The Wave Hennets: Toys, games, gadgets
GAMES
You have only to look at the spectators'
heads at a game of tennis. In that of chess
there are clocks that make players alternators.
Those playing 'Strip Jack Naked', ignoring hearts
and the other suits, have to, nevertheless,
keep to a rhythm that makes them counterparts
till the Jack effects capture. And the team game
balances goals, two sets of competitors
running this way and that with the very same
ball being danger and delight. Good players
can turn evil to vantage against the deal:
Call it cheating illusion out of the Real.
WHAT MAKES GAMES GAMES
I worked out what makes games games. Take a crossword.
This letter here was part of that word Across
and of that word Down, perhaps wouldn't be heard
(silent like 'e' in love ) one way, the other
was pronounced (as in enemy ). What was loss
here for the Black in chess was quite another
thing for White, and trick was seeing it first.
Over the net comes the perfect lob, but she
who could see what its weakness was, she reversed
all expectations, made us gasp. Strategy
is a fooling. In Judo, all is pretence:
his attack will become your perfect defence.
CHILD ON A POGO-STICK
With a squeaking of raw springs inside the steel
tube, a compression of strength for the future
(though it be but the next second), he must feel
how he'll return at the moment he's dropping
with his hardest of stamping feet, this cocksure
pogo-stick child, for, rising without stopping,
it was up he was heading when he went down
bending his knees to drive the maximum force
to the ground to the sky, as spry as a clown;
then as he leaps, he is following a course
that will take him to earth, this freedom-flyer,
though he'd like to go higher still and higher.
YO-YO
When you play with a yo-yo, the aim is to
make it return to your hand just in order
to release it again. The point that you threw
it was to get it back. It thought, as it went,
it was gathering all speed to explore a
region away from you, but power was spent
to make sure of the opposite. Green and red
lights shone on some of them as they went rolling
and unrolling the string that bound them. They sped
down and then up, flashing okay and warning,
keeping leashes in grooves. Not always good luck,
though you tried very hard. Sometimes they got stuck.
THE RUBBER LOCH NESS MONSTER
At the swimming pool, Children's Morning. A Loch
Ness Monster, forty feet long, straddles the pool,
but its beaming balloon-face smiles. At each rock,
all of the bloat humps and dips vibrate, silent
slow drums. Noting the gothic in the toadstool
polka-dots, not noting it, on the giant
tight erection the children clamber in safety,
lifeguard attending. One child, arms wide, slides down
from a hump, and the dip dips, and a tipsy
wave sends its wrinkles to everyone. To drown
is impossible. One falls to his death in mock fright,
and it slews to the side and they shriek in delight.
A BALL
The real trick of a ball is that it's a wheel
this way and that, no matter which. Could say it
has an infinite number of wheels that reel
out of the one thing. Could go forward, crabwise,
any way that you want, all directions fit.
Forward it goes, though it's backward to your eyes.
Putting spin on it puzzles them more: it hides
power inside it to swerve to another
tack, and thrusts out at angles, flying to sides
never expected. Each point goes from upper
to lower in sine waves — that's our conviction,
but there aren't any — it's only a fiction.
SUPERBOUNCE BALL (I)
See the Superbounce Ball in perpetual
motion — well, only the merest tap. Back in time
it kept going as if a renewal,
followed precisely, would ensure that it got
it quite right. You could say it was like a rhyme
coming along when expected, being not
what it was. After all, it comes up at a
different angle, challenging you to keep
it in play. In a poem the new matter
bounces in place, having lost none of the leap
of the meaning, unless you're worse than a child
and it wastes all your energy running wild.
SUPERBOUNCE BALL (II)
Was a Superbounce ball, defying a fall,
back in the hand without effort. You could say
it fell upwards as much as downwards. Could call
bouncing like that a perpetual motion —
whereas everything else just had to repay
gravity all that it borrowed — devotion
to the down at the end, autumn leaves, people,
even sequoias. This ball, cheekily spry,
will come trustingly back. Dropped from a steeple
would it, I wondered, be strong enough to fly
to the top once again, and forever too?
It was almost as if it was hitting you.
BOY WITH RADIO-CAR
Watched the radio-car, like a squirrel, dash
full tilt from stop to stop. The boy-controller
stood unmoved, save for busy hands. It would smash
into the kerb, rush backwards and then not be
rushing backwards but forwards, its prompt motor
thrusting the plastic body into a spree
of spry crashes, determined repetition,
frisky perversity. Its aerial wand
plied a pennant that nodded to volition
elsewhere. Fled touch and go, but had to respond
and return. It does not perform so featly
if it runs out of radio range completely.
THE FRISBEE
Watch the frisbee go skimming: its revolving
steadies its aim, a long smooth flight that makes air
its ski slope, the free tenuous blustering
magicked to roundness of Sussex downs, firmness
of oiled steel, this bold wayward breeze made to bear
speeded inwheeling unaware; a wingless
plane that's all wing, and true to its own motive
strictly careering, careening according
to an inward commitment. There is no give;
nothing's deflected; all its track recording
where it's tracked and will track. It's caught, all the same,
and its force is swung round to fly where it came.
THE LINES ON A FOOTBALL PITCH
On the grass they have marked out a football pitch,
whitening the grass, like the gardeners in Alice.
Can't be frost in the blades. Each line's like a stitch
crimping the green with a paper-coloured writ
fixing order for playing. Examine this
vigorous grass, off-white, compressed, how it
isn't meant to mark off-sides and penalties,
yet both the umpire and the linesmen, both the sides
watch the ball as it crosses it. Loyalties
war in the stands as the centre-forward slides
in or out of the penalty area
as the mud hides the white's monomania.
THE WHOOPEE CUSHION
Heard the fart. Was a 'Whoopee!' cushion. But since
I'd been discussing the Joke with this young class
we could use it as illustration. The wince
specially pretended by each boy round him and
his own gawp of embarrassment — these can pass,
flaunted before me, as clues that clearly stand
as support for the truth for authority.
But the great blurt was ambiguous. We then
all examined the bloat sac, the oddity
of the adhesive tube that could part-tighten,
part-release. This unlikely clue to the truth
for the rebel let age be tripped up by youth.
VELCRO
When you fasten the Velcro, all the rough hooks take
hold of the fluff, hug it close and won't let go,
so your shoes or your bicycle bands won't break
loose. It's because there are so many hooks and
so much fluff. All those sprigs of stiff plastic stow
coils into hair and get tangled so they withstand
any pulls sideways. When you peel back, though, they
have to leave go. Hear them spit and growl as you
boldly tear them apart, like pulling away
plaster from hairy skin, but there's no pain to
explain such a harsh outcry, no suffering
as embraces must brave out a severing.
DARUMA ON THE LADDER
Little cylinder painted with Daruma's
face, with its frown of impatience (at the world).
There's a slit at each end. Aims to use humour's
rhetoric smartly on us. Here's a ladder —
if you slide him on top, right away he's hurled
sudden, it seems, to catastrophe, madder
upsets, head over heels down the rungs, ringing
out his alarm on a tinkling bell. Trouble,
pain, disaster await his somersaulting
down to the bottom with each helpless double-
over jolting him hard. But the Japanese
have arranged a surprise — he stands at his ease.