#and not ambiguous or in flux in any way; and most important of ALL she can never have experienced racism.

[stellerssong]

ok sorry the OTHER thing about lucienne is like. as previously stated she is dream's handpicked emissary from the waking world to the dreaming she's the diplomat in chief she's the translator she's the bridge. because the dreaming is, in a very real way, dream's own psyche, this is tantamount to giving lucienne a tremendous degree of access to his interiority and by transitive property also tantamount to entering into a deeply emotionally intimate relationship with her (unimportant for the purposes of this post whether that relationship is platonic or romantic).

now, in general, looking at the pattern of dream's close emotional relationships—dream doesn't share himself with people as a rule (beyond the access that all things that live have to the dreaming; but i'm talking about his self here, the one he doesn't like to acknowledge he even has), but when he does share with people, it's with people who have some shadow on the soul, so to speak. just looking at attested relationships in show canon, his deepest emotional connection seems to be with death, who embodies the duality of light and dark even better than he does himself. calliope is the muse of epic poetry—heroism and tragedy—and also bears the sort of divine pride that led her to cut dream off for hundreds or thousands of years when he wronged her. the less said about that other guy, the better, but he's no sunshine-rainbows-unicorns type—he's a soldier of fortune, a bandit and a killer, a man who profits from the sale of human life. even best bird matthew, in comix canon, had a sordid past that will maybe be partially retconned for the show but has still been gestured at.

dream likes the complicated ones. he's drawn to them. they speak to something in him that he won't acknowledge in himself (he has to be Whole, fully integrated, without reservation, because he is the king and he is the dreaming and if the dreaming ain't whole then the universe is in trouble—but he feels that ache nonetheless).

all that is to say: when people try to portray lucienne as dream's Designated Well-Adjusted Neurotypical Friend, i begin to harm and maim.

[pixelsareforsquares]

To Become with Others

A reflection on the importance of intra-action in my performance practice.

I am sitting.

I am sitting in a rehearsal space.

It’s a big space.

And it’s mostly empty.

I could…

I could…

I could do a lot of things,

here

in this big open space.

I stand up.

I walk across the room.

I try moving my body a bit.

It feels good but it’s not what I’m looking for.

I try filling the void with my voice, which feels good too, but…

But

The stakes are low.

I try writing things on big pieces of paper. I hope it will fill the vastness around me, but...

But all it does is echo the expanse of my mind. So I try moving these big pieces of paper around, my generous handwriting seems flimsy against their broadness. And sitting somewhere in all this space is the thing I’ve tried so hard to bat away, with my body or with my voice or with my writing. Thinking if I fill it, it won’t have the space to exist.

“But if I were a real artist I would know what to do."

What am I supposed to do here?

How can I best use this space for my research?

What can I uncover?

Here.

Alone.

Who am I without anyone else?

via Somatic_based_content_only on Instagram. 19.04.21

This scenario repeated itself during a workshop with Dagmar Slagmolen, director of the Amsterdam-based music theatre company, Via Berlin. Over the past few months my research has focused on vulnerability and its role in audience participation. My aim is to create a method for accessing and utilizing my own emotional vulnerability to better connect with my audience in order to enhance and expand the participatory experience. In our initial meetings, Dagmar was very excited about this project, particularly my interest in the links between shame and vulnerability. The piece I am creating in order to explore some of these techniques, focuses around my personal sexual history and hopes to buff out some of the shame which is so deeply ingrained in the patriarchal narratives surrounding sexuality in western society. In the days prior to the physical workshop, I discussed my work with Dagmar and the three other workshop participants, which helped me condense and clarify my research so far. I was then given the task of continuing to think about and experiment with vulnerability during the workshop.. Therefore, after a brief talk with Dagmar upon arriving in the studio, I was left with, none other than….. space and time to experiment.

Spaces which I had time to experiment in

Sitting in this studio, I became increasingly aware of a considerable obstacle. Explore vulnerability with who? Myself? Can one even be vulnerable with one’s self? Vulnerability is an act of revealing, an act of (emotional) exposure (Brown 2012). I find this an impossibility considering the omnipresence of the self. At least for me personally, the idea of exposing my self to myself seems nonsensical, as my emotional vulnerabilities exist in relation to others. This notion of impossibility seems to parallel the more ambiguous feeling that I described in the introduction, which creeps in whenever I undergo a solo studio practice in order to create work. The work I make is not only the presentation of a skill or story or technique, but the intra-action of space, time, set parameters and most importantly, other people. While I may use studio time to learn or refine certain physical techniques, this is usually a small element of my practice. Just as I cannot experiment or rehearse my vulnerability alone due to the fact that the very notion of my vulnerability is conditional to the presence of others, so is it impossible for me to experiment or rehearse a performance which is reliant on inter and intra-actions with people around me.

Pieces of paper, large and small

If all the world’s a stage, then when and where do we rehearse? When and where do we experiment? According to performance scholar Richard Schechner, the extended childhood particular to humans is a rehearsal, where we learn the behaviours which we ‘restore’ each day in our performance as adults (2013, 29). However, as restored behaviour may be combined and adjusted in a multitude of ways, and as our co-performers, sets and scenery are invariably interchanged, one’s performances of restored behaviour are thus in eternal flux. The performance of everyday interactions is a constant improvisation structured through certain social parameters. Each experience becomes the rehearsal for the next. It is an act of becoming, an intra-action of the players, the space, the audience etc. Scholar and physicist Karan Barad defines intra-action as “a mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (2007, 33). As I understand intra-action, it negates the idea that anything can be independent from anything else. If I think about it in the context of interactions with others, I understand that my presence and actions do not come from a self that is independent of those around me, but instead materializes through my relationships with others. Moreover, because of the multiplicitous constellations of people, places and things that come into contact throughout daily life, this diffracts into exponential infinity.

As much of my practice relies on such intra-action between myself and the other persons in the performance space, I must then question the where, how and why’s of rehearsal in my practice. Improvisation has always been wildly fulfilling to me, and even more so when I have an audience. This overused saying of ‘dance like no one's watching’ has never made sense to me. It is the eyes of others that grant me the ability to take the risks that make for an exhilarating performance. It is here where I get an embodied sense of intra-action between the audience, and myself where our relationship invokes a disassembly of any and all facades of self.

Some reflections on my relationship to improvisation as a 14-year-old

As I better understand this relationship, it also becomes clear as to why cabaret has remained at the heart of my practice. While I may wear the same costume and perform to the same music for any given act, the stage which I step on is always different, anywhere from a small piece of cleared floor with an audience member given a light with which to illuminate it, to a circus tent in the middle of a music festival as swarms of drunk people wander in after a headliner rock band. I have given myself the same task and the same tools in each however, I must remain nimble and responsive to my audience’s and surroundings. In an interview with José Esteban Muñoz, Nao Bustamante, describes a similar working method “It’s very important for me to maintain a fresh space.. I have these 12 positions that I hit within the piece… and then within those 12 positions anything can happen, and I just allow myself to watch myself, watch the audience, watch the interaction, focus on that particular moment or balance” (2002). My performance is not one of set actions, but a response (to a response to a response…) within a microcosm of intertwined energies in a room. In speaking about the work of Bustamente, Jack Halberstam writes, ‘Her body must respond on the spot and in the moment of performance to the new configurations of space and uncertainty" (2011, 144). As I have noted in previous reflections on my practice, a frequent piece of feedback I receive is along the lines of ‘It was so great to watch you when everything went wrong’. This is usually in reference to some technical difficulties that I’ve had to fix before or during a performance, crouching awkwardly on the floor in whatever absurd costume I’m wearing. These moments are moments of failure in which holes of uncertainty are pulled and stretched and the audience engages in a different way than they have rehearsed. We are together in a liminal space of both watching and non-watching. I think that the reason why I seem to be adept at such moments is because I invite my audience to continue to engage with me as I make plain my failure. “It’s those moments of failure that also build empathy for the character” (Bustamante 2002). The intra-action between myself, the audience, the liminal space of performance/not performance and failure coalesce to create a space of vulnerability and empathy that is near impossible to recreate alone with myself in a rehearsal space.

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.” (Nabokov, 2011, 118).

A phrase I have repeated many times in collaborations over the years is, ‘It’s not about me’, which is both entirely true and entirely not all at once. It is, of course, always about me. I am always present, inescapable even, as the protagonist of my own life story. However, I am also unsure, as indicated by Nabokov above, and in relation to Barad’s concept of intra-action, if there is any essence of self that is able to exist independently of the world and the people in it. A friend from many years ago always talked about how everyone we encountered was only a reflection of ourselves, which is something I still ponder on often. In contrast, the artist, Ann Liv Young, under the guise of her persona Sherry (whose work I investigated recently in relation to my own) suggests that the opposite is true. She is a reflection of others, rather than vice-versa. Sherry is a highly confrontational and contradictory semi-autobiographical character which Young uses to create improvisational participatory work. During performances, she maintains that Sherry is merely a reflection of her audience, making statements such as, “I only work with what’s in the room. I am very boring. I am essentially a mirror” (Good Sherry, 2018). These proclamations are used particularly at moments when her audience seems uncomfortable with what Sherry is saying or doing. Young and I are both interested in using vulnerability in our work, however I find that Young as Sherry wants to draw out vulnerability from her audience, while using Sherry to deflect her own vulnerability. Whereas the methodology of my approach is more about creating space and leading by example. However, when one uses intra-action to examine these relationships we see that they may both exist concurrently or not at all. One is both a reflection and reflects others. If everyone we encounter is standing with a metaphorical mirror in order to call into our existence, then we too must be holding a mirror to realize all other’s existences. Similarly to the elusivity of an objective truth, the idea of a self, independent of the world around it, slips from the realm of possibility. The self is in a continual flux of intra-actions with what is outside of us. Thus, as I explore my practice and how I might better engage with vulnerability within it, I understand the centrality of intra-action, particularly with other human beings and come to understand how important the methods of performance-as-research and performance-as-practice are to my work. Moreover, while I may have engaged with both of these methods in my practice for many years, it is an element which I have often wished I could pull back from. However, by switching my focus in order to better understand how and why I use performance-as-practice, I will be able to explore the full depth and range of how performance-as practice might be used to its full potential within my practice.

Reflective reflections. Some props I acquired.

....becoming something with others.

Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Brown, B. (2012) Listening to shame. (TED2012). Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame (Accessed: 15 November 2020). Felden Krisis (@somatic_based_content_only) • Instagram photos and videos (no date). Available at: https://www.instagram.com/somatic_based_content_only/ (Accessed: 25 April 2021). Halberstam, J. (2011) The queer art of failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Muñoz, J. E. (2006) ‘The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante And the Sad Beauty of Reparation’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 16(2), pp. 191–200. doi: 10.1080/07407700600744386. Nabokov, V. V. and Nabokov, D. (2011) The eye. New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=722896 (Accessed: 25 April 2021). Schechner, R. and Brady, S. (2013) Performance studies: an introduction. 3. ed. London: Routledge. Tactical Aesthetics (2019) Ann Liv Young: Everybody has a responsibility to respond (excerpt from ‘Good Sherry’). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqEJyWxWzzs&ab_channel=MGM (Accessed: 3 March 2021). Video: Interview with Nao Bustamante [videorecording]. (2002). Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/5dv41nv8 (Accessed: 25 April 2021).

[tokiro07]

Okay...

So the theory goes that Jumpman, the Mario from Donkey Kong, is actually the father of Mario and Luigi (based on the fact that the original DK is supposedly now Cranky Kong and the current DK, who has faced off against the current Mario, is the son of DK Jr.)

If that is true, then Jumpman is likely the same Mario that worked as a demolition man in Wrecking Crew, given both the era of the game and the fact that Jumpman could easily have been a generalized construction worker (as he was stated to be a carpenter in DK). There is a Luigi in Wrecking Crew, though, so maybe not, but who knows, twins could easily run in the family and maybe Jumpman named one of his sons after his brother 

Either way, that would mean that Jumpman, the father of the Mario brothers, worked with Foreman Spike, who for some reason hated Jumpman and his brother. Depending on the game, Foreman Spike bears a striking resemblance to either Wario or Waluigi. Now, we already know that Wario and Waluigi are canonically not brothers, so I’m not saying that Spike is both of their dads.

Just one of them. 

(Long post under the cut. This whole thing really got away from me, but I think it ended pretty nicely, so I hope y’all enjoy it)

Probably Wario’s, if I had to bet, given that we know Mario and Wario have known each other since childhood (stated explicitly in the instruction manual for Six Golden Coins), so it would make sense for them to know each other if their parents were work “friends,” and it would especially make sense for Wario to be as hateful of Mario if his dad, Spike, were hateful of Jumpman. Hell, it would even explain his name. Jumpman has a kid and names him after himself, and then Spike has a kid around the same time and decides to invoke some nominative determinism and labels his kid “bad Mario.”

How Waluigi fits into the picture is ambiguous, but with a number of simple solutions. While some early sources indicate that they are brothers (strategy guides, official websites, etc.), while later sources refer to them as either cousins (Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games) or as friends (Mario Sluggers, voice actor Charles Martinet). They could be adoptive brothers, but this wouldn’t really explain the visual similarities, unless Waluigi explicitly modeled his appearance after Wario or Foreman Spike. This wouldn’t require that they be brothers at all, though, as Waluigi could have done that even if he was just a friend. The cousin aspect works best at explaining the visual similarity and even the name, as that would mean that his name was chosen to spite Luigi just the same way that Wario’s was chosen to spite Mario. The only issue there is that we’ve never heard of Spike having any siblings. He’s had multiple conflicting designs, so MAYBE there’s multiple Spikes and Spike is a family name, but I doubt it.

Personally, while the cousin angle wraps everything up the most neatly, I’m still a fan of the idea that Waluigi is some kind of shapeshifted disguise for Tatanga, since the two are both purple misanthropes with an unhealthy obsession with Princess Daisy, a hatred for the Mario brothers and an odd friendship with Wario. This would also of course explain why the exact nature of their relationship is so unclear, since it would imply that they’re outright lying but can’t keep the story straight. I would rather the cousin thing, though, since I would like Tatanga to be able to make a comeback, but that would still be a really fun twist.

The one major hole in all of this, though, is that Pauline appears in Mario Odyssey and gives no indication that she’s not the same Pauline from Donkey Kong, implying that Mario and Jumpman are, as they’ve always been presented, the same person. However, there is surprisingly an explanation for this. You see, in the original Donkey Kong, the damsel in distress was a blonde woman referred to as Lady. It wasn’t until the remake for the GameBoy that she was redesigned to be the brunette Pauline that we know today. While particularly damning sources (Shigeru Miyamoto, Smash 4) have claimed that Pauline and Lady are the same person, various extended Mario media present them separately (The Cat Mario Show, a 1994 encyclopedia, various Mario manga), and even present them as having opposing personality types. Naturally, Shigeru Miyamoto should be considered the most credible source here, but that’s no fun, and he also said he was Bowser Jr’s mom, so I’m going to ignore him. 

So.

Jumpman’s pet Cranky Kong kidnaps his girlfriend, Lady, and he has to save her. Sometime later, Jumpman orders two children from the stork with Lady, whom he names after himself and his twin brother, Luigi, after a somewhat delayed delivery. His work rival, Spike, and Spike’s brother...Stanley the Bugman, why not, maybe he blames Mario for DK getting into his green house, both have children delivered around the same time, and name them Wario and Waluigi to spite Jumpman’s children. The Mario brothers and Spike children grow up to hate each other, and DK Jr. has also grown up and decides to kidnap Mario’s girlfriend, Pauline, just as his father did to Lady all those years ago. Mario saves Pauline, but unlike Jumpman and Lady who were brought closer together by their trauma, they break up, although they remain friends. Some years later, after Mario has established himself as a recurring hero to the Mushroom Kingdom, gets a toy line which DK III becomes weirdly infatuated with, leading to Pauline’s second kidnapping by a DK (or this is the first time, and Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 was just a remake of DK on the GameBoy to give more context, the specifics aren’t too important here). Sometime after this, Pauline becomes mayor of New Donk City, which is adorned with references to Donkey Kong and his family’s crimes as if it’s all one big joke to these people. But I digress.

Somewhere in all that, Mario is given a castle for some reason, which is the last straw for Wario, who I imagine is working on a farm at the time, given that his best friend is a hen named Hen. Deciding that back breaking labor doesn’t satisfy his ambitions while his rival lives it up as a hero, Wario enlists the help of the alien Tatanga (who now that I think of it, he may well have met on his farm during an attempt to abduct a cow or something) to trick Mario to leave his castle so that Wario may steal it.

After Mario foils Wario’s plot and reclaims his castle, Mario extends an olive branch and invites Wario to play tennis with everyone, as that’s just the kind of guy he is. Wario, realizing he doesn’t have a partner, either a) invites his cousin Waluigi, who has gone into construction like uncle Spike (evidenced by his excavator in Mario Kart), since he loves sports and hates the Mario brothers as much as Wario does, or b) recruits Tatanga and has him disguise himself as someone who could ostensibly pass as a family member to lay low in case anyone tries to hold him responsible for his crimes (which they wouldn’t since they never try to arrest Bowser or Wario, but apparently he doesn’t know that)

As far as I can tell, the only thing we’re missing is where Waluigi was when Wario and the other Star Children were being delivered by the Stork and intercepted by Kamek. Perhaps he got passed over since he didn’t have a star? Maybe Bowser captured him and found he didn’t have a star, then discarded him. 

Actually, what if...

Waluigi was SUPPOSED to be delivered to Spike.

Waluigi was SUPPOSED to be Wario’s brother.

But when Bowser went back in time to find the seven Star Children, he messed up the route that Waluigi was supposed to be on. When the Stork got Waluigi back, he accidentally delivered Waluigi to the wrong house, the way he did to Mario and Luigi at the end of Yoshi’s Island (as shown in Yoshi’s New Island). Unlike with the Mario brothers, though, the Stork didn’t catch this mistake, and Waluigi grew up in the wrong household. Maybe it was even Stanley’s, and Waluigi’s inherently nasty personality clashed with Stanley’s kindly personality, but he still inherited his adoptive father’s love of plants! Can’t believe I was able to work that back in.

That’s why no one knows if they’re brothers, cousins or strangers! Because they don’t know who he was supposed to be delivered to, but they can’t deny the visual similarity! That’s why Waluigi’s so misanthropic, because he wasn’t delivered to the right house and he felt out of place! 

That last bit could easily be explained by being raised under Spike’s influence, though, since Spike is apparently the kind of jerk who would sabotage his own employees to get a bigger paycheck for himself. 

Either way, I think that lends to a really solid idea for the story of a Waluigi game.

A long time ago, I suggested a game where Waluigi somehow travels through time and goes through  levels themed around various Mario franchise titles (Waluigi’s Time to Shine), but now I know how to frame it! Waluigi, feeling odd about his family situation, asks Bowser how he travels through time so he can see where he comes from. Bowser throws him through a wormhole and Waluigi witnesses the events that lead to the Stork delivering him to the wrong house. He decides this is either Bowser or the Stork’s fault (Bowser makes more sense, but it would be super funny if the Stork ends up being the final boss) and journeys to exact revenge. The spell or technology tethering him to the past messes up, however, resulting in Waluigi being in flux and going through all of the Mario franchise.

It’d be really funny if when playing through the Yoshi’s Island section he becomes his baby self and knocks Mario off of Yoshi (resulting in Mario’s capture by the Toadies), giving Yoshi some weird new ability the way the Star Children did in Yoshi’s Island DS, but I’m not sure that having one level have a completely different control scheme would be the best idea.

It could also be that Waluigi rides Yoshi as a full grown adult, which would also be pretty silly given his lanky proportions. 

A Wrecking Crew level near the end would also be a fun way to bring the story full circle, revealing Waluigi’s relation to Spike and Wario, and establishing that Mario and Luigi are the children of Jumpman and Lady. 

Waluigi, Nintendo’s ultimate loose end, would be the catalyst through which all of the loose ends of the Mario franchise are tied.

Get on that, @nintendo 

Edit: This ended up having a couple of revisions, but rather then amend this post, I just ended up making two others. You can check those here and here

[neocab]

Translating the Cyberpunk Future

I'm a video game translator, and I love my job. It's odd work, sometimes stressful, sometimes bewildering, but it always provides interesting and inspiring challenges. Every project brings new words, slang, and cultural trends to discover, but translating also forces me to reflect on language itself. Each job also comes with its own unique set of problems to solve. Some have an exact solution that can be found in grammar or dictionaries, but others require a more... creative approach.

Sometimes, the language we’re translating from uses forms and expressions that simply have no equivalent in the language we’re translating to. To bridge such gaps, a translator must sometimes invent (or circumvent), but most importantly they must understand. Language is ever in flux. It’s an eternal cultural battleground that evolves with the lightning speed of society itself. A single word can hurt a minority, give shape to a new concept, or even win an election. It is humanity’s most powerful weapon, especially in the Internet Age, and I always feel the full weight of responsibility to use it in an informed manner.

One of my go-to ways for explaining the deep complexity of translation is the relationship between gender (masculine and feminine) and grammar. For example, in English this is a simple sentence:

"You are fantastic!"

Pretty basic, right? Easy to translate, no? NOT AT ALL!

Once you render it into a gendered language like Italian, all its facets, its potential meanings, break down like shards.

Sei fantastico! (Singular and masculine)

Sei fantastica! (Singular and feminine)

Siete fantastici! (Plural and masculine)

Siete fantastiche! (Plural and feminine)

If we were translating a movie, selecting the correct translation wouldn't be a big deal. Just like in real life, one look at the speakers would clear out the ambiguity in the English text. Video game translation, however, is a different beast where visual cues or even context is a luxury, especially if a game is still in development. Not only that, but the very nature of many games makes it simply impossible to define clearly who is being addressed in a specific line, even when development has ended. Take an open world title, for example, where characters have whole sets of lines that may be addressed indifferently to single males or females or groups (mixed or not) within a context we don't know and can't control.

In the course of my career as a translator, time and time again this has led into one of the most heated linguistic debates of the past few years: the usage of the they/them pronoun. When I was in grade school, I was taught that they/them acted as the third person plural pronoun, the equivalent of the Italian pronoun "essi." Recently, though, it has established itself as the third person singular neutral, both in written and spoken English. Basically, when we don't know whether we're talking about a he/him or a she/her, we use they/them. In this way, despite the criticism of purists, the English language has brilliantly solved all cases of uncertainty and ambiguity. For instance:

“Somebody forgot their backpack at the party.”

Thanks to the use of the pronoun "their," this sentence does not attribute a specific gender to the person who has forgotten the backpack at the party. It covers all the bases. Smooth, right? Within the LGBT circles, those who don’t recognize themselves in gender binarism have also adopted the use of they/them. Practically speaking, the neutral they/them pronoun is a powerful tool, serving both linguistic accuracy and language inclusiveness. There's just one minor issue: We have no "neutral pronouns" in Italian.

It's quite the opposite, if anything! In our language, gender informs practically everything, from adjectives to verbs. On top of that, masculine is the default gender in case of ambiguity or uncertainty. For instance:

Two male kids > Due bambini

Two female kids > Due bambine

One male kid and one female kid > Due bambini

In the field of translation, this is a major problem that often requires us to find elaborate turns of phrase or different word choices to avoid gender connotations when English maintains ambiguity. As a professional, it’s not only a matter of accuracy but also an aesthetic issue. In a video game, when a character refers to someone using the wrong gender connotation, the illusion of realism is broken. My colleagues and I have been navigating these pitfalls for years as best we can. Have you ever wondered why one of the most common Italian insults in video games is "pezzo di merda"? That's right. "Stronzo" and "bastardo" give a gender connotation, while "pezzo di merda" does not.

A few months ago, together with the Gloc team, I had the pleasure of working on the translation of Neo Cab, a video game set in a not too distant future with a cyberpunk and dystopian backdrop (and, sadly, a very plausible one). The main character is Lina, a cabbie of the "gig economy," who drives for a hypothetical future Uber in a big city during a time of deep social unrest. The story is told mainly through her conversation with the many clients she picks up in her taxi. When the game’s developers gave us the reference materials for our localization, they specified that one of the client characters was "non-binary" and that Lina respectfully uses the neutral "they/them" pronoun when she converses with them.

"Use neutral pronouns or whatever their equivalent is in your language," we were told.

I remember my Skype chat with the rest of the team. What a naive request on the client's part! Neutral pronouns? It would be lovely, but we don't have those in Italian! So what do we do now? The go-to solution in these cases is to use masculine pronouns, but such a workaround would sacrifice part of Lina’s character and the nuance of one of the interactions the game relies on to tell the story. Sad, no? It was the only reasonable choice grammatically-speaking, but also a lazy and ill-inspired one. So what were we to do? Perhaps there was another option...

Faced with losing such an important aspect of Lina’s personality, we decided to forge ahead with a new approach. We had the opportunity to do something different, and we felt like we had to do the character justice. In a game that's completely based on dialogue, such details are crucial. What's more, the game's cyberpunk setting gave us the perfect excuse to experiment and innovate. Language evolves, so why not try to imagine a future where Italian has expanded to include a neutral pronoun in everyday conversations? It might sound a bit weird, sure, but cyberpunk literature has always employed such gimmicks. And rather than take away from a character, we could actually enrich the narrative universe with an act of "world building" instead.

After contacting the developers, who enthusiastically approved of our proposal, we started working on creating a neutral pronoun for our language. But how to go about that was a question in itself. We began by studying essays on the subject, like Alma Sabatini's Raccomandazioni per un uso non sessista della lingua italiana (Recommendations for a non-sexist usage of the Italian language). We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, "x," and "u."

Siamo tutt* bellissim*.

Siamo tuttx bellissimx.

Siamo tuttu bellissimu.

I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that's deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa (ə), the mid central vowel sound. What does it sound like? Quite familiar to an English speaker, it's the most common vowel sound. Standard Italian doesn’t have it, but having been separated into smaller countries for most of its history, Italy has an extraordinary variety of regional languages (“dialetti”) and many of them use this sound. We find it in the final "a" of "mammeta" in Neapolitan, for instance (and also in the dialects of Piedmont and Ciociaria, and in several other Romance languages). To pronounce it, with an approximation often seen in other romance languages, an Italian only needs to pretend not to pronounce a word's last vowel.

Schwa was also a perfect choice as a signifier in every possible way. Its central location in phonetics makes it as neutral as possible, and the rolled-over "e" sign "ə" is reminiscent of both a lowercase "a" (the most common feminine ending vowel in Italian) and of an unfinished "o" (the masculine equivalent). The result is:

Siamo tuttə bellissimə.

Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting. The player/reader need only look at the context and interactions to figure it out. The fact that we have no "ə" on our keyboards is easily solved with a smartphone system upgrade, and though the pronunciation may be difficult, gender-neutrals wouldn't come up often in spoken language. Indeed, neutral alternatives are most needed in writing, especially in public communication, announcements, and statements. To be extra sure our idea worked as intended and didn't overlook any critical issues, we submitted it to a few LGBT friends, and with their blessing, then sent our translation to the developers.

Fast forward to now, and the game is out. It has some schwas in it, and nobody complained about our proposal for a more inclusive future language. It took us a week to go through half a day's worth of work, but we're happy with the result. Localization is not just translation, it's a creative endeavour, and sometimes it can afford to be somewhat subversive. To sum up the whole affair, I'll let the words of Alma Sabatini wrap things up:

"Language does not simply reflect the society that speaks it, it conditions and limits its thoughts, its imagination, and its social and cultural advancement." — Alma Sabatini

Amen.

[dustedmagazine]

Dusted’s Decade Picks

Heron Oblivion, still the closest thing to a Dusted consensus pick

Just as, in spring, the young's fancy turns to thoughts of love, at the end of the decade the thoughts of critics and fans naturally tend towards reflection. Sure, time is an arbitrary human division of reality, but it seems to be working out okay for us so far. We're too humble a bunch to offer some sort of itemized list of The Best Of or anything like that, though; a decade is hard enough to wrap your head around when it's just your life, let alone all the music produced during said time. Instead these decade picks are our jumping off points to consider our decades, whether in personal terms, or aesthetic ones, or any other. The records we reflect on here are, to be sure, some of our picks for the best of the 2010s (for more, check back this afternoon), but think of what follows less as anything exhaustive and more as our hand-picked tour to what stuck with us over the course of these ten years, and why.

Brian Eno — The Ship (Warp, 2016)

You don’t need to dig deep to see that our rapidly evolving and hyper-consciously inclusive discourse is taking on the fluidity of its surroundings. In 2016, a year of what I’ll gently call transformation, Brian Eno had his finger on multiple pulses; The Ship resulted. It’s anchored in steady modality, and its melody, once introduced, doesn’t change, but everything else ebbs and flows with the Protean certainty of uncertainty. While the album moves from the watery ambiguities of the title track, through the emotional and textural extremes of “Fickle Sun” toward the gorgeously orchestrated version of “I’m Set Free,” implying some kind of final redemption, the moment-to-moment motion remains wonderfully non-binary. Images of war and of the instants producing its ravaging effects mirror and counterbalance the calmly and increasingly gender-fluid voice as it concludes the titular piece by depicting “wave after wave after wave.” Is it all Salman Rushdie’s numbers marching again? The lyrics embody the movement from “undescribed” through “undefined” and “unrefined’” connoting a journey toward aging, but size, place, chronology and the music encompassing them remain in constant flux, often nearly but never quite recognizable. Genre and sample float in and out of view with the elusive but devastating certainty of tides as the ship travels toward silence, toward that ultimate ambiguity that follows all disillusion, filling the time between cycles. The disconnect between stasis and motion is as disconcerting as these pieces’ relationship to the songform Eno inherited and exploded. The album encapsulates the modernist subtlety and Romantic grace propelling his art and the state of a civilization in the faintly but still glowing borderlands between change and decay.

Marc Medwin

Cate Le Bon — Cyrk (Control Group, 2012)

There's no artist whose work I anticipated more this decade than Cate Le Bon, and no artist who frustrated me more with each release, only to keep reeling me in for the long run. Le Bon's innate talent is for soothing yet oblique folk, soberly psychedelic, which she originally delivered in the Welsh language, and continued into English with rustic reserve.

Except something about her pastoralism seems to bore her, and the four-chord arpeggios are shot through with scorches of noise, or sent haywire with post-punk brittleness. In its present state, her music is built around chattering xylophones and croaking saxophone, even as the lyrics draw deeper into memory and introspection, with ever more haunting payoffs. It's as if Nick Drake shoved his way into the leadership of Pere Ubu. She's taken breaks from music to work on pottery and furniture-making, and retreats to locales like a British cottage and Texas art colony to plumb for new inspirations. She's clearly energized by collaboration and relocation, but there’s a force to her persona that, despite her introverted presence, dominates a session. Rare for our age, she's an artist who gets to follow her muse full time, bouncing between record labels and seeing her name spelled out in the medium typefaces on festival bills.

Cyrk, from 2012, is the record where I fell in, and it captures her at something close to joyous, a half smile. Landing between her earliest folk and later surrealism, it is open to comparison with the Velvet Underground. But not the VU that is archetypical to indie rock – Cyrk is more an echo of the solo work that followed. There’s the sharp compositional order and Welsh lilt of John Cale. Like Lou Reed, she makes a grand electric guitar hook out of the words “you’re making it worse.” The homebound twee of Mo Tucker and forbidding atmosphere of Nico are present in equal parts. Those comparisons are reductive, but they demonstrate how Cyrk feels instantly familiar if you’ve garnered certain listening habits. Songs surround you with woolly keyboard and guitar hooks, and one can forget a song ends with an awkward trumpet coda even after dozens of listens. The awkwardness is what keeps the album fresh.

She lulls, then dowses with cold water. So Cyrk isn't an entirely easy record, even if it is frequently a pretty one. The most epic song here, reaching high with those woolly hums and twang, is "Fold the Cloth.” It bobs along, coiling tight as she reaches into the strange register of female falsetto. Le Bon cranks out a fuzz solo – she's great at extending her sung melodies across instruments. Then the climax chants out, "fold the cloth or cut the cloth.” What is so important about this mundane action? Her mystery lyrics never feel haphazard, like LSD posey. They are out of step with pop grandiose. Maybe when her back is turned, there's a full smile.

Who are "Julia" and "Greta,” two mid-album sketches that avoid verse-chorus structure? Julia is represented by a limp waltz, Greta by pulses on keyboards. Shortly after the release, Le Bon followed up with the EP Cyrk II made up of tracks left off the album. To a piece, they’re easier numbers than "Julia" and "Greta.” The cryptic and the scribble are essential to how Cyrk flows, which is to say it flows haltingly.

This approach dampens her acclaim and her potential audience, but that's how she fashions decades-old tropes into fresh art. She’s also quite the band leader. Drummers have a different thud when they play on her stage. Musicians' fills disappear. She brings in a horn solo as often as she lays down a guitar lead. The closer tracks, "Plowing Out Pts 1 & 2," aren't inherently linked numbers. By the second part, the group has worked up to a carnival swirl, frothing like "Sister Ray" yet as sweet as a children's TV show theme. Does that sound sinister? The effect is more like heartbreak fuelling abandon, her forlorn presence informing everyone's playing.

Fuse this album with the excellent Cyrk II tracks, and you can image a deluxe double LP 10th anniversary reissue in a few years. Ha ha no. I expect nothing so garish will happen. It sure wouldn't suit the artist. In a decade where "fan service" became an everyday concept, Le Bon is immune. She's a songwriter who seems like she might walk away from at all without notice, if that’s where her craftsmanship leads. The odd and oddly comfortable chair that is Cyrk doesn't suit any particular decor, but my room would feel bare without it.

Ben Donnelly

Converge — All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph)

Here’s the scenario: Heavily tatted guy has some dogs. He really loves his dogs. Heavily tatted guy goes on tour with his band. While he’s on the road, one of his dogs dies. Heavily tatted guy gets really sad. He writes a song about it.  

That should be the set-up for an insufferably maudlin emo record. But instead what you get is Converge’s “All We Love We Leave Behind” and the searing LP that shares the title. The songs dive headlong into the emotional intensities of loss and reflect on the cost of artistic ambition. The enormously talented line-up that recorded All We Love We Leave Behind in 2012 had been playing together for just over a decade, and vocalist Jacob Bannon and guitarist Kurt Ballou had been collaborating for more than twenty years. It shows. The record pummels and roars with remarkable precision, and its songs maniacally twist, and somehow they soar.  

Any number of genre tags have been stuck on (or innovated by) Converge’s music: mathcore, metalcore, post-hardcore. It’s fun to split sonic hairs. But All We Love… is most notable for its exhilarating fury and naked heart, musical qualities that no subgenre can entirely claim. Few bands can couple such carefully crafted artifice with such raw intensity. And few records of the decade can match the compositional wit and palpable passion of All We Love…, which never lets itself slip into shallow romanticism. It hurts. And it ruthlessly rocks.  

Jonathan Shaw

EMA — The Future’s Void (City Slang, 2014)

When trying to narrow down to whatever my own most important records of the decade are, I tried to keep it to one per artist (as I do with individual years, although it’s a lot easier there). Out of everyone, though, EMA came by far the closest to having two records on that list, and this could have been 2017’s Exile in the Outer Ring, which along with The Future’s Void comes terrifyingly close to unpacking an awful lot of what’s going wrong, and has been going wrong, with the world we live in for a while now. The Future’s Void focuses more on the technological end of our particular dystopia, shuddering both emotionally and sonically through the dead end of the Cold War all the way to us refreshing our preferred social media site when somebody dies. EMA is right there with us, too; this isn’t judgment, it’s just reporting from the front line. And it must be said, very few things from this decade ripped like “Cthulu” rips.

Ian Mathers

The Field — Looping State of Mind (Kompakt, 2011)

Looping State of Mind by The Field

On Looping State of Mind, Swedish producer Axel Willner builds his music with seamlessly jointed loops of synths, beats, guitars and voice to create warm cushions of sound that envelop the ears, nod the head and move the body. Willner is a master of texture and atmosphere, in lesser hands this may have produced mere comfort food but there is spice in the details that elevates this record as he accretes iotas of elements, withholding release to heighten anticipation. Although this is essentially deep house built on almost exclusively motorik 4/4 beats, Willner also plays with ambient, post-punk and shoegaze dynamics. From the slow piano dub of “Then It’s White,” which wouldn’t be out of place on a Labradford or Pan American album, to the ecstatic shuffling lope of “Arpeggiated Love” and “Is This Power” with its hint of a truncated Gang of Four-like bass riff, Looping State of Mind is a deeply satisfying smorgasbord of delicacies and a highlight of The Field’s four album output during the 2010s.

Andrew Forell

Gang Gang Dance — “Glass Jar” (4AD, 2011)

Instead of telling you my favorite album of the decade — I made my case for it the first year we moved to Tumblr, help yourself — it feels more fitting to tell you a story from my friend Will about my favorite piece of music from the last 10 years, a song that arrived just before the rise of streaming, which flattened “the album experience” to oppressive uniformity and rendered it an increasingly joyless, rudderless routine of force-fed jams and AI/VC-directed mixes catering to a listener that exists in username only. The first four seconds of “Glass Jar” told you everything you needed to know about what lie ahead, but here’s the kind of thing that could happen before everything was all the time:

I took eight hours of coursework in five weeks in order to get caught up on classes and be in a friend's wedding at the end of June. Finishing a week earlier than the usual summer session meant I had to give my end-of-class presentations and turn in my end-of-class papers in a single day, which in turn meant that I was well into the 60-70 hour range without sleep by the time I got to the airport for an early-morning flight. (Partly my fault for insisting that I needed to stay up and make a “wedding night” mix for the couple — real virgin bride included — and even more my fault for insisting that it be a single, perfectly crossfaded track). I was fuelled only by lingering adrenaline fumes and whatever herbal gunpowder shit I had been mixing with my coffee — piracetam, rhodiola, bacopa or DMAE depending on the combination we had at the time. At any rate, eyes burning, skull heavy, joints stiff with dry rot, I still had my wits enough to refuse the backscatter machine at the TSA checkpoint; instead of the usual begrudging pat-down, I got pulled into a separate room. Anyway, it was a weird psychic setback at that particular time, but nothing came of it. Having arrived at my gate, I popped on the iPod with a brand new set of studio headphones and finally got around to listening to the Gang Gang Dance I had downloaded months before. "Glass Jar," at that moment, was the most religious experience I’d had in four years. I was literally weeping with joy.

Point being: It is worth it to stay up for a few days just to listen to ‘Glass Jar’ the way it was meant to be heard.

Patrick Masterson

Heron Oblivion — Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop, 2016)

Heron Oblivion by Heron Oblivion

Heron Oblivion’s self-titled first album fused unholy guitar racket with a limpid serenity. It was loud and cathartic but also pure beauty, floating drummer Meg Baird’s unearthly vocals over a sound that was as turbulent and majestic as nature itself, now roiled in storm, now glistening with dewy clarity. The band convened four storied guitarists—Baird from Espers, Ethan Miller and Noel Harmonson from Comets on Fire and Charlie Sauffley—then relegated two of them to other instruments (Baird on drums and Miller on bass). The sound drew on the full flared wail and scree of Hendrix and Acid Mothers Temple, the misty romance of Pentangle and Fairport Convention. It was a record out of time and could have happened in any year from about 1963 onward, or it could have not happened at all. We were so glad it did at Dusted; Heron Oblivion’s eponymous was closer to a consensus pick than any record before or since, and if you want to define a decade, how about the careening riffs of “Oriar” breaking for Baird’s dream-like chants?

Jennifer Kelly

The Jacka — What Happened to the World (The Artist, 2014)

Probably the most prophetic rap album of the 2010s. The Jacka was the king of Bay rap since he started MOB movement. He was always generous with his time, and clique albums were pouring out of The Jacka and his disciples every few months. Even some of his own albums resembled at times collective efforts. This generosity made some of the albums unfocused and disjointed, yet what it really shows is that even in the times when dreams of collective living were abandoned The Jacka still had hopes for Utopia and collective struggles. It was about the riches, but he saw the riches in people first and foremost.

This final album before he was gunned down in the early 2014 is full of predictions about what’s going to happen to him. Maybe this explains why it’s focused as never before and even Jacka’s leaned-out voice has doomed overtones. This music is the only possible answer to the question the album’s title poses: everything is wrong with the world where artists are murdered over music.

Ray Garraty

John Maus — We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (Upset The Rhythm, 2011)

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves by John Maus

Minnesota polymath John Maus’ quest for the perfect pop song found its apotheosis on his third album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves in 2011. On the surface an homage to 1980s synth pop, Maus’ album reveals its depth with repeated listens. Over expertly constructed layers of vintage keyboards, Maus’ oft-stentorian baritone alternately intones and croons deceptively simple couplets that blur the line between sincerity and provocation. Lurking beneath the smooth surface Maus uses Baroque musical tropes that give the record a liturgical atmosphere that reinforces the Gregorian repetition of his lyrics. The tension between the radical ironic banality of the words and the deeply serious nature of the music and voice makes We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves an oddly compelling collection that interrogates the very notion of taste and serves an apt soundtrack to the post-truth age.

Andrew Forell

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society — Mandatory Reality (Eremite, 2019)

Mandatory Reality by Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society

Any one of the albums that Joshua Abrams has made under the Natural Information Society banner could have made this list. While each has a particular character, they share common essences of sound and spirit. Abrams made his bones playing bass with Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Mike Reed, Fred Anderson, Chad Taylor, and many others, but in the Society his main instrument is the guimbri, a three-stringed bass lute from Morocco. He uses it to braid melody, groove, and tone into complex strands of sound that feel like they might never end. Mandatory Reality is the album where he delivers on the promise of that sound. Its centerpiece is “Finite,” a forty-minute long performance by an eight-person, all-acoustic version of Natural Information Society. It has become the main and often sole piece that the Society plays. Put the needle down and at first it sounds like you are hearing some ensemble that Don Cherry might have convened negotiating a lost Steve Reich composition. But as the music winds patiently onwards, strings, drums, horns, and harmonium rise in turn to the surface. These aren’t solos in the jazz sense so much as individual invitations for the audience to ease deeper into the sonic entirety. The music doesn’t end when the record does, but keeps manifesting with each performance. Mandatory Reality is a nodal point in an endless stream of sound that courses through the collective unconscious, periodically surfacing in order to engage new listeners and take them to the source.

Bill Meyer

Mansions — Doom Loop (Clifton Motel, 2013)

I knew nothing about Mansions when I first heard about this record; I can’t even remember how I heard about this record. But I liked the name of the album and the album art, so I listened to it. Sometimes the most important records in your decade have as much to do with you as with them. I’d been frantically looking for a job for nearly two years at that point, the severance and my access Ontario’s Employment Insurance program (basically, you pay in every paycheck, and then have ~8 months of support if you’re unemployed) had both ran out. I was living with a friend in Toronto sponsoring my American wife into the country (fun fact: they don’t care if you have an income when you do that), feeling the walls close in a little each day, sure I was going to wind up one of those kids who had to move back to the small town I’d left and a parent’s house. There were multiple days I’d send out 10+ applications and then walk around my neighbourhood blasting “Climbers” and “Out for Blood” through my earbuds, cueing up “La Dentista” again and dreaming of revenge… on what? Capitalism? There was no more proximate target in view. That’s not to say that Doom Loop is necessarily about being poor or about the shit hand my generation (I fit, just barely) got in the job market, or anything like that; but for me it is about the almost literal doom loop of that worst six months, and I still can’t listen to “The Economist” without my blood pressure spiking a little.

Ian Mathers

Protomartyr — Under Colour of Official Right (Hardly Art, 2014)

Under Color of Official Right by Protomartyr

By my count, Protomartyr made not one but four great albums in the 2010s, racking up a string of rhythmically unstoppable, intellectually challenging discs with absolute commitment and intent. I caught whiff of the band in 2012, while helping out with editing the old Dusted. Jon Treneff’s review of All Passion No Technique told a story of exhilarant discovery; I read it and immediately wanted in. The conversion event, though, came two years later, with the stupendous Under Color of Official Right, all Wire-y rampage and Fall-spittled-bile, a rattletrap construction of every sort of punk rock held together by the preening contempt of black-suited Joe Casey. Doug Mosurock reviewed it for us, concluding, “Poppier than expected, but still covered in burrs, and adeptly analyzing the pain and suffering of their city and this year’s edition of the society that judges it, Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.” Except here’s the thing: Protomartyr jumped that bar two more times this decade, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t do it again. The industry turned on the kind of bands with four working class dudes who can play a while ago, but this is the band of the 2010s anyway.

Jennifer Kelly

Tau Ceti IV — Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending (Cold Vomit, 2018)

Satan, You're The God of This Age But Your Reign is Ending by Tau Ceti IV

This decade was full of takes on American primitive guitar. Some were pretty good, a few were great, many were forgettable, and then there was this overlooked gem from Jordan Darby of Uranium Orchard. Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending is an antidote to bland genre exercises. Like John Fahey, Darby has a distinct voice and style, as well as a sense of humor. Also like Fahey, his playing incorporates diverse influences in subtle but pronounced ways. American primitive itself isn’t a staid template. Though there are also plenty of beautiful, dare I say pastoral moments, which still stand out for being genuinely evocative.

Darby’s background in aggressive electric guitar music partly explains his approach. (Not sure if he’s the only ex-hardcore guy to go in this direction, but there can’t be many.) His playing is heavier than one might expect, but it feels natural, not like he’s just playing metal riffs on an acoustic guitar. But heaviness isn’t the only difference. Like his other projects, Satan is wonderfully off-kilter. This album’s strangeness isn’t reducible to component parts, but here are two representative examples: “The Wind Cries Mary” gradually encroaches on the last track, and throughout, the microphone picks up more string noise than most would consider tasteful. It all works, or at least it’s never boring.

Ethan Milititisky

Z-Ro — The Crown (Rap-a-Lot, 2014)

When singing in rap was outsourced to pop singers and Auto Tune, Z-Ro remained true to his self, singing even more than he ever did. He did his hooks and his verses himself, and no singing could harm his image as a hustler moonlighting as a rapper. He can’t be copied exactly because of his gift, to combine singing soft and rapping hard. It’s a sort of common wisdom that he recorded his best material in the previous decade, yet quite apart from hundreds of artists that continued to capitalize on their fame he re-invented himself all the past decade, making songs that didn’t sound like each other out of the same raw material. The Crown is a tough pick because since his post-prison output he made solid discs one after each other.

Ray Garraty

[magicofthepen]

Gallifrey Relisten: A Blind Eye

The end of Series 1! (I will admit I had to stop myself from immediately jumping into Lies because that’s when things really get going for me.) Some thoughts:

Mentions of/spoilers for: Neverland, Zagreus, Spirit, Insurgency, Enemy Lines, the Time War audios (but in a vague way).

Romana announces her name and title and then immediately follows that up with “I want no record of my being here” lol.

This episode is the closest we get to “everyone has to dress up fancy for an event” and it’s a shame we don’t get more of this! I would love more off-world and/or dress up episodes that are less......dire probably isn’t the right word because there’s some heavy things going on in this episode...maybe frantic? There is definitely a difference between the degree of tension in A Blind Eye and the degree of tension in the off-world episodes in Time War, for instance. (Also A Blind Eye has more banter.) I’m pretty sure it’s just A Blind Eye and Spirit that capture this sense of “we’re going to do something different for an episode” and I like it! (I feel like this is part of my ongoing push for a post-Enemy Lines, pre-Time War series of misc. CIA missions and shenanigans. Please someone just shove more side adventures into gaps in the timeline.)

The banter! The banter. (“You have your business face on. / You’re a transtemporal crook Arkadian, meeting you could never be a pleasure.”) 1. Arkadian is a supremely entertaining villain, and 2. he’s a tremendously good villain opposite Romana specifically, purely for snark and banter reasons.

I was never a big fan of the Sissy Pollard portrayal — the character’s personality feels too....exaggerated? Over the top? And not in an effective or interesting way.

Romana’s defense of Charley is actually quite sweet, given that they weren’t super friendly in Neverland/Zagreus.

Romana chastises Leela for careless talk, but uhhh if you wanted to keep things subtle and not reveal anything, maybe don’t have Leela suddenly grab Sissy?

“Madam, the Alps are in the other direction.” “Are they? Damn.” / “Be careful, you’ll break it!” “I’ll break you in a minute.” Truly, maximum levels of scathing Romana snark in this episode. 

I have never seen anyone mention this, so I always assumed I’m not hearing it right, but....when the original!timeline train is about to crash into them....does Romana tell Narvin to fuck off?

Andred has a whole scene with no other Time Lord witnesses in which he could have told Leela the truth and yet.

“I am a Guard Commander of Gallifrey” apparently I never paid enough attention to what he actually said here because I think that was the first time I noticed that Andred gave his Chancellery Guard title, not his CIA title.

“Arkadian! You’ve met with that crook!?” Shoutout to Narvin for some A+ false indignation here.

I’m not sure there was a way to write a parallel between between real world Naziism and Leela’s fictional past without having it come off a bit as oversimplifying/cheapening the horrors of Nazi Germany. (But I’m white and raised Christian, so I’m also really not the person to be speaking in depth about the portrayal of Nazis in this episode.)

Does Arkadian know about Andred? I assume that he would just because he generally knows most things, but hmm it adds another layer.

Narvin is genuinely surprised when Romana gives in and agrees to leave lol.

Ms. Joy — it’s funny because we the listeners know that the one random character must be there for a reason, so it feels like the only reason the characters don’t know she’s suspicious is that they don’t know they’re in an audio drama episode and so she must be important to the plot.

Did Narvin really intend for Romana to go with “Torvald”? “At least he’s have been exposed?” Way to throw your President under the bus sir (although possibly he assumed that Torvald wouldn’t actually assassinate the President?)

“See, it is always a monster.” Wait, I take it back, Leela knows she’s in a Doctor Who (adjacent) episode.

“The only name in town where there’s temporal naughtiness to be done” — the Arkadian = Brax crack(?) theory is the most “I can’t unhear this” thing that’s happened to me since Narvin/Torvald. What is it with y’all and Series 1, I’m losing it. 

...does Andred have a plan when he lowkey kidnaps Romana or is he just panicking? He is quite genuinely pleading with Romana to go along with him into the TARDIS and sounds genuinely desperate. But then he seems to regain control and starts more tactically trying to persuade Romana to work along side him without giving her any real answers. Although really, he must know that he’s very close to discovery — maybe he wants to resolve the past!Torvald situation first? Or maybe he’s not thinking that far ahead?

“I have no paws.” Awww K9.

“I think you’re a bad President. I think you’ve willfully sacrificed Gallifreyan influence upon the altar of your own increasingly cranky liberal agenda.” 1. “increasingly cranky liberal agenda” is such a specific insult wow, 2. I can’t tell how much of this is Andred still trying to be Torvald and how much he actually means this? The politics of this incarnation of Andred were always a bit fuzzy to me, even in series 2.

Also. Any conversation between Romana and Andred has a whole weird vibe on relisten when you know about the uhhh future murdering that’s going to happen.

I do love a Dramatic Reveal, and this one is incredibly dramatic.

....does the train crash? Does the train not crash? I’ve always been a bit confused about what happens in that moment — I assume Romana doesn’t actually plan on the train hitting the TARDIS, and we hear the TARDIS dematerialize so I think the train is fine? But it’s a weirdly ambiguous sound/end of scene.

“I can tell you are lying. It’s when your lips move.” Okay Leela snarking at Arkadian is also very good.

It is genuinely so interesting how connected this plot is to Neverland/Zagreus — if I had to pick one “you should listen to this audio before Gallifrey” I'd go for the Apocalypse Element because of the enormous ripples it casts in terms of Romana’s characterization (and also it’s more stand alone), but I imagine this episode would be particularly confusing without Neverland/Zagreus? (Would be curious to hear people’s experiences.)

“I never lie!” Romana, that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told. 

The narration of what happened to Andred by Andred and Romana is um. It’s a little bit obviously an info dump for the listener, but I’m not sure it’s the best way for Leela to find out? I mean, hearing the context and explanation probably was a better idea than just “oh btw I’m Andred”.....possibly this felt weird to me because of the acting? It’s very emotionally detached, very “so this is what happened” — Andred manages some emotion afterwards when he’s pleading with Leela but uh. He could have sounded more apologetic here.

Leela. Leela. “You have watched me suffer and worn my enemy’s clothes?” / “The man that I loved is dead.” Goddddd I want to give her a hug so much ughhhhh. Leela just goes through so many awful things throughout....all of Gallifrey actually, and she still remains such a good person with such a genuinely caring heart......give her a break please.

“I think the only person who’d actually benefit from a temporal war would be a...dealer in arms? A trader in secrets? A fixer and a fiddler. A dishonest broker with no scruples and no shame.” / “An interesting theory Madam. Prove it.” I just really like the delivery of this bit. Although: I realize there were several things going on at this point, but really, they just let Arkadian walk away at the end?

And thus ends Series 1. It has some highs and lows but it honestly ranks near the bottom on my constantly-in-flux list of favorite-to-least favorite Gallifrey series. (Weapon of Choice is probably the only episode I actively look forward to relistening to?) I said in my Weapon of Choice post that Series 1 was a nice “palate cleanser” after Apocalypse Element and the Charley arc through Zagreus, and that was true for the first time listening, but I think some of those same attributes mean I’m kinda meh about relistening to it. It just doesn’t hold my interest quite as much as many of the other series. (Series 2 though....👀)

EDIT: I realized I forgot to tell my personal story of my first time listening to the Andred reveal, and I wanted to have some record of that, even if I don’t quite remember the specifics of my reaction. In general, my first listen of Gallifrey was shaped by knowing a lot of major spoilers, which is what happens when you spent a lot of time lurking on Tumblr blogs in advance of listening to the series. (It actually led to a lot of super fascinating experiences of “well I know X happens, but I don’t know how or why” and being really curious to find out how X played out.)

So I knew something about Andred and Torvald going in, and I think I should have known that it was simply Torvald = Andred, but somehow I got it in my head that oh no, no it’s weirder and more complicated than that. But of course there are a lot of hints throughout series 1 that Torvald is Andred, so the first listen was this cycle of me going “I think maybe Torvald is just Andred? Nah, it’s going to be more convoluted than that. But no really, it makes sense that Torvald is Andred...” etc. etc. So it was a weird experience of knowing pretty early on that Torvald might be Andred, but still not being quite sure until the end of series one. The other bit of this is that I can’t remember at what point I knew that Andred died (and how) — I think I may have known he died before I listening to Gallifrey (or at the very least I knew that he was written out in some way or another earlier on), so that may have also confused me further re: the series one question of: what actually happened to Andred? All around, an odd experience of “I was spoiled...but somehow I still wasn’t sure what was going on” and I wasn’t surprised per se but it was still a reveal. 

Next Episode Reaction: Lies

Previous Episode Reaction: The Inquiry

[septembriseur]

Towards the end of this post I mention an idea that I’ve come to think (over the course of a couple of conversations, including one with @uniwolfwerecorn about interpreting 410′s final Flint scenes) is the most complete, satisfying, and persuasive reading of Black Sails’s conclusion. I’m sure this idea must have occurred to other people, but I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere yet; for me, it arrived as a way of deciphering the finale’s focus on couples over trios, despite a celebration of more-than-two-ness over the course of the show.

I say “more-than-two-ness” because I think that the emphasis on multiplicity has less to do with some belief that couples can’t be happy than it does with a critique of binary oppositions and the problems that arise when people (or ideas) become either/or, self/other. But I couldn’t quite square this with the way that two important couples (Flint/Thomas and Madi/Silver) close out the show. Yet when I considered Flint’s case, it occurred to me that his situation at the end of the show does involve the collapse of a binary opposition: an internal one, that between James McGraw and James Flint. We know that Flint has previously seen himself as being two different people, and that these two different people are to some extent at war. In the story that Silver tells about Flint’s journey to Savannah, this opposition is dissolved through the “unmaking” of the character "Flint.”

A strong presence of death overshadows this journey, and various signals attach that death to Flint, even as other signals also argue for his survival. Elsewhere, I’ve argued for embracing that element of ambiguity, which I think is deliberate and done to drive home the point that Jack makes: it’s the stories we want to believe that matter. However, I also think that it’s possible to read another kind of fruitful paradox in Flint’s story, which is that Flint dies without dying and survives while staying dead. What I am saying is that James McGraw lives while “Flint” dies.

I don’t think this is a simple argument; the dying that I’m suggesting is not as easy as a casting off a character whom McGraw has played. In fact, Silver suggests that Flint fought— fought his imprisonment, but perhaps also fought against his own “dying.” The death of Flint is a profound loss: the loss of a dream that had swelled and grown to stretch across horizons, and the loss of the power to dream it. That dream was not a dream that James McGraw dreamed. But at the same time, Silver figures the death of Flint as the birth of a moreness. He talks of seeing something from James’s mind that was strangely “unexpected,” portraying McGraw not as James bereft of Flint but as a James to whom possibilities of feeling had been opened that had not existed as/with Flint. I’m reminded of feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz’s work on prosthesis. She writes that the prosthesis can be regarded as “as an opening up of actions that may not have been possible before, the creation of new bodily behaviors, qualities, or abilities.” At the same time, to choose not to use a prosthesis can have the same effect; Sara Ahmed writes that “to accept a body with parts that are missing is to reorientate our relation to our bodies.” This is an idea, of course, that Silver would be uniquely situated to understand, and one wonders if this might have influenced his perception of what it means to adjust to life without a piece of oneself.

I don’t think it’s at all incompatible to see Flint as dying and yet also see his death as the healing of a wound (Silver reaching into the past and undoing the great tragedy that birthed Flint) or as a resurrection. For me, this evokes the Christian concept of dying to oneself— an evocation that I find significant not least of all because Thomas is one of two characters who’ve been explicitly linked to Christianity (the other being the actual pastor, and we don’t know very much about his faith). Thomas is, of course, also the other character who occupies a state of existential flux: he is alive if we accept Silver’s story, dead if not. Perhaps it’s fair to say that both Thomas and James have died yet survived. They have died to their ambitions in the world, to their hopes, to their friends, even to their names, yet this death has made possible a new life together. No wonder Oglethorpe’s plantation resembles heaven.

This reading of Silver’s story (and its accompanying images) as an elegy for Flint, who has had to die to make possible a life for James, appeals to me for a number of reasons, among which is the fact that it supports a reading of the finale as breaking the show out of a cycle— maybe even the type of violent cycle that Mrs. Guthrie describes to Max. Every previous season of the show has ended with a significant character death (Gates, Miranda, and Vane), and each of these deaths has resulted in escalating violence. Here, Silver and Flint echo these previous deaths (most notably in Silver’s use of the phrase, “This is not what I wanted”), yet Flint’s “death” actually engenders new life, and not only for him. (To be clear: I don’t agree with Silver’s decision, and I think one can argue that ending the war actually increases suffering, but I don’t think that’s relevant here.) One could flippantly call this a kind of “new testament.” I wonder if the journey to Savannah took three days?

The very paradoxicality appeals to me, also, because it invites us to hold multiple things true at once— to “watch two points in space at the same time,” as Silver says. This is another element of breaking down binaries: not either/or, but both/and. The entire show, in my view, has pushed us to do this (a character is rarely any one thing, and frequently moves from one thing to another), and continues to emphasize it in its challenge to us to accept that whether a story is true or untrue may not matter, and often isn’t a meaningful question. A story can be true and untrue. Flint can be dead and alive. I’m arguing in favor of opening ourselves to the zone of potential, in which we search for expansion rather than negation. Nothing seems more true to the spirit of Black Sails than this.

[siobhanoleary-blog]

‘Postmodern art challenges all conventions within art — even the legitimacy of art itself.’ - an essay

Many times, I have pondered this quote. Twisting it through my brain... Myself having always preferring a Bosch over a Hirst, I attempt to push it past my own reservations towards postmodern art.

For postmodern art to be considered as a challenge of artistic convention, there would have to be an applied definition of art available to be contested. By the 1950s, many philosophers had been led to “despair of the possibility of defining ‘art,’” as George Dickie has noted. In an influential article published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1956, Morris Weitz declared, for example, that “the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties.” Thus the postmodernist philosophy behind the art of Francis Bacon, and the postmodern art of the likes of Marina Abramovic and Cy Twombly, must be viewed as a natural evolution and trajectory of the art world, and should not be aligned to the viewpoint that their art is inherently an act of challenging (which in itself would restrict the true intention of the artist). In terms of the legitimacy of art, postmodern art encourages legitimacy, as it presents a rejection of teachings about the supremacy of reason and the notion of truth and the belief that man could be made perfect through art and architecture; which are all highly legitimate areas of sociological and philosophical debate that when interpreted through the vessel of the artwork, solidify the importance of artistic expression within our modern society.

The idea of a postmodernist ‘challenge’ is besides the point of postmodernist art, as it is more definitively a change of focusing — to art based on ideas rather than on formal features that characterised the Modernists (such as realism, landscape, narrative and history painting). To understand why postmodernism is currently such a dominant mode of art practice, it only takes a few moments to consider the progression of art to date, and to understand it as a constant conversation between an exchange of ideas and a response to the trajectory of society. Marina Abramovic is one such artist who proves this theory perfectly. Today Marina Abramovic is known as “the grandmother of performance art”, due to her role as a pioneer of the use of performance art as a visual arts medium. Abramovic began her career in performance in 1973, when she was already in her late twenties. Before that, as a student of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramovic explored her interest in the body through paintings influenced by the abstract forms of Picasso. However, Abramovic found herself frustrated by the limits of expression in painting, and thus in a logical artistic progression upon her exposure to the performance art medium while at school in Zagred, her works became increasingly immaterial. Abramovic cited Marcel Duchamp and Dada, as well as the fluxes movement, as being immensely influential in her work. The early philosophy behind postmodernism is evident in her work, as Abramovic herself explains ‘I have arrived at the conclusion that… the performance has no meaning without the public because, as Duchamp said, it is the public that completes the work of art. In the case of performance, I would say that public and performance are not only complimentary but also inseparable.’ It is important to know that the movements origins can be traced to the more fundamental critique on capitalist society of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies. Perhaps Abramovic’s most famous piece is Rhythm 0 (1974). With a description reading “I am the object”, and “During this period I take full responsibility,” Abramovic invites spectators to use any of 72 objects on her body in any way they desire, completely giving up control. Rhythm 0 is exemplary of Abramovic’s belief that confronting physical pain and exhaustion was important in making a person completely present and aware of his or her self; a nod to the introspection of postmodernism. This work also reflects her interest in performance art as a way to transform both the performer and the audience. She wants spectators become collaborators, rather than passive observers.  Although the use of collaboration and the body as the medium could be considered as a challenge of artistic convention, it is more insightful to consider it as an upward trajectory from modernist concepts to our contemporary status of practice. Abramovic’s work does not attempt to defy traditionalism, but rather to free art from the restriction of paint and canvas to ensure that art remains reflective to our innovative present.

Hans Rookmaaker (1922-1977 — Renowned Dutch Professor and author who lectured on art) believed that the Arts are the forerunners of each new era of thought; it is as if the artists have their finger on the pulse of their culture and express visually what the philosophers and critics later describe in words. Rookmaaker notes that the rise of the postmodern era was foreshadowed in the Arts as early as the 1920s through Surreal and Dada art and poetry. Postmodernism is defined by a rejection of absolutes, a rejection of the objectivity of science, a disillusionment with the notion of change being equivalent to the process and loss of faith in humanity. The art of Cy Twombly and Francis Bacon allude to this change of thought process in their ambiguous yet gripping artworks. The painterly values of Twombly’s work move far beyond any sort of simple definition pertaining to flatness of the canvas, for his lines and forms seem to protrude and hover, immediately suggesting the thoughts and hands of the artist rather than asserting the solidity of the canvas to the viewer. Lending further mystery to the puzzling nature of Twombly’s work, cryptic writing is a defining motif in many of this artist’s paintings. The postmodern text, in essence, seems wise in its inclusion in Twombly’s monumental paintings. Rather than being produced for the purpose of the viewer’s understanding, Twombly’s script is a suggestion of emotional states rather than purely literary communication. Similarly, Bacon’s art is focused on humanity, the human condition. His paintings nearly exclusively depict humans or humanoid beings. As in “Head IV (1949)”, his portraiture depicts humans on a similar scale; approximately three-quarters life size, they tend to be solitary and are frequently contorted in some manner, be it physical or emotional. The distortion of the face is a common feature in much of his art; specifically the area above the mouth was frequently obscured or omitted in some way. This distortion is all the more apparent due to the level of detail often afforded to other features such as the mouth itself. This distortion was clearly deliberate. It is not from lack of artistic ability that features were distorted, rather it was a calculated decision, drawing the audiences attention to the infallibility of our own consciousness. Twombly also reduces the meaning of what we know as words and letters while also offering a new perspective on written language, particularly hand written words, which are so often represented in his paintings. As seen in “1986 print”, the painting of Cy Twombly display a meditative, trance-like translation of the thoughts of the artist rather than displaying pure abstractions as his contemporaries aimed to create.  It is depiction of uncertainty, insecurity, doubt and ambiguity that is synonymous to postmodernist art. This ‘reflexive’ reveals that postmodern art is inherently not a challenge of the definition of art itself, but rather an attempt to utilise less constricting aesthetics to question of the self-consciousness of modern society.  

As a movement, postmodern art presents as the evolution of the trajectory of artistic expression. in order to accurately imitate life, art must be reflective of the changing modes of thinking — and innovation — of its present. The works of Cy Twombly and Francis Bacon are imperative in revealing the plight for deeper meaning through ambiguity and experimentation. Marina Abramovic’s performance art is a testament to the developmental nature of taking art to the audience, removing the need for restrictive mediums in order to create  reflective and touching metaphors of our modern reality. This need for expression is what immortalises the legitimacy of art, no matter how experimental. Thus postmodern art is not a challenge of convention, but a progressive reflection of modernity.

[how2to18]

ON JULY 9, 1975, the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in a 13-foot sailboat named Ocean Wave, intent on crossing the Atlantic alone. The trip was to be the second part of a greater work, a triptych he called In Search of the Miraculous. Nine months later the Ocean Wave, crusted in barnacles and floating aft-up like a dabbling duck, was discovered by Spanish fishermen 150 nautical miles from the Irish coast. Ader’s body was never recovered. Just four years earlier in 1971, Ader created a video piece called Broken Fall (Organic) in which he can be seen hanging from a branch suspended above a river in the Dutch countryside. He hangs for a fitful two minutes, which are wrought with tension, until, finally (inevitably), he falls into the water.

Ader and his work — his interest in water, falling, and disappearance — shadow Niña Weijers’s brilliant debut novel The Consequences (2014). The book, recently translated by Hester Velmans, opens with its own water-related disappearance: on February 11, 2012, Minnie Panis, the central character of the story, steps out onto the thawing ice of an Amsterdam canal; it quickly gives way and she plunges beneath the surface. This, Weijers tells us, is the third time Minnie has “vanished from her own life.” The relationship between Minnie’s disappearance and Ader’s work won’t be obvious to readers at first, but the connection comes to light later through an insightful and beautifully written critical interlude. The short essay on Ader, which bisects the novel and delays a return to the central character’s story, serves to further enrich the symbolism and philosophical underpinnings of The Consequences.

The question why lurks beneath the surface (the ice in the case of The Consequences) of both Bas Jan Ader’s and Minnie’s disappearances, and Weijers boldly engages this question right from the beginning. At the end of the prologue, she invites the reader to wonder why Minnie, who is a newly minted art star with a blossoming career, would, on a cold winter morning, walk to the middle of a frozen canal. The act either seems completely irrational or, of course, suicidal. Both Ader’s and Minnie’s disappearances are undeniably enigmatic, raising certain inescapable questions: Why did Ader set sail alone on such a dangerous voyage? Why did Minnie step out onto the ice? Why do things happen the way they happen? Why do people do the things they do? These why questions lie unshakably at the heart of both life and literature. Why can also be a strong motivating force, even while it remains an often frustratingly unanswerable question.

Minnie herself is confronted by mystery at the beginning of the novel: “She stared at the dark ice and suddenly it occurred to her that the lake was extremely deep, deeper than the deepest ocean trough, a conduit to all the mysteries that had dwelt in the center of the earth since the beginning of time.” This realization, vast and almost geologic in scope, also informs the personal mystery at the center of the novel, which does not fully reveal itself until Minnie receives a letter from a Dr. Johnstone. Johnstone, as we learn from his letter, is the director of the cryptic CBTH, a treatment center with the enigmatic slogan, “The only thing the fish has to do is to lose itself in the water.” (If it isn’t obvious already, water is an important symbol in the book.) From the letter, we learn that Minnie received some kind of treatment from CBTH when she was young, but Johnstone withholds all information about what conditions this center treats as well as the nature of the treatment Minnie received. Instead the letter alludes to elements of Mayan mythology, drawing parallels between Minnie’s first round of treatment between 1991 and 1992 and the beginning of the last k’atun (a roughly 20-year cycle in the Mayan calendar) of the current b’ak’tun (a cycle of 20 k’atuns), set to end December 21, 2012, the year the main action of the novel takes place. Both the letter and the novel as a whole, hint at a vague cosmic correlation between these ancient cycles and Minnie’s own life without ever stating anything definitively. From this moment in the story, the central question — why did Minnie step out onto thawing ice? — is temporarily supplanted by a new line of intrigue: who is Dr. Johnstone and what happened to Minnie as a child?

Though The Consequences is in no way a genre mystery novel (there is no crime, no one is killed, there is no villain), Weijers often borrows standard cues of suspenseful plotting as the story progresses: clues are gathered and the plot consists of many unexpected twists and turns. And while the novel circles around questions of cosmic correlation, synchronicity, and how they relate to the events of Minnie’s past, the mystery unfolds as an odd journey of self-discovery in which the lead character comes to know herself through a fascination with erasure. The first of Minnie’s artworks we hear about, for example, is called Does Minnie Panis Exist, which is described by one fictional critic as a “self-portrait in the negative.” Weijers gives Minnie’s second project Nothing Personal the following artist statement:

On November 3, 2007, Minnie Panis’ lover left her. He departed for an island sinking into the sea somewhere near the North Pole and she put her sofa up for sale. Five months later all she had left was a bed, a few items of clothing and a toothbrush. As far as she knows her ex is still on that island, perhaps with water up to his ankles, or perhaps not.

For Minnie, erasure seems to function as a means of getting down to the core of things rather than obliterating them: finding the essential while ruthlessly eliminating everything else. This is also a poignant metaphor for the process of writing.

Minnie’s story is almost Sophoclean in its mixture of self-erasure and self-discovery. Both Minnie and Oedipus engage in forms of self-annihilation. Like Oedipus, Minnie is given a riddle: the mysterious note from Dr. Johnstone and the cryptic slogan of the CBTH, which haunts her like a scrap of music playing over and over in her head. Minnie, like Oedipus, can only come to “know herself” by unraveling the mystery of her origin. The alluringly mysterious role of synchronicity — is it fate? or just coincidence? — dominates both of their stories, bringing both characters unwittingly into contact with long-lost parents (though to a much more gruesome end in the case of Oedipus). And in both Oedipus’ and Minnie’s cases, the reader sees the solution to the riddles of the characters’ pasts before the characters do. We are given insight into Minnie’s past in The Consequences through a series of chapters that take place during and before her childhood. Weijers almost seems to tease the reader with details in these chapters. We learn about Minnie’s odd behavior as a baby and the details of her subsequent perplexing treatment at CBTH. We learn about several other unusual childhood experiences in Minnie’s past along with information about her parents’ history. Rather than providing the reader with any sense of answer or resolution, these details only deepen the mystery surrounding Minnie. These details also increase the sense of synchronicity at work in Minnie’s world, making the reader long for some source of ultimate causality.

While Oedipus’ story can be read as a tragic illustration of the impossibility of altering one’s fate, on another level — one perhaps more relevant for The Consequences — the Oedipal story suggests that even without fate, our identity is still ineluctably tied to our past: to “know oneself” is to know one’s origin. Weijers complicates this idea, teasing out its subtle ambiguities. The Consequences is a sensitive and erudite exploration of the tangled relationships between synchronicity, identity, life, and art. To know yourself is, undoubtedly, to understand where you come from. And yet identity is neither discrete nor static. It grows out of a past context that continues to shape us long after we might have forgotten it. Weijers is sensitive to that tension, creating a character whose identity exists both in context and in flux. Weijers frees her protagonist from that ancient sense of immovability, suggesting that our origins do not affix us to an unalterable life path — they do not fully determine our identity. Instead, the novel proposes a more contemporary idea of identity as something that exists between the determination of a forgotten past and near-constant change — a sense of self that slips through our fingers. Minnie consistently showcases this proposition in her art, preoccupied with Pessoa-like questions of identity, existence, and disappearance: “People were always kidding themselves about their own place in the world. In reality, thought Minnie, all you have is bits and pieces continually dying off and never coming back. You keep vanishing from your own life, over and over, without ever saying goodbye to yourself.”

Weijers is also sensitive to the relief that a fatalistic view of the world might offer in the face of difficult questions, like why. Fate can at least give us a sense that things happen as they need to happen. Even without fate, we have a tendency to give our lives tidy narratives. Weijers writes:

[Minnie] was always amazed to hear people giving their lives a more or less logical story. No matter how many turns or detours, no matter how many steep slopes or dead-end paths, there was always some sort of clearly marked course. Even the worst decisions and the greatest coincidences fit into the overall plan. How did people do that? How did they manage to get every cause to flow seamlessly into an effect, as if it wasn’t hard at all but the most normal thing in the world, a law of nature, like water in a river flowing in just one direction?

As The Consequences points out, we tend to read causality and meaning into the events in our lives, connecting them with a thread that looks a lot like fate, even if that term feels somehow ancient or out of date. We might not like to admit it, but we all desperately seek relief from the burden of the why questions of this world. Weijers does offer a tentative answer to one of those questions, which the reader can find tucked away in her poignant analysis of Ader’s Broken Fall (Organic): “When after two long minutes that body falls, it knows at last what Camus knew, as did the Taoists in ancient China, the sadhus of Vaanasi, the first rabbis, the Zen Buddhists, the medieval mystics from Cologne to Antwerp: the one who lets go, understands the universe.” The answer to certain why questions might just be to let them go, even when we most want to hold on.

¤

Rebecca Waldron is a writer based in Los Angeles.

The post Let It Go: Niña Weijers’s Debut Novel and Understanding the Universe appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[themindfulword]

PSYCHOLOGICAL & SPIRITUAL THERAPY: What to do when you have a feeling of home-sickness that won't go away

In our new weekly Psychological & Spiritual Therapy column, therapist Jack Surguy is offering professional advice to The Mindful Word readers for all those questions and problems you have wanted to discuss with someone qualified and caring. If you would like Jack to assist you in any areas of your life and relationships, fill out this form. He will respond to your questions through this column, published every Monday.

QUESTION

Dear Jack, The other day I had a feeling come over me that I have only had a few times in my life. It's the deepest longing and I have sometimes said it aloud—"I want to go home." There are some instances I clearly remember. The first time, I was about six years old and I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen with my mom. I said the words and she said, "Don't be silly, you are home." Then 30 years later, I was talking to my sister in my home. Suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling of home-sickness. I again said, "I want to go home," and got the same response. I replied, "I'm not." Now almost 30 years later again. I was talking to my partner in our home and the feeling overwhelmed me so much that I started crying, "I want to go home." He asked, "And where might that be?" I responded, "I don't know, but I know it's not here." And by "here," I don't mean any specific country, or any specific place. I just don't know where home is. The feeling passes, and I'm not in the least suicidal, so that isn't it. It's just a not belonging wherever I am, an incompleteness of some sorts. Like an alien on this planet. Just weird. It isn't always there, but when it comes, it takes my breath away and I remember it for a long time afterwards. Jane  

RESPONSE

What a wonderful question, Jane, and what a great start for this column. If I understand your question correctly, you're hoping to find some understanding and insight into where and why this feeling of “wanting to go home” overcomes you at times, and leaves you feeling confused about where “home” may in fact be. There are a couple of ways to try and answer this, one from the “psychological” perspective and the other from a more spiritual perspective. I’ll try and address the psychological perspective first.

Psychological perspective

Typically, when most people think of “home,” it's often associated with feelings of love, acceptance, protection and security. Most people when thinking about their childhood will readily admit that it was not perfect, but that for the most part they knew they were loved, accepted, encouraged to grow and provided for by their parent(s). Most people also associate home with their friends and neighbours who played important roles in their life and development. Furthermore, in looking back at those times, and through adult eyes and understanding, we realize how carefree we truly were. If we were fortunate as children, we did not concern ourselves with bills, money, savings or planning for the “what ifs." Instead, again if we were fortunate, our lives were consumed with our friends and making big plans about how we were going to be hugely successful in life. All those aspects, the feeling of belonging, being accepted, protected, and loved, are vitally important for a growing child. If those components are present for a young child, they're internalized by the child and continue to provide a sense of those feelings long after the child has grown and moved into adulthood. The person, in a very real sense, carries "home" with them wherever their life might lead them. However, what if a child is not fortunate enough to have truly experienced feeling loved, accepted, belonging, feeling secure and protected? This can happen for a whole variety of reasons. Growing up in what may be considered an abusive or neglectful home can cause this. Life events can also strike a very close, loving family and cause this as well. An example from the movies In the 1986 movie Stand by Me, which was written by Stephen King, the main protagonist, Gordie Lachance (played by Wil Wheaton), is trying to come to terms with the death of his older brother, a star athlete. Gordie feels like he does not connect well with his father, who did appear to relate more easily with the older brother through their love of sport and competition. The death of the brother obviously turned the parents’ world completely upside down and shook them to their core. In the aftermath of the death, the parents became more withdrawn, resulting in Gordie feeling lost and abandoned in a world he no longer understood, and a world that was no longer safe from loss and death. At the end of the movie we see Gordie break down and cry as he revealed, in intense anguish, his belief that his father hated him, and that he was the one that should have died. I doubt Gordie’s father truly hated him, but due to the intense emotional pain the parents endured, that was the message that was unintentionally conveyed to Gordie. At the very end of the movie, we see Gordie as an adult, played by Richard Dreyfuss. Gordie is now a successful author who has for the first time, finally set down and processed everything that happened that summer in his youth. In other words, Gordie had carried the feeling of being unloved by his father throughout his entire adult life, and was only now beginning to process those feelings. Sometimes as children, we're born into unfortunate, unhelpful or challenging circumstances. Take for example a child who may be more inclined to study and self-reflection, and place them in an environment where only physical labour is considered appropriate work and asking deeper questions is considered nonsense. The child may grow up feeling that they do not belong. That may not have been the intended message, but it may have been the message the child received. As I stated earlier, abusive or neglectful home environments can also cause significant feelings of alienation as well. These are the areas I would likely explore with a client if they came to me with a question similar to yours. In session, I would ask them to think back as early as they could to times when they felt like they did not belong, times when they felt deeply misunderstood and/or alone, times when they perhaps felt unwanted, and explore those significant moments in their life.

Spiritual aspect

The other approach to exploring these feelings takes more of a spiritual interpretation. I believe in a spiritual level of existence and feel comfortable in exploring the client’s spiritual beliefs, as well as what possible spiritual meanings they may believe apply to the feeling of wanting to go home. One's spiritual path helps them to cope and deal with such feelings. Whether taken from a purely psychological perspective as detailed above, or from a more spiritual perspective, the process of dealing with those feelings is very similar, which will be discussed next.

Dealing with feelings

The most difficult and unpleasant truths I have been forced to repeatedly learn are that life is completely unpredictable, that there are no certainties, and that nothing stays the same. Everything is always changing. Just when I feel like I’ve finally gotten all the pieces into place, life changes and all the pieces are scattered once again. Just when I start feeling safe, like everything is finally going to be OK, something happens that either threatens that sense of security, or completely obliterates it. Life is groundless; there is really no solid ground upon which we can place our feet. My Christian friends often have a difficult time with this lesson. I agree that on a surface level, it seems to contradict what many people are taught to believe about God and their faith. However, as we discuss the issue further, I try to make the point that a person’s belief about God or the divine is based upon their current understanding of their faith. Novel information they're exposed to will affect their understanding, thus resulting in a faith that is dynamic, fluid and always in constant flux. Regardless of this truth, we struggle to put ground underneath our feet, to construct certainty and security, to find final solutions to ambiguity and dissatisfaction, to find a place that's unchanging and feels like home, all of which are fundamentally impossible. As such, as a possible course of therapy with someone haunted with the feeling of wanting to go home, of feeling like an alien and not belonging, I would try to help the person truly welcome and fully accept those feelings of alienation and feelings of being incomplete.

Welcoming painful aspects of self

But why do this, many ask? From my perspective, one possible reason for the feelings of alienation and incompleteness may in fact be due to the person trying to alienate, or push away, those parts of themselves that trigger emotional pain and sadness. They're in a sense incomplete—not because they're missing something, but because they have fragmented and pushed away parts of themselves they do not like. Once a client welcomes those painful aspects of themselves “home,” they start to feel more at peace, more complete, and more capable of living an uncertain life. The more a person comes to fully accept and incorporate all aspects of themselves into their conscious awareness, the more they feel at home, within themselves, where they're indeed fully accepted and loved. The person can create a sense of home that they carry within them, even when they find themselves in a foreign land. image via Pixabay Click to Post