Latticework
In Final Fantasy III’s orientation around crystals, there’s a reference in the macro (the crystal as a structure) to the micro (the geometric crystalline arrangement of the text). The crystals are in duality, between light and dark equivalents of the same sets of four. Four crystals for each classical element, in parallel, light and dark. Serving the crystals are four heroes, those of light and those of dark. The game is structured around this basic geometry, two sets of four (heroes, crystals) between which the duality of light and darkness (imagined here as forces, both positive, like lipids and waters, not the typical absence/presence binary of light and dark).
It’s this lattice (numbering sixteen nodes in total, the structure of which is relatively intuitive if you wish to diagram it out) through which the world moves. Light and Dark are in conflict against each other, with one threatening to overwhelm the other and create nothing at all. The Void, that emptiness which pre-exists and under-exists, forms by totality - when everything is of one substance, nothing exists at all. The player controls four heroes of Light, sent by the crystals of Light to stop the overwhelming influence of Dark. At the end however, the player discovers themselves to only be one link in a back and forth cycle. In ancient times, the crystals of light and their technological orders created an imbalance in the opposite direction, and the same pattern occurred. Four heroes were chosen by the crystals of Dark to use those powers to bring the Light back into balance.
The crystals then make up, with the heroes, an active and passive side of the same. The crystals, restored by four heroes, make up a discursive background while the hero forms the active. The crystal has to be restored, ie, acted-within, by an active motion within its lattice.
Writings of renaissance intellectuals were obsessed with this kind of crystal logic. The baroque obsessions with a crystalline sort of harmony between all things, to link the world together as assemblages of signs, to form the crystal lattice.
There are four main bosses for the crystals - the djinn for the wind crystal, salamander for fire, kraken for water, and titan for earth. Each of these must be defeated, put into proper order by the protagonists - excess life from a particular point in the lattice corrected back into proper geometry.
This arrangement of course mirrors traditional understandings, where the four elements were seen as domains, within which various beings were of - their being existing in resonance with their home element - the salamander for fire, the gnomes and brownies for earth, etc.
All things work similarly. The scholar class enables the player to discover the elemental attribution of each creature, to determines its element, its place in the grand harmonic resonance of the world.
The heroes of FF3 move the great gears of the world as the astrolabe-planets of the baroque writers. Geocentrism was so intuitive for this purpose, as what else could explain the motion of the celestial bodies? Earth had to be at the center of the whole of the heavens, for what were the heavens except a great clock which governed the subtle vibrations of Adam?
To consider the world was to consider a grand mechanism, to find humanity in the midst of a harmonic resonance from God. The work of science was always the work of finding the sort of crystal resonance the protagonists in FF3 work towards, to develop the unifying actions of the world and bring all things into its proper crystalline form.
12,500 Feet Below the Surface
Captain Smith overlooks the bow deck being overtopped with water as the ship begins to slip below the waves. The water has come into the vessel cleanly, expanding into the space efficiently. The glass-like surface has quietly absorbed the ship, filling into every crevice through the fractures where the hull buckled inwards on the starboard side of the bow.
Two monumental events of deconstruction marked the late stage of the ship. The first, where the grand staircase floated away in the sinking. After water rushed into the large cavity in the center of the ship, the staircase, made entirely of wood and structurally isolated from the ship, detached from its cavity and floated off. The second, where the ship was cleft in two, between the bow and aft - usefully demarcated by their interactions with the water. While the bow filled uniformly, the water rushing in at an even pace to fully penetrate the hollow body of the vessel, the aft did not, filling only partially, before filling violently when the ship broke. The bow sunk smoothly, flying straight downwards like a stone, while the aft sunk with a hollow cavity facing downwards. The pressure of the vessel pushed it downwards as water was forced against air pockets, creating a cataclysmic series of contractions and explosions as it sunk to the bottom, settling on the bottom in far worse condition than the other half.
For the filming of James Cameron’s Titanic, a mockup of the ship was built explicitly to fulfill its terminal end. The ship was recreated in a simulated form, for the sole purpose of being flooded. Cameras hung from the ceiling as water rushed in from the top and sides, the movie filmed in between. The flow started and stopped, as they simulated the black ocean overtopping the corridors and halls of the ship. At a later stage, when the water began flooding into the grand staircase, it recreated the first of these monumental acts. The symbol of the ship, recreated privately and in exhibition, shown in every depiction as some metaphoric or ideal fact of the ship’s nature, detached from the hull and floated away - Cameron himself remarking that this most likely explains the absence of the staircase he witnessed when he entered the wreck.
More than any other shipwreck, the Titanic remains in the popular imagination for the poetic perfection of its sinking. Almost no other ship has sunk the way it did. The water was completely still, the ship was isolated in the blackness of Atlantic night. If not for the rogue iceberg, the ship would have never had any reason, besides sabotage, to sink. And with the iceberg, its sinking was theatrical, the slight buckling of the hull allowing for water to slowly flood inwards. Similarly famous wrecks, the Estonia, the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Costa Concordia, were all spoiled from what the Titanic achieved, by human interference or violence. When the Fitzgerald went under, it did so suddenly, with the violence of a gunshot. Rogue waves in a typically violent storm destroyed the ship almost instantly, the bow slammed into the bottom of the shallow lake as the stern was twisted and rent. The event lasted barely a minute and every last soul was dead within five. When the Concordia went under, it was a comedy, a barely fatal accident brought about by a series of humorous incompetences and almost a decade of media circuses. The Titanic however, sunk as though it were slipping into death itself. Like a terminal patient fading, an empire crumbling, the ruins growing ivy as little flakes of marble fall off in the rain and wind, it slipped, quietly and with all the poetry of a slow memento mori into the inkblack glass of the North Atlantic. In the Titanic, in the night, in the water, in the frigid cold, in the slow flood of the grand microcosm of Victorian society amidst total isolation, we see a primordial drama, the ruin of empires played out in slow motion. The water as time, the ship as civilization… the sinking is a poetry in itself that needs no great imagination to see in the same enchanting lights as the ruins of the Grand Tour.
The contemporary retelling of the myth of the Titanic is found in Spec Ops: The Line. The Heart of Darkness story takes place in the city of Dubai, where ocean-like sandstorms have flooded the once prosperous city. The player takes the typical role, venturing deeper into the heart of the city, as the sinking accelerates. The player acts, through the course of the game, as a grain of sand in themselves, worshipping the sand’s flood, shooting out glass to bring it flooding over enemies, raining death on thousands upon thousands of people. The city, already buried in the waves and winds of the sand, is brought deeper and deeper, in much the same as the Titanic.
It’s telling then, that Dubai was chosen, for the same reason as the Titanic sunk with such impact. The Titanic was a microcosm of its society, everything from the interior decoration to the class structure in imitation of the people who birthed it. Dubai in the same way becomes a microcosm of what the protagonist is sent into Dubai for, the petrostate built as a monument to all the fever dreams of 21st century conspicuous consumption, now swallowed in utter isolation by a liquid measure of death - the sand of the Arabian Peninsula, the water of the North Atlantic.
Ground Zeroes
In the second section of After The Law, Land writes of Gilles de Rais in the context of the medieval economy. Medieval warfare, in his reading of Bataille’s reading of de Rais, was a great wastage, the deathcult inherent to all social organization. Human endeavor must at some point recourse to zero, the absolute (remember Antonius looking into the light, kneeling before his master?). Accumulated material is burned senselessly, towards the highest, in a great kiss with the divine. Such is always found in violence, decadence, and consumption, the Aztec solar religion creating royal spectacles of death atop their temples.
De Rais found himself lost without this orgy, his own ability to dispense with great fortunes in ceremonies of wastage and his own pursuit of senseless war taken away from him, he resorted to the creation of a black hole. At the center of his cloistered fortress, he took in the children of the surrounding area and murdered them, a zero-point to sacrifice within as war and nobility became increasingly overtaken by rational calculations he found himself alien to - a creature of noble wastage at heart.
In De Rais we find an echo of the serial killer. The same zero-point has been found again in the roving chaos of the city. A man unknown stalks the darkness of the streets, taking those he finds into the same space of death through little rituals of violence akin to the killings perpetrated by de Rais. Each one that explodes finds itself in strange echo to the culture at the time, the rituals functioning like all these zero-points do, a cathedral at the end, where energy can be burned safely, preventing glut at the end. For the serial killer, burning happens to the stagnant, the consumptive wealth at the end of the global supply chain, the American suburbs where it all sits in the form of plastic and petroleum. The serial killer burns it finally, taking the great glut and its consumers, throwing them on the pyre, looking to the heavens like the Aztec priest ripping the heart of the victim out.
“The Night Stalker” finds his echo in the stealth game protagonist. The environments are set up to be destroyed, a level rendered, and then populated with a system of martial violence that exists solely to funnel into the player. Every piece, every NPC, every environment, exists for the player to create death. The player dismantles the level piece by piece, the roving black hole into which the entire apparatus disappears in a ritual of death.
Nowhere is this more summarized than in the Hitman series. The two components of the ritual ascend to the podium. On one end, Agent 47 dressed in executioner black. On the other, the targets in Gottfried’s 00000 white. The rocket is sent into the air as Agent 47 rips their heart out before the solar altar. If the player kills every NPC on the Isle of Sgàil, a group of heavily armored knights wielding assault rifles spawns around the map, in the six empty armor stands. They shout out and behave as guards, attempting to take out the player. Echoing this, in BedBananas’ video, The Rise of Agent 47, Agent 47 begins a killing spree by donning the same suit of armor, studying and then posing in front of a hanging painting of carnage. The bodies are piled in key locations before a chain explosion is set off. Guards, firearms, debris, are thrown into the air by the single press of the duck’s detonator as Agent 47 walks off into the ocean. The island becomes what every level is, a cathedral for the grand sacrifice, a ritual taking out as Agent 47 disposes of every last soul to see the spectres from beyond the zero appear.
To say the Washington Twins are “asking for it” is not just hyperbole, but a feature of the very environment built around them. An apparatus is constructed solely to channel libido, for the black-suited executioner to drain them like an unplugged bathtub kill-by-kill through the roving hole of his violence.
Jensen awakes with his cybernetics stripped, bloody and limping through the corridors as guards debate the prisoners locked beneath. Awakening from his self-imposed coma, he emerges from the dusky orange of Hengsha into the bluegrey steel of the Hei Zhen Zhu. The ship eventually reaches Rifleman Bank Station, Jensen still in tow. In the basement, civilians have been kidnapped and yoked as biological computers to Zhao’s projects, their brains hopelessly instrumentalized.
Jensen emerges from his coma, tortured after an explosion, tearing apart the crate he was in and requiring half a dozen men to subdue him. From his birthplace in the shipping container, he emerges on a trajectory towards Commander Burke, towards the destruction of the entire project. Like the Washington twins, he sits atop his fortress, asking, a throne begging to be destroyed, passages and labyrinths leading only to that fertile center.
Jensen’s birth here is as a flow to the end. The world is constructed for him to conquer it, and his birth is that of a warmachine to fight onwards. He was rebuilt after entering the field of combat and failing. Burned and remade by that fire, he was reformed into a being of combat - his humanity destroyed with Jason Namir threw him through that window. Agent 47 has much the same backstory - created as a flow, as an entity to move through a defined set of rules & corridors in order to complete the system he is thrust into.
Like the women of the Hyron Project, Jensen and 47 exist as instruments. Remade for a singular purpose, remade as machines through which a given flow is manipulated - a flow of violence, a flow of information, water birthed to fill a series of constructed canals.
The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull
An engineer was commissioned by the local ruler to construct a flood control mechanism, to save the farmland and villages from seasonal flooding. He set to work as he expected the problem to be solved, building a dam. The dam burst upon the first flooding. The engineer was diced into as many pieces as the dam crumbled to and cast into the raging flood. The engineer’s son was commissioned next, and set to work on a negative construction. He built a system of waterways, with overflow being run harmless downstream, silt not allowed to be deposited in farmland, and excess flow being harvested for irrigation.
This construction required the building of a particularly quick-moving canal through rock. Unable to use dynamite, it was dug via a process of heat and cold to weaken the material. The rock would be cracked, those gaps then stuffed with burning coals. A dam would be released and cold water would crash upon the rocks. The now brittle surface would be chipped away easily, pushing the canal another inch forward.
During the war, the Japanese attempted to destroy the project. They failed - unable to recognize its existence. Even as they flew directly over it, they saw only the landscape. For the engineer, this is the highest goal of their work. The project becomes so enmeshed into the world that it is the world. A god dies and its bones become the hills, mountains, valleys, forests of the world.
When Rome fell, it did so in this fashion. Travelers to the once imperial capitol reported it now a monument to the countryside. The grand buildings became a forest, shepherds grazing their flocks between the ruins, pastures and farmfields sprouted up atop the floors crumbled to dust, ivy growing upon the walls, ceilings long absent. The Colosseum became a pilgrimage site, a cross erected on the blooded sand, hermits building their niches in the high walls surrounding the arena.
A river is born as the bed and water form each other into one entity. The Strid at Bolton Abbey became what it’s infamous for as a dramatic example of this process, the water forced down a narrow rocky strip of land, carving for itself a series of underwater caves and chasms. On a flat plane this force works to make the river into a series of loping S-curves down the landscape. The water shifts each curve outward until it becomes an omega-shaped bow which eventually cuts off, as the water erodes a shortcut. The section, now a lake, is stranded as the river continues flowing and curving onwards. After millennia, this process forms the landscape into a set of deep chasms which no longer bend in their course as they once did. The river solidifies itself into deep curving furrows that make its near permanent course.
Melquiades the Exhumed Archbishop rises from the darkness below the platform, his own body divorced from any interior life. Thrusting him upwards is a set of thronging hands, controlling and powering his every move like puppet strings. He has achieved immortality, via the Church, without heavenly intervention.
His flock lifts him upwards, becoming the blood of his veins, the beating of his heart. His veins become the robes he wears, the office he serves. Melquiades is an empty throne - in terms of an individual person, a “soul”, yet he is an immortal, larger than any soul-imbued human could hope to be. Melquiades lives as a superorganism formed by the sum of all parts animating him.
Like a river formed by its beds, Melquiades is formed by the bones and robes of his office, vivified by the flowing blood and passion of his flock below him. The ultimate ambition of any office is here - the bones of the grandfather, the founding patriarch become more than powder, they become the body of an organism, one fed daily by countless generations afterwards. The roads of Rome are still traveled today, the paths of language and commerce constructed by the caesars forming the bedrock of every nation which touches the Roman Lake. Like Dujiangyan, to destroy Rome would be impossible - the structure is perfect engineering, so seamlessly blended into the world that it becomes the world, an ascension from its minute origins, as the nature of its body remains identical, while its body changes its form, rising into higher levels, harnessing greater sums of power to live. How could one, after all, destroy the latin origins of so many languages? The debt owed in religion & philosophy to Rome? The wealth built by trade over thousands of years that all traveled through the ruins of the empire?
Rome, like Melquiades, like Dujiangyan, achieved the final goal of engineering. The bones of the grandfather become the mountains of the Earth, the blood of his giant body replaced by the teeming throng of mankind.
Rivers & Their Beds
One of the finest mechanical machines built in the era of clockwork were the Analytic & Difference Engines built by Charles Babbage. The devices used punchcards, which were then read through a mechanism that transmitted the information via the motion of the gears in such a way that information could be read and recombined - calculations could be performed.
Later on, the techniques of producing these machines with electricity (and in niche cases, water) were invented - the circuits of which became the logic gates that undergird the modern computer.
What all of these machines have in common is their mechanism, of the manipulation of flow. With electricity or water, it appears most dramatically - their transmission of information being far more efficient and manipulable than the kinetic energy of gears moving each other - where the flow of the basic medium is turned into a raw material. Electricity through a circuitboard is forced down a series of channels connected by gates that mimic basic logical operations. The end result of the flow and its passage is something greater than the sum of its parts - information.
Every system is constructed like this, the banks and the water. The river itself, the entity we consider (for instance, “the computer” or “The Mississippi”), a system objectified.
Systems interact with each other as objects - nodes, raw material for the greater harnessing of their existence as particles into higher systems.
A system is a set of rules for the manipulation of a flow - that flow being constructed of particles & with its own properties. We see this puzzle in games. A typical game consists of a set of players facing each other off in a system that forces them into conflict that cannot be resolved within the standard rules of the system. When two players meet in Counter-Strike, one player planting a bomb and the other defusing it, they have a problem of mutual exclusivity that cannot be solved until the individual particles come into contact, with their own noisy, chaotic interactions. The bomb can be either detonated or diffused - two interactions from the particles in question, with the outcome being both except in individual instances where a specific type of outcome is observed.
A game always comes down to this chaotic interaction between systems - a system of competition between systems reduced to flows under the discourse of the game.
Picture an ant colony, the relative simplicity and insignificance of its individual participants. To appraise it, you can either do so from the level of macro - the superorganism of the colony or micro - the behavior of the participants. Both have their contexts. The superorganism’s behavior will fit in as part of a larger ecological system, while the participant’s will fit in with its peers within the colony. At the same time, downwards, the colony affects each participant downwards in the hierarchy of instruments, just as each ant has its own system powering it, the system of its blood and carapace, its organs.
Laozi speaks of the original binary begetting the ten thousand things. Consider this in the light of rivers, the system - the water and the land, that combine to form the singular thing. Once singular things emerge they slot into each other, forming combinations, those combinations acting in greater concert.
Hobbes imagined a nation as a human body, a superorganism of each soul, each cell, working in concert. The ant colony example applies as well, the body of the nation made up of the individual bodies, systems that are every cell of the nation.
Turtles all the way up and down. Organisms acting in interlinked concert, within each other - a nesting doll going infinitely in every direction. Deists would speak of God as the clockmaker and that is true - we live inside a clock. Yet not the grand machine imagined by those astrologers of Kircher’s day (though in a limited sense they were on the right track - just without thinking far enough in all dimensions), picturing the Earth at the center of a grand system of gears moving upon the lives of God’s creation, but as one gear, a gear made of smaller gears made of smaller gears… fitting in ourselves as gears into larger apparatuses fitting as gears into larger apparatuses… The question of our locality is a question of size - who links under us, who do we link into? What are we within the systems of others, what are the systems below us, what are we in collaboration or competition with our peers in this clockwork?
Any mathematician will tell you - there is no randomness in the universe. Only cause and effect, only clockwork. The noise we see, what we call chaos isn’t random at all, but gears moved by forces we cannot comprehend, systems opaque to us. To understand the world is to understand it as Laplace’s Demon - to understand the slotting in of systems into systems into systems into systems… to trace the flows of things, the rules of those flows...
Bibliography
Final Fantasy III PC remake, Square Enix
Crystals
A Man of Misconceptions, John Glassie
Titanic, James Cameron
Historic Travels Youtube channel
Spec Ops: The Line, Yager Development
After the Law, Nick Land
The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergmann
Night Stalker, Netflix
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link DLC, Eidos Montreal
Hitman 2 (Isle of Sgàil map)
The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, Earth
Dujiangyan, Dujiangyan City
Thirst, Steven Mithen
Blasphemous, The Game Kitchen
In Ruins, Christopher Woodward
The Strid at Bolton Abbey
Meandering streams
The Colorado River
The Difference & Analytical Engines, Charles Babbage
Electronic circuits which utilize logic gates
The idea I had to build a computer with water instead of electricity (I never went beyond imagining the logic gates)
Everyday Chaos, Brian Clegg
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve
Dark Pattern Games
Ants
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
The things I saw in a fever dream induced by being extremely sick, fading in & out of consciousness while watching Eyes Wide Shut on loop while drinking gin mixed with some truly disgusting cane-sugar cream soda. I watched Parks & Rec as I recovered from this sickness after this single tumultuous evening.
The Dao De Jing, Laozi
A River, Like Clockwork
A Zizek-esque amphetamine rant