Lyrics: Dance and Revel

Video

Verse 1

Let's get it ooon tonight
Never dreamed, I'd be so free to be me tonight
It's all about, the here and now
We're sooo alive

We light it up ' tonight
Liberty, and ecstacy, we buuurn so bright
Live for today, stress melts away
In flaaashing lights

Connector 1

We are on ano'ther level
All we're gonna do is dance and revel

Verse 2

We goin' haaard tonight
So let 'em stare, we'll be dancin' here wei past sunrise
We're on the floor, and we want more
Our heaaart's on fire

Give it your aaall tonight
Don't you dare hold back, let your body track what's real inside
To free your soul, give up control
It feels so right

Connector 2

Liberated from our inhibition
Celebrating life, don't need permission

Bridge

We will siiing
Don't care what we're told
If we're dancing
The stars won't go cold

And we're not scared
to show off who we are
The world's unprepared
Our party will burn out the dark

Cuz we're the staaart
Of somethin' bigger than all of us
We're glitterin', synonymous
With the joy in our hearts and this melody
And the lights and the stage and the rhythm and the beat

Poem: Maybe

Video

Maybe I'm a lodestone.
Maybe I'm powered by the lightning.
Maybe *I* guide the Wei.
Maybe if I were left as my own devices, all-Weis would face true north.
Maybe what I attract reveals me.

Wonder why my modeling career hasn't taken off yet.

Maybe it's cuz I'm an undiscovered diamond in the rough.
Or maybe I'm the rough. Maybe I'm a cow's tongue questing out for saltlick. Maybe I'm the grippy half of Velcro, seeking something soft to snag. Maybe I'm a city's asphalt skeleton. Maybe I'm coarse-grained sand supplicating skin for sanctuary. Maybe I haven't yet been ground to powder. Maybe I'm bench-pressing pestle up from mortar's bottom, and maybe the pressure's *not* too much to bear. Maybe the ones trying to stamp me out are losing.

Or maybe I'm the one who's stamping.
Maybe there's no Wei to grasp the scale of my senseless inner violence. Maybe I'm the planned extermination of a million joyful stories. Maybe I would savor a people's final choking gasp.

Maybe I'm a genocide.

Wait, no, I don't *wanna* be a genocide!
M-maybe I'm a... a sunrise, distracting everyone with pretty colors as I {exhale} blow out the stars.

Maybe I'm a poet.
No, that definitely not right.
I'm more like a toddler's dirty underwear, soiled because the child using me didn't know how to express themself and I just so happened to be the pair their parents paired them with that morning.
Maybe it'll come out in the wash.

Maybe I should drink more water.

Maybe I'm a urinary catheter sucking piss out from the universe, but
Maybe that piss is hatred.

Maybe I tilt the karmic wheel towards kindness. Maybe there's a beatific Brahmin biding by my shadow. Maybe the aforementioned lightning was divinity's crackling hand, flaring me out to glory.

Or maybe I'm not quite there yet. Maybe I'm the distance between those fingertips on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the fool in every Buddhist fable, the space between the Surahs.

Maybe that's a disappointment.

Maybe music's *not* the space between the notes.
Maybe I'm diving for pearls of wisdom in Nietzsche's famed abyss.
Maybe I'm drowned by my own pretension.
Maybe I'm on the fast-track out to pasture, maybe I'm Uranium-235, maybe I'm that glow you get post-orgasm, maybe I'm cesium keeping time.
Maybe I'm atlatl after atom-bomb, an anachronistic hymn. Maybe I should watch The Royal Tenebaums. Maybe all I all I all I do is win.

Maybe I should steal other people's art and pass it off as my own.

Maybe I already have.

The Sword and the Axe

The invader slashed at Iben with vicious certitude. Iben raised his axe to block.

The axe had been lovingly crafted by Iben's great-grandmother Neref one hundred and two years ago. Its handle boasted an arm-and-a-half's length of shadestone ebony, rare wood prized for its durability and beauty. Neref had felled the tree herself, then treated the wood with precious minerals to amplify its resilience while reducing its weight. Intricate calligraphy wreathed the black haft, chronicling the artisanal skill rich in Iben's ancestry. The result was an implement light as balsa and hard as steel, capable of cutting through a mighty trunk as smoothly as a tailor's shears might glide through paper.

The invader's sword had been forged by a novice coppersmith over four thousand years ago. Its edge bore myriad ugly notches, and those millennia of oxidation had corroded the weapon's outer layer. The result was a sickly blue-green patina deformed by ashen bumps and ridges.

But the invaders' archaeologists* had discovered, laboring in their abominable museums**, that this blade had been shaped for war, and that made all the difference.

* This word can equally mean "engineer".

** Equally "weapons research facility".

The invaders' records of the ancient war had been barren, nothing more than a few strange hieroglyphs scratched on shattered pottery. But years ago, a translation breakthrough revealed a piecemeal story: the sword's coppersmith was from an aggressive empire that had conquered an impressively-large peninsula. Its design carried no trace of passion or beauty -- its sole intent was to subjugate through violence.

It was no surprise to the invader, then, when her sword chopped through Iben's axe handle like a butcher's cleaver through fatty tissue, sundering the ebony with ease. Its momentum barely halted; it continued on through Iben's leather pauldron (made ten years ago to commemorate a memorable hunt -- it enhanced Iben's storytelling, but offered no protection), then his clavicle, biting wickedly though ribcage and lung and spinal column, finally emerging just above the hip. Iben's dying scream squelched out as a choked gurgle.

Iben's daughter Remsa, eight days away and oblivious to the carnage, was busy carving out the handle of a specialty chisel. She felt her hands go clumsy.

Iben's ally Hopet lunged at the invader in wild ambush, spear-point flashing in the sun. But the invader's soft leather boots had been plundered from a centuries-old dancing culture, so it was trivial for the swordswoman to twirl away from the attack, dodging with balletic grace. Abovewater, Hopet's fishing-spear thrust hopelessly slow and missed by a full arm's length. Before Hopet could recover, turquoise-grey copper sliced again, parting head from shoulders.

The invader loosed a guttural shout, half-battlecry, half-chuckle. The ceremonial belt around her waist -- delicate gold with conch-shell buckle, wrought for a long-dead clan's doomherald -- amplified the sound, anointed it with the imperious grip of fear. Wisps of nightmare slithered out from the subconscious minds of the invader's enemies, paralyzing the remaining ten midstride. Another shout, and a ramshackle assortment of bows, daggers, and handsaws clattered to the ground.

Before the invader could exult in victory, her eye caught on Iben's axe. She strode over to it, picked it up, admired its elegance and lightness. A shame it had been damaged -- but no matter, the archaelogists would restore some of its functionality.

"This," she said, waving the axe in front of another tribesman's frozen rictus, ignorant of the language barrier between them. "How old is it? What is it for?"

-----

Story Notes

The inspiration for this short story came from someone I met in a writing group yesterday. Her story takes place in a world where items become more powerful the more they're used for their intended purpose. I absolutely loved the idea!

Nihilist Philosophy in Concorditor Humilia

There is no sound in the world uglier than music.

I would sooner submit to the squealing of a starving infant, the shriek of stone on glass, the squelching of a warrior's intestines than submit my ear to song. No auditory experience is as grotesque, passion-killing, or debased. Yet these plain facts elude us, for our lives are *drenched* in song, from the moment we are born (always crying) to the moment we die (surrounded by others who are crying, if we are lucky). We are immersed in the abomination so we cannot see it, wanderers blinded by a killing-fog.

The most common ontology of music frames it as a "contract". This is pure delusion. A contract is, by definition, an agreement. There is *mutual understanding* in a contract, an *intent* to be bound by terms. Even the most exploitative, labyrinthine contracts nonetheless exist in *some* enforceable space, are *in theory* intelligible.

Music bears no such features. Music is more like *begging*. The first measure of a song is the first measure of an anguished, raving entreaty, a desperate plea for the universe to loosen its grip on our neck, just a little. And though the grip might relax ever so slightly, it never comes close to relief.

So the choir's plight is *worse* than helpless supplication. For the beggar, no matter how destitute, is at least in relationship with another human being when they beg. But the universe is no human. The universe feels no emotion, experiences no beauty, harbors no mercy. The nature of the universe is *evil*, incapable of consideration or intent, much less mutual understanding. From the incessant Firestarting Canon to the vomit-inducing Grappler's Canticle, every chord rings out with desperation. Let us not forget the act of song -- which some have the gall to call "art" -- originated as a means to violence.

Then there is the *act itself*. No act is more soul-crushing and less creative than making music. Music is, at its heart, *repetition*: harmony borne from the same rote spacing, melodies reaped from the same abysmal harvest of frequencies, that infinitesimally small subset again and again and again -- to say nothing of music's underlying *structure*. Measure and time signature are jail cell and prison, with the (aptly-named) key locked inside, preventing all escape.

Endless, monotonous repetition is in music's *bones*. Composition tries to rearrange these bones into something lifelike, but it's as hopeless as breathing life into a skeleton. And what do we *get* after shuffling these identical puzzle pieces around for the millionth time? What awaits us when our throats are raw, lungs gasping? What is our reward for participating in this looping nightmare? We get to wake and do it all again on the morrow.

I say, no thank you. I reject song, reject music. If choir is necessary for our survival, then I proudly choose annihilation. At least, down that path, I'll find *peace* for my aesthetic faculties, my body, and my dignity.

--------

This is philosophy written from the point of view of a nihilist in the world of Concorditor Humilia, which is a game of Microscope I played with a couple friends. The premise of the Microscope game was pretty fun: we'd hit the RANDOM button on TvTropes a bunch of times, and build the resulting chaos into a serious fantasy world.

We got Headlock of Dominance, Finger Poke of Doom, Killer Game Master, and Ominous Latin Chanting, so we envisioned a world where choirs empowered martial artists to duel each other. Two competing traditions, the Grapplers and Strikers (or Headlockers and Finger Pokers), had a bitter rivalry. The universe was an inhospitable, brutal place to live (a Killer Game Master), and could only be persuaded to relax its viciousness by song (Ominous Latin Chanting). Consequently, survival necessitated membership in a choir. I wondered how it might feel to hate that.

Movie Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

In this sermon, an antisemitic, ignorant pastor who calls himself Brother Sean rants about why God hates video games. He used to be a gamer, but he quit a long time ago: "It was vain. It was stupid. It was a bunch of flashing lights."*

*Later, the pastor says has has a DVD player, which is better than a video game console because he can use it to watch YouTube. This is confusing for many reasons.

"Flashing lights" is a throughline Brother Sean returns to in the sermon, a two-word phrase that in his mind illustrates the idiocy of video gaming with the irrefutable force of a mathematical axiom. "That's what [video games] are," he says, "A bunch of flashing lights." And again, in fiery conclusion: "... it's a bunch of stupid, vain stuff. It's flashing lights on screens."

After I finished watching the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once, I started reading its reviews. I'm happy I did, because reviewers found some wonderful turns of phrase to express the essence of that movie. I've seen the word "maximalist" a few times, which is indisputable. (I mean, it's right there in the title.) New York Times writer A. O. Scott came up with the delightful sequence "exuberant swirl of genre anarchy." Consequence's Clint Worthington wrote about its "dadaist absurdism and blink-if-you-miss-it pace." For The Guadian, Mark Kermode submitted "madcap invention and frenzied visual wit." IGN's Rafael Motamayor had the four adjectives "bizarre, gross, heartfelt, and honest" for us, while the Critics' Consensus section on Rotten Tomatoes describes it as "an expertly calibrated assault on the senses."

Don't get me wrong, I like all those words. They do a wonderful job of describing this movie. But for me, the core of Everything Everywhere All at Once is best captured in sermon. Everything Everywhere is a bunch of flashing lights. It's vain. It's stupid. It's flashing lights on screens. But here's something lost in Brother Sean's sanctimonious haste: flashing lights on screens are also some of the most compelling things humans have ever produced. For me, Everything Everywhere was a particular sequence of flashing lights that gripped me like few things I've ever seen.*

*Other notable titles: La vita è bella, Wolf Children, Homecoming King.

Early in the movie, a woman named Joy tries to communicate her sexuality to her senescent grandfather in awkward, mangled Chinese. Not knowing the word for "girlfriend", she falls short. Her mom Evelyn steps in and, unable to get past homophobic Chinese mores, fails to stand up for her own daughter. Joy is infuriated by her mom's betrayal and storms away, even though Joy can't say the words herself.

This is just one example of the how film uses language to highlight its characters' complex emotional lives. Another is the meticulously-crafted chaos of Evelyn's dialogue. She bounces from English to Mandarin to Cantonese -- often mid-sentence -- with effortless, rapid-fire pace. These transitions are highly intentional, but they don't sound engineered. They rang with an authenticity that brought me right back to my parents' living room.

A full movie later, Evelyn has gone through a hero's journey. She has deep insight into every possible facet of experience, which conveniently helps her work out her problems. It's no surprise when, at the film's climax, with every reason to abandon her mediocre life and broken family, with the full weight of existential despair on her shoulders, Evelyn chooses love and connection. And as she redeems herself in front of Joy, finally telling her father (Joy's grandfather) the truth, Joy does not forgive her.

"I'm tired," Joy says. "I don't want to hurt anymore and for some reason when I'm with you, it just hurts the both of us." Joy just wants to go, to be left alone. And Evelyn says, "Okay."

I was no longer watching Joy in that moment. I was her, and I've been her countless times before. I've lost track of how many times I've wanted to tell my parents I don't care how or even if they're bettering themselves. How I don't want to hear any more apologies or rationalizations. How I can't forget the suffering they caused. I want to tell them I'm tired, and being around them hurts the both of us, and I just want to be left alone.

But at the same time, I want to tell them I forgive them, even if I'm not sure I do. I understand how their upbringing shaped their choices, and I'm not bitter about the resulting harm. I'm doing beyond well on my own. I'm past healing, into thriving. I'll never fully understand them, they'll never fully understand me, and that's fine. I know they did the best they could. How could I hold that against them? 

More than wanting to say any of this, I want acceptance. I want to hear my parents say, "Okay." That's why seeing Evelyn do so was so cathartic. It was my life and more, all rendered in magnificent flashing lights.

Sadly, this is also where Everything Everywhere All at Once disappointed me. Because in the aftermath of Joy's rejection, Evelyn gives a second heartfelt speech about love and connection, and Joy relents. She collapses into her mother's arms in a tearful hug, and the painfully honest bittersweetness of the scene is drowned out in a saccharine deluge of total reconciliation.

However badly my parents might want reconciliation, I do not. I don't want grand speeches collapsing into tearful hugs. I want acceptance and understanding, but I also want to move on. Sometimes, happy endings are not compatible. By contriving them to align so tidily, Everything Everywhere becomes less real, regressing back into the generic universe of every other feel-good action movie. This is especially frustrating because Everything Everywhere has a whole multiverse at its disposal. There was such rich potential to tell a multitude of stories, and having them all end on such high notes killed that potential. If the endings had spanned the full spectrum of human experience -- if there had been a soaringly joyful one, an absurdly silly one, a mature bittersweet one, a deeply tragic one, and a mysteriously ambiguous one -- if there had been everything everywhere all at once -- I would have been a lot happier.

Hollywood's inability to divorce itself from less-than-perfect endings hurt the film again in the story of Evelyn's failing marriage. After decades of emotional neglect, her husband Waymond files for separation. I was excited at the potential here. It was a chance to fight back against the false notion -- especially prevalent among Chinese-Americans I know -- that divorce is the worst thing that can happen in a marriage, so disastrous as to be unthinkable. I don't buy that. Far worse is trapping yourselves and your children in a toxic, loveless union defined by daily routines of blame and abuse. I was looking forward to a story about how divorce, though undoubtedly tragic, can also be liberating and virtuous -- a mature way to move forward and start fresh. Instead, after a few intense hours culminating in a single grand moment, the spark between Evelyn and Waymond rekindles and she enjoys total romantic renewal. In real life, I don't see single grand moments undoing decades of strife and neglect. Which is weird, because I see it all the time in flashing lights.

Part of me sees the happy endings of Everything Everywhere All at Once as inevitable. It's a movie about Evelyn gazing into an incomprehensible multiverse, with all the vanity and stupidity that entails,* and nonetheless finding Joy, triumphantly emerging with an even stronger claim to hope and purpose. The movie's character arcs and themes demand these happy endings.

*One sequence of flashing lights features a supervillain laying the smackdown on security guards with two giant dildos, and that's not even the weirdest thing to happen in that scene.

But Everything Everywhere is not just a movie about triumph over existential dread. It's also a movie about being a first-generation Asian-American immigrant. It's about the vast linguistic, cultural, and generational barriers that alienate those immigrants from their children. So I couldn't help but feel like it's about me. 

It isn't, of course. Even though it's so close to my heart I could jury-rig it into a Pacemaker, Everything Everywhere All at Once is not about me. Sometimes, people do want total reconciliation. Sometimes, happy endings are compatible. Sometimes, when we gaze into the incomprehensible universe, we find joy gazing back. Especially when we're gazing at a bunch of flashing lights.

Here's a rare accomplishment these flashing lights can claim: By the time I'd spent 140 minutes with them, I identified with them so strongly that any divergence from my own lived experience felt wrong. They made me forget that the unique bittersweetness of my own life story isn't the only flavor out there. Vanity was in the theater, just not all on the screen.

It would be easy for me to decry Brother Sean's vitriol as vain and stupid. So I will. Almost everything in that set of flashing lights is beyond vain, beyond stupid. He raves about how Jews own Activision and Bill "population control" Gates wants to murder babies. Truly deplorable stuff. But as much as I hate to admit it, there were rare moments in his sermon when I found myself nodding in agreement. One was when he denounced the military "going into countries and killing people," how they indoctrinate soldiers to devalue human life. Violent video games aren't how they're doing that, but I support his antiwar sentiment nonetheless.

 

More relevant to his point, I have spent too much time playing video games. Brother Sean cites Titus 2:7, exhorting his congregation to "in all things [show] thyself a pattern of good works." I also strive to in all things show myself a pattern of good works, and video games have been an obstacle. The flashing lights can be so captivating they entice me to neglect my responsibilities, or sacrifice longer-term fulfillment at their altar.

I don't mention the specks of truth in Brother Sean's incoherent screed because I think we should take it easy on his ideas. They deserve every bit of condemnation we can muster. But when I think about how truth survives even in that rambling wasteland, I realize something interesting. While Brother Sean's sermon captured the soul of Everything Everywhere All at Once for me, the same also happened in reverse. When we gaze into the multiverse -- when we lose ourselves in that infinite, meaningless blur of flashing lights -- nihilism feels more than tempting. But he who fights monsters should take care lest he thereby see everything as monstrous. And if you gaze for long into the abyss, love and meaning also gaze back into you.

The tragedy of Deroy

Video

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So I'm playing this tabletop roleplaying game right now, this collaborative storytelling game called City of Mist and it's absolutely amazing. It's incredible. The characters and the plot are compelling and rich and I wanted to share just a small piece of that with you today just to give you a taste of the story that's being told. Now there's going to be massive spoilers here, so if you don't want that you can check out the podcast, it's in the video description below.

All right. So, I was talking to one of the players, let's call him Jon Doe. I was talking to Jon about the gap between individuals and large-scale power structures. Because the characters in the game right now -- there's six players, each with their own character -- the problems they're dealing with are large-scale problems. There's this horrible gang that dominates their neighborhood and it has a ton of control, and it does drug trafficking and corrupts politicians and it's killed people. And there's also this huge corporation that started out as something pure but got twisted over time into something cold and uncaring and vicious.

One of the most recent things that happened was the team went out to take out some of this corporation's surveillance drones and the corporation found out and dispatched these security forces and the security started gunning down an innocent bystander. And for me, those security forces were a microcosm of the story of this corporation because the corporation started as a business intended to empower artists and support the dreams of individuals. But as it grew and grew and grew the importance of the individual got left behind, and that's why these security forces are so scary, is because they don't care about individuals. They're only there to defend the corporation's interests. They didn't care that the guy they were shooting at wasn't involved, they were just following orders.

So we have these massive, formidable institutions. These institutions are the villains. And I like that, because we see stories -- and especially RPG stories -- about the heroes fighting a single big bad evil guy all the time, and a power structure as a villain is scarier, it's amorphous and domineering, and I like the nuance there. But I was talking to Jon about how it seemed like a really difficult story to tell. Because individuals can't change massive societal power structures on their own. We can't do it alone, this is something I really believe is that the only way to overcome harmful power structures in real life is by organizing and large-scale collective action. And that kind of runs counter to the core fantasy of role-playing games, because in a role-playing game you play as a single character, an individual, a hero who does have the ability to enact grand scale change. The whole story is about how the actions of these individuals change the world.

So that kind of seemed like a contradiction to me. On one hand, I have this idea that you need large-scale collective action to solve large-scale collective problems, but on the other hand you have the fantasy that these six individuals are gonna change the world. And so I presented this to Jon and Jon said no, that's not a fantasy at all. Actually, individuals can do an enormous amount to change the world, and the false belief that they can't is precisely how these toxic power structures maintain their grip on society and propagate. Even large-scale collective action is based on the choices of individuals. And he said individuals actually have a lot of advantages over large systems, because individuals have better communication, it's much easier to coordinate logistically, they're faster and more agile. The more people you have in an organization the more it bogs down under its own weight, and you need more management and there's more miscommunication. And he said maybe our team of six can use that to our advantage. And I said that's very interesting, but there's a big problem. There's a big, gaping hole in that plan. And that's this: one of the power structures the team is fighting is a huge gang. It's called the Ouranios gang. And two of the characters on the six-person team are also in the Ouranios gang. In fact, they are directly connected to the people at the very top of the Ouranios gang. So you don't have that advantage of communication at all, because the leadership of the Ouranios gang has a direct line into the heart of your team. And the storyline of those two team members who are in the gang, their names are Kaz and Agave, is a storyline of abuse and manipulation. They're being controlled in toxic ways by the leaders at the top of the Ouranios gang, and a big question in the story is if they're going to be able to make it out of that horrible situation or if they're going to stay trapped and keep suffering and cause suffering. The redemption of Kaz and Agave are the key to this whole thing. And then I said it seemed like you and the other people on the team are working on that, you're working on bringing Kaz and Agave out of their toxic relationships and giving them a positive support network, and then you won't have spies in your own camp and you'll be able to take advantage of all that stuff you were talking about before. And Jon said yeah, I was doing that. I was doing that before. With Deroy.

And that was heart-wrenching for me. It was so brutal, and to understand why you have to understand the story of Deroy. Deroy is a character based on the Hindu god Shiva, the Destroyer. Deroy is cool because he can annihilate anything. He can just clap his hands and make anything disappear, just vanish. Gone. And it's not just physical objects he can make disappear, he can also destroy metaphysical concepts, like ignorance, or the linearity of time. And he can also choose what breaks, so he's indestructible. When Jon first pitched this character to me he just pitched me this image of Deroy getting slashed across the face with a machete and the machete is shattering into a thousand pieces while Deroy takes no damage, and I was like that's badass, that's awesome. So you might be thinking, Deroy sounds totally overpowered! How is that fair? He's completely indestructible and he can destroy anything, including metaphysical concepts. He is the avatar of destruction incarnate. But here's the problem: he can't make anything. He has no originality, no creativity. When he tries to paint, he can only produce the most bland, generic paintings. When he tries to drum, he can only produce the most boring, basic beats. And he's got this childhood friend called Eddie who's a prodigy! Eddie's this genius musician whose music is so good it moves his environment and Deroy always feels inferior to him. And eventually Deroy runs away from home because he just can't bear living in Eddie's shadow anymore, and he sees how Eddie is doing everything on his own and Deroy wants to do that too, but he can't, he can't make or build or create, he's cursed to be the avatar of destruction. So he runs away from home, he abandons his support network and tries to do it all on his own and meanwhile Eddie is deeply embedded in his community, and Eddie is supporting others and receiving support, so Deroy's whole notion that Eddie was doing it on his own was misguided. And Deroy just goes more and more downhill and he's blaming himself for all of it.

And this is where we get to the climax of the story. Picture this. The team is facing off against a major villain and they think the villain has won. They think the major villain has killed a whole crowd of people. And Deroy sees this, and he blames himself. And he wants to completely erase that villain from existence, not just destroy her, but make it so she never even existed at all. He wants to turn back time and wipe out every trace of her from reality. But he knows it's gonna come at a cost. This is a destruction of such magnitude that the only way he can do it is if he sacrifices himself and leaves the story. That's the price he has to pay. And he pays it. Because he falsely thinks he's the only can fix this.

And here's where to Kaz and Agave. Remember, Kaz and Agave are the key to this whole thing. They're the reason will never be able to win against the Ouranios gang. And Deroy was one of the few people who knew about the toxic situation Kaz and Agave were in. He had done all this work investigating them, learning about how they were being controlled and manipulated and when he sacrificed himself, all of that was lost. In trying to redeem himself he destroyed a crucial piece of the support network those two needed so badly. And that's the tragedy of Deroy.

A review of some reviews (of some reviews, on occasion)

Video

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"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain", by Jorge Luis Borges, is a short story in the form of four reviews of four books that don't exist. So what you're reading right now is a review of a review. Actually, Borges sometimes reviews reviews in the story, so this is also a review of a review of a review. And if you were to review this blog post, that would be a review of a... well, you get it.

These reviews are incredibly fun to read. The reviewer describes the four nonexistent books with such vivid, skillful prose that you can't help but want to read them. One's prologue "evokes the inverse world of Bradley in which death precedes birth, the scar the wound, and the wound the blow"; another is "highly diverse, but also retrospective." But the reviewer is not full of effusive praise: in the first, he notes "the vain and frigid pomp of certain descriptions of the sea", and of the last he simultaneously lauds and laments "a good plot, deliberately frustrated by the author".

Borges' deep knowledge and mastery of his craft is on full display here, and he gets to employ those skills in ways both literal and literary: he's telling you about deficiencies in prose at the same time he's demonstrating his aplomb with prose. He's evaluating intricate plot constructions even as he's enveloping you in one. It's mesmerizing to read a great writer's thoughts on writing for the same reason it's mesmerizing to watch to a master chef showing how to prepare a gourmet meal, or hear a painter's breakdown of a blending technique. Mastery is an enigma, and these moments allow us to glimpse it -- but only glimpse, because the talent and effort required for this kind of mastery means most of us will never touch it directly.

Now, if that were the end of the premise, that would already be a great short story. You'd be forgiven for thinking Borges was merely great, but in fact, what he manages to achieve in "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" is even more subtle and ingenius. Because after I'd finished reading the story -- while I was sitting there, missing the nonexistence of these four nonexistent works by a nonexistent author, wishing I had the opportunity to have these literary experiences, I realized I had just had them. Even as Borges enthralls the reader with descriptions of amazing, labyrinthine journeys of the imagination, he's secretly taking the reader on those very journeys. And all in just four pages.*

*There is a breathtaking elegance of language here -- Borges really is the God of the Labyrinth. Indeed, while writing this review, I was afraid it would be longer than the story itself. I abated these concerns by leaving a lot of stuff out.

The first non-book by the titular Quain, The God of the Labyrinth, is a murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie. The mystery is first difficult, eventually resolved: "An indecipherable assassination takes place... a solution takes place in the end." But after the solution, there's another sentence in the book, a sentence which causes the reader to realize that "the solution is erroneous. The unquiet reader rereads the pertinent chapters and discovers another solution, the true one. The reader of this singular book is thus forcibly more discerning than the detective."

This plot is a secret mirror of my experience reading "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain". I initially thought it was going to be some fun book reviews, premises Borges never got to realize. It's only after I read the last sentence that I realized what Borges was doing was not so simple. In other words, my original conception of the story was erroneous. Thus unquieted, I reread the the pertinent chapters and discovered another solution, the true one: that Borges actually did realize all his premises, and he did so in the very story I had just read. My second reading was thus forcibly more discerning than my second. My review of my experience was, in a way, more real than the experience itself.

The final sentence of "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" reveals the unnamed reviewer of Herbert Quain's work is none other than Borges. Apparently, reading Quain is what inspired Borges to write his story "The Circular Ruins". But this characterization is a total lie, because Quain isn't real. Borges made him up for this story. Plus, "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" was written after "The Circular Ruins", so the timeline doesn't even line up. Hence, in the real world, "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" possesses a retrograde chronology.

This chronology is precisely captured in the second book reviewed, April March. The title is already indicative of the backwards perspective. Borges writes, "In judging this novel, no one would fail to discover that it is a game; it is only fair to remember that the author never considered it anything else." One wonders which author Borges is referring to.

April March is tells a story with a "regressive and ramified" history, in which each subsequent chapter takes place earlier than the previous one. The events happen over three eves, all very different, further subdivided into three chapters, also very different: "the temper of one of these novels is symbolic; that of another, psychological; another, communist; of still another, anti-communist; and so on." But Borges tells us "Quain regretted the ternary order, and predicted that whoever would imitate him would choose a binary arrangement": two parts divided into two parts, resulting in four distinct stories.

The resulting structure is the exact structure of "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain": four distinct stories, all very different, in binary arrangement. Two parts divided into two parts. This division is further elaborated on in the third story, The Secret Mirror, a play that follows a droll and fantastical aristocracy. "We suspect" the main character "does not cultivate literature", but at the same time, the first act contains "vast fortunes and ancient blood", "a nightingale on a night", "a secret duel on a terrace."

In the second act of the play, things get weirder: "everything becomes slightly horrible, everything is postponed or frustrated." And "the characters of the first act appear in the second -- bearing other names." This is the second part of the play, but also the second part of "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," in the structure Quain wanted his successor to use: two parts divided into two parts, the second half a bizarre reflection of the first.

That's not the end of the parallels: because Quain is Borges' fictional inspiration, he also functions as a secret mirror to Borges, a weird, distorted reflection of what Borges is himself, or an appearance of Borges -- bearing another name. Quain titled his works after labyrinths and mirrors, recurring symbols in Borges' oeuvre. Quain wrote a collection of eight stories in his book Statements, as did Borges in his book Fictions. This casts all of Borges' assessment of Quain in a new light: "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" is no longer an author writing about another (fictional) author, but a real, semi-autobiographical self-reflection, coyly rendered as third-person critique. As an example, Borges' initial chastisement of Quain (he's "over-anxious to astonish") becomes less of a straightforward attack and more of a sly apology.

It's all the more fitting, then, that this collection of reviews is not only a collection of reviews. It's also a sort of eulogy, written in the wake of the fictional Quain's death. The author is "not astonished to find that the Times Literary Supplement allots [Quain] scarcely half a column of necrological piety," and makes up for that by writing "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain". Borges is both literally and literarily burying and celebrating his fictional reflection simultaneously.

Here, we get to the core of what makes "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" so great. In one sense, Quain and his works are fake -- pure confabulations invented by Borges to tell a story. But in a deeper sense, the stories of Quain are very much real. Not only did we just read about them, we experienced -- both literally and literarily -- the narrative arcs essential to each of them. Borges wasn't simply crafting fictions, he was also making history. And as Borges writes of Quain, "in his mind, there was no discipline inferior to history."

When we remember stories, we don't remember every word of them. We remember the broad strokes, the feelings they inspired, the concepts and premises they espoused. In that sense, our memories of what a story was are more real to us than what the story actually is. In the same way, by taking us through the essential qualities of Quain's not-real works in multiple ways, Borges makes them more real to us than they would be if we'd merely read them -- not to mention how "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" is indisputably a real short story, a concrete piece of literary history. So as Borges dreams these stories into life, we have to ask: who is the reflection? Borges, or Quain?

In Borges' final review of Quain's Statements, he says "one of the stories -- not the best -- insinuates two arguments. The reader, led astray by vanity, thinks he has invented them." This is an inversion of the arc of The God of the Labyrinth, wherein the reader does come to a solution superior to the one presented by the detective. But the statement about vanity distorts our understanding of that initial review retrospectively: were we "forcibly more discerning than the detective?" Or had we been "led astray by vanity" even then? Which do we believe, and which is the reflection?

You're about to finish reading my review of Borges' short story, "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain". Between the story and the review, which of them feels more real to you? And is it the reflection?**

** As I was editing -- reviewing -- this post, I realized its final form was both (a) more true to what I wanted to say, and (b) a mere reflection of the initial ideas I had before I wrote it. But maybe I'm overanalyzing here. Maybe I, like Quain, am "over-anxious to astonish."