The Library

I often dream of working in a library.

I mean, that I am working in a library. Not that I aspire to work in a library as a job. Well, I wouldn’t mind that but it isn’t what I’m intending to say by those words. I’m saying that I often dream of working in a library, like while I’m asleep I’ll be dreaming about it. In the dream, I’m in a library and I’m supposed to be there because I work there. Typically, it’ll begin with me in the process of returning books to the stacks. I’ll be looking at a book’s backbone to decide whether it can be put on this shelf, and that’s how it begins. Dream time.

It’s happened often enough that the library dreams have kind of taken on a shared reality. I have enough memories of dream libraries that new dreams about libraries can draw from those. What confuses me about this is that I don’t understand why this started happening.

I mean, I’ve been to actual real life libraries but it isn’t as if I’ve spent all that much time in them. I’ve probably been inside of a few dozen libraries throughout the country, and these visits are often no more than a few hours long. And I’ve certainly never worked in a library. The only thing that comes close is when I was a senior in high school I volunteered at my local library to fulfill my community service hour requirement. During that time I never did typical librarian stuff. They had me ripping apart books that no one ever checked out. I was a decommissioner.

And it’s been quite a while since I’ve spent any amount of time in a library. So it’s a bit confusing why I have these constant library dreams. One possible explanation is that the library dreams started while my life was rife with libraries, but I never remembered those dreams. Then later I had dreams about those dreams, with the memories of the dreams discombobulating into new dreams, and these are the dreams I’m remembering. Of course, it’s also possible I’m just dreaming new dreams that happen to be in libraries. But why so many.

The dreams aren’t just mundane of course. As with many of my dreams, fantastic elements and horror elements will work their way in. The library will be on an alien planet, or in some fantasy universe where books are somehow magical and important. Often the dream will derail into something else entirely, as dreams often do.

But the start is usually the same. I’m in the stacks and I glance down at the book in my hand, my gaze hovering on its spine. I’m checking the title, the author, or the little number if it’s there. (Some of these libraries can be pre-Dewey apparently, or they exist in some universe where methods of organization are illogical or antilogical.) Then I either slide it onto the shelf or I don’t, and things go from there. Sometimes after doing this I see someone down the aisle from me, or someone walks by behind me. I hear their stride, the vibrations of their steps, and I turn around to see who it was. Sometimes I’m suddenly aware that the library has no roof, or it’s in the desert with the shelves just drying in the open sun. One of the books might come to life or sometimes I open a book and fall into it like Alice into a bad sequel. Sometimes I spy someone working in the next aisle and it’s me again, and it repeats.

There’s more to the beginning though, which is what I was thinking about this morning. There’s an awareness of a larger context. In that first moment, I’m at work. I’m in the library, but outside of the library there’s no wider world. The library does not exist in a city. It is everything. It is like Borges’ infinite library. Even though sometimes this will change because everything in a dream is subject to change, it always begins this way. This is an eternal, sprawling library and I am performing this tiny, mundane action in a deathly silent, slightly dusty but massive room. I am swallowed by it.

A few months ago I had one of these dreams where I stayed in the library the whole time. I became aware of the room I was in, and then I went in search of other rooms. I was pushing this cart through hallways lined with books. Everything was lit by candle and lamp. I think this was a world without electricity. You know, the books were all bound in that stately style, with the hard covers and gold inlay. My clothes weren’t modern at all. I think I had on a hood and what you might call a jerkin. Okay, so it was like that. And not only did I work in this library, I lived in it. Everyone did. Oh yeah, there were tons of other people, all living in the library and returning books to where they belonged, pushing carts down hallways lined with books. We’d sleep in the smaller rooms, but these rooms were also lined with books. There were just tons and tons of books, so many books that there wasn’t enough shelf space. Not enough shelf space, but rooms and rooms filled with shelves. Rooms with enough shelves to build a city out of, or to furnish a forest. Rooms with floors of shelves stacked higher than you could see from the bottom, and wooden staircases tacked on to the side of the shelves, and people would live their whole lives without ever returning to the bottom. They’d start families up there and generations would pass before someone from their dynasty would climb to the top of the room to return that book beginning in ‘AA’. This was an infinite, eternal library, the library of Babel. This concept is so close to my heart that I dream it again and again, in every variation. This time it was like this, with us humans living like little insects, crawling among its bones, sorting it. It was disorganized, incredibly disorganized. And at one point I found a room which gave me a clue as to why. There was a crowd gathered there, and it was immediately obvious why. In the center of a room was an impossible structure of books, a shelve-less structure. Shelve-less! That’s irresponsible, everyone knows that. You don’t form large structures without the help of the shelves. But in this room there it was, and they were many people helping to build it. Swarms of people were expanding this giant stack of books. It stretched upward higher than I could see, and it was ribbed with scaffolding that people were scaling like professional rock climbers. A system of ropes and pulleys was being used to haul carts of books towards the top. I walked closer and on my way I could saw the faces of fellow onlookers filled with awe, perhaps a religious or spiritual awe. Some were on their knees with arms outstretched in veneration. They were in worship to this giant free-standing stack of books. Everyone was invested in seeing it continue. How many books could be added? Perhaps enough to fill this enormous room, wouldn’t that be something, an entire room without shelves, filled to the brim with this innovative sculpture. A room full of rebels! I moved closer to the center, intent on finding some sort of leader for this cabal. Perhaps as a loyalist I intended to report them to the front desk. Perhaps that’s what was passing through my mind. Yet once I entered the central circle I forgot everything because I was so shocked. The leader of this insanity was none other than my good friend Fariq. He was unmistakably of Middle Eastern descent, although that really makes no sense in this world, the  world of the library. This isn’t Earth, so there is no Middle East. There’s just Fiction, Non-Fiction, Periodicals, Poetry, Appendices, Indexes, you know, the different sections. But anyway, there was Fariq with his strong sweeping gestures, directing the hell out of this living blasphemy. I was shuddering with rage, and I thought about leaving without confronting him as I knew I should. I knew it was protocol to report him straightaway but I just couldn’t. I had to look him in the eye, this “friend” of mine. He needed to know that he had cracked my heart in two, like a book spine too carelessly tossed. And so I marched directly at him with drums boiling in my brain. The worst part was that when he saw me, he smiled. He was happy to see me, and I could see he immediately wanted to share the wonder of this monstrosity with me. He wanted us to be collaborators, comrades, co-conspirators. It’s as if he never knew me, never knew who I was, how seriously I took my librarian’s oath. Then once he saw my expression I knew that he knew, and that his soul had also been ripped in two. I could see it shatter within him, and though I was angry I was also sorry to have hurt this man whom I had loved like a co-worker for so many years. I did not want to feel the rest of that pain, and so I wrapped myself in rage. I swaddled myself in a broken wail and charged full force at him. As I tackled him he hugged my head close to his chest so I could hear his contrition. I thrashed in his embrace and lifted his whole weight with my neck. Fariq! How could you! How could make light of the librarian’s oath! To always shelve responsibly and to never use a book other than as a record of, or conveyance for, ideas which may or may not be worth their weight in paper! Yet he had, and so I beat him against that pile of books with all the power that his betrayal afforded me. In my wild fury I did not sense what caused the crowd around me to gasp, but their gasp was unmistakable and in unison. Then everyone started shouting at once, some barking orders, some in warning, others with a shrill despair. Once I felt the tremors, I suddenly knew what was happening. This tower of books, this irresponsible blot upon librarity, had wobbled. Of course it had. It had no shelves for stability. As any shelver knows, according to stack physics, an acceptable stack wobble is in inverse proportion to the quotient of radius to height raised to the power of average shelf length, and here the shelves were basically as squat as your standard ruled hard cover. We would feel the reverberations first, but the entire stack was coming down. A cataclysm. It was as the receptionists had foretold. The hard rain was upon us. Many spines would split this day. I watched in slow motion as people ran from the room, tripping over each other, helping each other up. A woman reached helplessly and screamed for her child, who stood a little ways away, sobbing pitifully, obscured by the legs of the rushing crowd. Classic. I moved off of Fariq and offered him my hand. Even at this distance to the door, there was a chance that we could still make it. He had betrayed me, yes, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to die. I wanted only for him to receive the proper number of demerits. He did take my hand, but didn’t move away from the tower. He beckoned me to sit beside him. Books were pelting the floor around us but I was too emotionally exhausted to care. If Fariq had something to say for himself, I’d hear him out. As I sat down, he grabbed a piece of the tower and wiggled one of the books free. When I saw the cover I think my heart restarted. It was an index of the first shelf section we’d ever sorted together. He must have requested it and kept it close by, through all these dusty years. I was touched, but also peeved, considering it must be long overdue by now. The fine should be withheld from his pay. Still, I suppose that didn’t matter anymore. I sidled closer and we cracked it open, to give it a first and last reading, as foolishness piled up around us, fallen books from the sky, as my real self stirred in its sleep, ready to awaken, ready to be confused as to how I can feel so sad and angry and happy at once.

Baba Is You

noun verb adjective

Baba Is You

“Baba Is You” is a game, most likely the best puzzle game ever created.

When it comes to puzzle games they ideally do two things well.

1. They make you feel dumb.

2. They make you feel smart.

And they only do the first to enhance the second. Baba Is You hits both these marks repeatedly. You will often be faced with an impossible problem. By rewriting the rules of the world, you will transform that problem into a fond memory, a laughable moment. In time you learn to laugh in the face of the impossible. You marvel at your own ingenuity. This is the gift of Baba Is You.

Baba Is You descends from movement and sequencing puzzlers like Sokoban of the 1980s. It enhances this basic structure with such an ambitious twist that it tops the genre quite easily. I played this game last year. I still think about it. I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and grin and shake my head in admiration. I yearn for it to forget it so that I can play it again. It’s that good. I’m actually really nervous to write about it. I’ve been putting it off.

Puzzle games are all about rules so I’ll explain them. Each level in Baba Is You contains its own rules. If the rule “Baba Is You” exists somewhere on the level, then the Baba (a cute bunny-like creature) is you. That is, it represents you. You inhabit it. When you as the player press a direction key, the bunny will move in the corresponding direction onscreen. However, each word of this rule, “Baba”, “Is”, and “You”, are also onscreen objects with the potential to move or be moved. You use the bunny to push them around. But take care! If you sever the connection between the words then the rule will be broken and you’d no longer control the bunny’s movement. You would be Baba no longer.

There are three types of word objects in the game. “Baba” is a noun, “Is” is a verb, and “You” is an adjective. (I’m use these terms loosely. They’re near enough.) Whenever a noun-verb-adjective combination is assembled, the game enforces it across the entire screen. If there were two Babas onscreen, for example, they’d both be controlled by you.

So by pushing words around you change the very nature of reality. It’s an incredibly powerful dynamic, and the game keeps pushing it further and further. And further. It just keeps going and growing. I’ve played a lot of puzzle games and puzzle-platformers. Typically, there reaches a point in the game where the player has seen everything the game has to offer. No new tricks, just remixes and rehashes of what came before. This sometimes happens early on, even during the very first level. What impressed me most about Baba Is You is that it keeps its foot on the gas the whole way through. There are plenty of points at which it could have stopped and phoned it in. So for puzzle lovers in the audience, there’s plenty of meat here. It’s the real deal.

There’s the further hope that a puzzle game will do more than entertain, that it will actually teach you something useful, or even make you smarter. It’s very questionable idea, that games might have some positive mental impact. I think that puzzle games like this could be one of the best staging grounds for such an argument.

I am part of that generation of boys raised by video games. We know that there’s a lot of trouble we could get up to, so instead of getting up to it we can best serve society by learning the ins and outs of made-up fantasies which have no impact on reality. Yet in those mass graves of time we sometimes stumble across the occasional wedding band of useful thought-schema or gold tooth of genuine emotion. And as annoying as it is to actually learn something while trying to hold a pillow over one’s purpling life, it does indeed happen. While you’re busy trying to forget you’re a person you can get caught by something that changes you. You become someone. You learn each game like an instrument or a language, and meanwhile your friends are doing it, and meanwhile your strangers are doing it, and then suddenly you have a shared culture. You’re a part of a society, the exact thing you were hoping to avoid. It’s frustrating, I know, but it’s unavoidable.

Part of it is that these games are all designed for humans, around humans. They all tease out something hard-wired in us. Action games are calibrated to our reaction times, the rush of adrenaline we get, the coordination our spatial imagination has with our meat systems. Games of randomness exploit our sense of anticipation and the intuition we have for probabilities. We have games that cater to our need to organize, our need to progress, our need to destroy. There are even games that satisfy modern man’s need to use spreadsheets filled with data and have that actually mean something each and every half hour. The way we play will always reveal something in us.

I recall when I was studying the philosophy of language. One of the first lessons was about reference and referent. Words are labels that point towards meanings that are meant by minds that are saying words explaining why Socrates was pointedly meant to be such a son of a bitch. Bertrand Russell arm wrestles people one at a time at a corner table while Chomsky tap dances on an open casket piano. The room is sick with smoke as someone whispers into your ear something that sounds quite French. But, saily-vee, you don’t speak French, you’d only need a drink to clear your head to get a good looking out there buddy, great catch with the lime green shoes. Lick the salt off your hand and turn the page.

Page turn.

On the next page is a gung-ho review of Baba Is You. Thank god, at least that makes sense. We were just talking about that.

The noun-verb-adjective of it all is that Baba Is You doesn’t say much. It doesn’t write reviews of itself and it doesn’t claim to elucidate the nature of language or contemplate how the grammar of our native tongue influences the structure of our minds, or how a game could restructure how a mind perceives itself. And if while you are playing you have thoughts of genius, and it’s made clear to you how thought comes into being, and how words are handholds in a gossamer landscape of meaning which breathes like an ocean of rubbery telescopes, or how the universe of imagination while seemingly amorphous is actually delimited by finite sets of vocabulary and grammatical rules, or if you realize any thing of that sort, well. Please just be aware that this is simply an effect of playing the game. It’s a spell the game has cast on you. It’s an illusion. You aren’t actually realizing anything profound. You’re just having a lot of fun in a very, very cute and clever way.

You’re just a Baba in Baba Is You.

The Two Popes

Last week I decided to watch The Two Popes first thing in the morning, and that’s exactly what I did. I found myself quite moved by this movie, perhaps because there’s nothing more touching than genuine forgiveness. A movie about forgiveness that caused some real hard introspection.

The cynic in me sees this movie as nothing more than propaganda for religion, and its treatment of forgiveness nothing more than a play by the church (or church-siders) to gain the world’s forgiveness. Because I think in the mind of a non-believer like me, the harboring of sexual predators and child abusers (masked as loving shepherds) is something truly heinous and unforgivable. But even with that dark cloud elbowing into my mind, after the movie was over I sat back and had a real good long think about all the things I’d want to be forgiven for. And more generally, what a special thing it is that religious beliefs can move people to such kindness.

The nagging question whenever I see a movie like this is, how true is it? Because it certainly isn’t that true on the microscopic level. All these details are mostly flourishes of artistry, each with the immediate purpose of keeping eyeballs on the screen, and the secondary purpose of lingering in the mind, and tertiary purpose of being persuasive. I really doubt these two popes are like this. They’re certainly endlessly more complex than could be conveyed in a two hour frame. You can’t condense eighty years (x2) into two hours without losing a lot along the way.

Then we must be meant to take these two men as representative of factions within the church. Or if not factions, then aspects. Francis is everything someone like me wants the church to be. Benedict is everything I abhor. As a “liberal” non-believer I am square in the center of the target for a movie like this. I’m a mark.

There’s that familiar danger lurking here, to simply enjoy the movie. To walk away, pat myself on the back, thinking that I really got on that movie’s good side. That movie’s my friend now. We can have a reunion next year, or not, depends if I’m doing anything that weekend. But the movie will miss me if I never call. After all, I’m one of the good ones. I deserve this smile. I deserve to feel good about myself and the world. I’m something of a pope myself.

But wait.

I’m not a pope. I’m me. I don’t deserve forgiveness. Truly, I don’t.

There are things I’ve done in my life that disgust me, that fill me with deep and unshakable shame, things that cause my mind to run away from itself. And more, to turn on itself. I have self-hatred cemented into my being quite firmly, and because of this self-hatred I hurt myself over and over. When I was young this manifested sometimes physically, sometimes in behavior designed to get others to dislike me or otherwise lower my social standing. And as I evolved these became more complex or indirect. They became interwoven with other parts of my personality with varying weight. And eventually I found torturing myself to be kind of fun in a way. I would make a game of it. Give myself hope, fan the flames of a dream, let myself fall in love, and then take it all away.

Why? Because that’s what I deserve. I mean, that’s justice.

Now, some of these things I feel guilty about are so mild and tiny that most people would probably laugh or scratch their head. But I was one of those kids who never compromised. And each time I failed to meet my own standards I would throw a part of my soul into eternal flames. I would condemn myself to a lifetime of self-hatred and self-hurt. Of course, by the time I was a teenager and beyond, I would sometimes do things that were actually worth feeling guilty about. Hurting other kids’ feelings, disappointing my parents, all that stuff. So I was already punishing myself for tiny stuff, and now some heavier crimes came along. Well what else could I do but increase the punishment.

And it’d a deepening cycle, like a screw into bone. Because every time I punish myself in some way it invariably has consequences on the world and the people around me. And then I (rightfully) blame myself for this collateral damage, which adds even more moral debt to the equation. Oftentimes the whole rig takes on such gravity that it collapses in on itself, and the only human response is to act out in some absurdist fashion, to make light of the whole situation. After that episode is over, I feel even guiltier afterwards.

Unfortunately, even in recognizing some of these mechanics I can’t untangle myself from the whirlpool of my own psychological failings and immaturity. I know I should get out there as I once did and make an effort towards doing something I would be proud of. Help people. Get in front of the burning car and wave people away. Pick up trash from the side of the road and find a bin, or at the very least swallow it whole. Sometimes I do manage to, briefly. When I’m really hungry for it.

But I’m a purist at heart and a thing once tainted is wholly tainted in my eyes. So as soon as I was old enough to first recognize I’d made a mistake, once I’d learned REGRET, I was over it, over everything. I was done with life. Alright, this one’s gone to seed. Let’s wrap it up people, fellow organs, my dear chemicals and atoms. Siéntense.

So that’s me.

But yeah so I was watching this movie, and something finally clicked for me about the church. Because it’s never made sense to me why the church would protect pederasts. Or it did make sense, with my image of organized religion as a nefarious blob of evil. But it never made sense with my image of organized religion as a bunch of nice people who believe in miracles. How can you move priests around and let them do these sick things again and again? Like, why? That’s just unforgivable.

Then it hit me. Unforgivable. And I’m sorry if this is either way off or stupidly obvious, but when it comes to religion I’m as ignorant as a goat out of wedlock.

To Benedict and Francis, nothing is unforgivable. Nothing! There is no such thing. And that is absolutely mind-blowing. In the culture I’m accustomed to, there are many unforgivable acts. And as I’ve described above, I began my journey into ethics from a position where most things are unforgivable, even any slight deviation from perfection. So it’s crazy to me to imagine a mindset in which one is expected to believe such a generous truth. Nothing is unforgivable.

Or actually, it isn’t crazy to me. Because at this point in my life my outer layers, my most recent layers, are all relativism. But it’s crazy that I never connected the Pope’s religion with “nothing is unforgivable.” Those two things didn’t pair up in my brain. When I think of organized religion I think of rules on rules on rules, where many things are not allowed. You can’t be gay. You can’t say no to a priest. You can’t have dual citizenship with another god. But actually they are all allowed, all of them, but they aren’t, but even though they aren’t they’re all forgivable, if you really mean it when you say you’re sorry. Nothing puts you so deep in the hole that you can’t be helped out. God forgives you. Or at the very least, you can leave him a message and he sends you a guy to do it for him.

I think that’s cool.

In my twenties I realized that I needed to get to a place where I could forgive. And not just sometimes. Every time. Everyone. For anything. But it took me a lot of work to get there. I studied a lot of ethical theories and bit a lot of moral fingernails before I was able to put my head on that pike.

Note that I still don’t forgive myself very much at all. But other people? I am very forgiving. Verging on infinitely so. And this has been huge. I think it’s probably the healthiest task I’ve ever assigned myself. Nothing but good has come from it. I’m telling you, it will do wonders for your back, and your acne, and even the rest of your face.

Everyday American ethics has a huge hole in it. And that is what to do with people who commit unforgivable acts, aside from putting them in a hole and doing unforgivable things to them.

Let’s say I’m me and I meet a guy who has sexually assaulted someone. What am I supposed to do with that information? This is not a crazy hypothetical. This happens to lots of people all the time, and it’s definitely happened to me. Am I supposed to shun this person? Should I condemn them in my mind, punish them in some way? Should I tell everyone I know? This is a problem that’s put me through the grinder many times.

Because if I do banish this person to the dark realm, then they stay there. And the only people they meet are other people who’ve been banished to the dark realm. Even worse, they probably continue to do dark things. People don’t do dark things for no reason. Usually, there are dark reasons for doing dark things, and the longer you stay in the dark realm the more dark reasons you have. So by banishing someone to the dark realm, I might be setting off a chain reaction that leads to more dark things happening. Now, you can easily say well, it’s not my responsibility. I just don’t want to associate myself with people like that. I choose to remain in the dark about what happens in the dark realm. And that’s fine. But someone has to do it. It can’t be no one. So like with any distasteful task, one ought to do it as often as one can stomach.

I just don’t agree with imprisoning people, or ostracizing people, or even yelling at people. Maybe it’s a difference of personality, but being punished has never led me to do the right thing the next time. Only kindness has. It took me a long time to realize that.

These people that go to church? Apparently they just start from there. That’s square zero. They just sit around forgiving each other and having meaningful hugs. They get really into rabbits once a year.

This movie is about that side of things. But it is manipulative. Forgivably so.