Holidays, with their long, mechanically, ritually repeated tradition, so ancient that they no longer remember what actually differentiates chronos from aion and kairos, even though all three words denote time, invalidate attempts to show that the situation is exceptional, extraordinary, dramatic.
In this aspect, holidays are blatantly unfair, favoring those who attack, who introduce changes. Holidays soothe, envelop, hum: loo, loo, baloo.
During holidays, any grand game is watched with greater distance, in satiated contemplation.
If the game engrosses you, if you identify with someone playing, prepare for a veeery long, mimetic relationship with the gameplay. There will be as many strands – of events, causes, effects, peripeteias, episodes – as there are players. It’s impossible to weave something coherent from them. Just as it’s impossible to play on a chessboard where, instead of white and black squares, there’s a uniform, smooth, gray-blue plane.
On the illustration on the left, we see the most famous video installation, TV Buddha by Nam June Paik; on the right – a 15th-century painting in Täby by Albertus Pictor, which inspired Ingmar Bergman to include a scene of a game between the Knight and Death in an old black-and-white movie, once long ago “played” during the holidays on television.
Leonardo da Vinci, Adorazione dei Magi, 1481, Uffizi
Important things are simple, very simple. Simple as a column. Everything around is based on them. It is very rare for us to see them clearly, “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12).
Perhaps, however, on Christmas Eve, during the Holidays?