Oracular Practice

 

The other day I wrote a bit about running my current game - one of the things I discussed very briefly was the introduction of controlled randomness into a storytelling space. In our hobby this is done with the simulational machinery of the game world - the dice form the foundation, and are spun out into tables, matrixes, resolution mechanics, etc. What distinguishes games writing from prose writing? For me it's the way it introduces bounded regions of indeterminacy into a text. An adventure location or module is explicitly nearly entirely indeterminate states, to be 'completed' by the characters as they navigate it. Character creation may have randomised elements - the bounds are set by the writer, who defines a range inside which this 'type' of being is exposed to this or that variety of gear, abilities, circumstances, etc. We are good at pattern recognition - we read the indeterminacy textually, and it tells us something about the world we are all inhabiting together. 

You can do this in prose writing, but in vastly less efficient ways. You could literally say something like: these types of people are largely predisposed to this sort of activity, but there are some exceptions that instead prefer x and y. You can also try to invoke the feeling of the indeterminate state of specific character: it's not well documented who these people are, their practices and origins are mysterious; sometimes they are described as x, sometimes y, and more rarely as z. There is some sense that keeping a natural voice (instead of breaking out into a table, or dice notation) stops something from rupturing - you are still inside literature (that is, you will compose and be read under a certain heuristic, or with a set of very widely-disseminated and agreed-on shared assumptions), and not inside games writing. I think this is probably true, but I find it interesting to think about the artificiality of the distinction. 

The Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani talks often (in my reading of him, mostly in Cyclonopedia) about 'infection' or 'implication' or 'opening oneself to' or 'complicity with' an outside. The complicity of the book's subtitle is of this sort - one enters into (reader or writer, there is a sort of levelling process here - the writer is already fully complicit and so cut away or damned; the reader is given a choice as to how far they want to take things by continuing to read) a 'complicity with anonymous materials', and in so doing, opening themselves to the inhuman (as in literally inhuman, not inhumane or bad or cruel, though they do certainly have their cruelty) logics of the outside. This is a radical and ungrounding movement - elsewhere he talks about 'pure intelligence' in similar terms, as something one might move towards and be opened up by, by the practice of reading (and crucially, thinking) philosophy. 

The cruelty (or danger, if you are the writer or reader) of a Negrestanian 'outside' or a 'pure intelligence' is not a directed, reasoning, torturing one (although he has some fun with thinking about what that might look like in Cyclonopedia, when he talks about the sentience of oil/the Middle East) - it is systemic, pattern-based, unreasoning, and non-sentient. You cannot 'think philosophy' effectively if you are unwilling to open yourself up to the logic of pure intelligence (which of course has nothing to do with people being more or less 'quick' or 'smart' - it's a total state of cognition, and in my amateur reading it feels comparable to but crucially distinct from something like computation), but in so doing, you necessarily expose yourself to ungrounding and cutting up and dissolution. These things are not good for humans to be exposed to (gung ho young men proclaiming their own mastery of or closeness to cruelty/pure intelligence/whatever verbiage they've picked up recently are one of the most unpleasant parts of reading philosophy at university, and also one of the surest tells of individuals not yet having been exposed to the forces under discussion), so exposure to the logic of philosophy must be carefully managed (even managed with kindness).

There is a section in Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaus where the authors explicitly state: 'now is the time to multiply practical warnings'. They say it while discussing how one might build themselves a 'Body Without Organs', which I always pictured as a sort of thought-pattern-machine by which one could live alongside and manage exposure to an outside, without too much damage being done. It is telling that they care to warn you against a gung ho approach - one of the many things I love about these two writers - because they know that being all-in about something like this can lead to. I have a couple of friends who've confided to me about psychosis and other difficulties that were exacerbated by attempting good faith engagement with this type of thought - it's no fun (although reading about it an be enormously fun and very sexy), it's work. For D+G I suspect (again, I am an amateur reader) that it was work against capital, and against capture by its sense-making - fun doesn't really enter into the discussion, although love and joy (as examples) certainly do. 

This is all to say that an outside, or a logic of ungrounding, is a potent and extremely interesting material to work with in writing - probably(?) the best approach to doing so seriously would be philosophy, but I write fiction, and find my enjoyment using the tools I have to circle around these things. To bring things full circle, I suspect that the 'region of bounded indeterminacy' that games writing hinges on with its tables and resolution procedures is an interesting technique for managing contact with an outside, a non-human (or non-linguistic) regime of sense. Combinatorial logics, infinite series, structural repetition - all of this can be described in prose, but not efficiently. We actually have the tools to do this efficiently ready to hand. I have no idea what this means for writing OSR games (lol), but it has been on my mind. 

After the post on Brythwin, Weird Writer put up a very interesting piece of writing about oracles. In my post I had mentioned the theory that oracular practice can lead to better decision-making, by systematically opening up the mind to interpretive solutions and unexpected first principles. In her post, WW gets to the point immediately - you don't ask an oracle for a second draw, or a second prophecy. To enter into the oracular contract/logic, you are tying yourself to that logic - you submit to the bounded indeterminacy that the system has cultivated (because all oracles work within a system of referent images - you are not 'purely' ungrounded), and also submit to its primacy. A hero might be clever with the prophecy, but a hero would never simply roll again if they didn't like the response. There is something in here about cowardice, dignity, fortitude, virtue - I suspect that AI chatbots and algorithmic content feeds and many of the other artefacts of our current moment that feel so sinister are created by people that would see no issue in simply rolling again on the oracle, if they thought no one was watching. It's amazing to me that someone could not see the absolutely abject failure here: you don't fail when you get a bad prophecy (though it may destroy you), you fail when you lack the courage to genuinely open yourself to its logic - if it's only risk when convenient, you've already failed.

When discussing in the Rainbow server, WW further mentioned an artist (I have embarrassingly forgotten who this was exactly) who had an idea: that everyone ought to draw their own tarot deck. A wonderful idea, and one that got me thinking in broader terms: how might one invent one's own oracle, or oracular system? If submission to an outside is a good thing in controlled doses (and I believe that it is), how would one go about controlling the dose?

It seems to me that what you need is a picture language, and a mechanism for generating semi-random states (shout out to this lovely post, which, among other things, talks about how to roll a dice in prison, where dice are not allowed). 

A picture language: this does not need to literally be a set of images or pictures with meanings, a la the tarot. It could be a series of states (as in the Book of Changes) with correspondences between them, a cast of characters (if the liver looks this way, then Hera's mood is such and such), or whatever you like. I think the important thing is that it comes from you yourself - that it has personal significance, and that you can elaborate on it in your own time. I would also say: that you can trust it, and trust yourself not to simply change it when it tells you something you don't want to hear. This probably means that the images in the language will need to find purchase at the level of human truths - love, alienation, ageing, fortune, labour, friendship, etc. Anything above this 'level' (I suspect) will be too specific to be usefully interpreted. 

A mechanism: dice, a deck of cards, the ways the birds fly, the liver of the sacrifice, anything you wish that gives randomised, structured feedback, and which can be associated with this or that image or state from the picture language. The combinatorial machine - the bounds that you set on this will limit your exposure to its inhuman logic. If you desire to create a mystical attachment to your own interpretations, you could use something fuzzy or difficult to cleanly demarcate. If you desire to create a pattern game, and have the interpretation come later, something like dice or cards are probably more appropriate. 

My sense is that it does not matter at what point in the process the interpretation happens, except that this style of interpretation suits you personally, and has been developed by you for your own use. Fuzzy images or fuzzy relations - both of these will work fine, and each will have its particular savour. 

The point is to develop something true to yourself; one might seek guidance or tuition (and I think that one should - no human society in history has failed to develop an image of a wise mentor), but the work must, ultimately, be done in isolation. You are the only one responsible, for the very good and potentially also the ill. 

I don't know how I would approach this myself - I think that it's probably one of those things (like any practice worth taking seriously; writing, painting, whatever) that ends up being the work of a lifetime. We have high visibility examples of people who have developed a system for themselves and successfully marketed it to others - my wager is that doing this creative work yourself, setting the appropriate bounds, managing your exposure, managing your relation to the picture language etc., is more fruitful that reading someone else's attempt. The very great systems in history are guides and foundations, and I imagine that the very great oracles had personal relationships with those vast and sprawling edifices of tradition and procedure. 

I could attempt a quick list for a personal picture language:

• A human torso, with the frame cropped such that the limbs are not visible.
• A 'net' of jewels, that can be placed in front, or behind, any other thing.
• The sharp point of the needle that slips beneath the skin.
• A human face with its eyes and teeth opened too wide, a sort of demon.
• The sun, the sunlight.
• The image of loneliness, distinct from a second image of alone-ness.
• Death, of course.
• The interior of the body, opened up by illness - a sort of red landscape of sores. 
• Smoke, steam, fog, mist - like the net of jewels, a framing image
• The shared meal, distinct from a second image: the solo meal.
• Chemical stimulants.
• The whole body, understood as a sort of sorting or processing engine - its flows easy and uninterrupted, and its various limbs, organs, and metabolic systems working as they should. 

I've found these over many years of writing and paying attention to what coheres and what remains in the wake of this or that particular attempt. I suspect that I will need more to build my oracle. 

As for the mechanism, I haven't found a good one yet, and so am at the mercy of my own preconceptions, desires, wants, obsessions. Discovering a semi-random mechanism to slot into the image language feels like a worthwhile project. I never used to like the Oulipo adjacent experimental groups, but as I get older I suspect that this is the sort of thing they were interested in and gesturing towards in their very self-conscious formal play - there are plenty of painters that end up here as well.

Thank you beloved Weird Writer for prompting this set of thoughts!