Perpignan
Actually, cosmograms can be recognized everywhere: in a marble, a cotton wad, a wart. It's a conjuring game, a fancy. 'I believe the universe isn't larger than a butterfly and that it never stops shrinking. It's shriveling, it is concentrated in one point in space and for me, that point is the train station in Perpignan.' Salvador Dalí
A game of chess
Two kings are playing chess. As soon as one king is checkmated, a horseman rides up the mountain to notify him his army has lost the battle. Man is playing and being played with. Man is a chess player whose actions change the world, as well as a pawn on the board of a higher chess player, who, in turn, is being played with by an even higher god, and so on. The god behind the god is an exercise in symmetry. Because it implies a hierarchy, a power structure, a gradation from good to evil, it is a blueprint for a intellectual, ethnic and political systems.
The World's Pedestal
The last step is to see the world as its own model and put it on a pedestal.
In an attempt to clarify the world, man resorts to science, esotericism, poetry, and - not to be forgotten - humor. Johan Huizinga maintains that all culture is born in a game on the line between jest and gravity. Without rules society lapses into anarchy, without play it degenerates into dictatorship. In a society in which play is no longer taken seriously, leeway disappears and rules fossilize into prescribed patterns, while play deteriorates into amusement in which nothing is at stake.
The objective is to celebrate and transcend the idiocy of existence in the ecstasy of play.
