BLOWHARD:

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU

It’s somewhat ironic that Blow concludes his lecture with an Alan Moore quotation about the magical quality of language, especially written language, only to subtly deride the discipline beforehand and far more explicitly so afterwards. I am reminded of what the late Roger Ebert said of Blow’s writing for Braid: that it read like a fortune cookie. For the first time, I agree with Ebert, whereas I did not bewail his passing at first, the latter chiefly as a result of Ebert’s insistence that video games would never become an Art Form. Jonathan Blow disproved this with his own work and these lectures, yet the nostalgia which I feel for both is only as strong as my nostalgia for the time within my life wherein I encountered them, a strange period of Soul-searching wherein the works of J.K. Rowling, Alan Watts, and Kahlil Gibran did far more than Braid did. If ever I loved Braid, (a love which might be substantiated by Steam’s testimony that I ran it for 133 hours total over the last seven years, more so than any other product I purchased through the service) it was only because I felt that games COULD someday rival books.

The limitations and the “linearity” of language are hardly absent from any other mode of human expression. Video games themselves may be atomized as lines of code, and if computers attained sentience they would probably see them in that fashion. Coding, in itself, is an extremely linear task, both for the programmer and for the computer, regardless of how many while loops and function calls are woven into it, and this fact accounts for the tendency for the most skilled programmers to become some of the least flexible personalities alive. The term “linear”, of course, was a misquotation of Blow, one of several ham-fisted and naïve attempts to equate him with the late David Foster Wallace. The term that Blow uses, however, is even more incriminating of the fact that Blow is a natural programmer, albeit an unusually flexible one, and that his approach to language is so rooted in programming language that he has mistakenly reduced the former parent to the latter child: “serialized”.

This at first ambiguous term may be translated fairly simply to refer to two qualities intrinsic to the use of language: its conformity to grammatical laws and its conformity to trends in usage. Every word is understood by reference to a number of denotated meanings, each of which may invoke a spectrum of connotated meanings, and each meaning is inferred by a sort of process of elimination which takes place, largely subconsciously, according to the context of the usage. For instance, the word “bus” means one thing in the phrase “come and ride the bus” and another in the phrase “please bus your own dishes”, and yet another in the phrase “be sure to bus your reverb to a separate audio track”. In each phrase, the denotative meaning of the word “bus” might be inferred from its juxtaposition with other words, such as “dishes”, “ride”, and “reverb”, and it is from this context that we might infer its connotative meaning as well. Yet this atomization of language is only a superficial reduction of it, and to insist that these are the confines which doom literature to an archaic obsoletion would be tantamount to saying that anything produced on a computer can never amount to the Heights of Music, since Music is composed of twelve notes whereas code is only a series of ones and zeroes. It must be immediately obvious that the very simplicity of binary code is precisely what lends it its diversity, since any positive integer, including 12, (1100) can be expressed as a sum of values, each of which is an exponent of two. So it is that the very simplicity of the word “bus” lends this word its efficacy as a vehicle for meaning, even within this present sentence, wherein I boastfully but subtly advertise this fact. Not only is it convenient that the word “bus” contains only three compartments, each of which is a different letter, the sum of which swiftly convey one syllable, by avenue only of the lips, throat, breath, tongue and teeth. It is also uniform in all of its meanings, so that beyond any denotative avatar its Spirit remains the same: a vehicle for transporting something.

At this juncture, we arrive already at two salient facts: one is that a single word, by manifesting as multiple avatars, can carry multiple meanings at once, thereby illustrating multiple dimensions which operate in tandem. The second fact is this: that if one wished to reduce any word to its most basic, quintessential meaning, stripped of all incidental definitions, it would require MORE words in order to define. Splitting the atom which is a word, we release literally untold energy. By blowing up the bus, we release a fire upon the road along which it travels.

Consider thus this phrase: “I had to find another means to bus because the server was down.” Who or what was or is “the server”? Does that word “server” refer to a waitress who would not bus my food because she felt too “down” to work, or was this simply a device used to host internet connections, the result of whose malfunction I could no longer use an online synthesizer to bus my audio? If I wished to infer the meaning of “the server” by reducing it to “one who serves”, I have simply expanded the field of meanings to include anyone or anything who or which, for any reason, “serves”, presumably my purposes.

This analysis may in itself corroborate Blow’s claim that language is “serial” in nature, though it also establishes its use beyond its merely mechanical utility. The apparent vagueness of poetic language, as opposed to scientific language, ensures that, insofar as we attempt to “express that which cannot be expressed”, we end up expressing only that which had YET to be. Even the phrase “express that which cannot be expressed” expresses a contradiction which computers cannot compute, simply because it is NOT as literal as the mind of a robot or a jilted programmer. Even a machine which can calculate the probabilities for any sum produced by rolling a six-sided die, an eight-sided die, and a twenty-sided die, within mere minutes, cannot “express that which cannot be expressed”, nor can it comprehend that expression, in itself an expression of itself, without returning an error message. Poetry does not conform to the laws of non-contradiction, nor to the principles of theoretical physics.

Furthermore, it is precisely the vagueness of certain phrases which contain layers of overlapping meaning, such as “the server is down”, that renders language that much more rewarding once its meaning is unriddled, like a puzzle in the game Braid. When Hamlet delivers a monologue or Joyce depicts an otherwise banal scene in Finnegan’s Wake, the mind is accosted at once with multiple layers of meaning, interwoven artfully and alliteratively, and it is precisely this musical juxtaposition which creates, in Huxley’s words, the impression of “living in multiple worlds at the same time”: a believable summary of the Human Condition. If Braid meets Huxley’s standard for High Art, then so do Shakespeare and Joyce, and that is why Ebert would sooner have sacrificed the works of Blow than the works of the Bard of Avon.

It may be true that the number 432 may be reduced to multiples of 3 and 2, only the first two prime integers. It may also be true that 432 waves per second, expressed as sound waves traveling through air and hitting the human eardrum, can be summed up, in musicological terms, as the characters “A4”. Yet critics contend that the more recent definition for “A4”: 440 waves per second, is the more “modern” definition, and audiophiles would retort that this “modernity” only underscores the loss of an ancient harmony which was embodied within the mathematics of Pythagoras. This note, henceforth called “middle A”, may be heard in theoretically infinite contexts, but it would only be within the confines of very particular constraints that even the most modern human beings might recognize it as “music”. These constraints do not deprive the pitch of its value; they lend it that value, and to operate within those constraints masterfully is to compete with the finest programmers and Chess Masters. The same can be said of any word in any language, though this is especially true of English, for reasons too expansive for me to go further into. While the word “bus” might, outside of English, mean something else, (in Latvian, for instance, it means “will be”) we are not concerned with what it might appear to signify for Martians, and unless we are writing in Latvian it will probably retain its proper applications, though beyond that its applications may again appear endless. Now that our bus is packed, it can transport us anywhere in the Known Universe.

David Foster Wallace might have distrusted language for its “linear” presentation, yet the fact that he wrote in English to address this problem, not just as a thesis but as a poetic exercise which in itself tested the thesis, proves that language can express anything which the writer intends to, presumably because it is out of language that the intent arises to begin with. That his novels lack classical coherence might be a testament either to his literary genius, one which he shares with literature, or to a lack of cohesion in his life, which would certainly explain his suicide.

It may be true that games and films can simulate bodily experiences in a manner which requires far less abstraction and imagination. Yet it is precisely because they require less of imagination, that internal technology which has now been supplanted and usurped by external technology, that they are subject to far more critical confinements. Watching a film may feel like being “trapped” within the setting for the scene; playing a game, I might just as easily be motivated to conclude a level as to start it, especially if by concluding it I escape an environment which no longer interests me. While any of these complaints might just as easily be applied to a peculiarly boring passage in a novel or treatise, the fact remains that I can change my impression of the book’s contents by thinking about them; I cannot, however, do that to an image on a screen or a sound in the stereo, and while the words on the page retain their constancy, my imagination may nonetheless lend them a realism to rival that of the video game or the film, yet this internal World I have created from the Words retains a malleability the other media surrender.

It is perhaps for this reason that books are seldom adapted to other media, and when they are adapted the original outshines its adaptations. The Harry Potter games are fun and at times exquisitely interesting, but they hardly stand out as testaments to what video games CAN be, and alongside the books they seem like a sickly parody; most children, if they had requested the book and received the video game instead for Christmas, would be devastated. The movies are a bit better, but nothing beats the books. The same can be said even of The Lord of the Rings. It may be true that Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King won el(e)ven Oscars, and I would contend that it deserved them. Yet even one of the best films of all time cannot capture the rewards of penetrating Tolkien’s prose; even to the child, the Shire feels more real on paper than it does on screen, and I doubt that even a trip to New Zealand would reverse this. While it may also be contended that The Godfather was a poorly written novel but a magnum opus on film, the shortcomings of a writer do not reflect upon writing. It is only when we see both literature and film at its greatest, such as in The Lord of the Rings, that we must confess that one greatness does not eclipse the other, and the more recent interpretation could never take the place of the original manifestation. Blade Runner may be a lauded science fiction film, but it will never blow my mind in the manner that seven of Philip K. Dick’s books did, and though Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? might have been the least impressive of the eight books I have read by him, it pales only before those other seven.

The magic is not in the limitlessness of the medium, but rather in the ability to work within the limitations of the medium, thereby transcending expectations. One does not EXPECT to be dazzled by print on a page until one has read Harry Potter, and even then how can one know that the ending of The Man in the High Castle would put one in a state of couch lock that even psychedelic drugs could not produce, though they might have inspired the writer? Even Prince Hamlet, a play, is sometimes best enjoyed on paper instead. The genius is not even confined to the native tongue. Rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Spanish, I am constantly impressed by how well I recall the story, so much so that even in a language which remains foreign to me I can unriddle what is going on according to what little Spanish I know and what I can recall when my memory is jogged. The limitations of any ONE language’s grammatical forms are often overstated. Though not all puns hold up in translation, some work almost better in Spanish, and in reading the translation I feel as though I am mediating between two worlds; just as the Hogwarts Express conveys students to and from school, the train of translation conveys me between two Schools of Expression, yet the Fictional Universe remains the same, alive with its renewed mystery now that it can no longer be reduced to comprehensible English prose and poetry. While I do not have the satisfaction of slaying robots or flaming Gnorcs, the wonder is incomparable, and let’s not forget that, no matter how well-designed Nier: Automata and Spyro the Dragon were, they were as much imaginative simulations as a novel is. (Anything more would be terrifying.)

Not all ideas must be expressed linearly, but all narrative ideas will be understood linearly. When I began writing this essay, I already knew what I wished to say; the task was in organizing it. Yet nearing the end of it I revisit my first paragraph, and what was at first a fairly arbitrary introduction makes narrative sense as foreshadowing a thesis, only because I understand it now in the context of what follows it. Human beings always must do this, for in spite of our transcendent aspirations we are caught within time’s constant flow. Perhaps Braid successfully simulated a system which could bend the rules of time and space, yet I still remember it as a story in six chapters, just as King’s Quest VII was; fate has a way of ending up linear. Braid did not achieve more in terms of defying common sense than James Joyce did in Finnegan’s Wake; both works take advantage of familiar patterns redefined in unfamiliar ways, leaving much to the manipulation of the puzzle-solving mind, though ultimately the puzzle must arrive at a solution and the story must go on. The difference: Joyce’s prose remains Mysterious afterwards. Even if Joyce’s only motivation for writing was to show the world his own facility with language, the seventeen years he spent developing Finnegan’s Wake was no mistake. As for that moment wherein Blow claws at Heaven in mockery of the “misunderstood Artists” who bewail the stupidity of their audience, I must only say that I relate with the Artists. In discussing respect for players and the role of Artists, let us not forget how disrespectful it is to disconfirm someone’s most fervent and unique Vision of the World and how it ought to be. Its uniqueness serves its legitimacy.

 

[({Dm.R.G.)}]