By Justin E. H. Smith
I've just arrived in Berlin
to begin a year-long research
fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really
smart
philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable
luster.
Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some
very
profound thoughts.
Day 1
I’ve rented a furnished apartment in Kreuzberg, and it came equipped not only with the usual couches and tables and IKEA dishware, but also with a Terminator 2: Judgment Day pinball machine. Digital samples of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice bellow you missed, and get out, and of course Hasta la vista, baby. I recovered long ago from the absurdity of Schwarzenegger’s governorship in my home state – that he was vastly less qualified than Ronald Reagan or even Gary Coleman for the same position, that his father was a Nazi, that he himself has been caught on film gleefully doing the Hitler salute. But when, here in the shadow of the Reichstag, the digital message beneath his grim, sunglassed image flashes “Los Angeles, July 11, 2029: Judgment Day,” it is different. Everything is different.
Unlike the pinball machines of my youth, in arcades, where one was required to insert coins to make them work, here at home in Kreuzberg, as an adult, I can simply stick my hand inside the machine and set it for as many credits as I like. I pump it up to 20 credits at a go. Already today I've done this 6 times, which means that I've played 120 games of pinball. At 3 balls per game, I’ve shot the ball into action 360 times. I only stopped when I realized I was out of crème de cassis and would have to go out for more. If I had played this much in an arcade in my youth (when I did not need crème de cassis), I would have spent $30 in quarters. If you had shown me $30 in quarters when I was 10 I would have had a grand mal seizure on the spot.
Day 2
A certain artist
from the
developing world who has enjoyed
tremendous success lately (a group show at MoMA, a MacArthur Genius
Grant) and
is now in residence in Berlin is supposed to be calling me back anytime
now. I
left her a message hours ago. She’s a friend of a friend in New York,
and he
thought it would be a good idea for us to meet. The phone is silent, so
I'm
back at the machine. When I take breaks, Arnold Schwarzenegger
announces
"I'll be back," to which I mutter in response: "I'll be back
too. It's just a piss break.”
It's 2 PM, and I've reset the machine 5 times, for 20 games a go. If I hit the machine too hard, Schwarzenegger's voice says “Chill out!” and on the screen under his face the words “Achtung! Achtung!” appear. Germans say "Achtung" when the floor is wet and slippery, when your fly is open, or when you're hitting the pinball machine too hard.
Sören
Kierkegaard came
to Berlin to study when he was 28
and spent the rest of his life mocking the Herr Professors he
encountered here,
with their massive architectonic systems. He decided to write instead,
frankly
and simply, about God and faith. He may as well have written about
pinball.
Pinball has it all. Take causality, for example. One’s actual influence
over
the motion of the ball is rather limited; as in poker, much depends on
simple
luck, or, as the philosophers of science say, stochastic processes. But
the
deeper one gets into it, the more one's perception of one's causal
reach is
distorted, and, consequently, the better one plays.
Day 4
I’m contemplating having a dinner party as a pretext for showcasing my pinball talents. I'll invite the woman artist from the developing world. Maybe she'll encourage me to apply for a MacArthur Genius Grant, too.
I now have to unplug the machine in order to stop playing it. Last night I reset it 8 times, which means I played 160 games, or shot the ball 480 times. When I plug it back in it has to warm up for about 10 minutes, during which strange messages appear on the screen in German, telling me to run the test module, and to insert, of all things, more deutschmarks. The unplugging is meant to discourage me, but it doesn’t seem to help much. If I were Ulysses I would tell my shipmates to bind me. But I am all alone.
Day 5
Berlin is a city consisting
of two principal ethnic
groups: Turks and hipsters. Now I know
we aren't supposed to talk about hipsters anymore; I've been upbraided
for it,
and told I was relying on “a crutch for uninspired alt-weekly hacks.”
But what
can I do? They're here. I didn't invent them. As Durkheim would have
said, they
constitute a social fact.
Day 6
With pinball, it is not at
all clear what the theme of the
game – Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in this case – has to do with the
game
itself. Am I supposed to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger character, or am
I
supposed to be fighting against him? How could this ever be determined
when “I”
am a perfectly spherical metal ball?
The digital screen tells me that I will earn a “Freispiel” when my score hits 30 million. Not just a free “guy,” as we used to say, but an entire free game. All of my games are free but I feel this is something I would like to achieve. So far I haven't made it past 15 million.
Day 7
I'm finally starting to
understand what makes a good
pinball player – that is, as a German philosopher might say, I am
starting to
understand the “principles” of pinball. I now realize that my earlier
perception of circumscribed causal reach was a consequence of my
attachment to
a mechanical model of reality, whereas the world under that glass sheet
obeys
only organic laws, by which everything is interconnected in ways that
cannot be
reduced to the mere collisions and repulsions of metal balls and
plastic knobs.
The pinball wizard is the one who grasps this, and is able to bend the
pinball
world to his own subjectivity. I believe I am close to doing this.
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
My wife said she would think about joining me in Berlin if I ever succeed in getting my act together. Otherwise, as they say, kaput. It was my recitations of Rilke, and not my pinball playing, that won her over, once upon a time.
I'm going to head over to the
National Library, the one
frequented by the angels – Bruno Ganz and the other one – in Wings
of Desire,
to see if I can't get my old life back. Bruno Ganz later played Hitler
in Downfall,
a German blockbuster that made Germans ask: are Germans ready for
Hitler
blockbusters? I can't answer this question, but in any case Bruno Ganz
deserves
his own Bruno Ganz-themed pinball machine.
Ganz's angel in Wings of Desire wanted to touch and taste and feel everything that the objects of his solicitude got to touch and taste and feel as real, flesh-and-blood human beings. He became a human being and suddenly everything was in color. He bought some sharp second-hand duds, went to a Nick Cave show, and kissed a girl. But being human hurts, too. In a Bruno Ganz pinball machine, the bumpings would be understood to represent the pain of being human. And if it were mine, or were part of my furnished apartment, I would reach my hand inside and charge it up with more free games than I could count.
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This essay originally published in N+1.