Hell, books

Trying to read bell hooks essays during the prep periods and lunches, with the kids jumping over desks during math and knocking down chairs at the end of the day, it makes you suspect that theory is essentially conservative, insofar as it seeks the truth, however liberal-critical it may present in its expressions and interpretation of that seeking. An activity of the soul, of the body in safety and the mind at leisure, insofar as it’s seeking the order of things, likes a certain amount of order in its surroundings--cosmological in the root sense, a beautiful measure. And so if teaching and intellectual conversation is still inherently personal and political, it might bear some closer examination just what the nuances of that personality and political standpoint reveal of themselves. Anyone who prefers the term praxis to the impatience to be doing something is most likely an old soul. And as the last election showed, as the old go, so goes the country.

The ten thousand things

Uncounted the days have drifted by, weeks and months since the end of November, and little done to shape the barely qualifying draft. Hideous fatigue, like what sets in the day after staying up too late, but weeks’ worth, and the time so long accounted by words running rampant without them. Other structures similarly crumbled: the Sundays at soccer and church on hiatus, though seminar readings kept up a bit better; seeing friends and brother Elliot interrupted the solitude, and highlighted friendlessness here, whereas the return to subbing and volunteering have opened all the opportunities for meeting new people one could want. An insatiable desire to read has come over me, and to have people want to read what I've been writing. For the near future, some kind of editing on the novel, so that James and Brian can read it and lick it into a more final form, but also this strong urge to get back to the wolf story has not abated. The structure of various characters all telling the story in pieces has that in common with the Annotations, but the fuller fantasy-world is its own. Still no word from the collaborators, and this when the arts and humanities bureaus here are soliciting poems with little or no cohesive plan other than a desire to write together and publish in some way. The town and state poet laureates both have projects going, and Spark is doing a partnership with actors and telephone booth engineers to share aloud while the sidewalks cheer us underfoot. But this is a kind of laziness, a looseness, again, a desire lazily expressed. It’s poetry where the vast extremes of care and carelessness in this regard must palpate. Wanting to say something, with nothing in particular to say; or wanting to say some unsayable thing, and never quite doing it--it is a fine distinction to tell them apart. There is that final unfinished work of David Foster Wallace hymning the paperwork itself--this last bastion of the written word in the world of practicality. I haven’t read it. What Sandra Williams said presenting last night on her Black Lens might be admirable, to want to have people sit down and read by printing a paper on paper, but then how many people do? It’s like her story, elicited by Taylor’s question: the foster child who leaves an abusive home to be taken into a kind and loving one, and only wants to go back to the abuse because it is home--sitting down to read something like the truth is also like that, a painful habit and a deep need, and print will stay with us as long as that home exists for human knowledge, though others may well be possible, and more comfortable, less painful, and less vexed ones, but not for this generation, at least, home. There was the girl at LC who insisted, each time I suggested she read, that books had mold in them, and refused on that grounds. I think I left my kindle reader there, unable now to find it, Rousseau’s unfinished sequel to Emile, if anything even sadder than Tolkien’s unfinished Silmarillion epic--and it could well be reading all this dismal stuff has put me in a funk as much as anything. The cold weather and short days setting in, the stress of further interviews and hustling, the Damocles sword of politics looming, and not having got to read the rest of Terry Pratchett still, that which is absent as much as the other stuff present, has to be playing its part.

In impressive ways, the combination of voice and text gets orchestrated in Prof Olsen’s seminar podcasts with his group of undetermined size, in which he plays Iluvatar and manages all things freely, and yet to the best, giving an order and shape to the questions, yet also launching into lectures when the occasion demands, returning to certain key themes again and again, and never exhausting the deep passion animating the questions and the answers--certainly the purest teaching I have had the privilege of beholding, unbeholden to any reason other than because reading it is a good thing, and yet, parlayed into a school and an identity, necessarily there must be more to it. Similarly the Christian thesis underlying, against which Pullman’s bound to have his say. Still more on this tyranny of love tack, too: for if the traditional response to the problem of evil is to resolve it into the perversion of love and of the good, that only opens up the flip side of the question and poses a problem of good and of the supreme Christian good, love. Some ways of talking about this: Stockholm syndrome, and the abusive home or relationship, the way the words rape and lust have changed and narrowed their meanings over time, the problems of possessiveness that come with love, particularly in the creative act, artistic or sexual, and the question of how to make and enjoy stories in which nothing bad were to happen. These last of course come straight from the Silmarillionaires, and it would be interesting to know what has already been written along these lines. The other main influence here is the time spent in schools lately: while the girls were all making paper airplanes and throwing them, the boys were still at their table talking about philosophy: perception, parallel universes, Schrodinger's cat. Oblivious or seeming to be the whole time of the girls pushing their table nearer, trying to force the girl and boy who liked each other to interact. Favoritism, jokes no one else gets: these are already mingling desire with power.

Suppose that monogamy saves us from the tyranny of love insofar as it is the mutual surrender of self, whereas profligacy is possessive of self and pleasure first, and of others only incidentally. Then this continual harping on respect, which must be given to be received--it makes you wonder if we don’t actually want disrespect, since that is what we most often show, if that is what we are more comfortable with, since it absolves us of the difficulty of opening ourselves, lets us feel victimized--doesn't trauma produce more trauma, as a kind of generation, if not art? And don’t we derive from these stories a pleasure that would be sadistic if it were from realities? And boredom, which is the student’s great nemesis, arises most when they are quietly working, but would actually be undone if they were learning and thinking. Instead, though, they find expedients in messing with each other, taking pencils, playing with phones, even reading fantasy books, or talking about something important or trivial, flirting and looking at one another with lust in itself no bad thing, again, if only it were turned toward learning and seen within a coherent worldview, but that seems to be splintered.

If even the words have lost their meaning, the concepts are surely enervated: the kid who yelled I swear to God when the girl came near with a marker, and I swear to Jesus this school is retarded, which I tied to tell him was synecdoche, but it might be metonymy now that I think about it. It bears taking a moment to notice Augustine’s style, too, in Confessions, as a kind of joy wrought from past sorrow that might look sadistic without more careful attention, and surely the tradition of confession, repentance, and penitence satisfies something in the lust for meaning as well. The sub across the hall overheard and commiserated in passing, I don't think they care. I followed up asking if words have meaning to them. If teaching might consist largely in this, and what engagement really looks like is kids teaching you and one another in words and actions meaningful to them--like the airplane philosophy session Friday afternoon science class became. The two science teachers were gone three days to work on some kind of test; the day I gave the eighth-graders their quiz, they talked constantly and showed the same apathy towards it that they do the worksheets it resembled. They only pay attention and write anything down when answers are projected on the screen, and only temporarily then.

The other things we’ve been up to lately are Skyward Sword and sleigh rides. Still no edits to the story. It makes you wonder how much of the game depends on the euphony of the subtitle: every game follows a more or less formulaic progression centering around a key item identified in the name. A lot of the gameplay elements follow from the sword, even to a frustrating degree, as it not only fights enemies but solves puzzles and finds things, and the fights themselves become a kind of puzzle and struggle against the hardware as you try to figure out first what you need to do deal actual damage and then fiddle with the remote to see how to actually do it. The struggle descended into my dreams the past couple of nights, with diving for treasures and a creation of the world by goddesses talking about forms and etchings and the fourfold world, Plato and Blake and Heidegger stirred up by swordplay. The whole romantic theme, and then the personified voice of the sword as a female robot calling you master, suggests all kinds of wish-fulfillment at work. The theme of time, and the occasion of the 25th anniversary in the background of the game, the androgynous mysterious foes and friends, and the Ghibli-style animations for the monster-maw and Skyloft and birds in flight all contribute to the somewhat less unified feel of the game compared to others in the venerable series.

Anyhow, the sleigh rides then in the park gave me one more way my poem for I am a Town might matter; though the horse metaphor is dropped for the winter portion of the structure, it must have been in my mind somewhere. The neighbors and extended family of the hosts all gathered in the front yard where two fires were burning merrily, and on the porch tables for the holiday cookies. Apparently the house on the corner there used to be a bed and breakfast, and the owners used to open it up to show off the rooms during the gathering, but they retired and passed away in the last year or two, and not as many people showed up this year as there used to be, according to Bob and Martha. They left shortly after we arrived, having just missed the ride they were waiting on, being numbers thirteen and fourteen when the wagon held twelve.We got on the next one, near the middle, wondered at the horses’ traction on the packed ice, muddled through Christmas carols we realized we didn’t really know the words to--a few were printed up on damp papers it was too dark and shaky to read--but I did learn the part of Jingle Bells about the bells on bobtails, since they were in evidence right in front of us. A couple of neighbors were especially jolly, right across from us, singing lustily and wearing hats that danced electronically when they pushed a button. Another girl kept making an ass of herself telling everyone to sing, but then we got to be gracious about the poor job we were doing and come together somewhat about her bad grace. If it was her mother across from her, that’s too bad, but it wasn’t nearly bad enough to spoil anyone’s ride who wasn’t family and ashamed of her, that peculiar kind of shame, obverse of the honor that used to structure the world. We sipped cider and ate gooey brownie as well as we could, though it stuck to the pan. We took it home all but full, with a few extra cookies, too.

A good visit home, seminar and videogame dreams. In the one, a lego spider was going to race a cat and a dog, but Gollum-like she kept escaping. The last time was right before the race, and we could’t find her. In the continuation, driving down from Juneau to Middleton in Canada, an invented town, where a ring of logs was constructed for the Bear festival. Skins were weighted and traded, food and drink. This was on the map both the dinosaur’s underground of EB and the Zelda map filling in with new discoveries, which owes so much to Tolkien, too. Somewhere here were also the buildings at Northstar school, where we were having seminar, it could have been on Crime and Punishment, or Kierkegaard, or those Nordic novels, the names were obscure, the content profound, and I listened to teachers' and students' comments, until interrupting a bit to stay on the topic, I tried to say something that had been elusive and still was as I pushed on my forehead and shut my eyes to try to elaborate it--something about how desire is either involuntary, and so where does it come from, or secretly willed, in which case it is a question of self-knowledge, that this was the question the book poses. Across the end of the table, I looked right at someone at some point, and at the end of my long speech one of my old students said to his friend it was all in Dante’s Inferno, which they would read next year. And here I thought I had said something original. She got up and said goodbye to everyone. Maybe it's that every so-called original thought is just one from a time people no longer read. My international student spoke quietly then, a few questions about specific passages, too quiet for me to hear, though they seemed to be addressed to me; trusting that someone else would hear and answer, I was not too concerned by this. I was thinking of French again, and some other language, German maybe,without as particular a purpose as St-Ex for which I was slowly trying to learn it, as if this excused my slowness. Slowness, quietness in learning--things I must dream of!

In the plane back I suddenly thought of another vistid I may not have ever illustrated clearly, a red and pale pink sky over a seaside village--now that I write this I realize it's the woodcarving picture, or a variation on that same one--where the seagulls and fish come and go, and the people are few and merry. We had our visit to Catoctin Park, with the pot-luck and the auction, a brief bitter cold walk to see an orienteering mark, and then warming by the fire in the visitor lodge. We went to see a house on E Deer Park hill for sale, with its huge fireplace of two stories and many master bedrooms, while the white house on the corner is still boarded up. Not much else did we do, but read and apply to jobs and eat. We took a walk in the freezing-rain-clad morning, and the first morning back here we went and sledded on the wet snow-covered hill above Emerson Park, under Glass Rd. Steph is sad about not getting the nursing-advising grant, which for her meant putting off getting a house again, and rage-wrapped twenty little bags of presents. Still won't get much interested in coding and making games, though we talked again about the logic game Pair a Docks. Thought about using the little pictures that spell out words, like that couple of days in Pre-Cal that seem so memorable now.

Woke today so full of vim, and spent it all on Return of the King rather than writing or revising of my own--oh well. And last night was the Solstice at church, only I haven’t been checking email much. That seems like the greatest luxury that there is, or is a part of that great luxury, anyhow, of doing nothing and not minding. Of coming unconnected, unplugging, whiling the time in the reading light, the cold and snow to run in, the utter freedom from care or responsibility, even if only illusory. For of course the wanting of common sense and decency is not a problem just to criticize in the others who display it, but is truly a wanting in the commons. And joy is also a thing to share--Patrick’s son was born this Sunday, though we didn’t get to see them at the hospital. In this, joy and community, is the stuff of stories of peace and comedy, not war and tragedy, that Tolkien seems to be seeking for, incarnating in the Hobbits who must go wandering in those great stories seeking home and peace. In the world created for that wandering to happen in, too, and in the songs and stories left untold but only touched upon, with whole languages like landmasses submerged. These books are different: and all the fantasies written since on that scale in some sense only derivative of this classic. So many fanfics.

Still, that simple question raised explicitly here and there, in the Hobbit and Silmarillion, about the lack of tales of the times of peace, invites more to say or sing--to roll in with Final Fantasies’ allure and video game violence generally, Conan the Barbarian and my abortive treatise on Weapons, which floundered from the start when I couldn’t spell the title, and found in the perplext moment that I had really nothing to say. Only something of the way my older friends looked walking down the hall and up the stairs reading books from the school library as they went, and their jokes on the bus and at the sleepovers, and how they played the games and talked about them intensively made me always want to try my hand at making as well as playing them, too. There was also my notebook on the letters in different languages, that the dictionary showed, and that History of the ancient world in the library that had the bare breasts of women illustrated in it, riding wild bulls and festooning the palace walls, and Patrick’s origami gifts and the stories we would write with Ronnie and Billy, our UFO club, and the trouble we got into being mean to one another and running form the girls, talking rudely about the long-term substitute, who was so hot after all, and confessing crushes on the type who would resurge later in middle school and punching the counselor’s pillows in revenge for the teasing that inevitably followed, writing a DARE story and reading it aloud, with all those little awards from awards ceremonies, which I colored in at the daycare later and made into bookmarks for Nintendo Powers, and paper ruled with space at the top for drawings, and telling older kids stories for them to type, and crying again for the boy who’d died and had a bench memorialized above the field.--Almost infinite stories, with no war or greatness, but small valor, virtue, and greed amid the gentleness.

So one thing that comes of writing, whether against a deadline or for a fulfillment of some inner drive, is the sense of how little can be said of all that might be said--the reminder of mortality, and the humbling of vain imagination--and these are both at work, small wonder, in a deep way in Tolkien’s depiction of evil and the struggle against it. His view of death is clearly not negative, and in the perspective of ongoing natural cycles as well as a larger theological mystery of which he feels the awe. But Bilbo in Rivendell and the high kings of Numenor each have their responses to the oncoming Gift, reflecting the author’s own views of things as he must have been aware of his own passing life--the attempts to preserve it in a form adequate to the Gift of its passing. The appendices and brief mentions of further stories all attest to the incredible imaginative work of the writer, and to his humbling in addressing himself to the little that he could more fully record. Small wonder then that he chooses for his protagonists the humblest people, while in the background there are movements of the great lightly brushed against. Similarly his personal beliefs are much more in the background than the other Inklings’, though it is easy to lump him in with them or with those legions of imitators and miss the complexity of his stories, with respect to his treatment of evil or his art of myth. So it is richly rewarding to read him more carefully, and in the company of others, as Olsen’s courses aid in doing. Like this tossed off insight he mentions here and there: that Tolkien’s restraint is amazing, when you consider the vast mythology but the sparing reference, the mention of the Valar or a comparison to Orome in the Return of the King, with no indulgence in explanation whatsoever, the Silmarillion not then published.

And so the insight along with that, that explanation is indulgence, that it takes a wonderful amount of leisure and a particular kind of laziness, or treading desperately against laziness, to read and talk about books like this, or games. All these analyses of games you can turn up on the tube, an entertainment in themselves when the entertainment they explain palls in meaningfulness as a way of spending time, but so much of this is taking a step backwards, really, a step away from meaningful action which would be creating something, a step closer to utter passivity and anomie. Mindful self-indulgence, surely that is much worse. But since you look at it like this, the inevitable thing looks to be to try your hand at the making side of things, making an explanation, an “analysis” or “critique,” a close reading if you like, if making a game is too hard. And since it is, and because among the ten thousand things is that long-deferred, never remotely pursued dream of making a game-epic, the temptation is also to write about it, and in writing about it to actually write it. Construct the narrative around the youtuber who makes video analyses of games, who begins playing Dream Saga. About the stories and games that this one is based off of, and the difference between talking about those sources and thinking through the choices the maker has made with them, and the difference between playing and watching.

As it happens at the community center workshop, the mother and her three kids, Celia doing work and organizing a party, and Charles writing a review of a Korean book translation, dropped in and wrote. The kids wrote about dogs, snowflakes, and youtubers, with varying levels of help. In the video games Minecraft and Roblox and the ginger cat with a green nose and other funny comments they talk about over the recorded play, it seemed to me that the kids could have made their own videos. They wouldn’t need their parents’ cell phones if they used the resources here at Spark, and all the other kids from the neighborhood could contribute, too! So now the great fascination is with bringing together Spark and Signum, with schools the repository of students more so than learning anymore. As far as innovating in teaching them, it would be hard to imagine a more momentous symbolic step than that taken last night in the Tolkien professor’s appearance in the lorehall at Bree in the Lord of the Rings Online to discuss some of Chapter 1 of the Fellowship of the Ring. He’s repeatedly called it the most well-done adaptation of Tolkien’s work, and he took the class gathered in-game on a field trip to Hobbiton to point out some of the reasons why--details of attention to the author’s paintings, faithful reconstructions and also filling in the blanks, by having Lobelia give a party in imitation of Bilbo’s under the tree, with the worn gate before. In itself, this LotRO world is an impressive example of the kind of book-to-game adaptation that I’ve wanted to look at for a long time, though the BookWarm blog has been idle ever since its launch, really.

And instead of bringing things together, I’m only more scattered than ever, thereby. Happening upon Tomato’s localization website, looking for text from FFII, has re-fired my interest in EarthBound, since he’s got a huge book delving into its history, published by fangamer. I’ll send Steve and Ryan a copy and try to have a reading club about it. The whole video-essay mode is one Steve knows a lot more about, but he still won’t toss his hat into the ring, it seems, any more than Ben has been willing to try an online writing workshop with me thus far. Still, I’m not one to talk, because what have I accomplished with my leisure thus far? Only so much hibernation. After I got to a certain point in Mato’s analysis, as if a voice was calling me, Push on past the spoony bard, see what he has to say about Mysidia and Mt Ordeals, the Paladin and the voice and the light, sure enough there was a particularly insightful quote there from some anonymous reader, treating the very question of justice and mercy, or violence and forgiveness, that seems to be at the heart of the video game medium. I sent him a facebook message asking who had sent it, and how I could read more like it, so-to-speak literary essays on the games I love. But if in four years in the desert I never made it over to Tucson to visit the fangamers, I doubt somehow--and over a decade on starmen without ever getting much attention or readership--that a real translator and work-doer will find the time to reply to me. Though it could be. He at least is also interested in asking the question of tragedy in this way, and he has an essential insight into the original language and culture that any serious study would require. All I can see of the tropes and tokens of heroism is colored by naivete, tempered by some light dusting of study of classics and fantasy.

But to begin there: in what sense Fantasy? In what sense Final? (If this is even what the thing would or should translate to,) To me, Fantasy conjures the escape, the world into which you escape, and this world is more or less consistent thorough the games, with more and more elaboration of its elements: chocobos, crystals, airships, etc. What is final, on the other hand, is twofold: the individual characters do not return from one to the next, because their story is in some sense ultimate, so when it is completed, there is nothing more to tell; only, to return to the beginning with another variation of the story, the world, with new characters.

But this is all still to grasp among the ten thousand things, and we also have to consider the One that creates, makes, condescends to do so, and plays, perhaps. This is to come back to the central theme of Tolkien as the Tolkien Prof reads him, which is humility and pride, or freedom and fate, our approach to it. For this must be restated, that part of what gives his analysis force and drives it is this deeper philosophical standpoint towards things, within which Tolkien’s is a particularly engaging and important example of subcreation, but where the creation writ large is not lost sight of. It is a Judeo-Christian, Classical-Medieval, western-traditional perspective, and it is pursued with love and in good faith. It is very different from what I have to presume is under-girding most of the analysts of video games--a video or ideo-essayist like Ragnarox productions on Metal Gear, for instance, which avails itself of much more Romantic, post-modern and social-scientific language and thought canons--the dialectic of suspension of disbelief and meta/fourth-wall-breaking, for instance, which is simply addressed in a totally different way in Tolkien’s frame-stories and the Biblical logos.

If that all means anything at all, I’ll have to try to say it in much simpler words at a bit greater length Especially, too, since kids I sub for keep showing an interest in my work, it would be good to make its language a good deal more lucid, its thought less tangled, and even to try again at the video-format or podcasts to help actually teach them, whenever they should feel the inkling to learn.