simulations of our scarcity-obsessed world, that he forgets. The timeless magic of ping pong takes away these deadening limits and reminds me that nature is my generous, playful friend, not an enemy to be fought, resisted. When I lose balance, I’m relaxed as I fall and pick myself up and have a laugh at my declining abilities.
I would go a step farther and get rid of all professional sports. Have your competitions locally and friendly, making sure there is always a consolation prize. There are millions of excellent players to watch without the cult adulation of artificial heroes, earning obscene amounts of money, providing ‘copy’ for journalists to wax about, whose private lives we snoop on instead of cultivating our own. And why all the mindless travel of big, expensive teams constantly filling the sky with CO2 in endless pursuit of their Rosebud? Sorry, there is no Rosebud, meaning, to a trumped-up distraction. Corona should have been a wake-up call. We can celebrate our local community and perhaps know the ‘stars’ personally. By eliminating highly paid millionaire superstars, we can have dozens of local professional ‘stars’, be one yourself.
Ping pong living
Technology is definitely not Darwin’s random but rather adaptive. It is achieved through awareness of purpose, guided by trial-and-error and narrowing your search. Nonlinear so we automatically rely on intuition. For scientists, evolution is random, for creationists, it is the work of God. Both think only man has intentionality. But what if evolution has intentionality in some sleight-of-hand way?
Darwin famously pointed out the uniqueness of the peacock, where its beauty is through ‘sexual selection’. Rather than taking his example to the logical conclusion, that ALL females ‘fall in love’, creating beauty. That we all, every atom and toad, operate on love. That it literally makes the world go round. Lynn Margulis and many other scientists now see cooperation as the driving force of evolution in both human society and nature. Nature’s ‘law of everything’ operates on the same principles as human social evolution. We are emergent beings part of a complex, very nonlinear web of life.
Bottom-up emergent evolution, not random imposed top-down hierarchical evolution.5 We don’t need to separate the human realm. We are part of nature. No need to build a tower to the sky. Sky is everywhere. What we do need is a miracle, i.e., a new sense of what is possible, born from surrender from the attempt to control, manage life. A miracle happens when life overwhelms you and you do the unimaginable (an alcoholic humbly surrenders and turns around his life). Let go of old ways of being (isolated, owning, having). Withdraw from the apparatus of the machine. See the love that bathes the world. Love of being alive, love of living beings. Stop thinking in terms of how much x is ‘worth’. Comparing. Competing. Think Rumi or McCartney, ‘All you need is love’.
Your goal is beauty, service, fun, self-expression. The collapse of the Newtonian world-machine reunites us with the world. We fall in love with it again, our first impressions coming back to us. Love biological life and our personal lives. Love the world and our time in it. We have been frightened into rejecting both, accepting as a result their plunder: the reduction of the living world to resources, things, money and reduction of our time to commodified hours, jobs, the grim necessity of making a living and turning nature, all of our commons, into dead private property.
Ping pong diplomacy
Hearing the steady stream of jingoism now, vilifying Putin and Russia, it ‘hit’ me how this Cold War political system is like competitive ping pong. Defeat your opponent by all ‘legal’ means, be ruthless, hostile. Intimidate him. Better yet, trick him, lie. We’re all fair ‘game’ (i.e., game = victim). War is merely politics by other means. War is good. It makes profits and should kill somewhere far away, ‘creates’ jobs. You see how we distort these words. To game someone is to make a fool of him. Profit originally did not mean exploiting others. We create jobs with no concern about how the things we make will be used. Our thinking is reductionist, reducing everything to money.
The logic of imperialism is the same Etonian cricket competitiveness which pervades all our games. At least in the 19th century variety among the elite, there were principles of modesty and fair play. The era of superstardom, superpowers, had to wait till our civilization had reached its limits of destructive force in the 20th century, when diplomacy collapsed and we were in capitalism’s death grip, in an increasingly totalitarian world.
This war mentality pervades our ‘civilization’. Life is war and Britannia rules the waves, i.e., waves the rules. Ha! The rulers can change the rules as they like. What kind of a game is that? How can a jingoistic, one-sided war mentality ever lead to peace? Peace is impossible if the ‘law of the jungle’6 reigns, where everyone is a slave to the system, where the rules are stacked to ‘keep order’. People are actually happier during real wartime than during peacetime under capitalism.
All nations need friendly contact, especially with neighbours. Before the rise of capitalism, that was done through ceremonial exchange of gifts. Sports are a great way to do that too, but why automatically compete? Gift giving wasn’t about winning-losing. The point is friendship, fun and health.
In ping pong, without the worry of being ‘out’ (i.e., not fitting in, poor, wrong colour), your range of shots increases dramatically as does your partner. Hey! It’s DEI.7 Ditto foreign relations and life in general. You trust your partner without complicated rules or a referee. And not everything can or should be legislated. The circumstances change and the way to deal with problems is courtesy and mutual understanding. Sometimes it’s okay to break the rule. We never walk away frustrated or a ‘loser’ from our ping pong, and, after four years, it just gets better. The end? You play till you’ve run out of inspiration, generally about an hour. End on a high point of enjoyment, go home and do your exercises for good measure.
In my books, ping pong is superior to all other racket sports, especially pickleball, which is a fitting metaphor for imperialism. Noisy, aggressive, takes over tennis courts, false sense of superiority, shortcut on aging. It presses all the wrong buttons. Ping pong praxis has economic, political, environmental, health benefits. #1 is demonetizing. Screw capitalism. #2. Eliminating scoring opens the competition to alternatives: paintball-style ‘killing’ the opponent, most bizarre shots, volleys, crazy rebounds off pillars, hitting the inadvertently musical railings, funny shots. Another is Jason’s ‘double clutch’.8 The goal is to keep the ball in play, i.e., cooperative. If boring, then push the bounds, throw in a wild card. No stasis. Homeostasis, i.e., controlled disequilibrium, an ever-changing balance between stability and creativity.
New story time
Of course, we grow up, leave behind ‘childish things’, we suddenly shoot up, grow into adults, but don’t keep growing. The teen years are difficult, challenging, full of competition, striving, jockeying for a place in the adult hierarchy, but thankfully they come to an end and we go back into an equilibrium relationship with the environment, our neocortex continuing to mature (hopefully) towards wisdom. Our new position is more like our infancy than our teen years. We find a huge complex world that we can explore with our newly refined mind-body.
Similarly, our society has followed such a trajectory, growing frantically for 500 years as our societies mature, but that dangerous exponential growth is coming to an end, as we monetize every inch of the globe in search of profit. Which makes ping pong all the more vital to our vita ludens. It thumbs its nose at our obsession with growth, property, money.
Old people, like children, are not concerned with this anymore. We naturally return to gift economy thinking, aware of how dependent and vulnerable we are, not isolated individuals in control, grateful to have these last moments of awe at what we must leave behind. People that make this transition back to gift thinking are the happiest. ‘You can’t take it with you’ govern us again, as it did before all the adult stories messed things up.
Our story of scarcity and private property (they are one and the same) is well past its due date. We can start with ping pong, reminding us that life is for play, that we need to reconceive work as play, that if we maximize anything, it should be laughter and joy, not dead property. Eisenstein calls for a technology of love in the Age of Reunion. P2P, LETS, Freecycle.9 End your game with a mutual flourish, like a full cadence at the end of dazzling scherzo. Create beauty or at the very least, comic relief. The law of sacred ping pong: better him <=> better me.
* See Harnessing human nature to save the world.
ENDNOTES:
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