Sand-eating

So, you're a group of aliens and you're watching the earth... and you notice that while the earthlings are interested in throwing up these satellites in order to help themselves show pictures of cats and share lasagna recipes, while carping about urbanisation, they don't occasionally send out a ship and circle their own moon. This is puzzling for you, but its also convenient, because here's this terrific real estate opportunity for you to build on, so you can set up your lab station to study these earthlings and maybe grab a few now and then for testing.

Then, lo and behold, after fifty years, a group of earthlings decide, in not really a lot of time, to throw a ship around the moon for reasons that aren't clear, but mostly seem bounded up in the same sort of performative political points that encouraged them to do it back in the day. But the noise of culture rolling up from the earth is just that, noise, so you miss it until nearly the last moment. And now here you are, base about to be in plain sight, as the earthlings go by in this year's version of a flying tin can. What do you do?

The beginning of My Dinner with Andre includes this in the opening monologue, in which Wallace Shawn explains his view of the world at the time he made the film, following his inability to get enough work in New York.

"I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side; when I was ten years old, I was rich; I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort... and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36... and all I think about is money."

The film worked for him.  You can watch it here.  The IMDb trivia page for the film is interesting and should be read by anyone who wants to be a filmmaker, because not only was this intensely low-budget film a success, it did something that successful low budget films almost never do on their own merits: it changed the way intellectuals talk about film-making. The film was stupidly successful on an unimaginable scale for 1981, and is the only reason why Wallace Shawn was able to wrest his career from obscurity to the place where now we all recognise his immortal connection with the word "inconceivable."

I think the film is terrible. It came out in 1981, when I was 17 and surrounded by musicians and artists and other writers, who all gushed about the genius of the film in the same way they gushed about Jean-Luc Godard and Frederico Fellini, whose films I had seen and knew well enough to stay the fuck away from, since they were filled with a fascination about the tiniest most obvious parts of life as a way of avoiding talking about anything that actually fucking mattered. My Dinner with Andre addresses a familiar point-of-view that most anyone drifts into at some point between the age of 20 and 50: "I thought my life was about this, but now I realise that it's about that." But it's not "intellectual," it's pseudo-intellectual. All the clever, amazing things that Andre tells Wallace in the film amounts to tin-foil hat logic, not especially useful unless, coincidentally, you want to sell something to someone by telling them that life isn't about pain... a line, incidentally, I get from the writer of the book that contained the word "inconceivable" that Shawn would become famous for later.

It's not that Andre is stupid. He's not. He's passionate, he's rich with detail, he's anxious to explain and be understood and to delve deep into the thing that fascinates him, while Shawn provides a counterpoint that makes the film watchable because it's well-written. But it's a sham. It's all empty-headed nonsense. There isn't a single thought expressed so well in the film that can be applied to anything except to explain how the My-Pillow guy made millions. And for me personally it frustrates me to death that even now, 45 years later, comments under the film include, "I watched it for the first time years ago and it has truly made my life better."

Yes, exactly. That's what it's supposed to do. You're dying of thirst in the desert and this film gives you sand to drink... and you drink it because you don't know the difference between sand and water.  From a film directed by the guy who directed Wallace Shawn when he said the word that made him famous.

For such people who write such comments, an alien base on the far side of the moon sounds plausible.

It is for this reason why repeated exhortations about what "adventure" is fail. And why admonishing the fudging of dice fails. And why point-by-point demonstrations of the execreble writing of the white box set fails. Because no matter how passionate one is, or how precise with language, or how specific one's structured examples, or the demonstration of evidentiary success vs. staggering failure one provides, it never comes down to the listener listening and weighing the two points of view to come to a thoughtful conclusion about what to believe.

The only measure that ever counts is what the listener feels. Which the writer has no power to change. My Dinner with Andre does not succeed because it was well-written or exceptionally shot or because it came out at the right time or because the performers were artists. Those things are all true, for their time, but they aren't the reason why the film was successful. It was successful because it didn't ask anyone to change their mind. It offered them a bunch of patterns that people recognised, that pseudo-intellectual recognised, and then waved them about for 90 minutes in a way that made the audience feel smart to be watching a film like this. Which worked beautifully.

A DM who fudges does so because early in their development in that role, they attached themselves to the idea, most likely because they could not help themselves. It was just too hard to actually kill their friends, or even strangers, because their nature forbade it. So having attached first, like a limpet, all that was needed after was to rationalise it. That rationalisation varies but mostly its to "create a good game" or "to make sure the game stays fun," or whatever. The tendency of the intellectual is to argue with the rationalisation, but in fact the rationalisation is incidental. It could be anything, so long as it sounds plausible. Because the issue isn't whether or not it makes a better game, the issue is that, inside, they can't keep themselves from doing it. Fudging possesses them, not the reverse. They aren't strong enough, as human beings, to stop fudging. So argument is really just a waste of time.

This is the one lesson I've never been able to learn. And my recent understanding, lately, that I haven't learnt it yet, is embarrassing for me. This blog has been to construct an argument about this or that or the other thing, just as JB's post is, just as is any post about D&D or any subject that I respect, because I walk away from such posts and such videos with an awareness I did not have before. Because I am an intellectual, and not a sand-drinker, which is what makes me formidable and scary. Because I won't argue decently, respecting the listener's feelings about what this is or isn't or should be or feels better or what fits the pattern and hey, you can't actually prove there aren't aliens on the far side of the moon. I don't accept premises like those. But because I don't, I'm also unkind, and abusive, and cold, and rude, and any number of other things that sound like I'm in your house telling you that you've put your sofa on the wrong end of your living room. It's what makes me intolerable.

Because, seriously, if you were in a desert and you saw someone who was thirsty enough to drink the sand, you'd try to stop them, wouldn't you?

And if you couldn't succeed, and you had to just stand there watching them do it, that'd get pretty aggravating after, say, to pull a number out of my hat, 61 years.

But what makes it truly worse is the guy on my right who has realised the solution is to sell the drinker more sand. And he's making a killing at it.

All this is the reason why intellectuals tend to retreat from the system as they age rather than continue to fight it to the end. They get tired. They don't tire of the facts or the arguments or the wish to rigidly figure out the sense of a thing... but they do get tired of the quiet expectation that, "if you're not going to sell the sand, you could at least provide it for free."  Which is the role I should have adopted with this blog if I wanted it to be successful. I should have just called it "Free Sand" and then shovelled it into the mouths of my readers, making them all happy. I failed to do that. And therefore, demonstrably, I failed.

I am an excellent writer. Anyone here who thinks I couldn't have used that skill to proffer the sweetest-looking, brightest, most soft-grained sand imaginable is a fool. If I truly despised and disregarded my fellows, I could have built a sand-selling palace here, with vaulted ceilings and music playing and every kind of sand one's heart could desire. Because honestly, seriously... straight-talking it here... people aren't really that hard to lie to. They really aren't. And anyone who has read a few books, who has gotten through grade school and watched the way that bullies operate up close, comes to a point early on between knowing that you can either fuck these people over or serve them... and as it happens, all the money is in the former.

And mind, it's more than just the language. It's the intuitive understanding that underlies it, the comprehension about why the sand is being eaten and what for and why it's hard to stop and how deep the desperation goes, that encourages the fellow with sand in mouth to garble through the sand what an asshole I am in telling them to spit it out and drink water. Those are all little buttons, with little labels under them, arranged in a neat little row, and all it takes it to reach out and touch the one that works right now... and just like that, Johnny eats the sand he's told to eat.

If I am a rigid asshole, if I am inflexible, if I'm not ready to "see the argument" or "understand," it's bitcoins to donuts that I'm keeping my hand off the button that would pour out the sand you want me to pour out. I learned how to do that in High School, to subvert teachers, to placate principles, to get around bullies, to survive. It is so easy... you have no idea. Once you really understand how little is needed to manipulate a person's perception with lies — a small concession, stroking their ego, a little feigned uncertainty, some carefully timed sympathy, silence because the person needs to "stew," a little false seeing their point — they melt just so. But all that created in me when I tried it early in life was contempt... and I didn't like that feeling. I didn't lean into it. I didn't decide, "Hey, but it'll let me fuck people over and get paid for it."

And I shouldn't be telling you this now, but hey... I'm already an asshole. Not for doing this, obviously, but for not doing this.

So, lately, I haven't felt much like writing. Anything. Figuring this one out, I think. Getting pretty tired of yelling at the void. Lost a good friend over this kind of thing, whom I thought was a good friend and I haven't recovered. Lost a good friend over this last year, too. Seems I'm always doing this. I might just as well lie, all the time. Churn out some slopware. Or just walk. Because except for the prospect of running D&D tomorrow night, which is really why I love D&D, I just don't seem to be able to give a fuck whether people want to eat sand or not.