The Park
In contemporary usage, the word park is perhaps associated equally with open recreational public spaces and with the arresting of movement—as when we park our cars, or park ourselves at a particular spot. Given the increasing encroachment of urbanisation and privatisation, and the way in which these phenomena place extra pressure on the inhabitants of suburbs and cities, public spaces like parks are often discussed as functioning in the paradoxical manner of providing both the opportunity for a break from movement and the possibility of recreation. On the one hand, parks seem to allow us an opportunity to park ourselves—or to ‘plonk’ ourselves down, as the wonderfully onomatopoeic idiom states—so as to interrupt the perturbations of everyday life, whilst, on the other hand, parks also offer the possibility of communal recreations—that is, those leisurely and playful activities through which people might rejuvenate themselves.
However, such a contrast between the action of playful activity and static relief from movement is perhaps more apparent than actual. For example, if we were to take the term recreation, not to refer simply to the rejuvenation needed for returning to work after a hard week of labour, but instead to refer to the possibility of re-creation, reinvention, or the emergence of something radical and new, then we might be able to better appreciate the two senses of park that were gestured to previously. In stopping, ceasing, and withdrawing from what is normal and habitual, one is offered the possibility of reemerging in a heterogeneous guise. It is perhaps only in stopping or arresting one’s course or movement towards something that there is the possibility of successfully deviating into the radically different.
Arguably, such a double