Limbo and the Repetition of Death

Know what game still haunts me? Limbo by Playdead game studios. You are this young boy searching for his missing sister in a shadowy realm. As you playfully skip and jump through a mixture of decrepit corpses, buildings, and traps. Until you find a hope that raises you out of the underworld. 

“Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters Limbo.” – Playdead

Presented in black-and-white with filmic grain effects and an ambient soundscape. Crackle and blur. Critics mentioned ideas from film noir, horror films and German Expressionism. At the time they were questioning if video games could be art with Flower, Journey, Bastion and my personal favourite Dear Esther. Narrative was becoming just as beautiful as the game engine. Much like the woodblocks by Antonio Manetti that accompanied Dante’s Divine Comedy.

You wake up. Slowly moving supine into a world of danger. Massive spiders crawl from behind you and spear you in the chest. You drown in the shallowest of water. You fall from a height and rag doll to the ground. Puzzles that incorporate using another child’s body to cross a river. You may even rip a spider’s leg off and use it as a tool. Squelch. Sometimes brain slugs drop from above and burrow into your skull. Making you into an automaton, losing control of the character, and driving you into a pit of spikes. 

What is upsetting is how many times you will die. How many times you will fall onto spikes in different ways. Not like Meat Boy where it’s about getting to the next level; it’s almost like failing this child; there’s a guilt that comes with losing. The obvious interpretation is that of Limbo itself. The Catholic doctrine of the Limbo of Infants (limbus infantium orlimbus puerorum) where unbaptised infants, too young to have committed sin, are left to find their way out of hell. Historically, even the Church forgoes the Limbo of Infants for the hope that infants will find their way to heaven.

Great sorrow seized my heart on hearing him,
for I had seen some estimable men
among the souls suspended in that limbo.

(Inferno. IV, 31-45)

You know this boy is here for his sister, but the soul of his sister is forgotten in the game. Maybe she went through this journey, and we were too late, and we must make this journey alone. We feel an emotional connection to this silhouetted world. Not like Plato’s Cave exploring truth by interpreting shadows on the wall. Although, this reference is not lost to the poet himself, when he meets Plato in this circle of hell. 

One moment, especially being killed by the monstrous spider, will remind you of a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Especially for those of us that want a non-religious interpretation of the narrative. Nothing could be more perfect than reading this quote while playing Limbo:

“Everything has returned. Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all things will return”. – Nietzsche

It’s this idea of the spider and returning again and again after death. It’s not ending the game, or moving to the next section because there are no sections in this game. It’s experiencing every death of the boy. It gets to you. You desire the return far more that watching death repeat itself.

Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, – a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. – Nietzsche

Anyone who has finished the game, understands this quote. The light, rising up to finish the game. You could see this theologically with purgatory, where the child “undergo[es] purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” As time elapses in slow motion we are transcending the child’s nightmare. Even the rays of sunshine, the particles of light, the way the boy floats into the sky. You feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise up as you say to yourself this game meant something. Overcoming or perhaps transcending your own childlike state of Limbo that never quite leaves you.

the gender gap in Australia

Australian of the Year in 2016 and former Army Chief, David Morrison (as seen scowling below) recently proclaimed one of the biggest problems in Australia is the gender pay gap. Not homelessness, nor alcoholism, nor violence, nor the state of Aboriginal Australians. We hear about the pay gap, rape, and the fear for being sexually harassed. It’s almost an existential war on women. But what are the statistics in Australia that paint this overall gap between the genders?

 The Australian Bureau of Statistics published  Gender Indicators for January 2015, let’s explore the top 10 gender based problems that informs a pay gap from my perspective:

1. More girls in Australia are getting Higher School Certificates than boys. In fact, there are more women enrolled at university and achieving more university degrees or higher. One partial explanation, from my personal experience, are social justice policies have been embedded in education since the 1970s. Has this focus on girls helped? Despite more women graduating, their first full-time employment, the median salary for female graduates under 25 years of age was $52,000, whereas the median salary for male graduates under 25 was $55,000. This is still a decent wage in Australia given a 5.45%  difference.       
2. The rate of unemployment is now equal, but women are less involved in the labour force and men have a higher labour force participation, and in other statistics men do more paid overtime. These are statistical significant reasons for the yearly income difference.
3. Despite parliamentarians, ministers, cabinet ministers, CEOS and Board Directors in ASX companies being mostly men, the Australian Public Service Commission shows women occupy 40% of Senior Executive Service positions and 47% of Executive Level positions in the Australian Public Service. Despite democratic choices and board decision and fair work quotas, women comprise over 57.5% of all Public Service employees.

4. Men have a higher median wage, but men do more paid overtime work, whereas women do more unpaid overtime and spend more time with children. We infer this is choice since our labor laws protect them. There is the possibility of the biological imperative to rear children and to prove this is possible, the rate of women spending more time with children is increasing over time, whereas men have plateaued for decades.

   

5. Women live longer and use more medicare services, whereas more men are dying of cancer, heart disease, and in motor vehicle accidents, therefore women have more earning potential over their lifetimes. This point clearly refutes any notion of an existential war against women.
6. Men are far more likely to offend, imprisoned, and sentenced. There are tens of thousands more men in prison unable to make money since we do not monetise prisoners in Australia.
7. Before you claim men are more likely to be criminals, men are far more likely to be victimised than women. Men are more likely to be assaulted, robbed and experience violence at a rate of twice as women. As a side note, the money earned by men who are victimised are more likely to be stolen.
8. Since writing this I was examining statistics for homelessness and we know there are thousands more homeless men, what is interesting is the rate of rent free housing for women jumps after 30-40 years of age, therefore at the prime earning age for women are able to achieve more disposable income.
9. Even since 2013 there were more male deaths despite being more women, e.g. prostrate cancer kills more men than breast cancer in women. Taking medical costs, earning potential, and time off work survivors have more debt as a result. According to other online studies men are more likely to suffer with debt, credit card debt, and person loans.

10. More men will die of suicide than women. Even though men chose to partake in more dangerous jobs, experience social isolation, and stay in rural and remote environments, men are burdened by society to achieve more despite missing time from their family. Even though more women report mental illnesses, more men will experience a lifetime mental illness. There is a quality of life that men do not achieve if we are sensitive to the implications of the suicidal rates of men. This relates to a study that claimed that women overall have a more pleasurable life. 

The statistics paint a picture that women are far more educated, women enjoy more time with their children, chose to do more unpaid work, statistically achieve more of a sense of life balance, less likely to die horrifically with heart disease or by motor accident, and have a higher rate of seeing doctors for diseases and mental illnesses in Australia. They are far less likely to be imprisoned and less likely to be attacked. This gendered gap, this distance shows men experience more violence, have shorter lives, lower education, higher suicides, and experience more suffering through disease and mental illness. But this gap if looked at financially comes at a cruel existential disparity.

violence towards women

In a previous post I mentioned the statistics of violence towards men and victimisation of men as being far higher and with higher rates. Being a victim of violence throughout my childhood I felt the need to explore the philosophical implications. According to feminist theory violence against women results from gender inequality on the societal level (Bograd, 1988). The theory explores the male-other as it exerts power over the female-other. This doesn’t do what happened to me justice as I feebly tried to protect my brother from my step-dad, nor does it fully express watching him pummel my mother. Nor does it look directly at the male-other, the poverty and pressure that encases the violent-male. There is no phenomenological approach, rather a messy subjective sociological theory based on the other, the weaker-other.

Domestic violence is a subdivision of violence that can be interpreted through the subjective lens of a feminist-socialist output. I had to ignore some biased papers on a feminist approach to domestic violence as I write this; the subjective nature of handling their data becomes strange. Though Feminist theory claims equality, this is not inclusive in their analytics as they subdivide the issue: violence only matters when it’s divided into domestic violence because it affects the female-other. Rape matters because more women are raped. I understand that we are cognitively myopic; only caring about what matters to ourselves as groups; but the subjectivity of this proposed equality is in contrast to the methodology as it narrows data points. Judith Butler explores this notion beautifully, when she writes:

‘We are at least partially formed through violence. We are given genders or social categories, against our will, and these categories confer intelligibility or recognizability, which means that they also communicate what the social risks of unintelligibility or partial intelligibility might be…But…a certain crucial breakage can take place between the violence by which we are formed and the violence with which, once formed, we conduct ourselves.’

This is not to reduce violence to the horizon of relativism, again I type this as a sensitive adult who was twice groomed by pedophiles, but relativism as it relates to our point of reference. Emile Durkheim writes poetically that violence bursts from moderating oneself:

‘This violence is a game with him, a spectacle in which he indulges himself, a way of demonstrating that superiority he sees in himself.’

You cannot moralise violence because the violent-being is beyond societal norms. It is no wonder that Gilles Deleuze described violence as ‘changing entities of our world’. Self becomes object-self to harm the other. In so far as violence destroys the self, the moral self, the hormonal based monster that twists our societal self.

Finally, we look to the victim because the violent-male is too difficult to look at directly. The image forces the reader to look away. Jacques Derrida claims this type of writing is violence ‘the violence of the difference, of classification’ There is a violence to the feminist-analytics: it leaves men in prison to be raped, makes the crushing skull of a man less important than the woman mildly coerced into sex, the cuts of each subdivision of human statistics, the weight of poverty that comes with male abuse, and why the brutality of their dismissals so fascinating.

Philosophical Bibliography Omitted.