I have been depressed recently, and
it’s not just owing to the migraines, though the migraines tell the story as do
scars; they’re a metonymy for the entire body of the problem. They started when
I wrote my first game. Ordinarily, I would have first committed my thoughts to
paper; my first attempt at a novel was inscribed on napkins. The game did well,
but I didn’t; I had to surrender several commitments to my acquired ailment of
the brain. I agonized over my publication and its legacy. It was well-written,
which no one contested. It was not “fun”, but novels do not need to be fun.
Ten years ago, during the Christmas
Holidays, my girlfriend at the time, now my only ex, and I visited the home of
our Humanities teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Rowan. The house was packed, to the
extent that I was bewildered and at a loss for what to do, surrounded by so
many of my colleagues and their associates. Most of the instance was a blur,
but I recall the conversation with Mr. Rowan. It was about Doctor Englund. He
said, “she believes that the World revolves around books. And I don’t.” He
laughed.
I asked my girlfriend, not yet my
ex (so: shortly thereafter) what he might have meant by that. She replied that
one needs “experience”. Ten years have yet to prove her right, but we are not
together anymore, so the meaning of her theory remains anecdotal.
This concept of the World Revolving
About Books stuck with me. In college, I struggled with the seeming Duality
between the Lunar World, one which revolved about Literature, governed by Moral
Laws, and the Solar World, one which somehow prospered by the will of the
People, however naïve or misinformed they might have been.
Most recently, I’ve had to ground
myself in Reality. The Quarantine compelled me to stay home, so I withdrew from
the company of my fellows, many of whom withdrew from me. I started reading
again. Many of my books have been lost, stolen, or vandalized over the years,
owing to a stream of false friends, but I kept my Bookstore Membership, and,
besides that, I had grown accustomed to using the Internet. When I read about a
Game Jam advertising an opportunity to adapt a book to a game, I decided it was
time to read Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard.
It did not take me long time to
comprehend Kierkegaard’s “genius”, nor why MacIntyre referred to him as such. Kierkegaard,
like so many other philosophers I’d read before him, (though they wrote long
after he did) was a Real Person, a breath of fresh air in a swamp of confusion.
Every sentence imbibed my imagination with a captivating brilliance, building
upon previous claims musically, interweaving novel concepts into a contingent
and self-contained whole which nonetheless felt timeless. Not for the first
time in my Life, a simple Book answered questions that I had struggled
previously to even articulate. Not for the first time in my Life, a Philosopher
did more for me than all the people I had met within the decade, altogether, as
well as those I knew before.
Returning to Social Life, even
through the window of the Online Forum, grew difficult and alienating. I
witnessed what Kierkegaard in a later text would call “leveling”: the process
by which Individuality was robbed of all Authority and reduced to Equality. The
Internet spoke to me as if one voice, and it was a voice combining conviction
with confusion. Most of my fellows in these Game Jams were frankly illiterate;
the sorts of spelling and usage errors they were making were only typical of
native English speakers. One guy did end up reading a novel I recommended for
him, (Ubik by Philip K. Dick) but he was not a native English speaker.
(Most probably: Italian.) People who wrote code were bamboozled by my simple
prose. I had acquired the Promethean Flame of innovation once more, yet it was
apparently blinding. I became Midas; all I touched turned to Gold, so I could
not avail myself of it. Ideas flowed from me as if from a well-spring, but I
could not convey them, not for a lack of facility, but for an excess of it. My
only companion was in Kierkegaard. And that was when the migraines began again.
There is a scene in a recent film
called Good Will Hunting. Within the film, the protagonist recites his
favourite authors to a psychotherapist, citing those authors as his “friends”.
The psychotherapist contends that the protagonist cannot have a conversation
with them. Yet not even six years ago the actor who portrayed that
psychotherapist dropped dead of his own accord. I can’t have a conversation
with HIM, either. And most of the lines he improvised for that film are ominous
in retrospect.
Exhausted from the chaos that my
computer screen is heir to, I talked my Mother into watching me play a video
game today. It’s a recent remake of an old favourite: Ratchet and Clank.
The story is a perversion of the original, but the mechanics are good. The
gameplay is narrated by the buffoonish superantihero Captain Qwark, an
ingenious literary invention when encountered in the original publication,
reduced now to a clichéd parody of himself. I might have laughed, three years
ago, to hear him refer to the “Hero” as “they”. Instinctively, I correct the
misappropriation of the plural pronoun in my head, each time I hear it. At
least one thing I could cling to as a Universal Constant was grammar, always.
Yet, this time, something like a shadow came over me. I did not recall his
calling Ratchet a “they” before. Who were “they”? Had “they” changed things?
Was this the “they” that Dick wrote about? The Elite who sought to control the
World by manipulating the Language in Orwellian Fashion, with Huxley’s Consent of
the Ruled, robbing us of History?
Clearly, migraines are not my only
problem.
[({Dm.A.A.||R.G.)}]
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