The Blue Curtain
Play - not games, not joy, but the kind of complicated, serious play that confuses our understanding of what play is at all - often happens in ways we do not expect, in places we do not anticipate.
We are in hospital, sat in a cubicle waiting for a consultation. There are five other cubicles on the ward, delineated by that most recognisable piece of hospital equipments - the privacy curtain. As doctors and nurses come and go, NHS-blue, ceiling-mounted fabric is pulled open and closed, the sound of runners on rails the sound of impending medical intervention.
The privacy afforded by these curtains, however, is underwritten by a shared understanding that the curtains are more private than they are. Sure, the curtains provide an element of visual privacy: patients can be examined by healthcare professionals without displaying themselves to the rest of the ward. But, as Sinéad Gleeson writes:
"A curtain is not a door. Confidential consultations hang in the air, a murmuration of medical words" (p. 110-11)
Waiting for our consultation, we can't help but overhear the lives of the other people in the ward; the health complaints, the worries, the fears, the medical histories, the conversations with loved ones. "I am fuckin' terrified", says the man in the cubicle next to us on the phone to someone we assume is his partner.
Behind our own curtain, we acknowledge our inadvertent overhearing: we laugh silently when an old man cracks a joke to a surgeon; we wince as someone cries out in pain. We try to hold conversation to make it seem as though we are not eavesdropping, but this is short-lived - with so many other conversations going on around us, it is hard to concentrate on not listening. When we leave, we act almost as though we did not hear the things we heard; those were private, intimate conversations that only accidentally fell on our ears.
Sociologist Erving Goffman referred to this kind of observing-but-not-too-close as civil inattention. Passing a stranger in public, he observed, we give them just enough of a glance to show we've registered them, then look away to show they're not a spectacle. It's the small courtesy that lets strangers share space without it becoming an encounter. When we use the privacy curtain, we are engaging in a shared make-believe: that the curtain provides us with more privacy than it does, and that we have not heard, and have not been heard.
The privacy curtain is not a door. And yet, in pulling it closed, we play with the reality of what we can and cannot see and hear; we play pretend in order to respect each other's dignity and privacy: a fiction we sustain together, and for each other.
References
Gleeson Sa (2019) Constellations : reflections from life. London: Picador.
Goffman E (1963) Behavior in public places. Simon and Schuster.