Javelins of light are sent right down, a fantasy interpretation of the missiles we have grown to know as shaping modern warfare. The warring team has introduced a hitherto unknown element of destruction unto their enemies, and the look they give each other is horror as they see the figures emerging from the sky. The glint in their eyes, now that they are really seeing, is that of shock and awe.
These are the tools used by the final antagonists in the RPG game Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Many Japanese role-playing games follow familiar themes, and a not dissimilar narrative structure. One thinks that a monarchy, state, or autocrat is the problem, and then comes the classic reveal, realising halfway through a playthrough that they are only human, and the issue is god. The problem with these kinds of gods, fittingly, is they act like humans. They barely qualify to lead a human population, much less the kingdom of heaven. They rise to anger quickly; they are indecisive, clumsy with their own responsibilities, their vision of society is pat.
You start off collecting some hay, maybe a rusted sword to fight off some low level beasts—your shield is say, a piece of driftwood that you’ve fashioned into protection. You chat to an NPC in a store who says “traveller please rest your weary feet” or, “would you like some mead sir”. Now here you are all of five seconds later, assigned the task to “attack and dethrone god”—who is either a dragon, sorceress, or in some cases, a malevolent and devious bloodthirsty ambitious gay jester, the kind that most sane and well-adjusted people go out of their way to avoid. “Oh no.”
You happen to control Byleth, who like other RPG protagonists contains only a sliver of personality written into the script so as to become an empty vessel for the choices, desires and hesitations of the player. You could say this suggests the kind of empty space that God fills, the one you might have if you turned heathen, a shove in the gut to make room for something else; and sure enough, the creator of the universe, Sothis, midway through the game, sutures herself into the soul of Byleth. Now she has the power of the progenitor, and to signal the change, her hair turns a beautiful pastel green. It glimmers, unexplainably, especially in the sun. A few people comment on it but mostly it is accepted as normal.
Byleth is a mercenary with a gruff, well-intentioned mercenary father as her only surviving family who, by way of happenstance, is called upon to fill an empty position at an Abbey which is also a college which is also a training ground for a Holy War Machine. A series of unusual events, kidnappings and bump-ins with shadowy characters, often pinned on bandits and low-lifes, leads to what can only be described as a larger conspiracy, with one nation discovered to be mere puppets for a secret underground society, with advanced technology and ungodly intentions. By virtue of using the weapons, the secret society hold the power to completely upend the scale of the other side and manage to destroy the whole city. The characters scale the ramparts at its edge and turn to look. They are looking at a proud civilization, established over centuries, and now after being given warning, the place becomes completely demolished. They cannot quite register. They cannot consider how someone could possess such weapons, or that they could even go so far as to use them; the ability to do so seems to fall so far out of the usual rules of war to be deeply evil. “Such violence is not alien to human conduct but is simply unleashed by the permissions of war”, writes Jacqueline Rose. “It is something that erupts when laws, respect for others, and fear of God have been suspended, and men act without restraint. To that extent, war changes nothing.”
Javelins of light can grow in time to become the most definitive form, that self-same shape which devotion takes. It can soar past these limits. Surely from where it starts to where the firmament ends, a javelin can become a transformative device. Grief, in all its destructive potential, serves as such a device. In When things fall apart by Pema Chödrön, the writer argues that the real measure of pain is its unique ability to countenance our own suffering with that of the rest of the world, especially grief, an emotion we will all experience sooner or later and the only real promise to those who choose to know another human being at all. The more we grieve, the more likely we are to empathise, to fully enter the slipstream of connective energy that charges the exchange from one human to another, with all its heavenly power. Anyone who has been taught or self-taught knows that there is no greater, no crueler teacher than the knowledge discerned from experience. It is there that all the dimensions of understanding become revealed, in their totalising form, all five senses compelled, and from that point we take to the experience with our full sentences, translating that into a gift we can give to others. We might say—well yes, I understand. Here is how I know. Inside modernity there is, however, a higher likelihood of those logics becoming moot. There rises a delusion reaffirmed by one’s belief in a smooth self-perfection, ossified by the ego: that the soul is a possession, that imperfections or ruptures in the expected are cause for shame, pity, that loss is a spanner in the works, rather than an integral part of our experience of being alive.
It might thus appear that two distinct paths split in opposite directions from where one stands, there at the site of the wound. It is the latter that is more often incentivized—the other, ‘healing’, and the rewards of bouncing back from one’s suffering with the ability to make reparation, comes with no fanfare. The former, however, receives airtime on every major news channel and is never more present than in the pre-audition footage of an American Idol contestant, prostrating themselves before the world with their sob story, determined to prove that their pain is not only valid but exceptional, a competitive gesture, and worthy of special status. “I think it is the reason that every boob with a hangnail has been clogging the courts and haunting talk shows across the land for the last twenty years, telling his/her ‘story’ and trying to get redress,” writes Mary Gaitskill. “Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It’s to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the ‘story’ must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending.”
Increasingly reactionaries on both the left and right, as well as well-meaning, sensible people who market themselves as enlightened, seem inclined to argue that we fundamentally cannot understand one another. This belief is what we might call misanthropy. To believe just that, to silo ourselves into our own definition of suffering, perhaps even to compete against others over who suffers more, who falls below or above another in the hierarchy, is to defeat the foundational lesson which pain teaches. It is not the incident (and that it is what it is always called) which matters, but the extent we go to turn our pain into an empathic shape. A piece of raw material can be taken from the ground, and celebrated, shown off; perhaps this display will work—but its real power lies in taking the true untapped potential and making it serviceable. A real, thick shaft, a cleverly made piston like a Stobie pole made total, a crystal at the end. (Note to reader: is this getting too euphemistic? I’m typing this with acrylics right now and they slide across the keyboard so beautifully. Please email me?)
