Stoicism

Colloquial stoicism – the stony stoic temperament – is a vice, inevitably compounded with sullenness, passive aggression, brooding, and envy. Stoicism as a school of thought – Zeno to Aurelius – has nothing in common with it. The big-S Stoics knew how to be happy and how to weep. But though I may be a Stoic myself I think the real thing has its own vices.

Necessity is called the mother of invention. Therefore inventors must be necessitous: the inventor is the obverse of the whiner. Stoicism forbids us to dwell on what we cannot change; but if the inability is only temporary, premature acceptance risks making a temporary difficult permanent.

Asking for help is hard to do. We ask for help only when we must; the sting is the prod. We are each pricked with our own miseries, but suffering reaches its maximum when everyone keeps their troubles to themselves. Nature has usefully given us signals of suffering that compel attention: acutely, to cry, cry out, go off; chronically, depression, distraction, misjudgment. Telling your sad story with tears can get you help when telling it plainly would only get commiseration – or worse, some reciprocal confession. Tell another’s sad story with tears and it sounds like bad news; tell it plainly and it sounds like a joke. We hear, the squeaky wheel gets the grease; we should also hear that the silent wheel gives no warning before it breaks.

Suffering is a kind of work. A certain amount of the bad demands a certain amount of sorrow. And, like work, it can be divided. If someone else joins in, it feels like half the work is done. Maybe your arguments will chip away at the bulk of sorrow, someone else’s or your own; but by sharing that sorrow, or sharing in it, you cleave it instantly.

Stoicism is strong medicine. Like any strong medicine, it has side effects. Sometimes invention, consolation, and the power of sympathy are helpless; but Stoicism should not be prescribed for lesser evils.

Nontrivia

People do not mean what they say; they say what they mean. Taking things literally is the lowest conversational gambit. Conversation is not mathematics. Reductio ad absurdum is a dead end. “Nobody really…” “There is no true…” “Strictly speaking…” – all true, but trivial. Say something nontrivial. The solipsistic machine of logic never surprises. Inhabit a world that you share. See words as things – stubborn stuff, taking effort, substantial even when they are senseless. If you hear only what was said, not what was meant, you have not heard at all. Judging human things on other than human scales is a disease of the mind. Everything is footnoted with mortality and futility. Everything is perishing. Of course the play looks absurd when you watch it from backstage. But the absurdity is not in the play; it is in you. You are watching from the wrong angle.

Descent

I play few computer games and no video games. But when Windows was wondrous, the Internet was a rumor, and time spent with the miracle machine was its own justification, I spent far too much time at it.

I played two more than any others: Civilization and Descent. Civilization was and is a popular game; I have nothing new to say about it. But I cannot assume that anyone remembers Descent. It did have sequels; it was a plausible rival to Doom, making it Lilith to Doom’s Eve in the ancestry of first-person shooters. Descent was also an FPS: but an FPS with a difference.

Here is the boilerplate. An all-powerful corporation operates off-world mines crewed with robots. In some of these mines the robots have gone wrong – suffered some infection. They have massacred or imprisoned the human staff. You have a heavily armed one-man ship. In one mine after another you must fight your way to the power core, destroy it, and get out before the mine goes up. If you should rescue any hostages along the way, that would be appreciated, but is not required.

None of this hints how strange and intense playing Descent is.

All your opponents are robots; the hostages wear helmets; except in cutscenes, nothing like a human face is seen. You are alone from beginning to end.

The mines are not just underground spaces; they are warrens, tangled nests of open and hidden tunnels, labyrinths in three dimensions and zero gravity.

The Wright brothers deserve their fame, not because they were the first to lob a glider into the air with an engine strapped to it, but because they were the first to wrap their heads around the fact that a plane must be controlled in three degrees of freedom – roll, pitch, and yaw. It took about fifty years from the first experiments in powered flight for earthbound minds to make that leap.

In Descent your ship has six degrees of freedom: roll, pitch, yaw, heave, surge, and sway – the combined maneuverability of an airplane, a car, a submarine, and a dream.

This is a puzzle in interface design. Playing Descent with standard gaming equipment is impossible. The default compromise puts two degrees of freedom – pitch and yaw – under the right hand, on the mouse or joystick, and distributes the rest somewhat haphazardly on the keyboard. A good player will change the keybindings to bring all the controls under the left hand, coordinating patterns of motion like musical chords.

(Note that the ship behaves as if it had six separate engines, not one engine with six separate nozzles. With six engines simultaneous motion along multiple axes is a vector sum – which means that to achieve top speed you must move the ship simultaneously along three axes, triangulating your direction. This is called trichording, and mastering it is the only way to actually win the game.)

Just learning to play the game is mind-expanding; but that is not the intense thing about it. The game is claustrophobic. You fly at high speed down tortuous tunnels not much wider than your ship, whirling like a cell in the bloodstream – in a hostile bloodstream. As you thread each level, you map it; but the map must be presented as a model, not a projection – there is no two-dimensional way to make sense of a level in Descent. If you play for more than an hour I guarantee you will dream of those tunnels. You will see them when you shut your eyes.

Descent is unique for good reason. It has the steep learning curve a game could only get away with when there were few other choices. And some people physically cannot play the game; just being in the same room with someone playing Descent can cause motion sickness. (Really, Descent has seven degrees of freedom – roll, pitch, yaw, heave, surge, sway, and puke.)

The question has been raised: “Can video games be art?” Inclusively of video and computer games, I say no. Games can contain art, but the game itself is no more art than a museum is art. Games cannot be art to the satisfaction of genteel tradition. They are not art, but they are something. It is arrogant of me to dictate to a genre I do not participate in, but what I want in a game is not a movie or a novel – old wine in new skins. I want something to rewire my brain; I want something to infest my dreams.

Three Horror Stories

I

“I’m sorry, sir. You can’t leave. The building is under quarantine.”

“Quarantine? For what? I feel fine. Just calm down. You don’t have to point guns at me. What is the welding equipment for?”

II

“Honey! I’m home!”

“Honey. I’m home.”

“Very funny. What’s for dinner?”

“Very funny. What’s for dinner.”

“Honey, is something wrong?”

“Honey is something wrong.”

“Stop it! Jesus, honey, stop it!”

“Stop it. Jesus honey stop it.”

“Look at me! Honey, I’m right here. Look at me.”

“Look at me. Honey I’m right here. Look at me.”

“Stop it! Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

“Stop it. Stop it stop it stop it.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you.”

“Honey, where are the kids?”

III

“Thank God I found you. I don’t know what’s happening. All my things are gone. My keys don’t work. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”

“I’m sorry. I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

Regret

Evil is the bad things that happened. Regret is the good things that did not happen. Regret troubles us more. Evil is bad in itself, not because of the things that did not happen instead; but we value what might have been more than what was as absolutely as we value the lives of children over the lives of adults. What happened is finite. What did not happen is infinite.

If harboring regret is weak then we are all weak. We shame regret in others, because we have no way to defy it in ourselves. Meanwhile regret reigns. Dreams beguile hope; fantasies beguile regret. The distinction matters because regret is stronger than hope – hope is finite. Love or money always come into it somehow. But less often as, “This will get me rich” or “This will get me laid” than as “It is not too late to succeed” or “It is not too late to be loved.” This is nontrivial. Hope only wants; regret has something to prove.

There is something heart-softening, something miraculous, about the repair of a regret, about a second chance. We stand naked before these incidents. Forget cures and escapes. A miracle is whatever repairs regret. And even then, even with the miracle, regret can still win. Too much time has been lost. It is too late anyway.

There is a poignancy to cosmologies which transcend regret – say, reincarnation, or the quantum theory of many worlds. We could be born again. We could have been born before. All the connections and chances we recognized but did not make, did not take, they were real – we missed them this time around, but we have made them before, we may take them again. There could be more than one of each of us, flickering above neighboring peaks in one eternal unresolved chord, near as the backs of one another’s mirrors – all arrayed, some strangely better, some strangely worse, some only strangers – but at least one, surely at least one, who was lucky, who was helped, who did not have to, who found a way.

But regret is not for escaping. The worst man is the man without regret. As far as philosophy purges regret, philosophy is bad. Ancient philosophy, the kind that would have us make philosophers of ourselves, is moving and useful, yet there is something in it not quite worthy, even somehow seedy: and this is because it does not recognize or accommodate regret. Here is Polonius. Here is a man learned, wise, crafty, with good taste in poetry – but he lacks regret, and this is enough to make him ridiculous.

Regrets are the broken circuits of actions. There they lie, loose and fatal as wrecks of power lines after a storm wind, still electric. Think of actors, finding in themselves the other people they might have been, getting to know them, putting them on. Think of music – music, after rhythm, runs on regret. (Thus the ancient enmity of music and philosophy.)

Regret is a shadow theodicy with an unknown god. Heaven, the very most that can be hoped for, promises to unite you with your loved ones; but not with the ones you should have loved, not with the ones who should have loved you. Regret is too large a part of this world to be salved by another. The veiled being who afflicted us with regret remains silent. Without evil we could still be ourselves. We are made of regret.

The South

In order, my first observations of the South. The stupendous clouds, like levitating icebergs. The jumble of wealth and poverty. I had seen mansions and hovels, but I had never seen a mansion, a hovel, and a clipped suburban lawn, all along the same mile of highway. The rarity of winter clothing – at temperatures when Northeners would bundle up, Southerners persevered in shorts and T-shirts, as if taking notice of the cold would only encourage it.

I have not gone much farther. I have become a Louisianan, but not really a Southerner. Of course being a Rodriguez helps with that. Here I pass for native unless I bother to deny it; but of course Rodriguez is not so happy a name in the rest of Dixie.

Comparing Louisiana with the South is tricky. Which Louisiana do you mean? Broadly speaking, all Louisiana is divided into four parts. The northwest, the watershed of the Red River, was settled by Americans of the same Scotch-Irish stock as the rest of the South. It is something like East Texas. This is where rock and roll happened. In the less south southeast, the Florida Parishes (Percy’s Feliciana) were settled by the English, and are something like Mississippi. This has been at times the most violent area in the US, host to multigenerational blood feuds. In the southwest, Acadiana was settled by Germans and Acadians; and in the very south southeast, Barataria (including New Orleans) was settled by the French and Spanish. (This is where jazz happened.) These last two regions are both culturally unique to Louisiana and very different from one another. Chances are, when you think of Louisiana, you are thinking of them: aristocatholic decadence and europeasant uninhibition.

But even allowing for regional variation, the interests of Louisiana were never quite the interests of the South. Again and again Louisiana has sacrificed for the South, and the South has taken. In the long view the relationship between Louisiana and the South has the shape of an unhealthy marriage: on Louisiana’s side, all passion and devotion; on the South’s side, something between tolerance and contempt.

In 1861 Louisiana was the wealthiest, most splendid state in the Union; four years later it was the poorest and most desperate, forever. “Often rebuked, but always back returning.” Mississippi, for example, resents Louisiana for stealing the spotlight during Katrina. When they talk about it there is a subtext something like this: We had it bad too, but we didn’t squeal on national television. We hearty salt-of-the-earth goodmen took our knocks, gritted our teeth, and rebuilt while those weirdo slacker heathens whined and sat on their thumbs. One might object something about the different challenges of rebuilding neighborhoods that were swept away in a night vs. rebuilding neighborhoods where the very ground spent weeks steeping in poison; but who can fight myth?

The Civil War is history to Northeners, yesterday to Southerners; something northerners learn about in school, something Southerners learn about at home.

In this respect I am an atypical Northener. As a child my best friend’s father was a Civil War re-enactor. I know the smells of campfire and canvas, of wet wool and black powder. I think “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was the first song I ever memorized. I am reflexively blue the way Southerners are reflexively gray.

The contradiction in my feelings about Louisiana and about the South is clearest when I look at the war. I have no quarrel with Sherman, the bugbear of the South in general; but I personally dislike Butler. True, the war was particularly bad here – things went on in the Florida Parishes under Butler’s blind eye that read more like Apocalypse Now than Gone With the Wind – but there is no real basis for this distinction; it is simply emotional.

Still, I am not a Louisianan by birth. As an outsider I have to recognize that Louisiana is part of the South. The distinctions are many, but they are only distinctions, not differences. If I want to understand Louisiana I should understand the South better.

Survivors

Reading in another language poses a recurring doubt. An image, a turn of phrase, an expression pleases you. Is it original to the author, or is it a commonplace of an unfamiliar tradition? Corollary: a minor writer within a tradition may be a major writer in literature generally, if there are no other survivors. (Even the first entrant to the mainstream from some tributary looms as better writers within that tributary never can.) No novel so trashy, no polemic so petty, no puff so creepy, that if some cataclysm obliterated the rest of the accomplishments of our civilization, it would not impress itself on our posterity. In any living literature there is something in common that counts for nothing from within, and everything from without. Lemma: greatness in writing requires you either to enlist an otherwise hidden tradition and impinge with it, or to imply the presence of an alien tradition, to bring some hidden weight to bear behind the cutting edge.

Theories

I look at the sky and see nuclear furnaces and transcendental distance. I look at an apple and see molecules, atoms, quanta of energy and motion. I look at a bird and see evolution, metabolism, aerodynamics. Yet looking at the same things others have seen a sphere of fixed stars, an apple-substance, and upholding angels. Some wit observed of the Ptolemaic cosmos: “If they had been right, what would the world have looked like?” The answer, of course, is that without a telescope it would look the same. Most experience is theory-neutral; we can get by believing almost anything about inner workings and ultimate origins. Even in the part of experience that science enables, people can get by without seeing scientifically. (I recall the moment of horror when I was learning to drive and realized there were people with driver’s licenses and Aristotelian intuitions about motion.)

Thus I try from time to time to put on wrong theories. I try to see Ptolemy’s sky spin or Newton’s sky tick, to see elemental matter with Aristotle or vortical matter with Descartes – to grasp and hold the view as long as I can. It interests me that this can be done at all, but properly the interest is in the consequences. The longer I can hold the view, the more I accommodate it. I feel the possibility of otherwise unknown moods; I feel a derangement in my scale of values; I feel a shift in my physical bearing – somehow how much of the universe is above my head matters to how I hold it; somehow the composition of dirt matters to how I stand on it.

The same life, the same world, but in a different key: the names, the patterns, the movements are the same, yet the overall effect is different. I wonder if this was what it was like to live through Einstein. I think of Feynman’s melancholy observation that science is not an infinite project, that it is at last doomed to run out of nontrivia to discover. I think of the commonplace that schools in art and philosophy sometimes end simply because they are too developed, because they require too much time to catch up with, foreclose too many possibilities. But there is no such escape from truth.

Short stories

There are too many short stories in the world. For all x, where x is heartbreaking or horrifying, mystifying or magnificent, pitiful or precious, agonizing or astonishing – some short story already satisfies it perfectly.

There is always room for another novel. Novels are too long for perfection. All novels do something wrong, leave some promise unfulfilled. There is always room in the gaps. The novel is fractal; from the right perspective we could see every novel growing out of another – see Don Quijote as the Mandelbrot set, dark among halos.

There is always room for another movie. I suspect good directors become so by watching bad movies. Every bad movie has one good character, one good scene, one good shot, one good line. Watch enough of them and these scattered goods add up to the shadow of a great but unmade movie.

But short stories can be perfect. Pry open the novelist and you find a frustrated reader of novels; pry open the director and you find a frustrated watcher of movies. But pry open a short story writer and you find delight and devotion. This is strange. Perfection is so high and so cold a thing; it should quell and silence us, it should make us prefer some open field. What could inspire us to imitate what we cannot rival?

(There is of course an analogy in music – old Bach is perfect, yet inspires composers – but that is only a parallel mystery.)

The point of fiction is its process. No work of fiction worth writing is fully planned. Not that fiction must be unplanned or shapeless; only that, for the writer, fiction is as much discovery as design – a revelation that may be determined, but cannot be predicted.

Imagine a pantograph mounted to a drafting table. Some points are fixed, some points are free. As the draftsman moves the arms the fixed points determine, as translated by the configuration of the machine, the shape traced out by the free points.

We only see the shape traced out when the drawing is done; but every work of fiction starts with something fixed and something free. Fiction is always experiment. The writer fixes certain points. Given the machine that the writer’s knowledge and sympathy are, what shape will be traced?

In the novel the apparatus is somewhat flexible. Time and tedium, research and tendency, blur the resulting image. But in the short story the apparatus is rigid and quick. The shape is distinct. For the writer, the short story is an experiment; for the reader, the short story is a demonstration.

If the point of fiction were for us to tell what we know about the world – to put on masks and do impersonations, to manipulate puppets and cast our voices into their mouths – then fiction would not be worth writing. Essays and treatises can tell more easily, completely, and comprehensibly.

We waste our powers when we exercise them only in being ourselves. To observe is to imitate; to sympathize is to become. We all do this; we simply call it knowing a person – knowing how they look at things, knowing what they would say, how they would say it. This is a basic human faculty, something we take pleasure in doing and cultivating for its own sake. We build music on hearing, art on seeing; we build fiction on knowing.

The Golden Disk

They came from the sky in disks of gold and told us we were not alone. When they walked, they walked like us. When they spoke, they spoke like us. They said they had found our golden disk, our message of music, and they had accepted it. They had come for our Bach, to crown him with glory, to admit him to the fellowship of the music masters of a million worlds. We told them he was dead and they asked us what that meant. When we could no longer bear the pity in their so human faces we asked them to leave and they went. You call my silence a conspiracy. But I have no words.