There is a reason that strange people or every political stripe, even quite far left, tend towards a strong sense of individuality and somewhat combative politics.
If your thoughts and opinions, more than that, if the nature of yout mind and soul is close to the mean. If when you walk into a room you are more than likely to meet someone like you, then to exist in a consensus-based political system is to be empowered.
Since your thoughts and emotions are already very close to the average of your group, then as a political or social consensus is formed around you, you lose very little of your selfhood, you are not forced to compress, explain, argue for, disavow, hide or surrender many of your views or moral intuitions. Instead you are invisibly empowered by a vast and growing chorus of voices that all seem to echo your own self. Your certainty and confidence grows and your inner self grows more and more like that of the group.
If, however, your selfhood exists outside the mean, if you are unlike other people, then a consensual system is hell. It is like being confronted with a huge and growing alien mass. The connections between you and the rest of society, probably already tenuous, run through intermediate people. Those who are a little like you and a little like the general mass. They exist in a kind of penumbra around a cultures central nodes of being, like lightning conductors, they link the very odd people living at extremes to the cultural core.
As consensus grows, those people start to disappear. A small number will be ejected and spray out into the social oort cloud, but most will be sucked in, make themselves more and more like the general mass and find (somewhat uncomfortable) places in the societal core. As they disappear those of us left spinning in the outer cloud loose our connection to the whole, becoming more alone.
So a consensual system designed to bring people together can, on some people, have exactly the opposite effect, isolating and freezing them in social space. A system made, with the best of intentions, to be warm, welcoming and reassuring, is to those outside it, cold, self-annihilating and frightening.
A highly individualist and combative system, though apparently more aggressive, and possibly containing more emotional or cultural strife in total, can, by comparison, be more pleasant and freeing.
The difficulties and pressures of navigating social difference are already 'built-in' to the outsider perspective since they would have to to that anyway. Since everyone is expected to argue with and explain themselves to everyone else all the time, and crucially, since difference is *assumed*, then the pre-existing difference of the outsider shows up less strongly and offends less when it is encountered.
This is a problem if you judge the moral worth of a society by the level of conflict within it. The horror of physical violence is one of the few things that everybody in a diverse system can agree on as a core value. Because it's something we all agree on, it becomes a moral centerpiece for arguments over right and wrong and a key currency in the trade offs we make between freedom and control. In almost all circumstances 'might-lead-to-violence' = 'bad'.
This becomes very complex when the moral prohibition over violent conflict seeps over into a prohibition over conflict in general. Often for pretty good reasons.
It leads to a strange paradox in which often quite-vulnerable people who have meaningful reason to fear cruelty, violence and alienation, and who generally really do not want to see anyone get hurt at all, can reasonably find themselves defending a rougher, less compassionate, more individualist social matrix, because though it is harsh, its rule ends at the borders of their flesh and will probably allow them to be the strange being they are inside without interference.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 October 2015
Saturday, 25 July 2015
Arthurian problems
I have been reading Malory's 'Le Morte D'Arthur' and thinking about 'Arthurian' style D&D.
I think a lot of things about this. It goes around inside my head. I think it would be really hard. The reasons I think it would be hard are kind-of-conservative reasons that possibly no one else reading this blog would care about.
They are about the power of the story being driven by particular kinds of concepts and structures and how deeply those structures conflict with the things that drive and allow a modern D&D-like to work.
RELIGION -
Strangely, this isn't the biggest problem, Malory's knights are always swearing by god and to god but in most cases you could swap out the gods and it wouldn’t make much difference.
There need to be hermits, these guys pop up everywhere, nunneries, monasteries, old churches, etc dotted around the countryside, but the actual nature of the religion they follow doesn't seem to matter much except perhaps as it relates to 'gentleness' as a virtue knights should have.
And the whole thing starts of in a kind-of not-that-Christian space. Merlin is possibly a cambion of some kind, many of the origin myths have Celtic roots in part, religion isn't central at the beginning
When it really kicks in is in the Grail Quest. The Grail Quest is all about the soul and specifically the soul as seen by Christianity. Pretty much every fucking thing that happens to every knight is an often-interesting but eventually frustrating metaphor for something or other. Some of these encounters happen in dreams and some in real life but the quality and nature of the encounters interpenetrate so that dreams and life interweave, which is quite interesting in itself.
(I really don't like this bit as the main hero Galahad is basically a personality-free vessel for divine sanction and god seems to play the role of dick G.M.
"Ah, in your dream you saw seven white crows and three black crows and the seven crows fed upon the poppy fields and grew fat and the three white starved and the seven were the seven sins and the poppies were the souls of the faithful and the three black was the holy trinity and so you see that your soul is hard with sin and you shall never find the grail."
"Wait, I was meant to *help* the black crows? But, in the last vision, black was bad, because you said the herd of black cattle were the pagan sinners of the east, and white was good, because you said the twelve goats were the apostles, and there was shit all I could do there either, I just had to watch the cows kill the goats. So how the fuck am I supposed to make sense of this shit?"
"Put on this hair shirt.")
So the good things about the Grail Quest are the strangeness and beauty of the individual visions and adventures and also the interpenetration of dream and reality. And also the Devil turns up and he’s a hot chick and that is always good.
But if you are not questing for the actual holy grail, the real one from Christian myth, if it’s the holy cup of Pelor or something, it gets a bit more dull.
And if you take out the Grail Quest in total then it gets a bit ore dull again, because that part of the story essentially ends the fellowship of the round table in full, exposes the spiritual weakness of the world Arthur has built and ushers things towards their tragic conclusion.
RACE -
Another surprisingly not-that-bad difference.
There are a handful of possibly-not-white knights in the Morte. Sir Palomydes is right there, along with his brothers. There are maybe one or two in the source legends.
We have no fucking idea how medieval people thought about race and that might be because they didn't much. My best guess is that the number of different coloured people in that world was low enough that you are either going on pilgrimage, in which case you meet a very large number of non-white people and are essentially moving through their culture, or you meet maybe one or two individuals over your life, in which case, every other thing about feudal society is more important than what colour they are. Are they a priest? Are they Christian? Do they have soft hands? Can they write? Are they on a horse with a sword?
If the bishop is black and he's the only black guy you've ever seen, what matters is that he is the bishop rather than that he is black.
...........
The exact racial makeup of medieval Europe is a culture war issue now. To boil it down we have the 'Why' side and the 'Why Not' side.
Why should we jam more black people in our history when there is really not much clear evidence that they were there?
Why shouldn't there be more brown people in European history? Since we know there were *some*, there *could be* and probably were more?
I will leave you to argue that one out amongst yourselves. Have fun. Endless fun.
...........
But if you want to introduce non-white people to Arthurian myth you have them there already in the form of Saracen knights. You have, in the Morte, Arthur taking over the Roman Empire at the beginning and vague mentions of people from all over the eastern Mediterranean. You have the likely, or possible historical existence of Ethiopian Chivalric groups and you only need to bend things a bit to get them in.
If you want anyone from further afield then you might run into problems of 'feel' and justification. And if you have the 'Drizzit' group where EVERYONE wants to play the Saracen Knight then you run again into the conflict between freedom of choice and the feel of the story.
The argument over the feel of stories and their racial makeup is a deep and complex one, especially with stories meant to carry the feel of the ancient past. It's one I won't get into here too deeply as my own thoughts are unformed and un-honed. It’s the ‘why no black hobbits’ question which I kind of briefly made fun of in a previous post but is actually kind of complex and fraught.
GENDER -
Gender, to me, is the most powerful element stopping Arthurian myth from being easily gameable.
Highly ritualised and extremely specific gender roles are written so deeply into the structure of the world that to abandon or change them would alter the motive power beneath peoples actions so much that they wouldn’t make anything like sense in the same way.
..........
Then Sir Trystram remembered himself that Sir Palomydes was unarmed, and of so noble a name that Sir Palomydes had, and also the noble name that himself had. Then he made a restraint of his anger; and so he went unto Sir Palomydes a soft pace and said;
"Sir Palomydes I have heard your complaint, and of your treason that you have owed me long, and wit you well, therefore you shall die. And if it were not for shame of knighthood, you should not escape my hands, for now I know well you have awaited me with treason - and therefore" said Trystram, "tell me how you will aquit you."
"Sir I shall aquit me this: as for Queen Beal Isode, you shall know that I love her above all other ladies in this world; and well I know it shall befall by me as for her love as befel on the noble kniigh Sir Kayhydyus, that died for the love of La Beal Isode. And now Sir Trystram, I will that you know that I have loved La Beal Isode many a long day and she has been the cause of my honour - or else I had been the most simplest knight in the world, for by her and becasue of her, I have won the honour that I have. For when I remembered me of my Queen Isode, I won the honour wherever I came, for the most part; and yet I had never reward nor bounty from her days of my life - and yet I have been her knight long regardless. And therefore Sir Trystram, as for any death I dread not, for I had as rather die as live and if I were armed as you are, I should lightly do battle with you."
"Sir, well have you uttered your treason," said Sir Trystram.
"Sir, I have done you no treason," said Sir Palomydes, "for love is free for all men; and though I have loved your lady, she is my lady as well as yours. How, be it that I have wrong - if any wrong be, for you rejoice her and have your desire of her, and so had I never, nor never am likely to have - and yet shall I love her to the utterost days of my life as well as you."
.........
There are things knights do and there are things ladies do. Everyone in Malory spends a lot of time worrying about their gender norms. Maintaining the correct image of yourself, not in the minds of others, but most centrally, in your own mind, is of overpowering importance. If the structure and the image cracks, you do too. When confronted with irresolvable conflicts in their own iron rules, knights go mad and women are decapitated and burnt.
Sometimes in Malory it seems that the genders appear to each other as strange spirits, not quite real, projecting from some other realm. The Lady in the Lake is this feeling personified, but the effect that women like Guenivere and La Beal Isode, and in a different direction, Morgan La Fay, have on men is either directly magical or so emotionally overpowering that it is virtually magical.
We don't get to see things from the women’s perspective in Malory, (somewhere there is, or will be, a Malory Ortberg Toast article called ‘Terrible Things Happening To Women In Arthurian Fiction’), but if we could, men would appear as strange spirits too. Violent, dangerous, clad in iron, appearing out of the mists, dealing out death and strange troubles, focuses of obsession and desire for power, greatly wanted, greatly feared.
We are each others monsters in this story. It works really well.
And this is insanely unfair and the opposite of anything you would want to put into a game. It keeps women locked in place and stops them interacting with things. It means they can't do violence. And like every game with actual sexism and actual racism, the players have to suffer it and the DM has to create it. And that's not fun. Especially over a long period of time.
There are ways around it, but they only work in part.
Damsels go on quests sometimes, and help knights. Damsels are often vectors of quests. They still never use violence and are rarely the subjects of deliberate lethal violence.
There is also the story-pattern of the woman disguised as a knight.
There is also the Brienne of Tarth 'I am one of a tiny handful of women warriors' thing.
So far as I can see, the evidence for women fighting in medieval Europe is pretty similar in scope to that regarding race. There is just enough for us to question the prevailing attitude that it could never happen but not enough for us to strongly replace it with a different well-proven paradigm. The culture-war sides break down pretty much as they do with race. 'Why' and 'Why not'.
So again there are ways out of the gender trap, if you consider it a trap at all, but the more you use them the more the strange, bonkers, psychologically fraught energy of Arthurian myth leaks out.
Religion and Women and spiritual weirdness come together in this very cool part of the Grail Quest.
.....
Then he went up into the rock and foud the lion which always bore him fellowship, and he stroked him upon the back and had great joy of him. By that Sir Percivale has bide there till midday, he saw a ship come sailing in the sea as all the wind of the world had driven it; and so it landed under that rock. And when Sir Percivale saw this, he hyghed him thither and found the ship covered with silk more blacker than any berry; and therein was a gentlewoman of great beauty, and she was clothes richly - there might be none better.
..
"Sir," said she, "I dwelled with the greatest man of the world, and he made me so fair and so clear that there was none like me. And of that great beauty I had little pride, more than I ought to have had; also I said a word that pleased him not. And then he would suffer me to be no longer in his company, and so he drove me from my heritage and disinherited me for ever - and he had never pity of me, nor of my council, nor of my court. And since then, sir knight, it has befallen me to be so overthrown, and all mine; yet I have deprived him of some of his men and made them to become my men, for they ask never nothing of me but I give them that and much more. Thus I and my servants war against him night and day; therefore I know no good knight nor good man but I get him on my side, and I may. And for that I know that you are a good knight, I beseech you to help me - and for you be a fellow of the Round table, therefore you ought not to fail no gentlewoman that is disinherited if they sought of you help."
......
Having the devil wander around as a random encounter with a sexy woman in a black ship is almost irresistible. Its exactly what I would want to put into a game. But you can only have it if you have weird christian religion and weird gender norms and ships being supernatural all in the same background. If you shift the emphasis of any of those things it wouldn't work as well.
LOVE -
As a kind of side-order to freaky gender-norms there is in Malory the enormous power of desire, but more, of romantic love.
Both of the Super-Powered ultra-knights in the story, Trystram and Lancelot, are powered by overwhelming and consuming love for other mens wives. This is considered to be generally a good thing about them. It make them better, the emotional power of love is almost translated into physical power.
We saw above with Sir Palomydes that even second-tier knights can end up transformed by love into something more. He thinks his love is responsible for his martial success and the text generally agrees with him.
The whole story of Arthur begins and ends with sex and desire. Uther for Igrane, Arthurs bastard son, Lancelot and Guinevere’s love that breaks the court in two. It creates and it destroys.
Love is hard to do in games, especially in OSR games that try to maximise player-freedom. Love limits freedom, chivalric love is essentially a one or two-person religion, once you are in you are IN. That's it. No more freedom for you. No more setting your own aims and goals.
In D&D terms it’s like changing class. You go from whatever you were before, Knight, Queen, Enchantress or whatever, to the class of Lover. It’s massively overpowered with some game-breaking abilities but you can never change again and you only level up by doing stuff for or with your opposing number.
NARRATIVE -
It’s a story with a beginning, middle and end. And it ends in death. If you keep the story you lose freedom, if you maximise freedom you lose invisible story-energy. Other people have written at length about jamming RPGs and fixed narrative together. They have probably done so better than I can here.
OTHER CRAP
The rules that knights live by, exactly when and why you joust, what it means to knock someone off their horse, when you do or don't fight on foot, how honour works, how tournaments work e.t.c, are actually all really gameable. They are literally rules that you can literally write down and make explicit so they fit very neatly into the structure of a game.
In fact it’s kind of creepy how neatly the rules of chivalry fit into the rule structure of RPG's, almost as if they were devised by the same kind of mind.
The dumb rules the story needs to work, knights never recognise each other, there is always a friendly hermit or monastery nearby, ships mean spiritual stuff is going down, damsels arriving with missions, dwarfs in the background, the quantum squires whore a clearly sometimes there to help with all the complex jousting stuff but also clearly gone some of the time, all of that crap fits neatly into the structure of a game.
NIGHTMARE VISION
Let’s look at a nightmare vision of what could happen to an Arthurian RPG game if you were totally fair to everyone.
Firstly, it isn't really a nightmare, it’s just very different. Secondly, this would never happen since almost no group would ever do all of these things, but by mashing them together I can make a crude, William-Buckley-esque sort of point. Thirdly, it’s composed of nothing but good feelings, honest intentions, respect for everyone involved and a genuine desire for them all to have fun
So, first everyone wants to be a cool outsider so they all play a Saracen Knight, one guy is Ethiopian, another wanted to play a T'ang Dynasty poet-knight because its sort of about the same period and maybe could almost have happened, maybe there was a shipwreck or something. There is one guy who wants to play a white guy but he's actually Muslim in real life and you freak out a bit about having his character do explicitly Christian stuff so you remove most of the more explicitly Christian elements.
Half your gaming group are girls, half the girls want to play their gender and half the boys want to play the opposite gender. Your only transsexual friend wants to play Lancelot.
So you have a group of Middle-Eastern, African and Asian characters wandering around pseudo-medieval england, half the knights are women disguised as men, there are three warrior women in a world where there might have been none ever, some of the Enchantresses sometimes try to clout a bad guy on the back of the head and one has taken to wielding a glaive. No-one is sure what religion they are but they keep having visions of vaguely religious things and deciding they are important before forgetting them. They are after the grail of something-or-other. All of the NPC's are programmed for standard Arthurian society but get used to your group of weirdoes surprisingly quickly because it gets tiring having a hermit go "but thou are a Womaaann." They get bored easily and half of them forget their feudal oaths, the other half forget their eternal loves, but it seems like they are having fun, they turn up every week.
It’s actually a pretty fun D&D game, or possibly a good night on the town. It's just not a very good Arthurian game.
If you want to start making it 'Arthurian', you need to start taking freedom away from players. And those freedoms are racial, sexual, religious and personal. They are exactly the freedoms that modern gaming is, if not built *on*, then at least built *around*.
.........
In a less blathery way, Malory and modern D&D are driven by different dreams. They are both dreams of harmonious order.
Malory was an imprisoned low-level knight living in a time of political and physical chaos, his dream is a deep dream centred in an imagined past. It’s a dream of peace and tragic loss where knights are what they should be, not what they are, and where love is a super-power.
The modern west is, for most people, quite physically peaceful. Socially it’s in tumult. Gender norms and sexual norms are changing as fast as they ever have. It’s more racially and religiously mixed than it has ever been. Everyone is either upset about Islam, upset about people being upset about Islam, upset about the whole situation or all three at once.
The modern D&D-alike often feels more as if it’s in a kind of post-everything future rather than the past. Instead of there being once central feudal authority, there is usually a kind of pleasurable chaos that lets everyone do what they want without much consequence. Instead of almost everyone being the same colour and religion, everyone is different, everyone is a unique race/species/gender combination and everyone is utterly equal and generally regarded so in the imagined society, with about as much race or species hated as an episode of US TV, enough to overcome in about 42 minutes plus ads. Instead of all the violent people being men and all the women being trapped in castles, physical power and the assumption of physical force is shared equally between the genders. Instead of everyone being the same religion, except for one guy who eventually converts, it’s vaguely pantheistic most of the time.
This is also a kind of dream of order. It’s the harmonious order of the concert rather than the order of the hammer. It is society, in some sense, as many of us would wish it to be.
They are two dreams that don’t mix well.
But, since I have looked at the problems, I should try to look as possible solutions and see what could be done to translate Arthur or move his mood and feeling into D&D without losing so much that it becomes pointless. I suspect that the best possibility might be a total transformation. But I have been at this essay for a while and that will need some extra thinking so I will have to leave it to a later post.
I think a lot of things about this. It goes around inside my head. I think it would be really hard. The reasons I think it would be hard are kind-of-conservative reasons that possibly no one else reading this blog would care about.
They are about the power of the story being driven by particular kinds of concepts and structures and how deeply those structures conflict with the things that drive and allow a modern D&D-like to work.
RELIGION -
Strangely, this isn't the biggest problem, Malory's knights are always swearing by god and to god but in most cases you could swap out the gods and it wouldn’t make much difference.
There need to be hermits, these guys pop up everywhere, nunneries, monasteries, old churches, etc dotted around the countryside, but the actual nature of the religion they follow doesn't seem to matter much except perhaps as it relates to 'gentleness' as a virtue knights should have.
And the whole thing starts of in a kind-of not-that-Christian space. Merlin is possibly a cambion of some kind, many of the origin myths have Celtic roots in part, religion isn't central at the beginning
When it really kicks in is in the Grail Quest. The Grail Quest is all about the soul and specifically the soul as seen by Christianity. Pretty much every fucking thing that happens to every knight is an often-interesting but eventually frustrating metaphor for something or other. Some of these encounters happen in dreams and some in real life but the quality and nature of the encounters interpenetrate so that dreams and life interweave, which is quite interesting in itself.
(I really don't like this bit as the main hero Galahad is basically a personality-free vessel for divine sanction and god seems to play the role of dick G.M.
"Ah, in your dream you saw seven white crows and three black crows and the seven crows fed upon the poppy fields and grew fat and the three white starved and the seven were the seven sins and the poppies were the souls of the faithful and the three black was the holy trinity and so you see that your soul is hard with sin and you shall never find the grail."
"Wait, I was meant to *help* the black crows? But, in the last vision, black was bad, because you said the herd of black cattle were the pagan sinners of the east, and white was good, because you said the twelve goats were the apostles, and there was shit all I could do there either, I just had to watch the cows kill the goats. So how the fuck am I supposed to make sense of this shit?"
"Put on this hair shirt.")
So the good things about the Grail Quest are the strangeness and beauty of the individual visions and adventures and also the interpenetration of dream and reality. And also the Devil turns up and he’s a hot chick and that is always good.
But if you are not questing for the actual holy grail, the real one from Christian myth, if it’s the holy cup of Pelor or something, it gets a bit more dull.
And if you take out the Grail Quest in total then it gets a bit ore dull again, because that part of the story essentially ends the fellowship of the round table in full, exposes the spiritual weakness of the world Arthur has built and ushers things towards their tragic conclusion.
RACE -
Another surprisingly not-that-bad difference.
There are a handful of possibly-not-white knights in the Morte. Sir Palomydes is right there, along with his brothers. There are maybe one or two in the source legends.
We have no fucking idea how medieval people thought about race and that might be because they didn't much. My best guess is that the number of different coloured people in that world was low enough that you are either going on pilgrimage, in which case you meet a very large number of non-white people and are essentially moving through their culture, or you meet maybe one or two individuals over your life, in which case, every other thing about feudal society is more important than what colour they are. Are they a priest? Are they Christian? Do they have soft hands? Can they write? Are they on a horse with a sword?
If the bishop is black and he's the only black guy you've ever seen, what matters is that he is the bishop rather than that he is black.
...........
The exact racial makeup of medieval Europe is a culture war issue now. To boil it down we have the 'Why' side and the 'Why Not' side.
Why should we jam more black people in our history when there is really not much clear evidence that they were there?
Why shouldn't there be more brown people in European history? Since we know there were *some*, there *could be* and probably were more?
I will leave you to argue that one out amongst yourselves. Have fun. Endless fun.
...........
But if you want to introduce non-white people to Arthurian myth you have them there already in the form of Saracen knights. You have, in the Morte, Arthur taking over the Roman Empire at the beginning and vague mentions of people from all over the eastern Mediterranean. You have the likely, or possible historical existence of Ethiopian Chivalric groups and you only need to bend things a bit to get them in.
If you want anyone from further afield then you might run into problems of 'feel' and justification. And if you have the 'Drizzit' group where EVERYONE wants to play the Saracen Knight then you run again into the conflict between freedom of choice and the feel of the story.
The argument over the feel of stories and their racial makeup is a deep and complex one, especially with stories meant to carry the feel of the ancient past. It's one I won't get into here too deeply as my own thoughts are unformed and un-honed. It’s the ‘why no black hobbits’ question which I kind of briefly made fun of in a previous post but is actually kind of complex and fraught.
GENDER -
Gender, to me, is the most powerful element stopping Arthurian myth from being easily gameable.
Highly ritualised and extremely specific gender roles are written so deeply into the structure of the world that to abandon or change them would alter the motive power beneath peoples actions so much that they wouldn’t make anything like sense in the same way.
..........
Then Sir Trystram remembered himself that Sir Palomydes was unarmed, and of so noble a name that Sir Palomydes had, and also the noble name that himself had. Then he made a restraint of his anger; and so he went unto Sir Palomydes a soft pace and said;
"Sir Palomydes I have heard your complaint, and of your treason that you have owed me long, and wit you well, therefore you shall die. And if it were not for shame of knighthood, you should not escape my hands, for now I know well you have awaited me with treason - and therefore" said Trystram, "tell me how you will aquit you."
"Sir I shall aquit me this: as for Queen Beal Isode, you shall know that I love her above all other ladies in this world; and well I know it shall befall by me as for her love as befel on the noble kniigh Sir Kayhydyus, that died for the love of La Beal Isode. And now Sir Trystram, I will that you know that I have loved La Beal Isode many a long day and she has been the cause of my honour - or else I had been the most simplest knight in the world, for by her and becasue of her, I have won the honour that I have. For when I remembered me of my Queen Isode, I won the honour wherever I came, for the most part; and yet I had never reward nor bounty from her days of my life - and yet I have been her knight long regardless. And therefore Sir Trystram, as for any death I dread not, for I had as rather die as live and if I were armed as you are, I should lightly do battle with you."
"Sir, well have you uttered your treason," said Sir Trystram.
"Sir, I have done you no treason," said Sir Palomydes, "for love is free for all men; and though I have loved your lady, she is my lady as well as yours. How, be it that I have wrong - if any wrong be, for you rejoice her and have your desire of her, and so had I never, nor never am likely to have - and yet shall I love her to the utterost days of my life as well as you."
.........
There are things knights do and there are things ladies do. Everyone in Malory spends a lot of time worrying about their gender norms. Maintaining the correct image of yourself, not in the minds of others, but most centrally, in your own mind, is of overpowering importance. If the structure and the image cracks, you do too. When confronted with irresolvable conflicts in their own iron rules, knights go mad and women are decapitated and burnt.
Sometimes in Malory it seems that the genders appear to each other as strange spirits, not quite real, projecting from some other realm. The Lady in the Lake is this feeling personified, but the effect that women like Guenivere and La Beal Isode, and in a different direction, Morgan La Fay, have on men is either directly magical or so emotionally overpowering that it is virtually magical.
We don't get to see things from the women’s perspective in Malory, (somewhere there is, or will be, a Malory Ortberg Toast article called ‘Terrible Things Happening To Women In Arthurian Fiction’), but if we could, men would appear as strange spirits too. Violent, dangerous, clad in iron, appearing out of the mists, dealing out death and strange troubles, focuses of obsession and desire for power, greatly wanted, greatly feared.
We are each others monsters in this story. It works really well.
And this is insanely unfair and the opposite of anything you would want to put into a game. It keeps women locked in place and stops them interacting with things. It means they can't do violence. And like every game with actual sexism and actual racism, the players have to suffer it and the DM has to create it. And that's not fun. Especially over a long period of time.
There are ways around it, but they only work in part.
Damsels go on quests sometimes, and help knights. Damsels are often vectors of quests. They still never use violence and are rarely the subjects of deliberate lethal violence.
There is also the story-pattern of the woman disguised as a knight.
There is also the Brienne of Tarth 'I am one of a tiny handful of women warriors' thing.
So far as I can see, the evidence for women fighting in medieval Europe is pretty similar in scope to that regarding race. There is just enough for us to question the prevailing attitude that it could never happen but not enough for us to strongly replace it with a different well-proven paradigm. The culture-war sides break down pretty much as they do with race. 'Why' and 'Why not'.
So again there are ways out of the gender trap, if you consider it a trap at all, but the more you use them the more the strange, bonkers, psychologically fraught energy of Arthurian myth leaks out.
Religion and Women and spiritual weirdness come together in this very cool part of the Grail Quest.
.....
Then he went up into the rock and foud the lion which always bore him fellowship, and he stroked him upon the back and had great joy of him. By that Sir Percivale has bide there till midday, he saw a ship come sailing in the sea as all the wind of the world had driven it; and so it landed under that rock. And when Sir Percivale saw this, he hyghed him thither and found the ship covered with silk more blacker than any berry; and therein was a gentlewoman of great beauty, and she was clothes richly - there might be none better.
..
"Sir," said she, "I dwelled with the greatest man of the world, and he made me so fair and so clear that there was none like me. And of that great beauty I had little pride, more than I ought to have had; also I said a word that pleased him not. And then he would suffer me to be no longer in his company, and so he drove me from my heritage and disinherited me for ever - and he had never pity of me, nor of my council, nor of my court. And since then, sir knight, it has befallen me to be so overthrown, and all mine; yet I have deprived him of some of his men and made them to become my men, for they ask never nothing of me but I give them that and much more. Thus I and my servants war against him night and day; therefore I know no good knight nor good man but I get him on my side, and I may. And for that I know that you are a good knight, I beseech you to help me - and for you be a fellow of the Round table, therefore you ought not to fail no gentlewoman that is disinherited if they sought of you help."
......
Having the devil wander around as a random encounter with a sexy woman in a black ship is almost irresistible. Its exactly what I would want to put into a game. But you can only have it if you have weird christian religion and weird gender norms and ships being supernatural all in the same background. If you shift the emphasis of any of those things it wouldn't work as well.
LOVE -
As a kind of side-order to freaky gender-norms there is in Malory the enormous power of desire, but more, of romantic love.
Both of the Super-Powered ultra-knights in the story, Trystram and Lancelot, are powered by overwhelming and consuming love for other mens wives. This is considered to be generally a good thing about them. It make them better, the emotional power of love is almost translated into physical power.
We saw above with Sir Palomydes that even second-tier knights can end up transformed by love into something more. He thinks his love is responsible for his martial success and the text generally agrees with him.
The whole story of Arthur begins and ends with sex and desire. Uther for Igrane, Arthurs bastard son, Lancelot and Guinevere’s love that breaks the court in two. It creates and it destroys.
Love is hard to do in games, especially in OSR games that try to maximise player-freedom. Love limits freedom, chivalric love is essentially a one or two-person religion, once you are in you are IN. That's it. No more freedom for you. No more setting your own aims and goals.
In D&D terms it’s like changing class. You go from whatever you were before, Knight, Queen, Enchantress or whatever, to the class of Lover. It’s massively overpowered with some game-breaking abilities but you can never change again and you only level up by doing stuff for or with your opposing number.
NARRATIVE -
It’s a story with a beginning, middle and end. And it ends in death. If you keep the story you lose freedom, if you maximise freedom you lose invisible story-energy. Other people have written at length about jamming RPGs and fixed narrative together. They have probably done so better than I can here.
OTHER CRAP
The rules that knights live by, exactly when and why you joust, what it means to knock someone off their horse, when you do or don't fight on foot, how honour works, how tournaments work e.t.c, are actually all really gameable. They are literally rules that you can literally write down and make explicit so they fit very neatly into the structure of a game.
In fact it’s kind of creepy how neatly the rules of chivalry fit into the rule structure of RPG's, almost as if they were devised by the same kind of mind.
The dumb rules the story needs to work, knights never recognise each other, there is always a friendly hermit or monastery nearby, ships mean spiritual stuff is going down, damsels arriving with missions, dwarfs in the background, the quantum squires whore a clearly sometimes there to help with all the complex jousting stuff but also clearly gone some of the time, all of that crap fits neatly into the structure of a game.
NIGHTMARE VISION
Let’s look at a nightmare vision of what could happen to an Arthurian RPG game if you were totally fair to everyone.
Firstly, it isn't really a nightmare, it’s just very different. Secondly, this would never happen since almost no group would ever do all of these things, but by mashing them together I can make a crude, William-Buckley-esque sort of point. Thirdly, it’s composed of nothing but good feelings, honest intentions, respect for everyone involved and a genuine desire for them all to have fun
So, first everyone wants to be a cool outsider so they all play a Saracen Knight, one guy is Ethiopian, another wanted to play a T'ang Dynasty poet-knight because its sort of about the same period and maybe could almost have happened, maybe there was a shipwreck or something. There is one guy who wants to play a white guy but he's actually Muslim in real life and you freak out a bit about having his character do explicitly Christian stuff so you remove most of the more explicitly Christian elements.
Half your gaming group are girls, half the girls want to play their gender and half the boys want to play the opposite gender. Your only transsexual friend wants to play Lancelot.
So you have a group of Middle-Eastern, African and Asian characters wandering around pseudo-medieval england, half the knights are women disguised as men, there are three warrior women in a world where there might have been none ever, some of the Enchantresses sometimes try to clout a bad guy on the back of the head and one has taken to wielding a glaive. No-one is sure what religion they are but they keep having visions of vaguely religious things and deciding they are important before forgetting them. They are after the grail of something-or-other. All of the NPC's are programmed for standard Arthurian society but get used to your group of weirdoes surprisingly quickly because it gets tiring having a hermit go "but thou are a Womaaann." They get bored easily and half of them forget their feudal oaths, the other half forget their eternal loves, but it seems like they are having fun, they turn up every week.
It’s actually a pretty fun D&D game, or possibly a good night on the town. It's just not a very good Arthurian game.
If you want to start making it 'Arthurian', you need to start taking freedom away from players. And those freedoms are racial, sexual, religious and personal. They are exactly the freedoms that modern gaming is, if not built *on*, then at least built *around*.
.........
In a less blathery way, Malory and modern D&D are driven by different dreams. They are both dreams of harmonious order.
Malory was an imprisoned low-level knight living in a time of political and physical chaos, his dream is a deep dream centred in an imagined past. It’s a dream of peace and tragic loss where knights are what they should be, not what they are, and where love is a super-power.
The modern west is, for most people, quite physically peaceful. Socially it’s in tumult. Gender norms and sexual norms are changing as fast as they ever have. It’s more racially and religiously mixed than it has ever been. Everyone is either upset about Islam, upset about people being upset about Islam, upset about the whole situation or all three at once.
The modern D&D-alike often feels more as if it’s in a kind of post-everything future rather than the past. Instead of there being once central feudal authority, there is usually a kind of pleasurable chaos that lets everyone do what they want without much consequence. Instead of almost everyone being the same colour and religion, everyone is different, everyone is a unique race/species/gender combination and everyone is utterly equal and generally regarded so in the imagined society, with about as much race or species hated as an episode of US TV, enough to overcome in about 42 minutes plus ads. Instead of all the violent people being men and all the women being trapped in castles, physical power and the assumption of physical force is shared equally between the genders. Instead of everyone being the same religion, except for one guy who eventually converts, it’s vaguely pantheistic most of the time.
This is also a kind of dream of order. It’s the harmonious order of the concert rather than the order of the hammer. It is society, in some sense, as many of us would wish it to be.
They are two dreams that don’t mix well.
But, since I have looked at the problems, I should try to look as possible solutions and see what could be done to translate Arthur or move his mood and feeling into D&D without losing so much that it becomes pointless. I suspect that the best possibility might be a total transformation. But I have been at this essay for a while and that will need some extra thinking so I will have to leave it to a later post.
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
The Shadow Archipelago
(Note: I use the word 'Civilisation' a lot in this post. I use it to mean '(often relatively) densely populated society dominated by urban centres' and only that.)
In his book 'The Art Of Not Being Governed' James C Scott talks about the uplands of South East Asia.
To cut a very complex argument down (also because I haven't finished it), his theory is an attempt to turn on its head the standard narrative of civilisation in which centres of agricultural power gradually expand, drawing to themselves various people with the strength of their highly organised society, before reaching the hills and mountains where they find dispersed ancient peoples, relics of a past age from before civilisation, people made hardy, uncivilised but independent and freedom-loving by the mountains in which they live.
In Scotts re-telling of this story Civilised centers essentially bully captive or near-captive populations into doing what they want. They fill flat valley-areas with grain-based agriculture, not because it is more efficient but because it locks people in place and makes them easier to control.
Then various peoples decide they want nothing at all to do with Civilisation and, as this is before the modern era and civilisations find it very hard to project force in highly complex mountainous terrain they bugger off to the mountains and build societies defined by the fact that they are very hard to centrally control.
So, in this version, the mountains don't make people independent, independent people go to the mountains. Mountain agriculture isn't necessarily that much less efficient than plains agriculture, its methods are chosen for political and semi-political reasons. To make the people who use it harder to find, harder to count and harder to control. And there is an economic relationship between the mountains the valley even if they are politically separate. And the mountains aren't full of ancient peoples, some of them may be ancient, but some may be quite recent indeed.
And, this is the part where it gets very interesting for me, even their forms of social-remembering may be specifically arranged to make them harder for the state to make use of. He mentions that all the societies he talks about have legends about how they could once write and had a written tongue, and in many cases that writing was stolen from them.
Oral cultures are more plastic, more personal and, crucially, are hard to reveal to strangers unless you specifically decide to.
This lead me to think of the nature of memory and of what civilisation does.
We live inside a kind of global Mnemarchy. Oral cultures are pretty good and you can do a lot with them but there is a hard limit to the amount of information they can carry. Civilisations are the guardians of deep-memory-in-detail. What we know, we know of densely-organised peoples, the history of distributed peoples is generally lost to us.
Again, oral cultures can carry something a long way into time but in terms of the amount of information they can carry, the level of detail they can carry and the distance into time they can carry it, writing, inscription and the products of civilisation win out.
So anyone who talks about history in the modern world is pretty much talking about the written history of civilisation. When we see any other kind of history we see it through the written history of civilisation. Like my buying 'The Art Of Not Being Governed', a book about distributed oral cultures, written on paper, by a guy employed by a university, produced en-masse, bought on the internet and distributed through a highly structured logistics network. It's a very civilised thing.
This is where it gets D&Dable.
To D&D something, or genre-fy it generally, we can take an effect, or something which is primarily an effect, turn it into a cause and then spin the dials on it.
Let’s accept Scotts argument about memory, in fact lets over-accept it and assume its the most important thing. People go to the hills and build societies where they carefully half-sabotage their own cultural memories, oralising what was written, embodying what was disembodied, turning record into behaviours and what can be read by anyone into something that can only be understood by a few, to make themselves hard to understand or control by the Civilised valley.
So the Valley Civililisation becomes the guardian of a certain kind of 'national memory' a structure for arranging and understanding knowledge of the world and making an identity of it.
What about the *opposite effect*.
Some people try to avoid the Valley Civilisation by going to the hills and making their memories shorter, more personal, more plastic. What if there was an opposite place, a place opposite to the hills where people went, maybe because, like the hill people, they wanted to, or maybe because they were forced to, or simply it was a natural progression of their nature.
These groups might not be driven by the expansion of the Valley Civilisation but perhaps separated when it goes through its periodic (but almost inevitable) contractions.
And in this place, rather than changing their own memories to make them more plastic, more personal, more embodied, less comprehensible to outsiders, they went the opposite way, they built huge icy labyrinths of total memory in which they lived. Absolute memories. Memories that could not be contradicted. Memories that could not actually be lived with comfortably in the Valley Civilisation.
And where is this place they might go? Well it has to be the opposite of the Mountains and in South East Asia, that is the Sea. The sea is wring because it’s actually very easy to travel by water instead of in the mountains, and maybe there isn’t an actual physical archipelago where you need one, but this is D&D and you might not be able to build the kinds of thing you would need in the 'real' world anyway. There is always they Plane of Shadow.
An archipelago of Shadow Islands, only part real, strung around the city at a distance, just far enough and strange enough that it is almost impossible, or very hard, to project military force there. But related, like the hill peoples, in some kind of cultural contact with the centre, defining the centre by what it is not. Changeless where the centre is alive, absolute where it is adaptable, locked into an unforgiving history and identity while the centre is strangely mutable by comparison. Like there is a certain level of forgetting you need to do to have a functional civilisation and they won't do it.
Not the remnants of an ethnic group that nearly got wiped out, but perhaps the remnants of the people who did the wiping out, and are still pretty much fine with that.
And all different, ancient histories and ethnicities and philosophies and ethnic or racial groups strung out like a ring of shadowy pearls around the City State.
An archipelago of eternal White Russians and loyalists to fallen crowns and adherents to once nation-shaping faiths now lost or changed. Each very small, yet many, an archipelago of hidden Taiwan’s holding alternative histories, almost like parallel political and cultural worlds. Expressions of what could have been if things had gone a different way, thousands of them from the long long history of the state as it grew and changed and fell and grew again, and shrank and grew and fell again and was re-built. All those other histories that were lost, distant but somehow keenly yearning.
The default idea is undead, and yes they might be there, but it’s almost more interesting to think of them as frozen or undead cultures, but full of living people.
(Some Arab cartographers called the Atlantic the 'Sea of Shadows' which I rather think we should have kept as a name.)
The islands are half shadow and you can only really reach them when there is certain light and certain shadow on the sea, which is rare, the shadows of certain storms and certain great waves against certain stars or certain faces of the moon. Or perhaps it simply takes a long long time to reach the shoreline of a shadow isle and if you go there, though the visit may be short for you, you come back years later.
But they are there and you can almost sense them as you sail past or through the oddly-stilled patches of sea.
Would the communicate with each other? It seems like they wouldn't be able to stand each other, demanding as they would the sole representation of the true history and true self. But, perhaps over time they might. They have something in common after all, they all remember the same place and I suppose each one would consider itself the 'real' nation and everything else relics or shadows of it and therefore no offence.
What would they trade in the Shadow Archipelago and what would they build? I don't know, art perhaps. Music. What would you pay to hear Roman music as the Romans heard it? Or to see a Greek play as the ancient Greeks saw it. The Spartans weren't allowed to write but they were famous for their music and their dancing, what would it be like to see that, or to own a Tang Dynasty vase made only a week ago?
Perhaps they would go mad and become fierce. And they would always be a strange threat to the Civilisation that birthed them, small as they are, with their alternate histories and alternate sense of self.
They would know a lot about certain things, scholars would try to get there.
Scott would say the closeness of the hills placed a kind of natural limit on the ability of the state to control its populations. If it comes down to it they can just go away and this puts a kind of pressure valve on what they can do. What would the Shadow Archipelago prevent or allow. Perhaps it would govern or control the amount of forgetting they could do.
In his book 'The Art Of Not Being Governed' James C Scott talks about the uplands of South East Asia.
To cut a very complex argument down (also because I haven't finished it), his theory is an attempt to turn on its head the standard narrative of civilisation in which centres of agricultural power gradually expand, drawing to themselves various people with the strength of their highly organised society, before reaching the hills and mountains where they find dispersed ancient peoples, relics of a past age from before civilisation, people made hardy, uncivilised but independent and freedom-loving by the mountains in which they live.
In Scotts re-telling of this story Civilised centers essentially bully captive or near-captive populations into doing what they want. They fill flat valley-areas with grain-based agriculture, not because it is more efficient but because it locks people in place and makes them easier to control.
Then various peoples decide they want nothing at all to do with Civilisation and, as this is before the modern era and civilisations find it very hard to project force in highly complex mountainous terrain they bugger off to the mountains and build societies defined by the fact that they are very hard to centrally control.
So, in this version, the mountains don't make people independent, independent people go to the mountains. Mountain agriculture isn't necessarily that much less efficient than plains agriculture, its methods are chosen for political and semi-political reasons. To make the people who use it harder to find, harder to count and harder to control. And there is an economic relationship between the mountains the valley even if they are politically separate. And the mountains aren't full of ancient peoples, some of them may be ancient, but some may be quite recent indeed.
And, this is the part where it gets very interesting for me, even their forms of social-remembering may be specifically arranged to make them harder for the state to make use of. He mentions that all the societies he talks about have legends about how they could once write and had a written tongue, and in many cases that writing was stolen from them.
Oral cultures are more plastic, more personal and, crucially, are hard to reveal to strangers unless you specifically decide to.
This lead me to think of the nature of memory and of what civilisation does.
We live inside a kind of global Mnemarchy. Oral cultures are pretty good and you can do a lot with them but there is a hard limit to the amount of information they can carry. Civilisations are the guardians of deep-memory-in-detail. What we know, we know of densely-organised peoples, the history of distributed peoples is generally lost to us.
Again, oral cultures can carry something a long way into time but in terms of the amount of information they can carry, the level of detail they can carry and the distance into time they can carry it, writing, inscription and the products of civilisation win out.
So anyone who talks about history in the modern world is pretty much talking about the written history of civilisation. When we see any other kind of history we see it through the written history of civilisation. Like my buying 'The Art Of Not Being Governed', a book about distributed oral cultures, written on paper, by a guy employed by a university, produced en-masse, bought on the internet and distributed through a highly structured logistics network. It's a very civilised thing.
This is where it gets D&Dable.
To D&D something, or genre-fy it generally, we can take an effect, or something which is primarily an effect, turn it into a cause and then spin the dials on it.
Let’s accept Scotts argument about memory, in fact lets over-accept it and assume its the most important thing. People go to the hills and build societies where they carefully half-sabotage their own cultural memories, oralising what was written, embodying what was disembodied, turning record into behaviours and what can be read by anyone into something that can only be understood by a few, to make themselves hard to understand or control by the Civilised valley.
So the Valley Civililisation becomes the guardian of a certain kind of 'national memory' a structure for arranging and understanding knowledge of the world and making an identity of it.
What about the *opposite effect*.
Some people try to avoid the Valley Civilisation by going to the hills and making their memories shorter, more personal, more plastic. What if there was an opposite place, a place opposite to the hills where people went, maybe because, like the hill people, they wanted to, or maybe because they were forced to, or simply it was a natural progression of their nature.
These groups might not be driven by the expansion of the Valley Civilisation but perhaps separated when it goes through its periodic (but almost inevitable) contractions.
And in this place, rather than changing their own memories to make them more plastic, more personal, more embodied, less comprehensible to outsiders, they went the opposite way, they built huge icy labyrinths of total memory in which they lived. Absolute memories. Memories that could not be contradicted. Memories that could not actually be lived with comfortably in the Valley Civilisation.
And where is this place they might go? Well it has to be the opposite of the Mountains and in South East Asia, that is the Sea. The sea is wring because it’s actually very easy to travel by water instead of in the mountains, and maybe there isn’t an actual physical archipelago where you need one, but this is D&D and you might not be able to build the kinds of thing you would need in the 'real' world anyway. There is always they Plane of Shadow.
An archipelago of Shadow Islands, only part real, strung around the city at a distance, just far enough and strange enough that it is almost impossible, or very hard, to project military force there. But related, like the hill peoples, in some kind of cultural contact with the centre, defining the centre by what it is not. Changeless where the centre is alive, absolute where it is adaptable, locked into an unforgiving history and identity while the centre is strangely mutable by comparison. Like there is a certain level of forgetting you need to do to have a functional civilisation and they won't do it.
Not the remnants of an ethnic group that nearly got wiped out, but perhaps the remnants of the people who did the wiping out, and are still pretty much fine with that.
And all different, ancient histories and ethnicities and philosophies and ethnic or racial groups strung out like a ring of shadowy pearls around the City State.
An archipelago of eternal White Russians and loyalists to fallen crowns and adherents to once nation-shaping faiths now lost or changed. Each very small, yet many, an archipelago of hidden Taiwan’s holding alternative histories, almost like parallel political and cultural worlds. Expressions of what could have been if things had gone a different way, thousands of them from the long long history of the state as it grew and changed and fell and grew again, and shrank and grew and fell again and was re-built. All those other histories that were lost, distant but somehow keenly yearning.
The default idea is undead, and yes they might be there, but it’s almost more interesting to think of them as frozen or undead cultures, but full of living people.
(Some Arab cartographers called the Atlantic the 'Sea of Shadows' which I rather think we should have kept as a name.)
The islands are half shadow and you can only really reach them when there is certain light and certain shadow on the sea, which is rare, the shadows of certain storms and certain great waves against certain stars or certain faces of the moon. Or perhaps it simply takes a long long time to reach the shoreline of a shadow isle and if you go there, though the visit may be short for you, you come back years later.
But they are there and you can almost sense them as you sail past or through the oddly-stilled patches of sea.
Would the communicate with each other? It seems like they wouldn't be able to stand each other, demanding as they would the sole representation of the true history and true self. But, perhaps over time they might. They have something in common after all, they all remember the same place and I suppose each one would consider itself the 'real' nation and everything else relics or shadows of it and therefore no offence.
What would they trade in the Shadow Archipelago and what would they build? I don't know, art perhaps. Music. What would you pay to hear Roman music as the Romans heard it? Or to see a Greek play as the ancient Greeks saw it. The Spartans weren't allowed to write but they were famous for their music and their dancing, what would it be like to see that, or to own a Tang Dynasty vase made only a week ago?
Perhaps they would go mad and become fierce. And they would always be a strange threat to the Civilisation that birthed them, small as they are, with their alternate histories and alternate sense of self.
They would know a lot about certain things, scholars would try to get there.
Scott would say the closeness of the hills placed a kind of natural limit on the ability of the state to control its populations. If it comes down to it they can just go away and this puts a kind of pressure valve on what they can do. What would the Shadow Archipelago prevent or allow. Perhaps it would govern or control the amount of forgetting they could do.
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
My Country Has Nine Days To Live
This is a politcal post. I considered setting up a politcal blog to put it on but to be honest, no-one would read it and I don't think about politics enough, or enjoy thinking about politics enough to make a habit of it.
Plus my policy here has generally been the opposite of internet best practice, I just dump what I like on the blog and let you filter it.
So here it is, its under a break so you can just avoid it if you want.
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