Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about of within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation." Pierce, Charles. "Reality of God". In Collected Papers. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1935. Vol.VI
Scientific Metaphysics
In his Scientific Metaphysics, Charles S. Peirce explains three Universes of Experience: the first comprises all mere Ideas; the second, brute Actuality of things and facts; third has to be with connections between different objects in different Universes; not only the Sign but the Sign's Soul as intermediary between Object and Mind. Peirce suggests that this third Universe is in relationship with the Musement Play of the Mind:
"through some to five to six per cent of one's waking time, perhaps during a stroll -it is refreshing enough more than to repay the expenditure. Because it involves no purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose. I have sometimes been self-inclined to call it reverie with some qualification; but for a frame of mind so antipodal to vacancy and dreaminess such a designation would be to excruciating a misfit. In fact, it is Pure Play.
I suggest that what Pierce calls Musement has to do with those moments when our mind scapes from our conciousness' control. May be our soul is in a metaphysical "ailleurs", may be only our brain is, like computers use to do when they dont "response us during processing data", saving and ordering peculiar information that has to do with aesthetics, eroticism, mystical feelings, etc.
Now Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of one's powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation. Religious meditation, the dawn and the gloaming that invite us to Musement. But also if "one's observations and reflections are allowed to specialize themselves too much, the Play will be converted into scientific study; and that cannot pbe pursued in odd half hours".
As I arrived to professor Girard class, I advertised the heterological inversion of learning process: what would you do face to a hole in the middle of the forest? I answered thinking about my curiosity for knowledge. I find musement playing with ideas and images. It is true, I do not prefer violence, I love musement, nevertheless, violence in Rugby and in social phenomena in general fascinates me as an heterological research non-object. At first I rejected emotionally to read about Rugby, then I remembered that the World Cup has just passed last year and that I was just in France studyin heterological processes, so why not? Rugby, as other popular manifestations as rock concerts or rave parties, seems to be an "evil's homeopathy", dionysiac shadow in our societies, evolutionary healing through a violent scape. In the other hand, as ancient mesoamerican ball game, where priests were sacrificed as prize for Victory, Rugby match constitutes a post-modern paradoxal sacredness: ritual practice of battle, combat and defeat, tribal moral, force and fight, body contact and spectacular physic and mental speediness. Playing Rugby. watching Rugby and studying Rugby produces a healing musement.
