LAKE Adventure by B. J. Best
There exists senseless suffering and death. This is a truth so momentous that we usually cannot bear to think on it. Of course what we want most is happiness. But when happiness is not on offer, we will settle for meaning. Yes, it is terrible that this person died, but …
… they brought it on themselves through carelessness.
… they died for the fatherland.
… their struggle against the disease is an inspiration for us all.
… they will live again in the hereafter.
… that’s what happens in such countries.
… their works live on.
… God had to create the world with the greatest possible diversity.
Any ploy, no matter how desperate, is deemed too bad to use. Anything that allows us to believe
to quote Tennyson, who ends this poem by stating that he is an infant crying for the light, and “with no language but a cry.” Of course that’s a lie. He does have language. Quite a lot of it, in fact. But it is precisely in using this language to set out so clearly the hope we want to have, that he forces us to hear the cry underneath – the cry of knowing that so much walks with aimless feet, that every day, life upon life upon life upon life is cast as rubbish to the void.
There exists senseless suffering and death. A five-year old girl dying from leukaemia. Why? What’s the point? For no reason, and there is no point. Of course what we want most is happiness. During the terrible months that she is in the hospital and that our mother is, quite understandably, mostly with her, we write a nice little game about our sister’s birthday party, a game we can play with her when she comes back home. But she does not come back. And so we settle for meaning. Or rather, we’d love to settle for meaning, but there is no meaning. The fantasy of the birthday party is now hollow. So we change things up; we tell a story about how we punish the bully who mocked her. But that is even more hollow. It cannot fill the gaping hole left by death.
It’s a smart game, LAKE Adventure. When we play old text adventures of the more amateurish type, we are often struck by the meaninglessness of what we are doing, the deadness of the worlds. Whoever programmed them must have thought them cool, but to us it’s just a series of locations, some under-clued tasks, nothing that generates coherence or meaning. To take that experience and connect it to the meaninglessness of death is brilliant. Of course the game meant something to young Eddie. It’s about his friend! It’s about his wish to have a boat just like his friend does! It’s about having fun with his sister again! It’s, a little more darkly and no doubt less consciously, about having his friend experience some hurt by having her be his sister. So the game starts out as meaningful. But then his sister dies, and his friend drifts away, and the game becomes empty. So he adds the bully. And it’s still empty, even more so. So he adds the memories. But they don’t give meaning. They just pose, again and again, the question of meaning. Why did this happen? Why did she have to die? And there’s no answer.
And now what are we to do? And the horrible thing is – there’s no answer to that either. Oh no, B. J. Best is not going to give us closure. We’re not ‘glad that we still have our memories’. We’re not ‘certain to see her again in Heaven’. And we certainly didn’t ‘grow as a person through this episode of sorrow’. There is no sense, meaning, closure. There can’t be, because there exists senseless suffering and death.
I would have liked the game to end after the end of the text adventure. Perhaps even before the futurity sequence, but certainly before our daughter came to get the computer. That “does ancient history matter?” scene was just too obvious about something that the game had made plenty clear. And among the things that become pretty clear is that reliving the past solves nothing; that all of this is still just as bad now as it was before. Nothing has healed.
My favourite lyric poet is Emily Dickinson, and one of the reasons for that is her ability to express this truth, this hard truth, the hardest truth of all. Here is she on the incurability of pain (this is from the middle of ‘I measure every grief I meet’):
It’s presented as a question, but it’s not a question. No, it would not give them any balm. Yes, they would go on aching still, through centuries of nerve. There is no consolation; nor should we want consolation if it were offered to us. For there is senseless suffering and death, and we must, my friends, we must revolt against that, and never accept it.