Braid – again

An incidental post, partially written simply because I have been away enjoying the marvellous, wonderful calm of the English countryside this past week. Whilst other countries may boast more spectacular vistas, more photogenic countryside or more things to do than strap on a pair of walking boots and tramp across soil, rocks and grass, none can compare to the marvellous sense of life one gains from England. I’ll write more on it some other time, when I have consolidated my admiration into something phraseable.

Just now, I completed Braid, the marvellous little indie title that I was fawning over a few weeks ago. The ending was, I have to admit, riveting in an entirely nonsensical way. Reading through a fascinating analysis here, I’ve reinforced my ideas that Braid both demands and deserves the title of Art. To link together an entire theme into the game mechanic is a marvel: the main character is desperate to make up for past mistakes, so the game is a platformer – circumnavigating dangers – whilst rewinding time to correct mistakes you’ve made. I could not have developed something so clever and concise myself, but then again I am no games designer. I am a games writer, and am somewhat mercenary about that – I’ve been driven into games writing out of a sense of apathy about the diabolical standards of writing in almost every game ever released not made by Tim Schafer. But, again, a subject for another time.

It’s that tiredness behind the eyes.

I’m no expert in the field of human fatigue. I’m not a biologist. I don’t need to be. If we were even remotely aware of everything affecting us I reckon we’d all be a whole lot unhappier given the current state of our political climate and what has not gone beyond merely being called the ’state’ of our ecological climate. We’d all be seated in lead bunkers, wearing tinfoil hats and playing Countdown just for the sheer irony of it. Happily, we are all slightly stupider than that. Never do we appreciate how blissful ignorance is until we honest-to-God try to start understanding things. So I’m in no great hurry to understand my tiredness. I just know that it exists.

In the same way that we have different levels of light, different levels of shadows, of love, of drunkenness, of idealism, of nervousness, of cleanliness, of income, of anything, humans have to put up with different levels of tiredness. There’s concentrated tiredness, which I like to call ‘lesson’ tiredness, and anyone who has lived through any school lesson anywhere in the world will be able to empathise. It is tiredness which strikes and leaves you in what is practically a vegetative state. It creeps on all of a sudden at some point in time and leaves you gripped as though in a vice. You cannot move. You cannot speak. You can barely breathe. Your eyes are streaming. The last thing you can do is listen and make notes. If you were hooked up to a full-body monitor at that point, neither your heartbeat nor your pulse would register. You are, for all intents and purposes, Comatose. This tiredness is paralysing, and yet for some murkily unexplained reason the second you leave the lesson you are enduring or the company you are chained to all motor and cognitive functions return, amped up to 100% efficiency and willing to write the next great British novel. Look back on your day and it’s like the middle of Saving Private Ryan: breathless opening, breathless ending, and then a whole chunk of the middle which seemed to have fallen into the earth. It’s lost time and it’s non-negotiable; you can’t win that time back in a sort of quantum science game of roulette.

We also have the generic drowsiness, which is boring and therefore shall have no more space devoted to it, and we have the natural tiredness which is basically your mind telling you that your pyjamas, mattress and duvet are a remarkably good combination at this hour. For most of your life this feeling can be warded off – though never eliminated – with coffee and for some reason between the ages of 15 and 21 this emotion is ignored with increasing ease. House parties couldn’t exist without this part of your common sense blinking out and shutting down but it does keep a tab, and presents it once you’re sobered up or come down from your high or orgasmed or whatever your body does to give you a non-physical slap round the face. Personally I succumb to it much more quickly than anyone I know; I appreciate my eight hours and demand it to stay constant.

But the most pervasive, the most damning tiredness takes us right slap-bang pell-mell into the treacle-like embraces of fatigue. This isn’t something you can simply sleep away. This is something cancerous, which erodes your strength so slyly that you don’t notice. You simply wave it away as something rectified by another shot of caffeine, something light which can be ignored. ‘You’ve been working hard, a few later nights than usual, you’ll be fine soon’. Great, if that were the case. No, this tiredness dislikes you. It’s not open. What it does is wait, hiding behind more innocent colours, until you realise its presence. And when you realise its presence, it almost feels like a shame.

You first click with the classic symptom of a pressing weight behind your eyes. Not painful, not particularly uncomfortable, just something you’re aware of. And as that refuses to leave, no matter how many aspirins/caffeine pills you pop, you realise what it means. Your body is running on borrowed time. It’s now bypassed empty and pulling bits of itself apart in order to supply energy. Your mind is overworked and starting to run more and more slowly, and you begin to crave sleep earlier and earlier. I’m at the point now where I’m drowsy at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, which I’m pretty sure is against the law for anyone except night shift workers and Spaniards. But the ending problem, the facet which adds a degree of indignity, of insult to injury, is how unfeeling this corrosive, pervasive tiredness is. It’s not in direct combat with you, not seeking to ruin your best-laid plans by locking horns and simply begging to be defeated. No, this tiredness is simply here. It watches you dispassionately, like an apathetic schoolmaster to a class of children destined only to fail. It carves away at your soul and ignores any attempt to chastise or corral it into simply leaving you alone.

It leaves, and mine will leave, but it will take a few weeks, and like a heroine withdrawal it makes you feel like death warmed up just before it is exorcised. This weekend, when I can sleep as long as I want, I will feel like a zombie. Like a marionette. If someone glues strings to my arms I will be powerless to resist their directions. But that will be for but a few days, and then my body will revert to balancing itself out, just in time for October.

This month will leave its mark.

Teaching begets teaching.

In the course of this morning’s lesson an interesting point was raised in the form of a quotation. I categorise quotations as the spice of life: a witty little phrase, full of flavour, to clip into your memory and think about when you’re doing something related. I’ve got a number of Quotation Books – most of them by the wonderful Rosemarie Jarski – and I’ll do a breakdown of them at a later date. They certainly start the mind whirring.

Today’s was on the subject of teaching, which can’t be entirely unexpected. Not attributed to anyone, it said: “Ironically, the principle aim of teaching is to make teachers unnecessary.” Which I wasn’t entirely prepared to hear. Teachers, making themselves obsolete? What? And then that little cog in the back of your mind clicks into place and . . . ahh. And that’s the beauty of a good quotation.

The thing about teaching is that in being a kick start, it has to equip with more than just knowledge and direction. You don’t only teach a person to sit on a bike and move the handlebars, you have to teach them to read the road so that they can do everything without you there pointing it out. Teaching is about equipping skills, readying students for when you can’t hold their hands. Which can be any reasonable length of time – often a matter of years, but International House is better than that. One month and they’ll have people ready and willing to bump up a fluency bracket. Anyway, after a while comes the time when one can’t rely on someone to tell them. They need to learn for themselves, as a continuation of what they have already. In this way, teachers aim to remove themselves from the equation: after a while, a child doesn’t need stabilisers; after a while, they don’t need waterwings. You ease those away. While over a longer – and I would say grander - period of time, a teacher should function in much the same way. And they do – it’s no coincidence that at university you’re doing most of the studying yourself.

I’m yet to come to a conclusion as to whether this is limited to language, though. There are many ways to practise a new language once you’ve got the basics, particularly if the language is English and you live in England. Free newspapers, internet, the works. With maths, however . . . that’s not practise on the same level. It’s more reaching out. And from there you’ll need constant guidance and redirection, because sometimes things can’t be learned from a book.

Well, that’s that. Maybe I’ll do a film review next, so as to make out that this blog has some kind of credulity, or at least an aim that differentiates it somewhat from the very blogs I said I didn’t appreciate in the first post. Hm.

A metaphorical post.

Apparently I know nothing about the American school system. Well, maybe one day I’ll stumble across a reason to give a damn, but until then I can revert to simple English ignorance. And Americans don’t know what A-Levels are, anyway, so it evens out.

Today, during my as-yet-noted lengthy commute, scanning but not reading the paper I started to wonder about metaphors. I’m not entirely sure why: newspaper editors try to avoid having their staff use metaphors if the intended audience regards the Sun as elitist, so I can’t have got it from there. Possibly I was running over emails in my mind subconsciously, wondering what would be populating my inbox upon my return to a two metre-cubed area not populated by fourteen other human beings because it’s those kind of thoughts that keep me distracted during the day. Personally I put it down to simply not having used one in a while, and my brain realising it had a quota to fill.

So. Metaphors. The dictionary defines them as when something is described as actively being something else – an ironic description given that if the words ‘like’ or ‘as’ are used it is no longer a metaphor but a simile, an poetic device seemingly invented so people who were no good at poetry could at least have a stab at it. Metaphors are a different beast, however: they’re broader and therefore potentially a whole lot more obtuse. You can never really have an impenetrable simile; they can be confusing – such as if I were to describe my voice as being like a paperback book – but if a simile becomes too much to handle you just move on and ignore the rest. However, there is something ingrained into the human psyche about metaphors, in that it just won’t let them lie. It can’t bypass them. It will tie itself in knots trying to unfurl and unravel them, but it never admits defeat because that implies the prose has got the best of them. And no one likes being beaten by the words on the page. Metaphors are more fundamental then most other poetic devices – for example, you could link personification, similes and a whole host of others under the same umbrella, and it speaks volumes that something can be metaphorical but not, say, similical. However, for the purposes of this muse I’m distilling them apart.

I’ll give an example of a personal favourite metaphor which I find works extremely well once the audience has re-read it a few times. When talking about sex, and my complete lack of practical experience but considerable theoretical knowledge, I refer to the entire subject as a mountain. Sex Mountain, naturally, because I’m not very good at naming things. Basically, every virgin is at base camp, and once their escapades begin they start climbing up the mountain: reaching first base, second base, third base, and the obligatory further. Where the metaphor differs from contemporary language, however, is that ‘going all the way’ does not equal reaching the summit. If sex was a concrete act - sex, or not sex - that might well be the case, but simply losing your virginity does not result in your knowing all possible ins-and-outs of the subject (kindly pardon the pun); rather, it just reinforces how far you need to go. Therefore, scaling the summit of Sex Mountain is entirely hypothetical and will never happen, because no matter what you’ve done there will always be other avenues likely (or should I say, hopefully) blocked off by simple common restraint.

So as you clamber all over your partner, you clamber all over Sex Mountain. What I like about the metaphor is the justice it does to the subject: imagine a mountain, a vast mountain, one covered with innumerable routes and challenges, most not seeking the summit but simply an opportunity to pit your body against nature (rock climbing has given me this mentality: if a cliff face is climbable, it’s not the right one for you). Some challenge endurance, some power, some simply your mentality. Some routes are easy, some scenic, some tricky, some fairly simple but with a crux that can have you biting your own lip off in frustration. Sex is a similar neverending end of potential challenges: some challenging endurance, some power, some your mentality etc etc. Describe a particularly tricky sexual position as a standalone thing and chances are your audience will have no clue what you’re talking about. Relate it to a climbing or hiking route, however, and something just clicks.

The other aspect of it is the scenery. When one scales a mountain, their reward is a spectacular view from the peak. However, almost-as-impressive views are capable from nearly everywhere high up on the mountain. Now, virgins and those who have not progressed very far cannot claim to have seen these views – they’ve not yet climbed to a point where they are visible. However, by communicating with those who have been there and taken it in fully, they will at least recognise the view when they see it. That’s why I advocate studying the theory of sex before the practical: you’ll know when you’ve gotten there.

Ooh, I quite enjoyed that. Metaphors have the power to breathelife into things; life which would otherwise remain very definitely elsewhere.  You can mentally deconstruct an entire subject and rebuild it as one which suits you. They carry the shadow of the auteur, which is a constant worry, but it is not something to be shunned to the same extent in this situation as elsewhere; not if the metaphor is designed to be kept personal. They are personal by nature. However, if you are planning to write a metaphor so that others can understand it, either keep it simple and broad so that the audience can run with it, or for God’s sake have the decency to explain it.

Originally composed September the Eleventh, of all times.

The plan of ‘no updates until October’ has, evidently, been drop-kicked out of the window. Those wide, spacious windows situated right behind me. But it’s only natural: one reads something interesting and his brain takes the information, considers it, considers it again from a few different angles, twists a few corners and winds up with something that might come under the same semantic field and bear a slight resemblance as to content but the important parts – the tone, pace, and most essentially the conclusion – are different enough to make both pieces of writing worth consideration.

Shona deposited something rather encouraging today, in her biweekly update; the Thursday one I always read much too quickly given it has to last me five days (including the weekend, where I often sit cycling hopelessly through my bookmarks looking for something new to distract me from Microsoft Word). “Corniest post ever written” it may be, though I would change that to ‘corniest post written yet’. Knowing American teenagers means knowing that there is no well of sap left unbored, especially during a three-year college education. The reason it struck a chord is I had much the same experience, though I’m not here to whine about it: I got the worst mark in my class on my first written assignment (of four) and unfortunately did not plan my assessed lesson to anywhere near the degree expected, therefore resulting in an uncomfortable lesson which I managed to keep hold of – barely – though I suspect the fact that the theme we were working on was ‘comedy’ helped. So did youtube. I will never again say anything against the Dead Parrot Sketch.

(While I didn’t have a year-long project thrown out with the trash, in what must have been a feeling right up there with having your heart scoured with a brillo pad, my recent laptop wiping destroyed possibly the best material I had ever written, so I can empathise to some extent.)

So, my day was disappointing. But then, that is the key word: disappointment. Life throws nails under the wheels of your proverbial car with an almost gleeful frequency, but I don’t find it the way we cope with such troubles important so much as how we think of them. Anyone can deal with an issue – you simply deal with the issue – but it takes someone with more-than-common willpower to avoid letting it go to their heads. The key point of any problem, any discomfort, is not to let disappointment become despondency, which is a shame considering that that is what your body wants to happen. Bodies, by nature, are lazy things: if you do something bad the first time, your body’s natural reaction is to question one, why you did it in the first place, and two, why on earth you would ever want to do it again. Which is problematic when a resubmittion is required, preferably by the next day.

And that is the thing. Becoming despondent drowns you; it aids nobody, especially not yourself. It leads to self-pity, resentment and loneliness. (It may possible have a positive effect on the quantity of blog posts but intevitably drags their quality down, leaving said blog in a worse state overall.) It begets further despondency, because no matter what state you were immediately after the original upset, your best chance of pulling things together was then. Ff you didn’t act then, the hole you have to dig yourself out of grows ever bigger. And your despondency prevents you from climbing out of it. Sometimes something trivial which is not addressed and vaulted can have effects lasting years; I’ve seen it, though I’ve no sympathy for the people involved. And I apologise, but this is a blanket judgment: if you let despondency take over your system, it is your fault. So don’t.

I shall now redo my assignment and pass it. I shall also start putting together my next lesson plan, for next week. I shall have them done, and therefore be happy. It’s not complicated.

ETA – I have just stumbled upon this glorious opinion: “I always operate under the assumption that I’m wrong about virtually everything.” That’s got to something to consider, surely. It’ll certainly stop you from opening your mouth and firmly planting your foot in it even before you’ve addressed your audience, much less during.