Meditations on the forgotten or overlooked corners of media
My friend Soph hates language. They are a vigorous and profound talker, but hate the sensation of meaning and intention crashing against the rocks of ambiguity. They’re a musician and sometimes they prefer to let music or motion do the talking. I’m wedded to words. They are both my profession and my passion. But that means worrying about language. I try to cut ambiguities out or leave them lying, splattering the page with ink so that meaning can be made from nothing. Writing is anxious, useless, violent work. It means considering what does this word reveal? What does this word obscure?
I worry that the way words like transphobia or privilege get used ensures that we skim over these real things that affect real people. These terms are an imprecise map layering over a multitude of experience, sometimes sharpening, other times obscuring. This has already happened with words like gaslight, which has grown from being a useful term describing a specific phenomenon to an accusation bandied about with the weight of flypaper. It has happened in an arguably more insidious way on the right, with “woke” becoming distorted and distant from its original meaning. When words stand in for so much, they can be made to mean anything.
The visual novel The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me entirely avoids these words, the closest it gets is “men” and “women” though only the principle character could possibly be identified as such. The emphasis is instead on texture: bark on skin, a sunburn, dirt between your fingers. It’s physical feeling with beings that talk and feel and fuck, but also are distinctly un-human. The main character explores a patch of the natural world, talking with the sun, the moon, the trees and finding everywhere otherness and reflections of herself.
In some sense this makes the game didactic or allegorical. The sun stands in for abusive, enveloping relationships, the moon for a loving–but fleeting–romance, a flower for self-image and self-hatred, the earth itself for shame, the lives we used to live but cannot anymore. The expression is in the texture of the natural world, but it’s also easy to make the leap toward more human relationships. But despite that directness, it feels “useless” as a feminist work. Though I described it as didactic, the game is pretty uninterested in teaching as such. The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me makes no arguments for policy or law changes. There is no call to action. There is no true ending. The format makes each of the game’s paths exploratory rather than definite. Many of them end in sharp ambivalence rather than defined messaging.
This creates resonance. The natural world is a potent metaphor here (though it is more than just a metaphor), because it all is both internal and external. The earth, flora, and fauna nurture all of us, but our relationship with those things has gradually become less direct. Similarly, the world we live in often forces us to hide or obscure our discomfort, our pain, and our needs. The return to the earth here is also a return to our bodies. A return to nakedness, in all that the word reveals.
The truth that The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me constantly flips over is that a feeling is not some private, shameful, unique thing. Even the trees feel–their bodies are a strange and variant as ours. Though some of the game’s subjects are cruel, distant, or indifferent, it understands them all as part of one place, as part of an experience that is shared between all the component parts of that place. In one sense, The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me’s central character is alone. In another, she’s surrounded by things like her, that have felt the same things she has. The game is about removing the ego from a feeling and instead finding the roots of it, feeling how it pushes and pulls from your mistakes and your glories.
That space, that rootedness, gives the game both a sharp specificity and a wide range of applications. The main character appears to be, and understand herself as, a cis woman (though even that “simple” category is as fraught and complicated as any other). However, in the multitudes of bodies and feelings I was relieved and overwhelmed to find a feminism here that could fully incorporate me, that I felt recognized by.
Still, I wonder if that recognition really means anything. New traumas are being created all the time, and all the telling of old ones didn’t prevent them. Writer Yasmin Nair has written frequently and powerfully about the inability of trauma-centric storytelling to actually result in change. Clear demands and organized action are what is needed. The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me is distinctly not a part of this problem; it’s too poetic, too un-rhetorical. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel the edges of what a work like this can do. Earlier I wrote that writing as both useless and violent. It can only really describe, and even that imperfectly. The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me is sharp enough to rely on that imperfection, to choose it. I don’t know if that makes it less uncomfortable.
Still, sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that the cultural machines of the powerful are all-encompassing and the cultural creations of the small are completely useless. If we believe that the propaganda of the massive systems around us, the manipulation and misappropriation of language, have power, then we must believe that our countermeasures can have power. If we believe that words can obscure, we have to also believe they can reveal. It helps that The Earth Is A Better Person Than Me is not strictly autobiographical or even “real.” It doesn’t have ambitions to open minds or free hearts. It wants to feel, to explore, to touch. That simplicity is what makes it so powerful. It can’t do everything, but a moment, it revealed something to me. In a sense, that’s all I can ask art, and words, to do.
Grace In The Machine 