Category Archives: analysis

one reason I like playing twine games…

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After Playing Reset by Lydia Neon I realized how much I fucking love playing well-crafted twine games.

Playing twine games requires skill….really…it does.

Good twine not only engages me as literature, but as a unique medium which requires a unique palette of skills to be enjoyed thoroughly. It rewards a kind of reading that I’ve never employed elsewhere.

In the twine world I am alert. I am feeling in the dark for corners and walls and passageways with my hands.

This is not something I do slowly. If I move too slowly, I falter; I cease to feel the forward motion of the game.

I scan to see if I’ve been in a passage-place before, knowing that if I do not read carefully enough, I will miss entire branches of the story, or as is the case with Reset, or howling dogs, or other games with beautiful tucked-away endings, I could miss beating the game. I emphasize “enough” because that “enough” differentiates twine reading from other kinds of reading. When the enough is reached and the certainty bell dings, I can move on. That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that I’ve read every familiar word again or as carefully as I did the first time I saw it.

This scanning feels great because it invokes a place in my mind that is deeper than working memory. I feel like I’ve gained “expertise” of a kind in a particular game. When I visit a passage that is familiar but sneakily different from previous passages I sense both the unique and the familiar as quickly as, well, as I’ve said elsewhere, as a skilled guitar player tunes a guitar–without faltering, without second-guessing. I just feel the node map grow and come together in my mind unto a point of deeply satisfactory completion.

My eyes jump to the newness and my cursor darts to fresh links.

However, this scanning process is pleasurable in all twine games, be they linear or elaborately branched.

Scanning is an aesthetic experience. How fast does it take me to feel out the structure of the game? What level of care on my part is required to assess whether I’ve been to a passage before? Can I anticipate whether a link will take me to a new place or to a familiar one?

My games, and many good twine games, (Marras’ mom is home, and swampmaiden’s Spending Money come to mind) are more deliberately linear and/or quick to feel out. And that is part of their character. They feel open. Transparent. Spacious.

So I would encourage you to play more than one twine game (preferably more than two) to get a sense of what I mean. This pleasure compounds with the number of great games you play.

gender and brilliance II

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This piece is a continuation of gender and brilliance and others pieces I’ve written on gender. (See untitled 1 and untitled 2).

The tone here is definitely different from the tone of my other piece, and frankly I prefer the tone of my other piece, which is the doing of femaleness in an argument, a pretty anti-hegemonic move. But this piece reflects the way my thoughts played out, just as gender and brilliance reflects the way my thoughts played out at that time. You might suggest that I rework this piece to better fit my idea of an appropriate tone, and I would say “Good suggestion.” However, the issue here is one I’ve belabored–once the thoughts are out it can be hard for me to reconnect with the “truth” I initially felt-saw. So reworking might in some ways be diluting or confusing the original ideas. Treat this piece, if you would, as a koan, though it sounds perhaps more didactic than gender and brilliance. It is still meant to be felt rather than taken strictly as “theory.”

And one clarification: When I talk about “female thinking,” I am not talking about something inherent to or possessed by women, but the phenomenon of a certain brand of femininity, “femaleness,” something any body can experience in a sustained way or minutely.

Like gender and brilliance, this pieces discusses the loss of “female genius” as it is depicted in the wonderful fucking diagram from Steven Pinker’s class. As you can see, women are clustered around “mediocrity.”

Why discuss this subject? For me it’s about helping myself and others find self-esteem and a sense of appreciation for the beauty of their own minds in a world that would have them feel pathetic, weak, dull.

I define “brilliance” here as the ability to make a highly skilled decision in a particular situation given the entire incomprehensibly complicated context surrounding. When people are compared to each other there can be such a thing as “absolute brilliance”…something that competitions aim to get at. But competitions cannot get at absolute brilliance per se because they are based on the visible.

The invisible has to do partially with heart. This is what I mean in gender and brilliance when I say that “the heart of female thinking is existing for another.”

A genius who tends to think in a “female” way possesses not only a skilled mind, but a skilled heart, by definition. To me, “heart” is the desire to do good for others, and a “heart” is the means by which one attempts to do good. Wanting in this case is intellectual, so desire and the acting out of that desire both take up mental processing power.

“Heart” is mandated by society for women. It is not a desire that is necessarily natural for or wanted by a particular person.

When one has internalized that it is imperative to do good for others, that imperative will always take precedence over another task at hand. All tasks are subservient to it. So art and happiness of the self are good insofar as they contribute to or do not interfere with the happiness of others.

In an artistic endeavor, a “female”-thinking genius cannot help but engage the project with their full knowledge–which includes the knowledge of the heart. While this may not be happening consciously, it is a mechanism that is rather hard to turn off. The knowledge of the heart is the mass of perspectives that person has collected in their search to do good. The more oppressed by society the person is, the more perspectives they are like to take into consideration. (Anyone can come to the conclusion that all perspectives must be taken into consideration. It is just probably more immediate to the more oppressed person.) When engaging the project, the thinker will somewhere be aware of the fact that the project is either actively promoting or not inhibiting happiness for others. If this changes, the project either changes or terminates. As the thinker is familiar with so many perspectives, the project has to be compelling to them in the realms of each perspective–not just the hegemonic. This takes up more processing space and can also yield projects that are unwieldy. On all levels, the thinker is in no way allowed to simply “focus” on the task at hand. The task at hand is all tasks, albeit perhaps semi-consciously.

How does this relate to invisibility?

In part, as I explore in gender and brilliance, the unwieldiness of the piece itself may expose the piece to, as I say elsewhere, “stupidly easy yet fatal critique.”

Yet there is something else at work.

There exists a conception of the artistic process in which beginning a work is considered the hardest part. One has to overcome inertia in the beginning, “writer’s block,” etc.

From one perspective, this paradigm isn’t entirely illusory. The beginning is “hardest” because it is the stage that can try one’s memory and thus one’s physical capacity to create. Mental cloudiness can become overwhelming. “Frustration” comes in when a great deal of struggle has taken place…fighting with memory…and there has been what seems like disproportionately little output.

Inertia, the thing that prevents one from wanting to start creating (or creating again), comes from a desire to avoid frustration.

Frustration can be amplified in the kind of thinker I discuss because it is not skill that is failing in the beginning but memory. And much of the brilliance of their thought process in the beginning becomes lost because memory cannot contain all of the moves made by that mind.

The project either ends or moves forward with information lost.

It can be profoundly saddening when all one’s endeavors are literally invisible (to others and/or oneself). And I mean the word “invisible” in a sense that covers varying degrees of invisibility…ideas can be invisible such that one cannot even reconnect with what has been lost, like waking up depressed after a dream in which a loved one has died and being unable to recall the dream itself. Or one creates work that is unworthy when compared to the brilliance of one’s thoughts.

The perpetual failing of memory is probably not often recognized as such. It may be recognized as mental dullness, slowness, simplicity, cloudiness…which can lead one to feel a sense of disparity or lack of self-esteem.

Furthermore, some people might be especially discouraged from entering again into a state of exertion. And exertion can be a source of happiness. It is where selves come from…all visible trappings of brilliance (like rich conversations, paychecks, good sex, sustainable relationships, environments made comfortable etc.) all come from.

Happiness itself comes in part from these externalizations of brilliance.

The construction called “the world as we know it” rests on the reign of the paradigm of “maleness”…which I discuss at length in gender and brilliance. I hypothesize that patriarchy, aka the mental and physical oppression of women, is in place not only because this phenomenon I call “female genius” can often be invisible to those thinkers whom I’ve described and to others, but because many of those thinkers encounter the cycle of frustration I’ve described, one that applies not only to the so-called “artistic process,” but to the process of self-creation. (These processes are not distinct). Wrestling with memory and wrestling with the artistic process itself both have a hand, I would say, in the loss of female genius.

Maleness is important because maleness *is* the artistic process. It is the way, I think at least, by which any analysis (or analysis as we understand the word) is arrived at.

I think that in a more egalitarian society, there would be more of a focus on respecting others’ unique and invisible brilliance. It would, in fact, be taken for granted.

While I have referred to “absolute brilliance” above, anyone who puts forth effort is “brilliant” in a way. A person’s “most skilled decision in a moment” can be based on their skill level. Learning cannot happen all at once by definition. So even seemingly inelegant thoughts can be “brilliant.” A choice is only brilliant within a context.

So in this world I’m imagining, life would be like my painting class, wherein we are all putting forth effort, and wherein the instructor talks about others’ work with a sense of deep respect for the minds behind the work, minds that he cannot necessarily see. He says to me, “If this were my painting I would…” instead of assuming that I’ve made unskilled choices. He offers advice, but not from a place of superiority. He shows us great works, but does so as an offering of information to peers. He does not replicate the lust for greatness extant in our society, but encourages us in our processes, which are not necessarily visible.

a veneer

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my mind shimmers. and this is not a tragic thing.

i think it is a beautiful thing to note to myself and to you because now is a moment of capturing.

things come to the fore and flit away in flashes.

these insights stand at the peaks of great mountains of structure, of truth, of evidence. but it’s all too much to hold consciously. so i let those pinnacles move through me.

i see the feeling of what it’s like to be you. and now no longer. no wonder i can’t remember what happened ten minutes ago. so many comings and goings.

for a moment i saw your logic. why you, a particular “you,” are passionate. your mind is different from mine. saturated by your own structure of art, you push the world. or at least from my perspective it would be pushing. against the force of silence. i push too, but this push manifests differently.

it’s hard to hold information because i can’t “remember” things well on the surface layer–the logic of y = mx +b, the depth of a word, the sketching from life. all i can remember on that surface layer is this rising and falling. so i squint, i wait, i look sideways. it doesn’t matter whether my hands are on the keyboard, my words will still be degraded or starts of sentences. hmmm…maybe.

just the thinnest veneer enters the space between me and you in those moments of falling, the moments of recording.

i have to trust that where i started going in the beginning of that sentence has an end that will bring us close together.

the Red Queen and the White Queen

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In Alice and Wonderland the Red Queen resents the White Queen, because the White Queen’s goodness towards the Red Queen reminds her that her entire life and energies have been misdirected, and so she would rather remain evil and ignorant than admit to having no righteousness. She chooses to be hateful, because the White Queen acts as a mirror to the Red Queen, and the Red Queen doesn’t like what she sees in the mirror, but she reckons that she’s so far beyond repair and her life is so far away from what she would like it to be that she chooses to hate the mirror and want to destroy it rather than taking the few small righteous steps she’s ever taken in her life.  It’s not just that the White Queen acts as a mirror; the White Queen and the Red Queen are coexisting, and so the White Queen represents the Red Queen’s decisions to be selfish (supposedly) and therefore she is in the Red Queen’s eyes, superior to the Red Queen.

Beauty, Wisdom and the Golden Mean

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Gaining in insight has a structure:

Newly introduced ans/or perceived information make one reread (reconsider the meaning of) a phenomenon.  The resulting reading may later be replaced by a newer reading when yet more information becomes available that changes the way in which the text is understood.  Ad infinitum.

The suchness of this process is backward-looking—made up of moments of rereading—for the reason that information relevant to the understanding of a phenomenon-text is revealed and perceived over time.

When we recount how our analyses of particular phenomena have changed over time, this is the kind of process we describe.  We sometimes call it “revelation.”

It is the structure of linguistic parsing, of academic discourse, and of zazen—processes that make proper reading of phenomena their goal.

Bear with me through a dense but light-hearted example:
Frida and Frederico are at a restaurant.  They stand removed from a table set with food, around which three other people are seated.  Frederico utters the syllable: “ðeɪr” in the IPA alphabet.   At first, Frida lacks the information necessary to decide whether Frederico’s utterance is the first syllable in a word like “thereof,” “therewith,” “therefore” or “therein” or a single-syllable word like “their”, “there” or “they’re.” (Let us assume that Frida and Frederico’s immediately preceding conversation makes either of these possibilities equally likely).  Frederico points to the food on the table, failing to supply a second syllable, leading Frida to settle on the likely and thus “working” reading of “ðeɪr” as representing the word “there”—a single-syllable word signifying “that place,” to which, it is likely, Frederico is pointing.  In other words, she reads “ðeɪr” through two nested lenses; Frida reads “ðeɪr” first through the absence of Frederico’s utterance of a plausible second syllable, which yields a reading of “ðeɪr” as a single-syllable word, then she reads what she has decided is a single-syllable word through Frederico’s pointing.  However Frederico next utters the syllable “fud,” such that relative stresses on “ðeɪr” and “fud” are as follows: ðeɪr ‘fud.  Had Frida’s initial reading been correct—Frederico intended “ðeɪr” to signify the word there—the emphases on “ðeɪr” and “fud” would have been equal, as in: “There.  Food.”  Frida is compelled to reread the significance of the utterance “ðeɪr” as well as the significance of Frederico’s pointing, checking the available information (Frederico’s pointing in the direction of both people, and food, his phrase: “ðeɪr ‘fud,”)  against the two remaining monosyllabic words (“their” and “they’re”).  She isolates “their” as the more probably-intended of the two meanings, at which point, she reads Frederico’s pointing and his utterance “ðeɪr” in light of the multiple people seated at the table.  She decides that his phrase is intended to be parsed as “Their food.”  But Frederico foils her one last time.  He walks over to one of the people seated, takes a bite out of an exposed arm, and issues a sound of satisfaction as he chews.  Frida, astonished, is amazed to find that she must again reread the phenomena before her, as she settles on the most unlikely, however truest, reading yet.  She reads the phrase “ðeɪr ‘fud” in light of the currently most salient piece of information, Frederico’s cannibalism, deciding that his utterances should be interpreted as: “They’re food.”
FIgure 1
We are not surprised at Frida’s astonishment.

That is because the experience of the miraculous is the emotional valence of the process of coming to see greater Truth.

The conch shell structure I describe can be understood as moving outward from the seemingly general, frequent, obvious and experientially mundane, to the new, particular, less-than-obvious and experientially miraculous.

When the witnessed phenomenon is framed, as in art, looking backwards through the conch shell from the miraculous, is witnessing Beauty equal in magnitude to the miraculous.

I first felt the truth of this thesis while watching a scene from a documentary—Jest to Be the Best.  In one scene an American street performer in the “jester” tradition interviews an instructor at a British school of circus performance.  The theoretical language the instructor uses to describe his school’s approach to teaching performance techniques, language like “advanced hatwork,” and the level of rigor of study he describes compelled me to consider the street performer as “serious,” against the common understanding of the street performer as without a formal education.  The presence of a mediocre American jester looking on, presumably wishing he were “real,” like the British instructor deepens the uncanniness, (the improbability or “miraculousness”) of the whole affair which is deepened yet again by the fact that such uncanniness is caught on film, and not staged.  My respect and appreciation for the documentary grew with each revelation.

Another example: a performance becomes more impressive when a new trick is added.

A woman is balancing on a unicycle.

…blindfolded.

….pedaling down a hill at 15 mph.

…darting around obstacles.

…and when new obstacles are introduced into her path…she STILL navigates around them deftly.

Each new piece of information forces us to reconsider how the other skills were performed, and results in a reading of the entire performance as more impressive, more astonishing, more Beautiful.

This is why narratives have “arcs” and climaxes…why time is required for a story to develop.  We must acquire the knowledge necessary to properly read, to in fact re-read the events of the story.  Were we to have all of the information at the outset, the reveal, the feeling of qualitative newness that constitutes the experience of breathtaking Beauty, would not exist. Beauty always swoops in from the wings…because newness comes from what is before us…what is within us…or both.

The labor of imbuing the reader of a text with the feeling of astonishment at the significance of the text is divided between the text and the reader.

Those heralded as the greatest artists create texts that work to make clear Beauty’s depths to their readers.  Through their texts, they make the experience of “this is Beautiful” inescapable.  We call these people geniuses because they are able, against the outward-spinningness of the task, to find new interpretative lenses that allow hitherto differently understood phenomena to be read in a new light.

Those with the greatest insight carry with them the capacity to see infinite Beauty in all things.  They do the work that the text does not.