Sawwon Lee

“Hundreds of Communists were in the same situation at the time. All their lives they had...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 01:57:05 -0400

“Hundreds of Communists were in the same situation at the time. All their lives they had entirely identified themselves with their Party. When it suddenly became their prosecutor, they agreed, like Joseph K., “to examine their whole lives, their entire past, down to the smallest details” to find the hidden offense and, in the end, to confess to imaginary crimes.” - Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

At some point in the recent but murky past, I was being sad about a unrequited love of mine. Perhaps I was lamenting my inability to exchange anything more than polite pleasantries; perhaps I was appreciating the plant life in a sunny conservation area northwest of Boston and thinking only of her absence from the scene. The historical details were never written down for me to recount in precise detail. However, in line with the typically abstract focus of my mind and memory, I do quite strongly recall the motions of emotion that ensued during this particular instance of sadness. In gross form, the motions were not atypical - there’s a cycle that frequently occurs, where I might think of her for whatever reason and feel warm, but then be glum about her absence, and then feel glad to even know her, but then be sad to merely ‘know’ her, et cetera.

Generally, these fluctuations happen in the span of seconds and the emotions would mix and be dismissed as the bittersweetness of affection unreturned. But for some reason at this one arbitrary time, I stopped to look at the emotional swirl - specifically at the part where I would “be glum about her absence, and then feel glad to even know her”. My attention was caught by this up-swing, by this turning away from sadness. It tweaked me, and in particular it tweaked me into a perspective on my past when I could think about the sadder moments and the happier moments, and then something clicked: my God, it’s reaction formation. In general, it’s a favored defense mechanism of mine - for instance at at one point I took pains to be chummy with someone who had offended me somewhat and whom I found philosophically disagreeable, because the idea of grudge-holding sat poorly with me.

To explain reaction formation in the specific case requires a lemma, though. At the beginning of May, I had come across a piece of advice given to someone having trouble getting over an ex, who had said something about wanting a clear rejection. The response given was: “What you mean to say is that you need her to hurt you. It’s much easier to give up hope when someone has really hurt you. And it’s a lot easier to let them make the final choice than to stand up and decide it for yourself.” And the idea seemed to make a lot of sense to me, but as a pain-aversive individual I find it difficult to accept being hurt, especially because I am often drawn to people for their nice or kind behavior. If I’m sad because of my configuration with her, then I can’t bring myself to place any of the blame for that on her, even if it would probably expedite the process of getting over things.

It would feel like a betrayal, almost, which is why I thought about the Kundera quote when I began composition. “She brings more happiness than a legion of generic ‘friends’ would,” I say to myself. “She deserves better than that.” And so to avoid the discomfort of thinking poorly of her, I turn away from critique, I bow myself under the weight of my offense, and I renew my devotion. It evokes the old saying that Communism cannot fail but can only be failed. Of course, in a literal sense, I have failed - nobody save for me is responsible for minding my delusional obsession and worship. However, the simple literal truth fails to capture the emotional truth - a truth which raises more interesting questions in terms of why I take certain positions so readily, and what end those positions serve.

Those questions are of course the ones I have been clumsily attempting to answer by suggesting that in response to sadness, I undergo reaction formation of happy affection for her. And this answer is important because if I want to move on, I’m going to need to willingly and honestly feel the underlying sadness. There needs to be room for the human feelings of deprivation and hurt if I am to grow as a human. And part of why this psychological conjecture rang so immediately true for me is that there has observably been a lot of unaccepted hurt (and a lot of corresponding affection). It hurt when I was approximately ignored for approximately a year. It hurt when her bed was shared with another. And the pain from those hurts was felt only in an irrationally entitled part of me, but when the pain was turned to over-exuberant affection it spread throughout the psyche. And spread it did, because there was a clear change in the intensity of feeling after these events passed.

I don’t know what any of this means, exactly. Despite an initial burst of motivation, things don’t seem as simple as deciding to trick myself no more. But I do think that if there is any particular story to be told about college freshman year, this is it. There are other ongoing stories that took place during the school year, like the mental struggle with my place in academia and the continued search for a sense of identity/self/direction, and those did contribute to the outcomes I saw. But if there are any particular events of the year that stand out on their own merits, they would fall under the umbrella sketched here: problems with love, and the tools of repression and mental redirection that made them into general problems with emotion.

[End-note: This is one way of presenting reality. I can think of about two other conflicting ways to present reality using the same topic. But I need to fully draw out the presentations before I can judge them.]

thepeoplesrecord: The troubling viral trend of the “hilarious”...

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:03:36 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

The troubling viral trend of the “hilarious” Black poor person
May 7, 2013

Charles Ramsey, the man who helped rescue three Cleveland women presumed dead after going missing a decade ago, has become an instant Internet meme. It’s hardly surprising—the interviews he gave yesterday provide plenty of fodder for a viral video, including memorable soundbites (“I was eatin’ my McDonald’s”) and lots of enthusiastic gestures. But as Miles Klee and Connor Simpson have noted, Ramsey’s heroism is quickly being overshadowed by the public’s desire to laugh at and autotune his story, and that’s a shame. Ramsey has become the latest in a fairly recent trend of “hilarious” black neighbors, unwitting Internet celebrities whose appeal seems rooted in a “colorful” style that is always immediately recognizable as poor or working-class.

Before Ramsey, there was Antoine Dodson, who saved his younger sister from an intruder, only to wind up famous for his flamboyant recounting of the story to a reporter. Since Dodson’s rise to fame, there have been others: Sweet Brown, a woman who barely escaped her apartment complex during a fire last year, and Michelle Clarke, who couldn’t fathom the hailstorm that rained down in her hometown of Houston, and in turn became “the next Sweet Brown.”

Granted, the buzzworthy tactic of reporters interviewing the most loquacious witnesses to a crime or other event is nothing new, and YouTube has countless examples of people of all ethnicities saying ridiculous things. One woman, for instance, saw fit to casually mention her breasts while discussing a local accident, while another man described a car crash with theatrical flair. Earlier this year, a “hatchet-wielding hitchhiker” named Kai matched Dodson’s fame with his astonishing account of rescuing a woman from a racist attacker. But none of those people have been subjected to quite the same level of derisive memeification as Brown, Clark, and now, perhaps, Ramsey—the inescapable echoes of “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife!” and “Kabooyaw,” the tens of millions of YouTube hits and cameos in other viral videos, even commercials.

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

Ramsey is particularly striking in this regard, since, for a moment at least, he put the issue of race front and center himself. Describing the rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives, he says, “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”

The candid statement seems to catch the reporter off guard; he ends the interview shortly afterward. And it’s notable that among the many memorable things Ramsey said on camera, this one has gotten less meme-attention than most. Those who are simply having fun with the footage of Ramsey might pause for a second to actually listen to the man. He clearly knows a thing or two about the way racism prevents us from seeing each other as people.

Source

Now that you know this is a thing, please stop sharing these memes. Poor Black people speaking candidly about various serious incidents isn’t a hilarious joke.

"How homonationalism works: 1) The Inclusion Argument: Sexual minorities should call for..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:31:00 -0400

“

How homonationalism works:

1) The Inclusion Argument: Sexual minorities should call for inclusion in the state through liberal rights of the individual (e.g. gay marriage). The struggle for individual rights replaces the struggle for collective rights, collective resistance, or the transformation of asymmetrical power formations.

2) Good vs. Bad Queers: The call for inclusion is predicated on making the distinction between good queers and bad queers. These appeals argue that most sexual minorities are no different than members of dominant society, and thus that these queers deserve to be recognized as part of the mainstream. Here, bad queers are offered as the undesirable other to help sell the good queers to Canadian society, since bad queers are dangers to society or drains on state resources. They include racialized queers, people who are HIV-positive, poor and homeless queers, drug users, non-status queer migrants, etc.

3) Reinforcing the Social Order: Once the right kind of queers are welcomed into the state, these institutions can use the newly admitted ‘good queers’ as evidence that symmetry has been achieved, effectively dismissing larger concerns over the rights of those who remain marginalized and subjugated. Further, the inclusion of sexual minorities under the terms of individual rights is then used in propaganda by the state to demonstrate how civilized, modern, liberal, and democratic the West is, particularly in opposition to backward, pre-modern, and non-democratic states (such as in the Middle East) – a tactic rooted in Orientalism.

”

- Trending Homonationalism – Natalie Kouri-Towe

(via hummussexual)

The Cold Hard Truth About White Radicals and the Black Panther Party

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:31:24 -0400

dancepunksnotdead:

by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

Contrary to what they claim today, I know many white radicals in the old Left hated the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s. They hated the idea of Black people fighting for their own liberation, without white radical leadership. They hated the idea that the BPP was able to recruit thousands of Black poor and working class youth. They hated the idea that the Black Panther newspaper was the central radical publication of the day, and could explain complex terms to urban Black people that made them “get it”, more than the 1960’s white radical and “underground” press. They hated the idea that the Black Panther Party as an autonomous movement inspired other ethnic and racial groups to organize similar groups, and even young whites whom they had hoped to recruit to their tired ass programs. They hated the idea that the BPP had put forth a socialist program that put oppressed Black/POC at the center of revolutionary social change in the USA and the world. They hated them then, and they hate them now, but today they pretend that they were their best friends of the BPP, and that they are creating programs “just like” the BPP, and that Black people just oughta join with them.

The problem with haters, and racism inside the Left itself, is that they want Black people to go against their own self-interests by surrendering to middle class white radicals, when only they can begin the process of securing their own liberation. Black/POC radicals can only join with others when there are shared issues of concern on a class basis, or there is shared sacrifice, but even then, we need to have our own autonomous movement to make sure our issues are not only respected, but given priority, by any movement claiming to be fighting for a new socialist society.

"Women aren’t raised in a culture that tells them they’re entitled to attention from men. We’re told..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:47:23 -0400

“Women aren’t raised in a culture that tells them they’re entitled to attention from men. We’re told instead that we have to earn it. And one reliable way of earning positive attention from men is to bash other women, especially women who speak out against sexism.”

“Excuse sexist behavior from men - get to be told you’re the exception. You’re not like those other girls, the bitchy ones. You’re special.”

- Amanda Marcotte - It’s Really Time for the Harassment to End (via bl-ind)

This is really interesting, because the claim that “culture tells us we’re not entitled to attention, we have to earn it” - I’ve always heard this from the male perspective, based on the constant, crushing demand to perform, to prove worth. And the article isn’t incoherent - it makes a very believable point when it says something like “When women deny them what they believe women owe them, instead of asking if in fact they were owed these things, [men] instead lash out at women.” I can/should/must believe that, but likewise I can/should/must believe that there is something behind the expressions of disempowerment and distress that I’ve heard.

And what I want to say - the framework I want to set up - is that of enfranchisement. To consider feminism specifically - it is the case that women as a generality are substantially more disenfranchised than men as a generality. But - to take a somewhat simplified view of things - if you consider the distributions present in each population - you’re going to have a lower end of the distribution for men, and a higher end of the distribution for women. The article sort of talks about that latter group - ”you can make a career out of it. See: Ann Coulter, S.E. Cupp and many right wing women like them.”

And considering the higher end of the female and male distributions - with the sufficiency mark defined differently between the two distribution - I don’t see why we have to care about them. I come from Christianity - Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to love our neighbors (i.e. the world) - and I understand the benefits of doing so. But practically speaking, I see little need to extend this love to people who already have love, to people well-nestled in the bosom of a dominant society - unless, of course, you’re indulging a selfish, tribal instinct to stand up for your own kind. God knows I get more defensive about Men, as an aggregate, than is appropriate. But when it comes to these people who harass - yeah, fuck ‘em, whatever.

But that still leaves the lower ends of the distribution. If you look at gender issues, and you sum these lower ends, you are in fact going to have a resulting set that’s mostly female. It makes sense, therefore, to mostly talk about women’s issues. But the male component is still there, and while it is rhetorically excusable to round it down to 0, it does not make good theory to do so. And theory does not accommodate the male component simply because its speakers acknowledge, hypothetically, that men suffer under patriarchy. It must be understood which men suffer (the most) under patriarchy, and build a model of Man that encompasses these already marginalized people, and not only the outspoken harassers.

The anecdote at the end - it especially strikes me, because it’s such a goddamn one-sided telling. She’s tweeting about “two categories that have some overlap”, all nice and rigorous and hiding in the technical definitions of what you said - but pardon me if I follow the example set by what she “knew right away” about this man and neglect to assume good faith. I’m incredibly, unsarcastically, glad for her that she can “joke” about “men who still aren’t over the fact that they didn’t get laid in high school.” I’m glad she has a readership and a publishing venue where she can insult these people’s psychological hangups, because it means I don’t fucking owe her anything. She’s an adult; she takes her “time to start self-soothing.” She doesn’t need my support, or my sympathy, or my respect, or my approval, so she gets none of it. And neither do those 1000 fuckers who recommended this piece of shit on Facebook.

To ratchet down the bitterness for a bit, this article is valid coverage of a real problem that occurs. I’m sure that everyone who shares it is doing so for that valid coverage. But in my mind, these people have the luxury of reading the article and not seeing the narrative I do, where a successful, published writer throws insult at people who have no voice. They’re not on the wrong fucking side of the power dynamic - presumably they have someone to take their side, in the mainstream feminism they adopt - and I hate them for it. It’s not a coherent ideology, but thankfully my inner bitterness is of no consequence to anyone except for me, because unlike some people I have no venue to spew it onto a broader audience.

The article said “derailing tactics” - I went to look up derailment - “Derailment occurs when discussion of one issue is diverted into discussion of another issue.” So, what, we’re just supposed to cede the terms of the discussion to whoever was there first? The socially acceptable liberal complex got there first, they claimed the moral high ground and set the terms of the discussion, and I’m just supposed to submit to that? Feminism - or at least a certain form of feminism, the same way there’s a certain form of LGBT activism - has a dominant position in the discussion of social justice, and I hate it for that. Its tribal adherents are too self-righteous, too comfortable, too accepted.

What I said to him, and what I need to say to myself, is that constant attempts at taking...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:08:00 -0400

What I said to him, and what I need to say to myself, is that constant attempts at taking assessments are inherently flawed. “Am I a worthless piece of shit?” It doesn’t matter, because I’m asking the wrong question. It will not add to my understanding. There is too much noise, compared to the signal, for me to be able to get any sort of reliable reading from the empirical. The path to success, insofar as success is possible, will be paved by following an articulated, well-reasoned strategy - and doing so effectively, of course.

((I was going to write something at length about duty, but I got tired; also, there is an actual quite pressing duty to attend to))

It is true - at least to some extent - that I worship certain people. The ardor of my veneration is about as weak as it was during my actual Christian years, but it is nevertheless the case that I attribute to them the power to save, or to redeem, or to judge; I give* them the selfless** love usually reserved for moral principles. And so it behooves me, to some extent, to think of this behavior the way one thinks of religion - and in that sense, Feuerbach has some ideas which are possibly relevant and applicable.

“In order to enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing… Man denies of himself only what he attributes to God,” says the internet, which is an acceptable summary of his ideas. The application to my life, as far as I see it, is that the traits I attribute to the beloved-qua-god - the traits I admire and idolize in them - correspond to traits which I deny in myself. (This is distinct from a previous interpretation in which I am drawn to people with strengths I lack, in that 1: the causal direction is inverted, and 2: there is the sense that I am actively suppressing some elements, rather than failing to cultivate them.) Of course, the traits of the beloved-qua-god are not well distinguishable at the moment from the traits of the beloved-qua-person, but the result will be relevant in time.

i’m looking back on my history father is yelling at me mother is yelling at me lynch is...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:22:34 -0400

i’m looking back on my history

father is yelling at me

mother is yelling at me

lynch is yelling at me

abramson is yelling at me

hani is yelling at me

truscelli is asking me to consider leaving school

some woman here is asking me to consider medical leave

mendelsohn looks disappointed

wilson is disappointed

i am disappointed

i’ve stopped crying and thinking of knives and nooses, but i’m still wounded

not belonging, not producing, not loved

i want people to tell me i’m worth life so i can feel smart when i disbelieve them

iheartmyart: patrickt: I recreated Piet Mondrian’s Trafalgar...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:12:36 -0400

iheartmyart:

patrickt:

I recreated Piet Mondrian’s Trafalgar Square in Excel. You can view the original here.

(via motherjones)

Selections from Kundera’s Dialogue on the Art of the Novel. I don’t even know what...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:05:00 -0400

Selections from Kundera’s Dialogue on the Art of the Novel. I don’t even know what I’m doing.

Or, put another way: What is the nonpsychological means to apprehend the self? To apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existential code. As I was writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I realized that the code of this or that character is made up of certain key words. For Tereza: body, soul, vertigo, weakness, idyll, Paradise. For Tomas: lightness, weight. In the part called “Words Misunderstood,” I examine the existential codes of Franz and Sabina by analyzing a number of words: woman, fidelity, betrayal, music, darkness, light, parades, beauty, country, cemetery, strength. Each of these words has a different meaning in the other person’s existential code. Of course, the existential code is not examined in abstracto; it reveals itself progressively in the action, in the situations. Take Life Is Elsewhere, the third part: The hero, the bashful Jaromil, is still a virgin. One day, he is out walking with a girl who suddenly lays her head on his shoulder. He is overcome with happiness and even physically excited. I pause over that mini-event and note: “The pinnacle of happiness Jaromil had experienced up to this point in his life was having a girl’s head on his shoulder.” And from that I try to grasp Jaromil’s erotic nature: “A girl’s head meant more to him than a girl’s body.” Which does not mean, I make clear, that he was indifferent to the body, but “he didn’t long for the nudity of a girl’s body; he longed for a girl’s face lighted by the nudity of her body. He didn’t long to possess a girl’s body; he longed to possess the face of a girl who would yield her body to him as proof of her love.” I try to give a name to that attitude. I choose the word “tenderness.” And I examine the word: Just what is tenderness? I arrive at successive answers…

I tell nothing about his childhood, nothing about his father, his mother, his family. And his body, as well as his face, remains completely unknown to us because the essence of his existential problem is rooted in other themes. That lack of information does not make him the less “living.” Because making a character “alive” means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situations, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more.

Man and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well. Since Balzac, the world of our being has a historical nature, and characters’ lives unfold in a realm of time marked by dates… But two things should not be confused: there is on the one hand the novel that examines the historical dimension of human existence, and on the other the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation, the description of a society at a given moment, a novelized historiography. You’re familiar with all those novels about the French Revolution, about Marie Antoinette, or about the year 1914…

Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. Example: In the years that followed the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the reign of terror against the public was preceded by officially organized massacres of dogs. An episode totally forgotten and without importance for a historian, for a political scientist, but of the utmost anthropological significance!

Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities. In Kafka, all that is clear: the Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality, it is an extreme and unrealized possibility of the human world. It’s true that this possibility shows faintly behind our own real world and seems to prefigure our future. That’s why people speak of Kafka’s prophetic dimension. But even if his novels had nothing prophetic about them, they would not lose their value, because they grasp one possibility of existence (a possibility for man and for his world) and thereby make us see what we are, what we are capable of.

For Broch, that history is clearly defined as a perpetual disintegration of values. The characters are locked into this process as in a cage and must find a way of living that suits the progressive disappearance of common values. Broch was, of course, convinced of the correctness of his historical judgment — that is, convinced that the possibility of the world he was describing was a possibility come true. But let’s try to imagine that he was mistaken and that parallel to this process of disintegration another process was at work, a positive development that Broch was unable to see. Would that make any difference to the value of The Sleepwalkers? No. Because the process of disintegration of values is an indisputable possibility of the human world.

Broch discovered an unknown new territory of existence. Territory of existence means: possibility of existence. Whether or not that possibility becomes a reality is secondary… The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence

454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011—2157

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:36:43 -0400

454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011—2157:

lazenby:

1.

In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective “European” meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in History, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because “the passion to know had seized mankind.”

The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.

The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, “the forgetting of being.”

Once elevated by Descartes to “master and proprietor of nature,” man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man’s concrete being, his “world of life” (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.

2.

Yet I think it would be naive to take the severity of this view of the Modern Era as a mere condemnation. I would say rather that the two great philosophers laid bare the ambiguity of this epoch, which is decline and progress at the same time and which, like all that is human, carries the seed of its end in its beginning. To my mind, this ambiguity does not diminish the last four centuries of European culture, to which I feel all the more attached as I am not a philosopher but a novelist. Indeed, for me, the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes.

Perhaps it is Cervantes whom the two phenomenologists neglected to take into consideration in their judgment of the Modern Era. By that I mean: If it is true that philosophy and science have forgotten about man’s being, it emerges all the more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being.

Indeed, all the great existential themes Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time—considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy— had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel (four centuries of European reincarnation of the novel). In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine “what happens inside,” to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man’s rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera.

The novel has accompanied man uninterruptedly and faithfully since the beginning of the Modern Era. It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect it against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

I would also add: The novel is Europe’s creation; its discoveries, though made in various languages, belong to the whole of Europe. The sequence of discoveries (not the sum of what was written) is what constitutes the history of the European novel. It is only in such a supranational context that the value of a work (that is to say, the import of its discovery) can be fully seen and understood.

3.

As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world.

To take, with Descartes, the thinking self as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic. To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage.

What does Cervantes’ great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote’s hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel’s core not an inquiry but a moral position.

Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apo-dictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty.

This “either-or” encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel’s wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand.

4.

Don Quixote set off into a world that opened wide before him. He could go out freely and come home as he pleased. The early European novels are journeys through an apparently unlimited world. The opening of Jacques le Fataliste comes upon the two heroes in mid-journey; we don’t know where they’ve come from or where they’re going. They exist in a time without beginning or end, in a space without frontiers, in the midst of a Europe whose future will never end.

Half a century after Diderot, in Balzac, the distant horizon has disappeared like a landscape behind those modern structures, the social institutions: the police, the law, the world of money and crime, the army, the State. In Balzac’s world, time no longer idles happily by as it does for Cervantes and Diderot. It has set forth on the train called History. The train is easy to board, hard to leave. But it isn’t at all fearsome yet, it even has its appeal; it promises adventure to every passenger, and with it fame and fortune.

Later still, for Emma Bovary, the horizon shrinks to the point of seeming a barrier. Adventure lies beyond it, and the longing becomes intolerable. Within the monotony of the quotidian, dreams and daydreams take on importance. The lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul. The great illusion of the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual—one of Europe’s finest illusions—blossoms forth.

But the dream of the soul’s infinity loses its magic when History (or what remains of it: the suprahuman force of an omnipotent society) takes hold of man. History no longer promises him fame and fortune; it barely promises him a land-surveyor’s job. In the face of the Court or the Castle, what can K. do? Not much. Can’t he at least dream as Emma Bovary used to do?

No, the situation’s trap is too terrible, and like a vacuum cleaner it sucks up all his thoughts and feelings: all he can think of is his trial, his surveying job. The infinity of the soul—if it ever existed—has become a nearly useless appendage.

5.

The path of the novel emerges as a parallel history of the Modern Era. As I look back over it, it seems strangely short and limited. Isn’t that Don Quixote himself, after a three-hundred-year journey, returning to the village disguised as a land-surveyor? Once he had set out to seek adventures of his own choosing, but now in the village below the Castle he has no choice, the adventure is imposed on him: a petty squabble with the administration over a mistake in his file. So what, after three centuries, has happened to adventure, the first great theme of the novel? Has it become its own parody? What does that mean? That the path of the novel winds up in a paradox?

Yes, so it would seem. And that is by no means the only paradox. The Good Soldier Schweik is perhaps the last great popular novel. Isn’t it astonishing that this comic novel is also a war novel, whose action unfolds in the army and at the front? What has happened to war and its horrors if they’ve become laughing matters?

In Homer and in Tolstoy, war had a perfectly comprehensible meaning: people fought for Helen or for Russia. Schweik and his companions go to the front without knowing why and, what is even more shocking, without caring to know.

What, then, is the motor of war if not Helen or country? Sheer force that wills to assert itself as force? The “will to will” that Heidegger later wrote about? Yet hasn’t that been behind all wars since the beginning of time? Yes, of course. But this time, in Hasek, it is stripped of any rational argument. No one believes in the drivel of the propaganda, not even those who manufacture it. Force is naked here, as naked as in Kafka’s novels. Indeed, the Court has nothing to gain from executing K., nor has the Castle from tormenting the Land-Surveyor. Why did Germany, why does Russia today want to dominate the world? To be richer? Happier? Not at all. The aggressivity of force is thoroughly disinterested; unmotivated; it wills only its own will; it is pure irrationality.

Kafka and Hasek thus bring us face to face with this enormous paradox: In the course of the Modern Era, Cartesian rationality has corroded, one after the other, all the values inherited from the Middle Ages. But just when reason wins a total victory, pure irrationality (force willing only its will) seizes the world stage, because there is no longer any generally accepted value system to block its path.

This paradox, masterfully illuminated in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, is one of those I like to call terminal. There are others. For example: The Modern Era has nurtured a dream in which mankind, divided into its separate civilizations, would someday come together in unity and everlasting peace. Today, the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere.

6.

Husserl’s lectures on the European crisis and on the possible disappearance of European mankind were his philosophical testament. He gave those lectures in two capitals of Central Europe. This coincidence has a deep meaning: for it was in that selfsame Central Europe that, for the first time in its modern history, the West could see the death of the West, or, more exactly, the amputation of a part of itself, when Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague were swallowed up by the Russian empire. This calamity was engendered by the First World War, which, unleashed by the Hapsburg empire, led to the end of that empire and unbalanced forever an enfeebled Europe.

The time was past when man had only the monster of his own soul to grapple with, the peaceful time of Joyce and Proust. In the novels of Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, the monster comes from outside and is called History; it no longer has anything to do with the train the adventurers used to ride; it is impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible—and it is inescapable. This was the moment (just after the First World War) when the pleiad of great Central European novelists saw, felt, grasped the terminal paradoxes of the Modern Era.

But it would be wrong to read their novels as social and political prophecies, as if they were anticipations of Orwell! What Orwell tells us could have been said just as well (or even much better) in an essay or pamphlet. On the contrary, these novelists discover “what only the novel can discover”: they demonstrate how, under the conditions of the “terminal paradoxes,” all existential categories suddenly change their meaning: What is adventure if a K.’s freedom of action is completely illusory? What is future if the intellectuals of The Man Without Qualities have not the slightest inkling of the war that will sweep their lives away the next day? What is crime if Broch’s Huguenau not only does not regret but actually forgets the murder he has committed? And if the only great comic novel of the period, Hasek’s Schweik, uses war as its setting, then what has happened to the comic? Where is the difference between public and private if K., even in bed with a woman, is never without the two emissaries of the Castle? And in that case, what is solitude? A burden, a misery, a curse, as some would have us believe, or on the contrary, a supremely precious value in the process of being crushed by the ubiquitous collectivity?

The periods of the novel’s history are very long (they have nothing to do with the hectic shifts of fashion) and are characterized by the particular aspect of being on which the novel concentrates. Thus the potential of Flaubert’s discovery of the quotidian was only fully developed seventy years later, in James Joyce’s gigantic work. The period inaugurated seventy years ago by the pleiad of Central European novelists (the period of terminal paradoxes) seems to me far from finished.

7.

The death of the novel has been much discussed for a long time: notably by the Futurists, by the Surrealists, by nearly all the avant-gardes. They saw the novel dropping off the road of progress, yielding to a radically new future and an art bearing no resemblance to what had existed before. The novel was to be buried in the name of historical justice, like poverty, the ruling classes, obsolete cars, or top hats.

But if Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era, then the end of his legacy ought to signify more than a mere stage in the history of literary forms; it would herald the end of the Modern Era. That is why the blissful smile that accompanies those obituaries of the novel strikes me as frivolous. Frivolous because I have already seen and lived through the death of the novel, a violent death (inflicted by bans, censorship, and ideological pressure), in the world where I spent much of my life and which is usually called totalitarian. At that time it became utterly clear that the novel was mortal; as mortal as the West of the Modern Era. As a model of this Western world, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of things human, the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe. This incompatibility is deeper than the one that separates a dissident from an apparatchik, or a human-rights campaigner from a torturer, because it is not only political or moral but ontological. By which I mean: The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.

But aren’t there hundreds and thousands of novels published in huge editions and widely read in Communist Russia? Certainly; but these novels add nothing to the conquest of being. They discover no new segment of existence; they only confirm what has already been said; furthermore: in confirming what everyone says (what everyone must say), they fulfill their purpose, their glory, their usefulness to that society. By discovering nothing, they fail to participate in the sequence of discoveries that for me constitutes the history of the novel; they place themselves outside that history, or, if you like: they are novels that come after the history of the novel.

About half a century ago the history of the novel came to a halt in the empire of Russian Communism. That is an event of huge importance, given the greatness of the Russian novel from Gogol to Bely. Thus the death of the novel is not just a fanciful idea. It has already happened. And we now know how the novel dies: it’s not that it disappears; it falls away from its history. Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged.

8.

But hasn’t the novel come to the end of the road by its own internal logic? Hasn’t it already mined all its possibilities, all its knowledge, and all its forms? I’ve heard the history of the novel compared to a seam of coal long since exhausted. But isn’t it more like a cemetery of missed opportunities, of unheard appeals? There are four appeals to which I am especially responsive.

The appeal of play: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste are for me the two greatest novelistic works of the eighteenth century, two novels conceived as grand games. They reach heights of playfulness, of lightness, never scaled before or since. Afterward, the novel got itself tied to the imperative of verisimilitude, to realistic settings, to chronological order. It abandoned the possibilities opened up by these two masterpieces, which could have led to a different development of the novel (yes, it’s possible to imagine a whole other history of the European novel…).

The appeal of dream: The slumbering imagination of the nineteenth century was abruptly awakened by Franz Kafka, who achieved what the Surrealists later called for but never themselves really accomplished: the fusion of dream and reality. This was in fact a longstanding aesthetic ambition of the novel, already intimated by Novalis, but its fulfillment required a special alchemy that Kafka alone discovered a century later.

His enormous contribution is less the final step in a historical development than an unexpected opening that shows that the novel is a place where the imagination can explode as in a dream, and that the novel can break free of the seemingly inescapable imperative of verisimilitude.

The appeal of thought: Musil and Broch brought a sovereign and radiant intelligence to bear on the novel. Not to transform the novel into philosophy, but to marshal around the story all the means—rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative—that could illuminate man’s being; could make of the novel the supreme intellectual synthesis. Is their achievement the completion of the novel’s history, or is it instead the invitation to a long journey?

The appeal of time: The period of terminal paradoxes incites the novelist to broaden the time issue beyond the Proustian problem of personal memory to the enigma of collective time, the time of Europe, Europe looking back on its own past, weighing up its history like an old man seeing his whole life in a single moment. Whence the desire to overstep the temporal limits of an individual life, to which the novel had hitherto been confined, and to insert in its space several historical periods (Aragon and Fuentes have already tried this). But I don’t want to predict the future paths of the novel, which I cannot know; all I mean to say is this: If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it.

9.

The unification of the planet’s history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man’s life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers. Man is caught in a veritable whirlpool of reduction where Husserl’s “world of life” is fatally obscured and being is forgotten.

Now, if the novel’s raison d’etre is to keep “the world of life” under a permanent light and to protect us from “the forgetting of being,” is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?

Yes, so it seems to me. But alas, the novel too is ravaged by the termites of reduction, which reduce not only the meaning of the world but also the meaning of works of art. Like all of culture, the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media; as agents of the unification of the planet’s history, the media amplify and channel the reduction process; they distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind. And it doesn’t much matter that different political interests appear in the various organs of the media. Behind these surface differences reigns a common spirit. You have only to glance at American or European political weeklies, of the left or the right: they all have the same view of life, reflected in the same ordering of the table of contents, under the same headings, in the same journalistic phrasing, the same vocabulary, and the same style, in the same artistic tastes, and in the same ranking of things they deem important or insignificant. This common spirit of the mass media, camouflaged by political diversity, is the spirit of our time. And this spirit seems to me contrary to the spirit of the novel.

The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.

The novel’s spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel. But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow.

10.

Does this mean that, “in a world grown alien to it,” the novel will disappear? That it will leave Europe to founder in “the forgetting of being”? That nothing will be left but the endless babble of graphomaniacs, nothing but novels that come after the history of the novel? I don’t know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.

The avant-garde saw things differently; it was possessed by an ambition to be in harmony with the future. It is true, avant-garde artists did create works that were courageous, difficult, provocative, ridiculed, but they did so in the conviction that “the spirit of the time” was with them and would soon prove them right.

Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgment on us, of course. And without any competence. But if the future is not a value for me, then to what am I attached? To God? Country? The people? The individual?

My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.

Recent Thoughts

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:36:00 -0400

I was scouring metafilter for articles for reasons I don’t yet care to dwell on, and found a comment that had a short list of gaming blogs. Exactly not my cup of tea, given how many video games I’ve played in the past couple of years, but for whatever reason I clicked on one of them - “The Border House, which is grounded in feminism and is a sorely needed voice in the video gaming world.” I scrolled down to “Sexism and Power Dynamics in Breath of Fire 4”, an article that seemed written in an appropriately masculine and robust manner (my sexism is being imposed post hoc after noting the author’s gender) and clicked a hyperlink which claimed “as a story it accomplished some interesting things.”

The review was, in fact, interesting. Breath of Fire 4 has a “moral choice” at the end, as many games do. But allegedly, “everything in Breath of Fire IV’s narrative is centered around this specific choice”, which gives it a tightness of focus that sounds highly appealing. “But for all of its 40 hours of random battles and side-quests… it’s all really about one singular idea” - and the réalisation of a single idea is, I feel, something that can effectively lend gravitas to an RPG. (And it’s important to remember, in life, that which is nice.)

I’ve felt it before in Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords: “this game is not at all about the Sith Lords, despite the subtitle. It’s not about Kreia, not about the Force, it’s not even about Star Wars. Everything in this game is about the Exile; it’s suppose to be an inward journey, and though it’s much more veiled than Planescape: Torment, it’s still a very real theme. The villains are not truly separate entities or characters; rather, they each represent some aspect of the Exile’s character.”

A similar sort of submerged message exists also in Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. And it’s interesting that these are sequels: 4, 2, and (the expansion to) 2. I mean, the two I’ve actually played and liked are both from the mind of Chris Avellone, but so is the non-expansion analogue to Mask of the Betrayer, and there’s no especial merit there. I suppose sequel money allows for creative freedom. Sort of like Bell Labs’ glory days, I suppose. I’d muse more on this topic, but it’s not a particularly gripping one - the most I’d get out of it would be high-minded proclamations about balancing power and corruption or somesuch. Nothing practically relevant to real politics.

I mean, it’s not like I’m very good at being relevant. I shy away from taking political stances; I have beliefs about what is more than I have opinions about what ought. For instance, on the topic of piracy, I don’t believe in intellectual property. It’s a relatively recent legal construct, historically speaking, and is not the only way of conceptualizing the relationship between artist and artwork. Therefore I believe that as far as piracy goes, arguments based on “property rights” have no moral standing. However, this relatively radical belief still does not suggest any opinion on the practical matter of the harm or benefit of various piracy-related actions. Especially extreme acts prompt unhesitant scorn, but generally there is an uncomfortably coward-flavored murk.

I’m not especially good at drawing lines, in general. For instance, I don’t like the idea of “rights”, property or otherwise; they can lead to bizarre loops and logical contortions. They involve drawing a contorted line between “The right exists” and “The right does not exist” in an uncomfortably boolean manner; questions reduce to asking where the topic at hand stands with respect to that twisting line. It seems better to judge that nobody is universally entitled to anything (or, if feeling economic, that everybody is entitled to pursue their self-interest in all circumstances, including circumstances that entail constraining more predatory folks’ opinions of their own best interest). There are no “rights”, there are simply things that are more or less right depending on the situation, and a nebulous duty for people to maximize good.

As an aside: I like wind. It is the movement of particles. Each particle exists as an object. The object has properties - its being in motion along a certain path. And those properties have the property that, when assembled into a larger whole of movements and coordinates, they express the phenomenon of wind. It’s vaguely reminiscent of set theory: you can have the element 1, the set that contains 1, the set that contains the set that contains 1, &c. All of these sets exist. Likewise, wind clearly exists, even though it is not matter. A peer says, now, that my blathering “sounds like amateur greek philosophy” - and maybe it should! Because this basic idea of layered properties of things is, generally, the emotional framework I use to think about truth, and morality, and God.

To listen strictly to my mind, there is no God, only matter. There are no moral laws, only matter. There is no truth except for the physical truth. But all this matter has properties - and more specifically, they have properties with regard to humanity. Notions of good and bad - or, preferably, notions of better and worse - arise somewhere within this stack of interconnected properties. And I think somewhere higher up, when you look at the moral consequences that arise, and you consider their properties - you see tendencies and patterns in the web of morals. And I refer to one such pattern as God, because I can’t explain some things without it and can’t find a better word for it. It is like the wind. And just as it sometimes serves communication to anthropomorphize the wind as angry or easeful, I accept the anthropomorphization of God as vengeful or merciful or what have you. I cannot believe in some heavenly father figure watching over us, but I must believe in something to center my view of the world.

And to return to the “greek philosophy” comment - I need to establish this rather eccentric view in opposition to ways of thinking about reality/morality/metaphysics that I would characterize as innately Greek. Common moral philosophy is influenced by Christianity, which was influenced by Plato, who framed the world in ways which I feel lead to inflexibilities and contradictions. And so I want to establish my soul in opposition to that, and so I lay foundations in Grecian style, which sadly means a priori blustering about the nature of the world. And I feel that I must do this, but at the same time I dislike doing this, because it means that the morality of religious people will disagree with my palate. The resulting opinions may often be the same - there is diversity of opinion among the faithful and a common cultural understanding of “good” - but they will deduce and judge in ways different to me (at least, extrapolating from the ones I know). And so I worry that I can’t follow them - that I can’t engage them on any level that is more than banal. And it feels somewhat lonely.

Consider “right” and “wrong” in their meanings that map more closely to...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:50:26 -0400

Consider “right” and “wrong” in their meanings that map more closely to correct-incorrect than to good-evil. I have a very pronounced moral sense of “right” and “wrong”, for that meaning. Less to judge others (though they are of course judged) and more to guide my own behavior, through a sense of duty or obligation. The truth will set me free.

Consider dreams and emotion. To me, at least, the symbols in a dream speak of emotion congealed across the sleeping hours. A girl in a towel, for instance, is unremarkable considered in physical reality. People shower, people change, whatever. The same happening in a dream, provokes a more visceral reaction - and I suspect this is because there has to have been a reason that this image, among others, was chosen for display. There are underlying emotional factors. The dream-sight of her in the process of brushing teeth, for instance, can send me into a tizzy for the better part of an afternoon after waking.

Consider a dream about a starship with a flighty AI that would take off upon any attempt of mine to approach. Combine that with the mental preoccupation alluded to above, and I was sent into a tizzy for the better part of an evening after waking. It spoke, at least emotionally, of an issue that needed to be addressed. And the only framework I had for such an address was my personal moral one: was this right? The preoccupation in its current state, and its associated fantasies and whatnot - were they prudent? Were they well-considered? Were they in line with best practices? Because it seemed very much contrary to good sense that I should focus so much on an area of play for which I have no endgame or midgame.

Consider the word “adorable”. I parse it in a nonstandard way much as Wiktionary does: “befitting of being adored”. There are two people to whom I have given adoration, and I turned to them both as moral guides. One of them is more generally knowledgeable in issues of the heart; the other, being the object of concern, would naturally have a particular expert perspective on matters. and i lost my train of thought so i’ll just wrap this up

I am not in a state of transgression. My feelings are not sin, nor are they wrong unless unduly harsh standards for truth are applied. As regards this topic, I have not erred in action and have nothing to regret - except, of course, having given into the voices of relentless inquisition as often as I have. What my conscience says, coming away from this, is that if she is adorable, it is right to adore her. It picks no pockets and breaks no legs. Things may change - the situation may become untenable - but that will be a different time, with different moral strictures. My thought can rest for now.

on sonic the hedgehog

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:24:26 -0500

circletoconfirm:

Sonic runs fast. That’s sort of his thing, most people say. But what does “running fast” entail? And, more importantly, what does it MEAN? Detractors will say it means “holding right and pushing A occasionally,” and they’re not particularly wrong. Other critics of the Sonic the Hedgehog series say that its main selling point, “running fast,” is just a fabricated marketing ploy and that Sonic only occasionally runs fast; and besides, Mario is just as speedy when you let him accelerate. This camp is even less wrong.

And yet the series continues to survive crappy game after crappy game (Generations notwithstanding) as its fans hold on to the hope that Sonic Team will somehow take the series “back to its roots.” Which, evidently, is running fast. But not TOO fast because then the game requires no skill. Except, not too many obstacles either; those get in the way of running fast. And so do Sonic’s lame friends for that matter. Oh, except for Knuckles; he’s awesome even though he mostly climbs and punches things instead of running fast. Tails is okay too, depending on who you ask.

It’s true that most people have no idea what they really want, but sonic fans have no idea what they really want more than most people.

Everyone is constantly told what they want by large corporations, but vidconners more than any other group seem totally oblivious or, worse yet, willing to accept the lies as fact. So, when the original Sonic the Hedgehog was released for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis in on June 23, 1991, and Sega advertised how only the Genesis’s amazing “Blast Processing” technology allowed Sonic to Run So Fast, which is What You Want, Running Fast became The Point Of Sonic.

The Sonic-loving children of 1991 didn’t have bad taste. As far as I can tell, no child has bad taste in any art within their level of comprehension. No, Sonic the Hedgehog is very much a game worthy of praise. I can’t think of a single game made prior to 1991 with such a striking, iconic audiovisual style. As a brief aside, consider Super Mario Bros. Now, SMB is a phenomenal game, better than Sonic 1, but though we often consider its symbols of bricks, mushrooms, and flowers “iconic,” I would wager that the game’s popularity came first, its icons second. In other words, people only remember mushrooms and flowers and pipes because Mario was such a good game. Sonic, however, asserts itself visually and aurally right out of the gate. Primary colors (I love Sonic 2’s level start screen, as seen below), bold lines, dancing flowers, beautiful blue skies, parallax scrolling, and that joyous music all come together in a powerful way. The game had a heart and a vision, and its vision was different than “make the best game possible” (this is the vision of Mario 3, which it fulfills). The heart is an artist’s heart and the vision is to make the player feel.

Kids didn’t fall in love with Sonic because he could run fast, though Sega convinced them they did. Kids fell in love with Sonic because he could make them feel a particular flavor of Actual Happiness in a deep way. Because Sonic the Hedgehog isn’t about running fast. Sonic the Hedgehog is about freedom.

Perhaps more specifically: Sonic the Hedgehog is about the freedom of not giving a shit. The levels are large and multi-leveled, which in a modern OCD gamer would be an invitation to explore every nook and cranny, but the levels are also designed as funnels, always pushing you further and further to the right. The game WANTS you to go right, and it will help you overcome your obstacles if you let it. So a child is driven not by the need to check off every box in his copy of Things I Can Do In This Game (gotta check off every box to get the most value for your money), but by the desire to Go Right. Fans say Sonic is partly about exploration, but he’s really about Experimentation. Missed that jump to an upper path? Don’t give a shit! Try it again next time you play! For now, just KEEP GOING RIGHT! Didn’t get all the Chaos Emeralds? Man, it just makes some flowers appear at the end. And don’t get me wrong, flowers are GREAT, but it’s nothing worth sweating over. Just don’t give a shit!

I used to not like Sonic very much. I never owned a Genesis, but I’d played all the games at least a bit, and the only one I really liked was Sonic 2. And in retrospect I’m pretty sure that was 95% just the music from Chemical Plant Zone. I think, when I was a kid, I was overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the levels (I particularly disliked Sonic 3 & Knuckles) and my inability to comprehend them. As a kid I also gave way too many shits in general. But now that I have become a man, I have put my childish ways behind me (“including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up,” as C.S. Lewis wrote). I now know fully, even as I am fully known.

I’m fully convinced that my Inner Child is now, at the age of 20, much more potent and voracious than it ever was during my actual childhood. Somewhere along the line, I stopped giving so many shits. I learned the value of blue skies, flowers, and friendship. I became free. Finally, last semester, I truly realized what Sonic the Hedgehog was about. And now I’m still a little more free.

-Michael

random idle thoughts because i am capable of little else The falunkalumph looks markedly...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:05:59 -0500

random idle thoughts because i am capable of little else

The falunkalumph looks markedly cute.

“Privilege is a way of framing issues surrounding social inequality” - namely, it is a way. It is not the only way. Sometimes it is a subpar way; sometimes it is an actively harmful way. The term must be considered in a critical context with respect to other issues; unfortunately, critical thinking is a bit scarce on the ground. Grumph.

This is nice. The guy who tweeted it chose not to put it on FB, though, and I presume he has his reasons.

“has there ever been a time when you tripped and fell so hard that every bone in your body exploded and the memory of ever having a skull or pelvis was erased from your mind” - metaphorically, yes. it’s troublesome. right now.

Facebook says: “Man lives in the abyss between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.”...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:08:00 -0500

Facebook says:

“Man lives in the abyss between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.” -Milan Kundera

Google says Wordpress says:

Let me try to explain it by means of an analogy. The symphony is a musical epic. We might compare it to a journey leading through the boundless reaches of the external world, on and on, farther and farther. Variations also constitute a journey, but not through the external world. You recall Pascal’s pensée about how man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The journey of the variation form leads to that second infinity, the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things.

Gutenberg says Pascal says:

But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

http://fosslien.com/heart/

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:17:48 -0500

http://fosslien.com/heart/

:D: So I'm making a game about depression...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:35:00 -0500

:D: So I'm making a game about depression...:

ohdeargodbees:

I’m making a short game about being depressed with Patrick Lindsey. The mechanics of it are that you have to attempt to balance your depression/motivation levels, and more options get greyed out the lower you get. I’ve noticed some things while working on this that I find has been interesting or challenging.

1: Two depressed people working on a game about depression can be… well, depressing…

happy valentine’s day #2

frmwrk: http://www.actualsunlight.com/about_reviews/ A game about developing and living with...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:33:00 -0500

frmwrk:

http://www.actualsunlight.com/about_reviews/

A game about developing and living with depression. If you want a window into what it’s like, this is pretty accurate. At least in my case.

happy valentine’s day #1

[Selections from the latter half of Gruen.] Penis envy is a self-serving invention; it camouflages...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:33:03 -0500

[Selections from the latter half of Gruen.]

Penis envy is a self-serving invention; it camouflages our envy of something that has eluded us and that we believe women possess: vitality and creativity. That is why we feel we must possess women, to whom we attribute these forces because we cannot acknowledge them in ourselves.

an intimate knowledge of life, of its beauty and splendors, be it a sunrise, a waterfall, or the gurgling of a baby

We idealise our husband or wife or some other “love” object, which means we never need to get close to the real person but only to the one we have imagined. Then one day our admiration is gone; the other person had disappointed us. This is the trick we use in order never to lose ourselves in the kind of close attachment we experienced long ago in childhood. In those days we still dared to be open to our helplessness, but we were often taken advantage of as a result, that is the source of the pain and the trauma that make us try to escape our real need for love and closeness. If we were conscious of this connection, we would have to confront the self that is based on power. Instead, we idealise, we tell each other that we are full of admiration and love, and we hold each other at arm’s length.

Only those who can endure their own suffering are capable of establishing themselves as a separate entity. If we always hope, as Proust put it, that the person who caused our suffering is the same one who has the power to lessen our pain, then we will believe in the lie of power, always searching for the authority figure who will corroborate the lie and never finding what is divine in ourselves.

Since he was the one who had activated these needs in her, she believed that her fate lay in his hands; without him, her life suddenly seemed meaningless. This patient had lived her whole life without experiencing real love. Her mother’s cool interest was the only “love” she had known. But when her long-repressed fantasy of receiving genuine support from an unknown father was stimulated and brought to life by her new admirer, she felt completely at the mercy of those feelings she had held in check her whole life by being “strong”, efficient, independent, and successful. Since society found these qualities good and worthwhile, they gave stability to her self-image. The split in her consciousness that made it possible for her not to come to terms with the fact of having been wounded by an unempathetic mother was also the impetus behind her drive to be successful, independent, and strong. But from the moment her need for warmth, for being taken care of, was awakened, no matter how unrealistic and futile her hope that her needs would now be met, her strength seemed to evaporate.

[This entire narrative of a culture of power is fine enough refutation for the ivy envy and other such things which pop up occasionally and often… such places would credential you, they would give you power, they would help you escape but they would not provide a stable foundation for a good self.]

In answer to the observation that the people said the National Guard was a corrupt pack of murderers came the response: “The people are full of shit. The people lie. Yesterday they were for Somoza, today they’re for the Sandanistas. What the people say doesn’t count.” Concerning the fact that the captured Somoza supporters were not executed: “… I don’t understand it. Why [do they burden themselves] with thousands of deadly enemies? I don’t think the Sandanistas have learned anything… They’re just civilians.”

[Selections from Wheelis: How People Change] Nothing guarantees our freedom. Deny it often enough...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:29:09 -0500

[Selections from Wheelis: How People Change]

Nothing guarantees our freedom. Deny it often enough and one day it will be gone, and we’ll not know how or when.

Throughout our lives the proportion of necessity to freedom depends upon our tolerance of conflict: the greater our tolerance the more freedom we retain, the less our tolerance the more we jettison; for high among the uses of necessity is relief from tension. What we can’t alter we don’t have to worry about

It makes no difference, we think, in that situation, his election of daring or of inhibition. Both are futile, without consequence. History sees no freedom for him, notes only constraint, labels him victim. But in the consciousness of that one man it makes great difference whether or not he experiences the choice… commitment to freedom may extend to his last breath.

Conversely, should a thief undertake to become an honest man, he must stop stealing and must undertake actions which replace stealing, not only in time and energy, and perhaps also excitement, but which carry implications contrary to the predatory life

He may then come to regard himself as lived by unknown and unknowable forces. As consolation prize he may acquire the capacity to guess, in the current jargon, at the nature of those obscure forces which move him… He may then remain forever the dilettante

since we who undertake analysis are those who have more than average trouble with inner conflict, we may receive considerable help - quite enough to justify the undertaking - and still end up with more misery than those who have not been analyzed.