YOU, DEFEATED
Content warning: This essay talks about suicide and grief.
I wake up to the tender crackling of fire and the steady, rhythmic pounding of steel on steel. There’s a blacksmith, one floor below me. He’s working, always working, his hulking body glistening with sweat, but every time I speak to him he sets his hammer down. He seems glad just to see me. He sharpens my sword, makes it more lethal. His services are priced fairly, even though he has such a monopoly on the blacksmith market that he could ask for whatever he wanted and I’d pay it. When I leave he says to me, “I’ll be seeing you, then. Be careful out there.” He doesn’t have to say this, but he does, like a kiss on the cheek, or a signature. He says it with humour and levity and care and just a note of sadness, like I’m his only friend in the world and he’s too shy to admit it, and I realise that he wants me to stay with him, that the world is full of peril and he’s worried sick every time I leave, never sure if he’ll see me again. I realise that no one in my life has ever said this to me in so many words. It makes me want to cry.
I venture out and cross a bridge. I step on a tile that sinks under my weight. Three arrows shoot out of the wall and hit me right in the chest, one after another. THWAK! THWAK! THWAK! Just as I’m reeling from this grievous new injury, a nine-foot-tall man with a snake head holding a slab of black iron as big as my body jumps out of the shadows and turns my skull into a pancake. I die. I wake up to the tender crackling of fire and the steady, rhythmic pounding of steel on steel.
Welcome to Dark Souls.
The first thing you should know about the Dark Souls games is that they are hard. They have gained a reputation for their oppressive tone, to the point where describing something as ‘the Dark Souls of’ has become shorthand for anything which is unreasonably difficult, or, in a purist’s application, which is hard but fair. The promise of a surmountable fairness is central to their experience and success. Pay attention; this bit is important.
There’s a state in phenomenology Martin Heidegger terms ‘readiness-to-hand’. It’s a state of being which is achieved when an action — a way of interacting with objects in the world — becomes so rehearsed that it reaches a second nature. Heidegger uses the example of a skilled carpenter hammering nails at his workbench. The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become. In this state, there is no hammer: so long as it functions, the skilled carpenter doesn’t recognise it consciously as an object separate from his own subjectivity. Without objects to orient himself against, the subject also sublimates. No hammer. No nails. No workbench. No carpenter. This is not a description of an automatic experience, where the carpenter has no conscious awareness at all, but rather one which is not aligned according to a delineation of subject and object. The experience is of the task alone, so often repeated that for the carpenter it becomes an unconscious gesture, as easy as speaking.
This state of being is created by repetition, a repertoire of memories that manifests somewhere outside of conscious thought. Heidegger’s carpenter is acting with what is commonly called ‘muscle memory’ — an interesting concept. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed writes of unpacking her kitchen in a new house. The familiar smell of spices fills the air. I allow the cumin to spill, and then gather it up again. I feel flung back somewhere else. I am never sure where the smell of spices takes me, as it had followed me everywhere. Each smell that gathers returns me somewhere; I am not always sure where that somewhere is. Memories arise unbidden, conjured by a sensation of the body, felt by and within the body, a somatosensory time travel which transports us unconsciously to another place, another set of experiences that conspire, coalesce, and collapse into our present.
Most of us are not skilled carpenters (kudos to you if you are). But most of us must remember how it feels to learn to ride a bike. I do. I remember my mother, arms crossed, eagle-eyed, standing vigil over me as I push and wobble in the parking lot behind our shop. We live above it, just the two of us, waiting for our business Visas to be finalised. Neither of us speak English with any fluency. At school, I’m bullied relentlessly for this inadequacy. The world can be very hostile to a single migrant mother and her stuttering, inarticulate child. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve wasted my entire life in compensation.
I remember the vocabulary board she makes for me, the list of new words to be learned pinned to it each week. We are learning how to speak together. I remember the exact moment I overtake her in language proficiency — the word is rot. I remember how she held me on her lap when I stumbled across a cartoon of a boy playing with his father and felt such grief that I started to weep without understanding why. But what I remember most is learning how to ride a bike. The unnaturalness of balance. I remember her patience in the face of my frustration, skinning my knees over and over, feeling stupid and slow, as I so often did. And at last the moment of revelation — a gear turns in my brain and I can do it like it’s nothing. I’m giggling, cackling, maybe crying with joy. She fades into the background, then I bring her back in, call out to her — “Mama, ni kan wo!” Mother, look at me. And boy, does she ever. She can’t stop. Her lips pull back into a grin, teeth beaming, says to me in her singsong voice, “Let’s go to Wattle Park.” And for hours, for days, all I do is ride, learning the balance, the weight adjustment, the speed, the traction, the brake, the turn, low-hanging wattles whipping across my helmet, hot summer wind against my skin. And mama, somewhere on the fringes of my periphery, ready to catch me if I fall.
She is my mother. I am her son. This is the closest we will ever be.
The second thing you should know about Dark Souls is that the world has already ended. You play as an undead knight in a fallen kingdom. The knight part isn’t strictly mandatory — you can also be a wizard or a thief or naked man with a club, really the world is your oyster (although I don’t see the point in being anything except a knight). The undead part, is. There’s something rotten in the state of Lordran, you see. A curse of undeath has been loosed upon the world. No one dies, not really. They are bound to come back, again and again, into this lurching, tortuous existence, like the kingdom itself, until time and madness grind them all to powder.
You cannot save this ruined land; the great battle for order has already been fought and lost. But, if you persevere, you can prolong it, just a little longer.
These two points work in a feedback loop to create a funhouse mirror logic of real life. Look at this broken earth, full of sorrow. Wouldn’t you like to save it, even briefly? Dark Souls taps into a kind of challenge fantasy of trial and adversity: that there’s an inherent conquerable fairness to the universe, that triumph is possible even in the midst of despondence, that the hard-fought battles of life are winnable. Because in spite of all this, there is a divine, merciful, cosmic justice to these games. No attacks come out without a windup animation, like a boxer pulling her arm back before releasing a punch. This is as true for you as it is for fallen gods. All around you are littered telltale warnings of the dangers that await you, if only you weren’t too dense to read them. There’s no such thing as luck. Plan well enough, react fast enough, learn thoroughly enough, and you’ll always win.
An armoured giant walks up to me with an axe the size of a minivan. Theoretically he should be able to destroy me without a second thought, wail on me without reprieve until I’m minced meat, but he doesn’t, because that would be unfair. It would be unkindly. He throws out an attack before I’m even in his range so I know the timing. I still mess up, and he flattens me, but I get the hang of it now. Like learning to ride a bike, I repeat the actions towards an unconscious state. I do a somersault into him at just the right second — not away, that’s the trap — the axe blade cuts through me but I’m unharmed, like a magician’s assistant I emerge miraculously whole. It’s a trick, a magic trick. The giant pauses for a moment. I imagine that he’s clapping on the inside.
Aevee Bee explains: There is a little secret here which perhaps you can notice: When the ugly monster’s limbs reach out to touch the small human’s body, there is about a tenth of a second — maybe less — where her body is invincible. It doesn’t even matter if she’s geometrically in harm’s way or not. She is safe because she timed it right, was perfect.
These frames of invincibility (or as the hardcore call them, “invincibility frames”) dangle like a carrot on a stick. See, even in this very hard game, there is something wonderful and fair: The game doesn’t care about the way bodies actually intersect. If your timing was correct, it agrees: “You were not touched.” Maybe if my timing was better I wouldn’t get hit. Maybe if I was more attentive and noticed the charred bodies on the bridge, the Hellkite Drake wouldn’t have made marshmallows out of me. I fuck up, I’m injured, I die. The controller vibrates in my hands, and I feel the virtual pain in my real body. The feeling etches itself deep into my skull. My two bodies compress into one. Now I’ll know for next time. It’s easy, see? It’s just muscle memory.
As part of my gender transition, I’ve been relearning how to speak. In professional terms this is known as ‘vocal feminisation training’. When the body is exposed to testosterone during puberty, the shape of the larynx changes: it widens in circumference, transforming the resonating chamber in such a way as to produce a much deeper sound. Once this has occurred, the larynx will never return to its pre-pubescent state.
So much of voice training is oriented towards ‘naturalness’. I am even training to feminise involuntary sounds, like coughs and sneezes. It turns out that all sounds are ‘involuntary’, insofar as one is not conscious of the anatomical mechanics of sound-making. Sara Ahmed: What does it mean to be oriented? How is it that we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn? When a pubescent boy croaks and sirens, his mind is adjusting to anatomical changes, orienting itself instinctually to the body’s new shapes. The process is one of rehearsal to the point of readiness-to-hand, wherein the larynx does not consciously register as an object separate to one’s subjectivity. If we know where we are, when we turn this way or that, then we are oriented. We have our bearings. We know what to do to get to this place or to that. To be oriented is also to be oriented toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. But if one wishes to go backwards, to once again sound as one did before their voice was broken, one must relearn how to make sounds with this strange, alien object.
What happens when there is a dysfunction in this phenomenological process? Voice training aims to first defamiliarise the action of making sound — to make such actions conscious — then to rehearse until they once again become unconscious, return to readiness-to-hand. Suppose the chain of my bike snaps, and sends me careening down the hill in terror. Suppose the hammer breaks mid-swing, landing instead on the carpenter’s finger, crushing the delicate bone. How would he feel, in that moment before metal hit skin, sensing the horrible shift in trajectory, already imagining the violence to come? The breakdown of material function in these objects is also a phenomenological splintering. The resulting injury is not just physical, but psychic as well. How would the carpenter regard his tools, if every time he picked up his hammer he recalled the sickening weight of it, his finger pulsing in phantom pain? Could I ever lose myself again in the childlike joy of riding? Would my mother scream? Would I?
I hate voice training. It may not surprise you to learn that I place considerable self-worth in my ability to make words. Of all the things about my body I resent, this foreign shape inside my throat is the worst; not just because the sounds it produces invite speculation and ridicule and all manner of dysphoric affects, but because re-orienting myself against it makes me feel so clumsy, a dumb kid once more. Nevertheless, I practice every day. Heat on fire, fire in heat. God, it fucking hurts. One two three four five six seven eight. My voice cracks at the cash register, the cashier flashes a humiliating glance of recognition. Ma me mo mi mu. I record and playback, listen and take notes, give up in frustration, begrudgingly return. Eeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. I push through because I want to be heard, as a woman. When I whisper I love you, when I moan Fuck me, when I say My name is Mia, I want it to be a woman’s voice that emerges. The re-orientation of my body-as-object is also a re-orientation of desire. Sara Ahmed: If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence, of how we inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces with. One day, I hope, this will be my real voice, homely and familiar. Like riding a bike. The rain in Spain falls on the plain. And any other sound I ever made — base and guttural — will be a distant memory.
But memory, however distant, is invariably stored in the body. Sara Ahmed: Sometimes the return is welcome, sometimes not. Sometimes it is tears or laughter that makes me realize that I have been pulled to another place and another time. Such memories can involve a recognition of how one’s body already feels, coming after the event.
I have this friend. His name is Solaire of Astora, another knight on a knightly errand. He wears a ridiculous bucket on his head like Ned Kelly, and he speaks with an infectious, unhinged jollity that feels totally inappropriate, a labrador in a morgue. I love his full-chested sunshine laugh, I love sitting next to him at the bonfireside in silence, I love that he has the patience to help me even when I keep fucking up in the same places. He is a good friend, a paragon of knightly virtues. I want to be like him. But as I do better and better on my quest, he does progressively worse. I keep winning, but he just can’t seem to. Like me, he is a disappointing overachiever. No matter how hard he tries or how nice he is or how many people he helps along the path, things never seem to go his way. He’s a loser after all.
I’m in the airport and my friend, R, is posting desperate updates on Twitter. I send them a message in concern — I recognise their desperation as my own, I’ve been so worried but never as present as I want to be, there’s just been no time. It’s past midnight and I’m gearing up for a ten hour flight with no in-flight entertainment — what are we, ascetics? — and the fluorescent lights overhead are somehow both too dim and too bright for me to focus on what I’m saying. It amounts to something like “It gets better” — just look at me! It’s not what I want to say. R sounds unconvinced. “I’m glad to hear you’re doing well,” they tell me. I can make nothing of the tone. It’s time to board. I say a hasty goodbye — at least I think I do. “When I get back,” I tell myself, “I’ll talk to you again, I’ll say what needs to be said.” But there is no “when I get back”, and there never will be.
On our last meeting I find Solaire in the Demon Ruins. He’s gone mad from failure. He doesn’t recognise me anymore, doesn’t recognise anyone. He swings at me wildly. No honour. It’s worse than death. I put him down like a rabid dog.
When I get the news about R, I’m not surprised. The scene is comical, one of those universal pranks with a punchline I don’t get. I’m on a cruise ship, confined with my mother. I have food poisoning. How many times had we talked about the despair of our lives? R and I were birds of a feather. Closeted Asian trans women, ‘they’s in lieu of ‘she’s, trapped in deadend office jobs that knew us as men, permanently anaesthetised by virtual distractions to stave off the terror of poverty and disinheritance from our conservative families. When I excuse myself from the putrid all-you-can-eat buffet, my mother asks what’s wrong. I explain that a friend of mine has passed away. “I’m sorry.” she says to me. “Was your friend a boy or a girl?” Without thinking, I project myself into R. R’s mother, who we had so often traded grievances over, becomes my own. I tell her a boy — an insult I instantly curse myself for. How could I be so callous? R lived across the coastline, but through a virtual space we could connect as our ideal selves, reach a mutual understanding untainted by the betrayals of our misshapen bodies. How many times had I also thought the unthinkable, faced with the pitch-black prospect of a future like ours?
I rush upstairs to throw up in the bathroom. I want to talk to my mother. I want to cry. I want her to hold me through my pain as she did when I was little, unable to express the ocean of grief inside me then as now. I want her to hold me as her daughter. But how? Instead, against the gently swaying toilet, dripping vomit, I kneel and pray to God.
If I knew that you needed to kill the Sunlight Maggot before meeting Solaire in the Demon Ruins then he would’ve lived. All I needed to do was donate 30 human souls to a blind-deaf-mute spider woman and unlock a hidden gate — a cheap price to pay for a friend. I would’ve saved him. I wanted to save him. If I only knew what it would take. Maybe if I knew how to spot the signs I could’ve saved this friendship, that relationship. Aevee Bee: Sometimes I wish I had this power in real life. If I had it would mean never having to say ‘no’ in so many words, nor the confrontation that sometimes comes with saying no. But that perfect, flawless dodge is not sustainable — you have to be devastated so many times to get the timing so flawless.
Maybe if I was more knightly, brave and just and true. A real knight always knows what to say, what to do, what to be, what to give. After my grandfather’s wake I’m speaking to my mother, my poor bereaved mother, and she says “No one in the world ever cared about me except dad, and now he’s gone.” She says this pointedly so I know she’s talking about me. I don’t say anything back. I won’t humour her. I try to summon more compassion but it doesn’t arrive. I want to be an angel of resplendent mercy — or at the very least some kind of lesser saint. But I can’t even manage that.
I don’t reread my final exchange with R. I leave it under lock and key, like Schrödinger’s cat in the box, both alive and dead at the same time. If I look it will be over, with certainty. So long as I don’t look I can still change the moment. I play it back in my mind like a tape recorder, over and over, I try and fail and try again, what if I’d just sent $10,000, I don’t even need it, just take it, whatever you want it’s yours, just don’t go, why didn’t I say “I love you”, why didn’t I say “please stay”, why did I make it all about me and how well I’m doing, I’m so selfish, it’s never any use, even in my dreams I can only fuck it up, the moment is a fixed point and I’m moving further and further away.
When I speak to my mother, I pitch down, relax my larynx, lower the resonance from my skull into my chest cavity. I open my mouth and a bellowing noise emerges from somewhere beneath my sternum. I hate the sound of it. I want to speak to her in my voice, my real voice, the one I’ve been working on so hard. I want to see her beaming at me as she once did. I want to feel her pride. “Mama, ni ting wo!” Mother, listen to me. My mother calls me, too late in the evening, her voice shrill and alarmed — “Have you called your grandma? Why not? If she didn’t pick up why don’t you call again?” — like I’m an idiot child — “I will!” I say back to her, almost shouting (the awful sound), too much snap in my voice, “Shut the fuck up!” I mouth — she hangs up without another word — I text her, “Got through and spoke to grandma, happy new year!” — she replies “Good night.” — and I know that I’m the worst daughter alive.
A real knight would never do this. A real knight pulls Ornstein’s aggro so her host can rush Smough. A real knight wouldn’t let an Invader touch her charge. A real knight tells her mama she loves her at every opportunity, a real knight calls her grandma every week even though her teeth are rotten and she doesn’t speak English and anyway she can’t even hear your voice on the phone so what the fuck does it matter, a real knight always messages her friends even when she doesn’t have the time.
I’m not a real knight, not here, and not in Lordran. But the great thing about the latter is, there’s always a next time. And therein lies the fantasy.
When you die in Dark Souls, you don’t die in real life. This is very good game design. GO BEYOND DEATH, commands the dull metal box of Dark Souls II Collector’s Edition. Death is the enemy, the oldest, the eternal, the first and last. Death is the root of all your earthly griefs and desires. What you are really struggling against isn’t snake-headed men or lumbering iron giants, but death itself. Dodie Bellamy: In horror, people do come back, but never the same. It’s a deep human fantasy. She’s talking about her essay, Phone Home, about the death of her mother, and about E.T. Writing is always equally about loss and gaining. It gives you the world while you’re writing, but you’re writing about things that aren’t there. So it’s always about loss.
Writing is also a kind of wish-fulfilment. Through these words I conjure a virtual avatar, a cyborg self. Can you hear my voice through the screen? Do I sound like a woman? Anne Carson: Put it in your mind you’ve got a wishing jewel. I plunge my psyche for painful memories, polish them like gemstones, labour over their melancholic beauty. I’m trying to get at something to do with memory and time, a bodily grief that arrives unbeckoned, transports us, uninvited, someplace else. It’s just like Dark Souls — the Dark Souls of self-representation. Look at this broken earth, full of sorrow. Wouldn’t you like to save it, even briefly?
In this world death isn’t real. It doesn’t follow the same rules. I finish the game and immediately start over from the beginning. Loss and gaining. I’m rewriting the story of my life. Undeath is a gift: I have as many attempts as I need. Here I can still speak to mama as I used to. Here I can still save R. Next time I’ll be better. I’ll be quicker, smarter, more practised. I reach my dropped souls and push further. I beat Knight Artorias with 5 Estus, then 3, then none at all. I sail through the air, my execution flawless. His sword glides through me, touches nothing. My body is a miracle. I rescue Solaire this time. He’s inconsolable — I can hear in his voice that he wishes he were dead. I don’t give a shit. So long as he’s next to me. If I’m good enough I’ll never be defeated again. Nobody I care about will ever die. Or maybe I can’t save them all, but the ones that I can, I will. I could even stop the world from ending. I just need to be good enough.
What a wonderful fantasy this is. Nothing like the real world. Small wonder that so many trans women are so drawn to this franchise. Not just for the wondrous elasticity of its character creation or the unquestioned competency of the women that inhabit its worlds or even for femboy icon Dark Sun Gwyndolin but for this, this magical promise. In our lives we are so quickly defeated — at least, I feel that I am. And in the real world there’s not always a next time. Sometimes a failure is just a failure and a loss is just a loss. Something that cannot be put back. There’s usually nothing you can do to stop this. And the worst part is you’ll mostly be too dumb to learn from it. You’ll lose without even knowing why.
Dark Souls is a beautifully crafted warped mirror, but when your future is pitch black it can become a substitute for the real work of becoming human: messy, confusing, risky, heartbreaking. No reflection, just frame. I know what becoming human means for me, but I can’t say it, I can’t even think it. Becoming human means having to admit that I’m a woman, that I want to be, that there’s no other life for me except this. Becoming human means transitioning, voice training, new wardrobes for a new body, new friends for a new name, coming out, cutting off, quitting my miserable job, going back to school. Becoming human means apologies I don’t want to make, difficult conversations I cannot possibly win, saying last goodbyes, too much, not enough, never the right amount, always getting it wrong.
It’s not fair! It’s bullshit! Didn’t anyone playtest this thing? I feel as if I’m always grieving for the idea of a life I thought I would have, for the people who no longer share it, the person I wanted to be, a thousand daily moments of joy that I took for granted because I couldn’t imagine a tomorrow without them. I think that’s what it means to live a queer life, against the ‘straight line’ of orienting towards others. It contains the possibility of new life, but it’s also a giving-up of familiarity, safety, belonging. Or a trading of one form for another — less stable — which is both its power and its curse. Even as I feel rapturously grateful for the life I lead, in all its splendorous opportunity, the tyranny of this contradictory grief rules over me, like an apparition, or a shadow, the shape of all my shadow-selves, lost to time.
Returning to Ahmed: Away from home, my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room, where we face many tables placed alongside each other. … In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one man sitting by one woman… I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple. How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?
To disrupt the familiar orientation of our bodies with objects — with the world, with others — is at the same time life-affirming and unthinkably painful. Ahmed may never again enjoy the unreflexive happiness of dining with her partner in the same way as any of the simulacra of heterosexual paradigm who cause such a jarring phenomenological breakage in her story. And I may never again feel the pride of my mother as when I learned to ride, be held as her daughter when I’m hurting, speak to her in my voice. As we struggle towards a subversive life, a life of new possibility, we are also giving up an idea of ourselves, a way of orienting towards others made forever inaccessible. It’s a constant failure, a never-ending procession of unspeakable disappointments. How can we begin to reconcile these feelings? How do we map this contradictory phenomenology?
Better to stick to the world I know, where invulnerability is quantifiable data and Wikidot is a quick search away, where I am useful, helpful, untouchable. It’s 2015 and I’m still playing Dark Souls, then 2016, 2017, 2018. I perfect my virtual body as my fleshly prison rots. My transition gets pushed back another year and I’m still playing Dark Souls. I miss another postgrad application deadline and I’m still playing Dark Souls. I’ve finished my Bachelor’s, I tell everyone, except I don’t know for certain, I never apply for graduation, never check my grades — the stakes are too high — and more importantly I’m halfway through another run of Dark Souls. “The flow of time itself is convoluted,” Solaire tells me on our first meeting, same as he always does. Time compresses, fragments, explodes. Empires fall, relationships fail, the planet cracks and grinds to dust around me, and still I play Dark Souls. Here in my lonely world I am queen, the loneliest queen of all.
Solaire stands on the precipice, heavy with failure. He soliloquises, and I listen in silence. No matter how many times I save his life I can never speak to him, never tell him that I’m his guardian angel. Our last goodbye is only in my head. I’m trying to say the things I really mean, the things that really matter, to my lovers, to my friends, to my mother, to myself, but I’m always too dumb. I want to be smarter than this. Jeanette Winterson: I don’t want to say these stupid things but there’s a space in my brain where the complex things should be. I just don’t know how to think. Imprecision of language looms over me like the undead curse. Asymptotically I approach victory but it eludes me, always, out of reach.
…But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
I’ll be seeing you, then.
(I love you.)
Be careful out there.
(Please stay.)
Thank you for reading! This essay is a companion piece to the comic LONE SHADOW.
If you wish to support me, this essay is available for purchase as an e-zine with footnotes, referencing, an afterword, and uncompressed image file of the cover art.
