#i feel like dividing ourselves into little sections just makes us all feel more isolated and different from each other

[dick-chugger]

My most controversial opinion on politics is that all far-left ideologies fall under the umbrella of communism

[kitsoa]

The Heart of Stories Pt. 3

Masterpost / Part 1  / Part 2 / Supplementary Analysis / Part 3 (here)

Question: What is Kingdom Hearts?

Kingdom Hearts: The supreme heart. A source of immeasurable power capable of re-writing the universe and all it contains.

It is notable that we have never truly received a proper in-universe explanation for what the force of Kingdom Hearts is. We know that lesser variations of the thing have been summoned, illuminating more so the nature of its components than the actual definition of its model. The first lesser-Kingdom Hearts was the Heart of Worlds, composited in the realm of Darkness where the fallen world’s hearts amassed. The second was the Heart of Men, captured from the Heartless slain by the keyblade. Being an amalgamation of Hearts— which by this definition is the essence of people and things— makes it so that Kingdom Hearts is some kind of collective existence. As lesser iterations, these Kingdom Hearts’ do not hold nearly the magnitude of influence or power that Xehanort was wishing to attain in his final attempt. So it must be assumed the quintessential example is a force that is the collective Heart of everything.

1. A Story about Stories is a Story

In the previous section we discussed how Worlds are vessels for lesser existences. Existences whom require connection and feelings to be real. As vessels to emotions, Worlds satisfy that process of asserting existence in the Kingdom Hearts universe by functioning as Stories. The Heart of Worlds is formed by the stories it tells. Tales created by the denizens of that world. A symbiotic relationship that produces a greater, collective Heart.  

So if stories are made up of the characters they hold. The even greater Kingdom Hearts— a collective Heart of everything— is made up of the Stories that it holds.

And ultimately that would conclude irrefutably that Kingdom Hearts is the Heart of the greater multiverse. And by the logic present in the previous section, that would make that supreme Heart the story of the multiverse. Fiction. Like the Worlds within it. So where is the line drawn? And what non-fiction lies behind it?

If Kingdom Hearts was about a kid jumping into his favorite Disney movies and saving the day, this would not nearly be as hard to parse. From that perspective, the concepts of emotional existence would be exclusively contained within the fictional worlds as some ground of non-fiction would exist within this hypothetical protagonist. But that isn’t the case as Sora— a denizen of his own World, is placed on the same plane of existence as his Disney and Original World contemporaries. The only thing elevating him from his World is the contrivance of a greater universe and a story empowering that traversal.

The story of a Keyblade giving a responsibility to defend these worlds. The conflict of a force looking to tarnish the status quo in some manner.

The Story of Kingdom Hearts.

The Heart of Kingdom Hearts.

Kingdom Hearts is Kingdom Hearts (2002), like Land of Dragons is Mulan (1998). Toy Box is Toy Story(1995). Olympus Coliseum is Hercules (1997). Atlantica is The Little Mermaid (1989). etc.etc.

A very obvious answer indeed. By living in a realm where emotional connection is paramount to existence, and where narratives are the vessels that contain those emotions, the Kingdom Hearts universe establishes itself as a fictional construct.

2. The Fourth Realm of Thought

This final layer of context allows for the very function of the universe to bow to the rules and whims of fiction. What was originally phenomenon functioning independently and in isolation is now completely constructed by intelligent design. A creator and author of the story—  someone who exists in a newly revealed Fourth Realm of thought (Heart<World<Kingdom Hearts<Fourth Realm). The realm holding this story is ambiguous because it exists beyond the scope of the already immeasurably large Kingdom Hearts multiverse. But by virtue of containing the final bastion of narrative purity, this Fourth Realm is most certainly a World of Non-fiction.  

Reality. The ‘real’ world. 

Now whether this can be considered our world is an exercise in futility, especially as the literal story begins to encompass a new scope of ‘Non-fiction.’ By bringing attention to it, the story makes it fictional. So while it can parallel our reality to a science, it ultimately cannot literally make real the fictional constructs of our imaginations. It is here that I am reminded of a familiar tagline. 

Take the further implications of this phrases source to heart, especially in regards to the Secret Ending, but also do note the substance. Reality and Fantasy. Non-Fiction and Fiction. This World of Non-Fiction can function as reality but is just as fake as a fantasy. That’s just the facts. Even so, the intention and conversation remains close enough to speak synonymously of our world and this Fourth Realm the Story of Kingdom Hearts expands toward.

And that’s where we can bring in the Fourth Wall. 

3. The Fourth Wall 

The Fourth Wall is a performance construct used in theater to denote the audience. It is an invisible, imaginary wall that divides the story from its observers and contains the narrative by force of thought and the willing suspension of disbelief. This wall manifests in variations of strength depending on medium, the weakest being live theater with a wealth of permutations below that. But ultimately, anything can break this wall and shatter the foundation of a functioning story. 

Addressing the audience in some form is the sure fire way to break the Fourth Wall, but simply alluding to the existence of the barrier in the first place is enough to ‘weaken’ the Fourth Wall for lack of a better word. What we see in Kingdom Hearts is the premise of an emotionally dependent existence ballooning into an innate recognition of its fictional status. A fragile relationship with the barrier that will inevitably break should the story continue. 

4. Putting it Together

Kingdom Hearts creates for itself a sort of existential terrarium. Fostering an ecosystem of self-sustaining narratives that are independent of each other, but subservient to the larger whole. It re-contextualized every aspect of the lesser story from there, functioning not as a selfish sequence of events, but as a small part to something much bigger. 

Sora, as the existences transcending all stories in this multiverse narrative, is not only an average, unremarkable boy— but is the Main Character. He functions a role outside himself that makes him a driving force behind the Story of Kingdom Hearts. The leader not by action, but by existence. Or to put it in a theatrically pleasing way— the King of a Kingdom. 

Light becomes the means by which a Story is seen. It is literally what illuminates existence so that hearts can connect. Gathering Light expands a story and when Light expires, the story ends. Darkness by that contrast is the process of ending stories. Destroying their relevance and meaning with with emotions unbefitting the childlike hearts that yearn to connect and resonate with them in the first place. But it is also the reason for a story’s being. From it’s consuming irrelevancy, light persists to combat it with more stories to replace what’s been lost. The original light of Kingdom Hearts that Xehanort wished to attain would be the Kingdom Hearts story in its purest, most earnest form.

Then the process of ‘dictating Destiny’ which Kingdom Hearts would supposedly grant, brings in the conversation of authorial intention and narrative flexibility. All the while speaking to a larger conversation about our place in our universe. 

So when asked what is Kingdom Hearts, I think @invigoraide observed it at its most simplistic in their analysis. Kingdom Hearts is the very force that gives birth to the primary conflict of this multiverse— that which drives the story of Kingdom Hearts. The plot device. The Plot made manifest. The heart in the sky and the disc in our gaming system.

Afterward

The importance of bonds, the feelings that people share, and the ways we leave our mark on others. Kingdom Hearts has a lot to say on what it means to exist. Pain, joy, sadness, wonder— life is all about those emotions and often times we get so consumed in the day to day that we never let ourselves feel and experience and connect. The stories that captured our imagination as children gave us models on how to do just that.

The quest to define a Heart in Kingdom Hearts seems strangely arbitrary because it’s just a lore glossary term. But the earnest manner in which the games try to do so sheds light on what it really means for the audience and the people who care. At the conclusion, if my thinking is right, we learn that the heart is what binds us to each other. It is what tells the world that we existed and that we mattered. Because we are just stories in the end. And we can only be as real as our feelings reach wide.

[duckbeater]

My friend Emma is the lit editor for Third Coast Review, a website following Chicago-based culture. She solicited my response to a novel that I thought would be a joy to read! And sometimes it was. The below reproduces my notes and feints as I worked toward producing what became a fairly strident response for her section, which ultimately surprised me. I read what was published on the site to Daniel and he said, “Wow, it’s unmistakable that you hate the novel!” and while this didn’t perplex me, I thought, Oof, I don’t actually hate the novel, I just have opinions about its shortcomings. So the below is also, I guess, something of my softer, second consideration.

 —

I read Browning's first novels, I'm Trying to Reach You (2012) and The Correspondence Artist (2011), a few winters back, at a rare juncture of poverty and exhibitionism. I had no money, no standards, and I was tired of staying indoors grousing over very cheap meals. I volunteered for a community dance project having never done anything like that before—that is, aside from drunkenly dancing my ass off in bars. I thought it would be constructive to turn a thing I loved to do, but that nevertheless filled me with deepest shame (trust me, I really broke it off at weddings), into a more mindful, more healthful and more regimented activity. It would get me out of the house, I thought, and it was free. I would be a part of making art, which is usually prohibitively expensive, as anyone with a fine arts degree can tell you. For dance, for this dance, the choreographer requested only that we show up on time. I'm a freak about punctuality. The stars had aligned.

Browning is herself a dancer (and an academic, and of course a novelist) and the narrators in her novels are same. The performing body and its capacities as a connecting medium (shamed and celebrated), this is the great inquiry of her work. If I felt, in that first month of reading her books while also dancing for the scrappy little corps, that I was conversing with her ideas—augmenting thesis with praxis—then I also responded to the novels’ meta-inquiry, the nagging suspicion that dancing for the company increased my sense of disconnection and isolation; that I had waded, in fact, into embarrassment. I might love to shake my body, I might even have the intensity and ferocity of a really expressive dancer—but that doesn’t mean I actually contributed in a meaningful way to a successful artistic enterprise. Being a part of an artistic failure, besides, is its own kind of experience, albeit one we try to avoid.

Browning’s latest novel The Gift probes the narrator’s compulsion to create “inappropriate intimacies,” while working to define what those intimacies could possibly be. Some of this work is done through dance—articulating intimacy by bringing us into proximity with a body, with the body’s hands, the body’s nakedness and movement—and a lot of this work is done through failure: failing to arrive, failing to tell the truth, failing to appear. Are we foremost bound up in bodies? When we extend ourselves across mediums—social, textual, televisual—and when we breach boundaries of cultural and creative divides, is the effect additive (increased sensorium, expanded presence) or subtractive (do we just spread ourselves too thin). How is intimacy sustained, enhanced, or encountered at all via absence?

Browning only half sustains her inquiry “novelistically” (with characters and situations), relying instead on a more academic mode of glosses, summaries, interpretations and applications of post-structural theorists and other en vogue critical discourses. A character is rarely in love without also examining that “love” through a lens of affect, queer, disability, and/or political theory. Sexual acts go through the Lacanian ringer. Emails, reproduced, irritatingly, seemingly unedited, are examined and replied back to at length. (Having a JSTOR account on hand isn’t necessarily a prerequisite, but it can really help.) On Browning’s website, she calls her works “fictocriticism,” an uglier version, I suppose, then Lance Olsen’s “critifiction,” though the fussiness of these designations could be swapped out with “auto-fiction” or “metafiction” with minimal loss in comprehension of the novel’s interest in formal innovation and authorial exposure.

I’m an advocate of Browning’s work but I want to be careful to express my unremitting frustration with this novel. Her avatar, Barbara Andersen, guides the reader through a series of low-heat, low-friction performance art encounters, recalled in (admittedly) hazy detail. The opulence of the narrator’s apologies on behalf of her faulty memory feels like the extension of a crude olive branch from the author herself, apologizing to the “real” people and their “real” projects the book describes. Some of these details are a bit off! It’s very much graduate student winking at the professor in the middle of a dissertation, or perhaps the dissertation’s acknowledgements section. I used to format edit those; that was my stipend work as a graduate student; the impulse is touching. Reproducing that impulse in fiction is, I think, meant to be a selfless corrective against critical overreach: the narrator doesn’t want to totalize or co-opt someone else’s experience or someone else’s performance: this “liminality” is ethically less suspect but makes for ponderous, slack descriptions of what would be better served by brute assertion of detail. (I just looked up “liminality” and it’s a term used in anthropology. Wikipedia says: “In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.” Browning would probably appreciate the idea that her sometimes fuzzy reenactments mean the readers must do the collaborative work of more fully imagining the novel’s happenings, the novel’s timeline, etc.)

Browning is adept at staging intellectuals in their milieus; she’s also acute in describing their off-hours, when they’re frustrated, alone, bouncing bad rent checks, and dithering away on deadlines. The Gift’s academic, in her off-hours, makes ukulele covers of sentimental pop songs, and begins a hiccupy romance with a musical savant in Germany. Whether you find yourself engaged by this part of the book may in part have to do with whether you’ve read Browning’s other novels, and whether you’re at all stimulated by a belated discussion of “the real” at a time when most any fourteen-year-old is versed on the personas we create online and the messy ways those personas betray our offline, “RL” bodies. It might also help if you love to dance or spend long hours avoiding your actual work (that is, the work your employer expects to compensate you for) (as I often do) watching YouTube videos of people dancing. Having a love for the mores of the academy and the scruples of graduate students and the particulars of cultural reportage also helps. Jennifer Doyles’ Hold It Against Me, a study of emotions and affect in in art (Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, James Luna), should figure but somehow does not.

Lauren Berlant crops up in Browning’s novels, and for this I read her essay “Affect Is the New Trauma” (wasn’t paywalled!), a discussion about “work” in the academy—a truly broad designation of activity that doesn’t necessarily look like “labor,” and that doesn’t necessarily describe a “career.” A painter sitting in his studio looking at a canvas is still “painting,” is my example. And professors, Berlant writes, describing her own procedures, “we are allowed to experiment and fail, to be wrong and revise, to get distracted, to not know what we’re doing while we’re doing it, to stop in the middle, to follow our instincts and hunches, not just building on established foundations. We are allowed to demand patience for the obscure, the experimental, the political, and the pedantic.” This is The Gift to a tee.

I would argue that the mediated self is a poor substitution for the living presence in all of Browning's works, not only especially this one. The German musician in The Gift, a mysterious figure who seems to drive the plot’s engine of desire, has a literal amputation—his leg above the knee—and a more figurative one, in his autism, which affects his ability to communicate and emote. He becomes a missed connection, and, if I’m reading the novel’s ending correctly, an ultimately abandoned one. Browning’s previous novel I’m Trying to Reach You said it right in the title: her characters are stymied by missed connection, by the shortcomings of most communiques, and then they’re heartbroken. You might send a stranger a quick ukulele cover, but it doesn’t mean that stranger will thank you.

[maddie-longson]

Developing our Design

Our next step after mid-sem to develop our concept into a finalised plan was to figure out exactly what kind of spaces we were wanting and what kind of environments that would require. Once we had that, we would be able to figure out relationships between spaces and piece together our site plan. I bullet pointed notes for the group during our discussion for everyone to further individually elaborate on.

A translation of my chicken scratches from our group discussion:

We divided the primary activities and spaces that we wanted into the list on the left - gardening, meditation (and yoga), rock climbing, craft, water (unsure if this will stay), art, tree climbing and reading.

Gardening - we had 3 types of gardens in mind that would provide different atmospheres and be best suited to different kinds of activities. Crops or a veggie patch has been an idea we’ve held onto from the original brief because of our shared interest in providing a sustainable feature. A flower garden, or a more sensorial garden, was our second idea as it would be able to be a more relaxed, peaceful and quiet space, away from the hubbub of people in social spaces (like we imagine the veggie garden to be). Third, and probably weakest a more desert-like garden, dry and hot, could provide another atmosphere in the space, though we have yet to come up with an activity that might take place there so likely this idea will be ditched.

Meditation - A typical meditation space should be quiet, calm, peaceful and relaxing, with diffused light, few distractions, warm materials and soft colours. We’re interested in playing around with these ideas and subverting somewhat from the norm, particularly after our exploration into a subterranean meditation space (see mid-sem section and moment sketch of the space). With this underground space, we imagine it to still hold all of the qualities listed above, but with perhaps cooler materials (stone) and muted colours (grey, white) over soft (pastels). It could be particularly interesting playing with diffused light if we go ahead with the water tank idea and skylights above. These kinds of ideas would come under the above “isolated - individual”, whereas...

Yoga - would come under the “nature - more social”. Doing yoga by yourself or in a small group can be intimidating if you feel like you’re being watched, so we’d like to provide for it in a more closed off, partially hidden way that has enough space to be performed in groups. We also felt that yoga would be best in a natural environment, a little busier for the senses but still ultimately a calm space. Personally I think it would be best to create pockets in the various garden spaces to do yoga, though I am as yet undecided on whether the busier, noisier veggie gardens or the calm and quiet flower gardens would be a better fit.

Rock Climbing - Like gardening, this is an activity we’ve clung to from the start. We originally chose it because it was a hands-on activity that could teach people teamwork and trust, as well as the mental and physical challenge of figuring out how to get up the wall, and then actually doing it. We’ve held onto the idea as we felt it would be a good way to incorporate stone into the building, and make the architecture part of the playground. In developing this further, we’ve narrowed down the specifics to a need for a purpose - climbing to get to the top because there’s something at the top to appreciate such as a view and a place to sit. We’re also toying with the idea of having a combination of bouldering and rock climbing, possibly a collection of bouldering opportunities and one rock climbing wall. This decision is because bouldering is a more individual activity and safer without equipment, while rock climbing takes you higher and thus requires equipment and a partner to belay.

Craft - We imagine the craft area being the only truly indoor area, with a communal hub for storage of materials and tools, and a variety of different sizes break out spaces where people can go to perform the activity alone or in small groups. The art supplies would be stored here as well. I suggested that we could bring sustainability into this supply of materials as well, a little like the Little Free Library system https://littlefreelibrary.org/ where the idea is take one, give one back. Bringing in old, unwanted materials, second hand clothes to be shredded - essentially if you take something from the supplies, you’ll bring something, anything, back to replace it. This would be the true social hub of the entire site, the gathering point before moving off into the different areas.

Water - While we’ve been trying to use water as a vehicle for an activity within the space, we’ve now decided that it’s just too impractical. If it was swimming we would have to provide changing rooms and safe water to swim in, kayaking would require a large amount of space and big equipment and therefore storage. Water will be a necessity for our gardens, so now we’re keeping it limited to just being part of the ecosystem of our design. We likely won’t create a large river running through the building (due to limited space), but I am still interested in how water might benefit the subterranean levels we are developing.

Art - While the art supplies would be stored along with the craft supplies, the activity itself would take place in an entirely different way. Because we’ve created so many different environments throughout this one space, that will come with a variety of different views, different atmospheres to capture. The best way to provide for budding artists would be to provide as many different vantage points as possible for people to capture whatever takes their fancy.

Tree Climbing - This seemed a natural progression from rock climbing, and ties into our intention to save as many of the existing fully grown trees on site as possible. If it was a large enough area of trees that we were using, we’ve also talked about having a kind of netting slung between the trees to turn them into a full-blown playground.

Reading - The kind of environment required for reading would be good, natural light (possibly achieved through the use of glass roofs), comfortable furniture, nooks and crannies to hide in (thinking back to my partners precedent from mid-sim) and a natural view, though not distracting. I think this would be best in the flower gardens, so perhaps being able to provide seating in that area would be the answer.

Our final point was the realisation that what we were imagining was 3 different kinds of space to house all of these activities and environments. Fully indoor, indoor that felt like outdoor (eg. a greenhouse) and entirely outdoor. A seamless transition between each of these types of spaces seems the obvious choice. We’re also going to give ourselves the constraint of building the fully indoor spaces on the footprints of the existing buildings (Commerce A and Elam B) to try and remain as close to in the site boundaries as we could manage and also a starting point, lest we end up with a pile of gloop on a page because we didn’t know where to put anything.

[beimanorthrun-blog]

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