The size of our capacious ignorance

"You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game... in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty. He stopped and twisted to face me. "Know what I'm sayin'?"

I'd given up on Richard Powers. I loved The Gold Bug Variations. Everything else was lesser. The couple Powers novels I read after that masterpiece didn't hold up; maybe they were the wrong ones. 

But the promise of Playground tickled a few synapses I couldn't resist. The game of Go, a sculptor, generative AI, a Montrealer, a stolen library book.

Three main threads. Todd, recently diagnosed with Lewy bodies dementia, reminiscing about his early life. The tale of Rafi and Ina living idyllically in Polynesia, until political environmental concerns threaten their way of life. And an old oceanographer who broke all sorts of barriers for women.

I loved reading this book because it reminded me of how I used to read books. It reminds me that I used to read old white men, and that that's not necessarily a terrible thing. It took me out of my present when I needed to step out of it. Less interiority, more in the world. Despite being set in a near future with extrapolated technological advancements, the novel revels in good old-fashioned storytelling.

I love that Todd does jigsaw puzzles with his mother. 

My mother and I were building a time tunnel, not just back to the childhood I never had, not just to Constable's 1821, but back several millennia, to the first magic picture puzzles from history's beginning. That's how my brain works.

[A jigsaw puzzle figures in The Gold Bug Variations as well, defining two types of puzzlers: one who looks for the spot that fits a piece, and one who seeks the piece that fits a spot. I think of this every time I puzzle.]

In high school, Todd discovers Godel, Escher Bach. His best friend Rafi steals a library book (The Philosophy of the Common Task, by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov), obsessed with its premise that evolution intends to defeat the design flaw of death, that humanity would someday learn to resurrect every person who ever lived. Rafi introduces Todd to Go. College begins with underground movies and poetry slams and being "schooled in the size of our capacious ignorance."

In the fall of our senior year, when the sweet gums turned burgundy, the maples went lemon and orange, and the oaks all over campus settled into shades of scarlet, when the daylight hours shrank and the air thickened with that sere, weird scent of anticipation, Rafi came back to our dorm room late one afternoon with an announcement. He smiled his most serene and philosophical smile, with his tongue in the slight gap between his two front teeth. "I've just met the woman I am going to marry."

Enter Ina, the artist, who keeps them together and tears them apart. Todd is on the path to super-rich tech bro-dom, while Rafi struggles to complete his thesis. 

He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga's classic, Homo Ludens: "At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play...." Judging from the lines he's sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.

When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, humanists took heart that a computer could never master Go. But in 2015, AlphaGo beat a human professional player.

If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

Children. Mammals, pets, dolphins. Machines. The machines are undeniably getting smarter.

The games industry surpassed the movie industry in terms of revenue decades ago. In terms of cultural reach and influence, it grows stronger every day. By Todd's account, "Games now ruled humanity."

AI's next turn would be the greatest game of all: Wittgenstein's Sprachspiel. Powers is definitely onto something here. (And Wittgenstein just won't shut up this year.)

The novel is ultimately about the power of play, the power of storytelling, and how similar these two are. Playground filled me with joy and wonder, and reminded me of my past and future selves.

Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

Excerpts  
Chapters 1 & 2 
Chapter 4 

The heartbreaking direction of nonexistence

...so the story essentially is in its form, the mode of its construction, the way it's laid out, its structural arrangement, from light to darkness, from hope to, you guessed it, hopelessness, like (hasty, sloppy, hurried writing, reader, granted, I recognize, but... no time, no time), OK, comrade, listen, the story is too beautifully conceived and, like, imaginatively narrated for me to be able to do it justice retelling it for you right now, but anyway, that's the gist of it, [from "Life Happened"] 

Sentence, by Mikhail Iossel, is a collection of stories whose conceit is that they are each one sentence long. Some are shorter than the really long ones, in fact, they're not even full grammatical sentences, they're fragments, but I guess they all tell a story in their way. Each story sentences the reader to being in the narrator's 4-year-old head, or his 8-year-old head, being a Soviet-born and Jewish, native Russian speaker but English writer, or being in the old professor's seminar, or a train carriage, I think they're all the same narrator, a singular narrator (not multiple narrators each with their own tale to tell and coincidentally all having the same voice, and sharing the same essential biographical characteristics with the author).

Our narrator takes the bus down Sherbrooke Street, or comments on it being an unseasonably warm day in Montreal, and so on, I love that, I love reading about places I know, and I do love Montreal. Oh, this is autofiction, but I have to think for a minute, what other men write autofiction, I am so used to hearing the term applied somewhat derogatorily to women's writing (oh but of course Knausgård, he of all the accolades, I don't know if they're deserved or not). 

The text is laden with parentheticals and editorial comments (like something something, needs a word here for rhythm) while he searches for the right adjective, verbal tics, and fresh phrasings ("a shoulder-shrug of a question in my eyes").

Some quirks are language-based, of course he has a Russian accent when he writes "an insane some of money" (and I google this expression as written only to discover how disturbingly common it is, and I question my knowledge of English now, surely we talk about "a sum of money" or "some money").

I happen to be reading the one-sentence story "Crying," a kind of staunchly political (anti-Trumpian) — the narrator, or writer behind the anti-Nabokovian narrator, dollop-bombs politics all over the story (can it be anything but a political story?) — dream fugue with a Roy Orbison soundtrack superimposed over it, when I remember I wanted to watch Trump's address to the UN General Assembly, it's already underway when I turn it on, he's droning on about the evils of migration, blurring the line between legal immigration and other forms and he tells the UN "your countries are being ruined" and I wonder to whom is he addressing this remark, surely not to all 193 member countries, all being ruined by migration, so who exactly does Trump mean? He boasts about cleaning up Washington DC, "Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you, nothing’s going to happen." Is he addressing the secretary-general? It's clear he doesn't mean women are safe, he means your property is safe.

This story occurs on November 7, 2024, in the aftermath of the US election of Trump, but also being the anniversary of the Russian revolution, and it's a little bit that was then, this is now, how different but the same, but so very different, do we ever find a better life.

Unimaginable

Imaginable is real, we know as much, but unimaginable is even more so, since most people end up living the lives they could not have predicted for themselves when they were little.

Why did I choose the Al Jazeera live feed over that of, say, CNN (OK, I rarely bother with CNN online anymore because it's too taxing to find real news amid puff pieces and sponsored links, so many pop-ups, and everything is video, not text, I can't find what I'm looking for, maybe it's changed lately, I dunno)? But after Trump's speech the broadcasters review some highlights and then move to other news in the world and I am struck to hear them talk about Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza, as opposed to its continuing strikes, or continuing war, and this heartens me a little, that some people are not afraid to speak the truth, it's a fucking genocide. The narrator remarks that "now the tsunami wave of antisemitism is rolling across the world again," and that's true but that doesn't tell the whole story, how can he tell the whole story in just one sentence?

Anyway, some great stuff in here, I can't decide if it's all a little too much in the end, like an old man rambling on a park bench and at some point you need to make your excuses and go sit on a different bench on the other side of the park.

for as long as your aching heart remembers and holds on to the pain of this rejection, the pulsating red-hot flower of a wound in your soul won't heal, and there is no greater desire than that of a wounded person for another wound, to quote Bataille, so perhaps you should maybe, like, you know, just a suggestion, fall in love with someone else, [from "How to Write  Russian Sentence in English"]

I will pursue this reference, further investigate Bataille, it's relevant to my love story, all my love stories.

There's a story about leaving Soviet airspace, and one about living in a language other than your native tongue. Really all the stories are about those things, and "striving to express the inexpressible," which is a recurring theme these days (my living, breathing days), somehow Wittgenstein has seeped up to the surface, I never studied Wittgenstein, despite my area of academic interest. Wittgenstein was often invoked as a curiosity but never taken seriously, both in the philosophy seminars and in the linguistics lectures, but oh there was that Greek god in so many of my classes, he with the tousled hair and the sweaters, maybe it was always the same sweater (I see him now in my mind's eye, looking like a cross between my grade-school crush, who was actually Greek, and Derek, a designer I worked with decades later, in a confrontational stance with the metaphysics prof, his complete antithesis, who also wore sweaters, very likely the same sweater repeatedly, a cardigan misbuttoned, and while it may not have been stained, it gave off the air of being so — stained with his own effluences, magnified by his lecherous gaze upon the glorious youth of his audience — and with hair like Layton or Richler, but matted with grease, he was the size of both those men put together, I wonder where my fellow student is now, what has he grown into), he always brought up Wittgenstein, as if it were the one thing he'd ever read and understood and around which the whole world revolved, and all of us, even the profs would roll our eyes, but oh he was beautiful, years later I went to see the movie Wittgenstein at the Bytowne and I remember thinking it was kinda mind-blowing but also it didn't help me understand Wittgenstein at all. My sister gifted me a copy of Wittgenstein's Poker the year it came out (I think I made it halfway through, maybe I'll try again), but that didn't help either.

...yet toward the end, especially in the last few months preceding his abrupt fall into final stillness, some actually found it rather fascinating, in a limited way, to listen to his, uh, vocalizations, with their sheer whimsical meaninglessness, his fancifully and haphazardly esoteric verbal emissions, as ungraspable as the illusory fleeting shadow of some imaginary giant non-vulturous tropical bird's splendid multicoloured wing's passage, o life o life, google Gulag, google Gulag, a mixture of incomprehensible metaphors, striving to express the inexpressible, forever leaving the shore of the basic shared human understanding and transforming itself into a hermetic hermitic verbal cipher, wholly impenetrable first and foremost to his own disordered mind, a singular matter of extravagant guesswork and elaborate leisurely interpretations, vague surmises, groundless inferences, meaningless metonymies, all grading unmistakably in the heartbreaking direction of nonexistence, just a distant episode of a life thwarted and discontinued, full of senseless symbols and uninterpretable signs, sighs and silence. [from "Google Gulag"]

Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine.

This concept is new to me. It makes me reevaluate space, white space. I reconsider my aesthetic tendency toward asymmetry. What am I leaving space for? What am I making space for? Meanwhile, all those situations where I require the fullness of symmetry, do they have no need for the divine? Are they already divine in themselves or are they shutting it out?

I've come to The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, too late in life, my life. It might've affected me more impactfully a couple dozen years ago, when I was pregnant and grappling with my body, motherhood, and relationship dynamics, all in constant flux, but it hadn't been published yet. It might've served me a decade ago, upon its release, as I processed my life to that point, and prepared for my rebirth as a single woman, single mother, singular entity. 

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's "normal" state, and occasions a radical intimacy with — and radical alienation from — one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?

As it is, I found this book frustrating; it made me feel both very smart (I have the wisdom of lived experience, of birth and death; I have known seven or seven thousand types of love, my heart has shriveled, grown, burst, reconstituted, softened, hardened, shattered, scarred, mutated, evolved; I have lived in my body across time and space; what can this book tell me about love, grief, identity, adaptability, responsibility, joy, that is new?) and very dumb (I don't know this academic language, these references or frameworks; I don't know what Deleuze said, I know Lorde the jaded pop star, not Lorde the intersectional feminist and civil rights activist. I understand my experience and express it in a way limited to myself and my own experience).

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it.

I was listening to a radio show, writers discussing favourite books, or major influences or recommended reading, and what now brought me to The Argonauts and hooked me on reading it was mention of "Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed," so here I am again, still, forever unable to articulate what's in my head, heart, soul, yet somehow assured that it doesn't matter; whatever I need to say is seeping out of my pores, obvious to anyone who cares to listen to my silence. Read me, I scream, without having written a word.

I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now — two years out — my insides feel more quivery than lush. I've begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

(The answer is yes. This is something I absolutely know to be true.)

Meanwhile this summer, my daughter went on vacation for over a month. It's the longest we've ever been apart. The emptiness is a strange feeling, a bookend to the fullness of pregnancy. A sneak peek at the empty nest syndrome I will someday soon endure, and I begin to understand how biological mothers may experience it with a certain intensity. An evolution in one's physical space, and the new emotional states that introduces. Although partnerless now for about a decade, I haven't lived alone since 1996; I am mostly very good at being alone — for an evening, for a few days, on vacation for a couple of weeks — I crave it, and am almost never lonely. Except sometimes. But solitude done right, strength at its core, is indeed a gift.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

The balance of self and other, when both are shape-shifting and changing direction.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependence. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again — not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

Delayed gratification

I am finally on schedule and, according to the page count set out at Infinite Summer, 52.something% of the way through Infinite Jest, and inching forward.

And being that a good portion of the novel is set in a tennis academy, and a good portion of those scenes actually has to deal with the philosophy and psychology of tennis, and that in my associated literary travels this week, I had the good fortune to read for the very first time The Federer Essay, I am truly unreasonably excited to know that Roger Federer will be in Montreal for the Rogers Cup this week and I might be able to witness, albeit through a TV screen, a Federer-Nadal showdown similar to what DFW described.

But the book. Is thoroughly entertaining! I'm loving this experience. I'm a far way off from calling this the greatest piece of literature the world has ever seen, and at this juncture I firmly doubt that I will ever reread it in its entirety (although I concede certain sections are worth coming back to, for their hilarity or their clarity, whether vis-a-vis the world at large or as a key to the book's intracoherence). Maybe this really is a novel for this generation (my generation? one slightly younger than my own?).

To this point, the book offers some powerful insight into the addiction-addled mind. I particularly appreciate Gately's God problem: what if the Higher Power in the 3rd of AA's 12 steps to which one is supposed to turn oneself over is one you have absolutely no concept of, let alone believe in? (Which extended passage, starting at p 442, also leads us to a "What the fuck is water?" moment, later retold again in that awesome commencement address.) I mean, how does an atheist deal with all the God-crap in AA? Do atheists not go to AA? Or do they go through the motions, lying to others and themselves? Neither course of action really seems viable in terms of kicking an addiction. What if you're addicted to God? Is there a support group for that? (But I guess a lot of people don't see God-dependence as a kind of problem.)

(Here's a tangent: Did you know some people actually get unbaptized? Really, I know a guy. Which paradoxically maybe attributes more importance to the ritual than the unbaptizee intends. It's not like a pact with the Devil that must needs be broken. If God's a nonentity, the whole thing's kind of null and void already.)

It's Marathe and Steeply's quasi-philosophical mountaintop discussion that really holds the book together for me. It makes clear the wider political backdrop as well as some of the themes (ah yes, delayed gratification, recognition of the thematic importance of which is itself a kind of delayed gratification) through which most everything else slowly comes to make some kind of sense. There's this fabulous exchange regarding America's pursuit of happiness, and freedom, and the reader is well aware that there's a difference between "freedom from" and "freedom to," so there's no earth-shattering insight proffered — the gist of these discussions has been voiced in countless homes, classrooms, dorms, automobiles, grocery-line checkouts, dentist offices. But it's made kind of hilarious through the Separatist's use of a hypothetical problem of two individuals vying for the only-available single-size serving can of Habitant soupe aux pois.

I've had opportunity to reflect this week on the nature of the group reading experience — a local journalist interviewed me w/r/t my participation in the Infinite Summer project. And my conclusion, which should come as no surprise, is that I mostly love it.

Sure, some forum participants go on about (or namedrop, at any rate) Wittgenstein, but whatever. The book is not about Wittgenstein, and I don't know that DFW meant for it to be read about Wittgenstein (Who knows? Maybe he did. He was undoubtedly an Extremely Bright Guy, with knowledge of Wittgenstein, but whether he consciously meant to represent what all Wittgenstein was about...?) But hey, go ahead and point out whatever scene of Infinite Jest as the ultimate illustration of Wittgenstein's linguistophilosophical thought; it's just that at some point the conversation stops being about Infinite Jest, which was kind of the original point, so it can get kind of tiresome.

(Did anyone ever see Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein? That made way more sense to me than anything the kids, or the profs, ever said about the big W at school.)

Yeah, I don't know. The journalist asked me whether the forum was an opportunity for showing off, and whether it was elitist. Mostly no, mostly it's a support group. And I'm grateful for being made aware of connections I might not otherwise make on my own.

I don't see this reading as a chore or as a homework assignment; I'm not hung up on page quotas or having to contribute meaningfully on an Important Topic. But I do acknowledge that I'm reading more carefully than I've read many books this year (even if I'm not writing any more articulately on the subject), and that's a good thing to do sometimes.