This post was originally going to be about LEGO Serious Play®, a powerful and under-utilized facilitation method I’ve been practicing lately.
I was going to argue the importance of play in business and its value in addressing serious issues like change management, innovation, consumer behavior, process improvement, and communication.
While searching for inspiration regarding the seriousness of play, I found this quote:
“Whoever wants to understand much must play much” – Gottfried Benn.
Who the hell is Goettfried Benn? Never heard of him.
And so I Googled myself into today’s rabbit hole and learned about this Benn character. Benn was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He fought for Germany in WWI and served as a doctor in an army brothel. After the war, he worked as a pathologist. Not exactly the resume of a playful guy. His first book of poetry was Morgue and other poems, published in 1912. Here’s a taste:
The solitary molar of a hooker, / who had died a missing person, / held a gold filling. / As if by silent agreement, the rest / had fallen out. / The mortician knocked out the filling, / pawned it and went dancing. / Because, he said, / only earth should return to earth. (From Wikipedia, of course.)
Benn was nominated for a Nobel prize in literature five times but never won. (Wikipedia, again) It might be due to his early sympathetic position toward Hitler and the Nazis.
Benn eventually realized his Nazi sympathies were misguided (to say the least) and reversed his position. (His Jewish girlfriend may have helped him see things in a different light.)
His initial political associations with Nazis pretty much torched his future legacy, and the denouncement of Nazism while still living and writing in Germany during WWII didn’t help him much at the time.
Being a great artist has a lot to do with timing and moral discernment. (A guy like Herman Hesse, who hated nazis from the get-go, fared better than Gottfried Benn. He actually won the Nobel prize, and to this day, kids in Nebraska are compelled to read Siddhartha. (Something to think about before declaring allegiance to an ideology.)
Writing about prostitutes and rotting flesh has a way of damaging word-of-mouth appeal, which may explain why it’s difficult to find English translations of Benn’s poems and why I’d never heard of him… and I doubt many of you have. I did find one of his lovely little expressionist ditties on Goodreads.
Beautiful Youth
The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes
looked so nibbled.
When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey.
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
they found a nest of young rats.
One little thing lay dead.
The others were living off kidneys and liver
drinking the cold blood and had
had themselves a beautiful youth.
And just as beautiful and quick was their death:
the lot of them were thrown into the water.
Ah, will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!
You might ask, “What does this have to do with play?”
While the content of German Expressionist literature, painting, film, and music may not have been all checkers and jump ropes, the processes expressionist artists used to create their works were playful and filled with child-like feelings rather than rule-bound intellectualism. No laws and structural constraints directed how an expressionist wrote a poem, painted, or made a film. It’s a rather playful approach to making art.
If artists can express some of the darkest and most serious ideas imaginable through the playful manipulation of words, sounds, and images, what does that say about the value and potential of play for processing and responding to other important matters?
Maybe there’s a business case here somewhere?
I’ll return to LEGO Serious Play another time and conclude this post with a “playful” poem that is all at once beautiful, heartbreaking, and disturbing. Serious play of another kind.
Man and Woman Go Through The Cancer Ward
The man:
Here in these rows are wombs that
have decayed,
and in this row are breasts that have
decayed.
Bed beside stinking bed. Hourly the
sisters change.
Come, quietly lift up this coverlet.
Look, this great mass of fat and ugly
humours
was once some man's delight,
was ecstasy and home.
Come, look at the shrewd scars
upon this breast.
Do you feel the rosary of small soft
knots?
Touch it, no fear. The yielding flesh
is numbed.
Here' s one who bleeds as though
from thirty bodies.
No one has so much blood.
This one was cut:
they took a child out of her
cancerous womb.
They let them sleep. All day, all
night. They tell
The newcomers: here sleep will
make you well. But Sundays
one rouses them a bit for visitors.
They take a little nourishment. Their
backs
are sore. You see the flies.
Occasionally
the sisters wash them. As one
washes benches.
Here the grave rises up about each
bed.
And flesh is leveled down to earth.
The fire
burns out. And sap prepares to flow.
Earth calls.