What Remains: From the Poems of Hannah Arendt to What Remains of Edith Finch
Illuminations and ruminations on what remains at the end of the week, the game, the century.
When I go looking for one thing and come up with another, and another, and... well, after awhile I almost can't carry it all; I have to call it a day (a week, etc.), throw it together as best I can for the moment (see the present post), and let it go back out into the world, hoping another will find it as well--and will find it interesting, with any luck. Or at the very least, I'll circle back to it one of these days to contemplate it anew in all its rich associations and, with the benefit of this open-ended time to come, will understand it a little better at last.
For example, the original point of departure here was meant to be a passage in Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, placed at the end of Illuminations, a volume of essays and reflections edited by Hannah Arendt:
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. (253)
Of course this passage leapt out at me, as it has for countless readers, for many reasons. Marxists of the Frankfurt school and AI prognosticators, Christian apologists and modern-day techno-charlatans alike, in all their combinations and permutations, will find in Benjamin a provocative thought partner. In my case, the drawing together of the imagery of play and theology makes for an endlessly fascinating analogy. I am a poor chess player and a slovenly scholar, but I do love to "imagine a philosophical counterpart" to games, and particularly love to wax philosophical about the ways in which their mechanics interact with their stories.
As for this particular image of "The Chess-Playing Turk," its "story is told," among other places, in a section bearing that name in Philip Pullman's little-known early novel, Galatea:
In the next room were a number of curious automata, such as the famous Chess-Playing Turk designed by the Baron Von Kempelen, which sat cross-legged at a cabinet too full of intricate machinery to conceal a person, and which had defeated the finest chess-players of its time. There was also a machine called the Temple of the Arts, consisting of an automated view of Gibraltar, with moving warships, a platoon of tiny soldiers marching up and down, and a band of mechanical musicians, playing suitable tunes. There was an orange tree which blossomed and bore perfect painted fruit in less than a minute. There was a duck which quacked, breathed, ate and drank. There was a life-size automaton fluteplayer made by Jacques de Vaucanson which, according to its label, performed so realistically that many learned men had thought that it was human. (211)
Though written in the '70s, Pullman's unsuccessful novel, with its shades of magic realism and its author's avowed admiration for the mystical quest narrative of A Voyage to Arcturus on full display, remains prescient for its surfacing of the question of the role of "the work of art in the age of mechanical [and electronic] reproduction".
Add to this the fact that the title of Benjamin's book is also that of Rimbaud's, and then of Britten's song cycle based on Rimbaud's, Illuminations, as I learned when I went looking for the searchable text on archive.org (and the search terms threw up the EarthBound player's guide, somehow, as well. As ever, EB is in good canonical company--though maybe that's just based on my own search history).
As the program notes have it:
Britten was deeply affected by the emotional intensity of these prose poems and decided to set them to music as soon as he had read them. As the soprano Sophie Wyss, the dedicatee of the cycle, recalled: “He was so full of this poetry he just could not stop talking about it, I suspect he must have seen a copy of Rimbaud’s works while he was recently staying with [W.H.] Auden in Birmingham.”
Britten chose a sentence from one of the poems as the motto for his cycle: “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”). This sentence also provides the “key” to Britten’s view of Rimbaud’s poetry: only the artist, observing the world from the outside, can hope to make sense of the “savage parade” that is life.
Having just played through the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII, with its own "savage parade" and botched assassination attempt on the Sorceress, I can well understand the impression produced by being "so full of this poetry [I] just could not stop talking about it"--podcasting about it, in my case, with my friend Alexander Schmid. But I draw the line at this notion of being alone in having the key; for it is only through our dialogues, on the contrary, that I feel like I begin to be able to process the meaning of such a densely woven text.
I certainly don't have a clue about what Rimbaud might be up to, and lovely as Britten's songs are, I doubt he is the first or the best interpreter of the poet, either in terms of music or meaning. If, as the program notes say, artists alone think themselves able to interpret the world, so much the worse for them; though we may benefit from the confidence embodied in such art as they are thereby moved to produce, it sounds like a terribly solipsistic and lonely activity. To observe the effect of such a belief in the case of Rimbaud's life, it appears to be part of what drove him to seek exile and enterprise in the desert, giving up poetry for salesmanship.
Though you never know. Lost poems may yet come to light. Or like Kierkegaard's knight of faith, perhaps Rimbaud carried the heart of his poetry with him through a superficially ordinary life of infinite resignation. My own opinion, to which I stubbornly cling with a fierce devotion, is that these knights are inside us all, hidden better than the chess-player theologian under the mechanical turk's table, and opening us like the Silenus of Socrates in The Symposium (and memorably related in Rabelais' Prologue). When the time is right, we are all "found to contain images of gods". In that light, the speaker of Rimbaud's line may well be this precious cargo, and his famous line "I is another" can be brought to bear in this connection as well. In which case I heartily agree: no one else could possibly hold the key to the "savage parade" of life.
In dusting off these reflections years later for a belated spring break post in this year of myth in games, I was actuated by another chance discovery: one of my favorite podcasts, Backlisted, just released an episode discussing What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Give it a listen! Arendt, besides editing the collection of Benjamin's essays, is the author of more than one of the 20th century's classic works of philosophy, and has bequeathed us the clearest and most cutting precis of her time: "the banality of evil"--though, as the podcast mentions, its meaning, and the work in which it is formulated, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is contested.
Last but not least, in the spirit of Dirt newsletter's weekly tab round-up, since I was recommending they look at Backlisted, too, here is a bit of what remains in my browser:
The Digital Antiquarian, recommended by Dylan Holmes, is well worth a read. Mixing up What Remains of Edith Finch (which I did watch a full playthrough of) and Dear Esther (which I didn't yet, though it's the one Dylan actually wrote about and recommended in our conversations), like "memory and desire" in April, "the cruelest month" to Eliot's speaker, perhaps, though that title by common consent is given to March here in Spokane, I finally sat down to read what he had to say about JRPGs and was captivated as much by the comments as the articles' content. Posters suggest links to a number of papers on localization, games as carriers of Japanese culture and values and cuteness, as locus of reflections on design and affect, and in a wonderful bit of synchronicity, to Beyond Role and Play, a book on LARP including a chapter that riffs on Don Quixote. There's also a FF series retrospective for the completionist.
What else? I still need to submit a proposal to this CFP, and break down and buy MJ Gallagher's book, and maybe this one on "Deep Games" by Doris Rusch, and actually read some more Arendt, including her poems--
This is the arrival:
Bread is no longer called bread
and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.
--and the rest of Kentucky Route Zero, and Dear Esther, and the use of an invented Latin-ish language in FFVIII. I should submit a question for The Bible Project on the Tao and the Exodus Way. I should write more about Philip Pullman, the wheel of fortune as game show and ancient motif, saving as economic and theological image, Christmas subsumed, the spectral in Marx and the invisible hand in Smith...
Or what about this strange constellation of Benjamin's bon mots on the theme of "backdrops":
On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. (121)
In his “Salon of 1859” Baudelaire lets the landscapes pass in review, concluding with this admission: “I long for the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion. I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that very reason much closer to the truth, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.” (191)
?
Let it be said of me, as Arendt does of Benjamin in her introductory essay: "Well, he did not succeed in consolidating anything, and success would hardly have been possible."