Books are not self-contained. They are not unitary. They are social beings. Because when we read we can hear the voice of the author. The imagination of the author's persona is the active experience of reading. This imagination is like a courtship. It is sequential, it reveals itself in steps, it assumes an objectective and pursues it relentlessly.

The most disturbing aspect of reading is hearing a sharp and clear voice but not being able to hear the voice of one's own self at all. Reading is harmless. It is like listening to music inside your head. The only suggestion we have is to read after you can at least hear murmurs of your own voice.

Murmurs in the actor's head while she is reading are helpful. The help they provide is two-fold. One is narrative and filtration. The other is only understandable via an analogy with singing, a duet is a mode of singing that involves listening to the self as well as the self's imagination of the other at the same time. A duet is a more realistic to listen to than a solo rendition of a song because it acknowledges more.

Narrative guides our mind to read selectively and constrain one's response to reading a text to the immanent friction involved in the act of reading. We have to refuse to think about what we read and respond to it only in the immediacy of the act of reading. The specific character of the text and the dynamic of its construction only reveals itself in this friction. Analysis after the fact, without an actor who can channel the friction of the original experience does not work. Analytical language attempts to be precise to discount the presence of the actor who can channel the friction. Analysis aims to encode the friction in the specificity of its jargon. But this does not work, as specificity in encryption does not equal specificity in decryption.

Books are not finite. They can skim over the limitations of their format easily and from voices become windows to a psychic experience, a relationship with another dimension.

If the binding does not exist, if the sequence of the pages is not numbered, if the commitment of a book is rather absolute.

A book can be a file. Through a set of rituals, this book can then be served with a refill periodically and grow in varied and unknown directions.

Because continuing a conversation is easier than starting a new one. If we interrupt our sequence of talking every now and then, then how do we constantly seek new listeners. Finding a single listener is hard enough. The listener or the reader is not passive but an active agent who is archiving our voice and after a point, she starts claiming to know us more than we know ourselves.

So, a periodicity is more valuable to us than a grand-standing. We want to cultivate a relationship and not enter into a dialogue. Presence is registered only when layers of time accumulate and make an impression on us.

Who are we? How do we know who we are?

Is there an absolute constant answer to these questions or only a wavering inconsistent one?

If there is an absolute answer then why are we not born with it? Why do we need to go around solving a puzzle and accessing a mythological landscape to know this answer? Why is the answer not immediate, why is it elusive?

How do we achieve the mastery over the knowledge required to know ourselves?

Answers to these questions are possible only after experiencing a deep personal stroke of a clarity that comes from self-observation and more important self-reading. How do we know? We read ourselves.

Cinema, the original grand narrative which has tried to replace reality itself as a reference frame, is misguidedly celebrating that it has survived all these years. We hold this celebration to be a mistake. We believe a mourning is more in order. Mourning how over the years it has slid down from its pedestal of spectacular magic to becoming a random image on a fifteen inch screen that fills time between advertisements. Mourning how at one time it was actually a living manifestations of the urge to create a life-like fabric, with bends, folds, ruptures, tears and mirror-work. In the act of playing God, very quickly what happened was a break down of the shamanic aura to a material logic of what propels it, the wisdom of awe broke down to the very base conversation about the mechanisms and techniques. So when video offered a fraudulent image as an alternative, cinema got distracted for a moment. Cinema started talking about method, viewing experience and technical quality. Cinema should have remembered that people still go to spas, temples, churches and still crave for a little bit of insulation as long as it is coupled with mystery, sour suspense and emotion. The cinema theatre could have grown up from a popcorn restaurant to so many other things.

But now we have a television at a home and a television in a darkened room. We have home theatres at all because cinema theatres are nothing more. Even commercial jets offer a more adventurous experience. I go to the toilet on a plane and I flush the toilet and I know I am flying through air.

Cinema is deeply wedded to the idea of continuous narrative, an illusion of space, time and emotion. Where does this come from? How did anyone ever think of a storybook which one could stare at and go home with a complete dream running in the head. Insomniacs to this day watch movies all night long, because it is an experience so close to sleeping. Even wet dreams are possible. Cinema is sleep. Cinema is dream-time.

To lovers, embedded deep within the love moment, this will remind them of something else. It will remind of love itself. When you stare at another person and track the fluctuations in their gestures across temporal landscapes, you are experiencing cinema. The first war known to humankind started when she said to him, "You are my cinema."

But how do you experience this when you are sitting by yourself on a dry rock in the middle of what was once a river? Only lovers have the automatic, continuous supply of cinema. Other folk, the cynics, the religious, the traders, the romantic, have no way to ever know this person-propelled-cinema experience.

And the world of cinema, the world of cameras, lights, actors and simulated sex was made to mimic the world of lovers for others. What shall we call the others, we don't know. The desire to copy this world is an unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled in perpetuity. Vestigial. And this leads us back to the source of the desire. It lives in the heart of yearning. The same organ in the body of our emotion that years for love, yearns for cinema. When you are looking into the eyes of your beholder you don't need to watch a movie.

The need to watch a movie arises in the moments that you are disoriented, lost, joyless, dry, opaque, idle, wasted or nonchalant. And no movie ever made has been able to address that itch. They try to substitute the cemetery of dry as a bone hearts with lush green fields of evergreen emotions. But the replacement only lasts till the movie lasts, the landscapes are reset after that. And because you can't rent an apartment in the middle of the limelight, can't be the movie star's next-door neighbour cinema is peddling biscuits to the dead baby. Just peddling biscuits to the dead baby.

Spaces for play emerge in games, sport and often in the business of life too. Play cannot be hidden as easily as playful expression. Play seeps into everything that systems collide with. As an element of the wider epidemic of artfulness, play is a strong deterrent to the fossilification of the urge to create. The plastic of containment of artfulness in rigid modes of behaviour is the failure of the system to restrain from the process of smoothening and calcification as a knowledge terrain.

Playspace can be modelled specifically as a game or generally as a literary space that has ambiguous design parameters and require an experiential description to be conveyed. In the latter case, the description might not even bear the minimum descriptors necessary to make a game but can be accessed as a story with variable content.