Caveat: this is a very long post. Not Max Landis long (A Scar No One Else Can See), but still quite thorough. It is intended to serve almost as more of a hub for subject matter connections, revolving around the name Samuel, and the aspect of him being seemingly numb to/unaffected by death and conversely hyperemotional about life.
With that in mind, please don’t feel obligated to read every single word - scroll through and spot any content that interests/piques you at your leisure. Of course, if you do read it all, kudos and props to you, and welcome to my brain pretty much, hehe :D
At worst/least you’ll have hopefully found some mote of it interesting unto itself, but my hope is that these connections truly could hold up and bear direct relevance to Death Stranding & Kojima.
Caveat 2: As per usual on Death Stranding Podcast, I explore beyond the bounds of just Death Stranding and end up drawing inevitable parallels between the game and Kojima himself, even extending that further still with Kojima’s own personal connection to, and channeling of (wether consciously or not) the character of Sam and the themes of Death Stranding. The path that he has taken, and that he is currently on both creatively and in life, are laid bare in many obvious instances of Death Stranding's premise and imagery (we have an episode coming up dedicated entirely to "A Symbolic Reading of Death Stranding As Unconsciously Expressed Metaphor for Kojima’s Life/Processes/Being").
That these congruencies/parallels are as unprecedentedly close (as I found them to be) to Kojima himself as they are, even considering his previous titles, speaks volumes of how personal Death Stranding is for him — the closest work to his most foundational/formative aspects/concepts yet, for certain.
This article will discuss the recently revealed name of the protagonist of Death Stranding, performed by Norman Reedus - ‘Sam’, as well as his character seemingly being unaffected (emotionally and physically) by the events happening around him.
Many articles to come will, I am sure, investigate the latest trailer’s allusions to Lovecraft, which I’m excited to read, but out of everything that leapt out at me was, arguably, the most solid piece of information we now have: the name Sam.
I’ll be expanding on/referencing this write-up during a specially-dedicated segment on Death Stranding Podcast Episode 9 (I showed my partner the latest trailer, and as a specialist in behaviour/emotion/meaning through her work, she immediately told me about the subjects I’m about to discuss, which I just had to share with you all here) recording in about 24 hours, but for now, I wanted to lay down the backbone of the connections I think I may have made. Make of it what you will :)
Introduction
As mentioned above, when we watched the trailer again, I turned and asked what stood out to Ray, and we discussed the name Sam, or Samuel, and the deep-dive began there.
Three Samuels of note arose to the forefront - Beckett, Johnson, and the biblical Samuel - and so this analysis will focus on them, in three parts.
After hours of reading, what was revealed was a common thread of/obsession with Beginnings and Endings, First Creation, Birth and Death, and even an allusion to being both a Prophet and one who leads others to certain doom (as we saw in Trailer 3). Please enjoy.
Part 1: Samuel Beckett - A Kindred Mind, Set Amidst Darkness And Light
The most kindred Samuel that I believe could be paired/matched with Kojima, and the first which I will cover, would be Samuel Beckett. If you haven’t heard of this gentleman, I have the great pleasure of introducing you to him, and believe me, if you connect with Kojima and Death Stranding on any thematic/philosophical level, you’ll be very glad to know him and his work.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French.
Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin (academic scholar and professor of drama) called the ”Theatre of the Absurd”.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".[4] He was elected Saoi (‘wise one’) of Aosdána (an Irish association of artists created in 1981, whose governing body is called the Toscaireacht) in 1984.
I’ve long thought Hideo has kindred selves out there, one of them being Tarkovsky (which I want to explore in another post/episode), and Beckett unquestionably is one as well.
When reviewing the imagery of the latest trailer with a collection of Samuel quotes (from many and various works, including The Unnamable and Waiting for Godot, as well as personal transcripts/interviews) handy, we found the following connections:
“The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.” Kojima Connection: Sam’s character’s eyes are unblinking and emotionless as he weeps.
“You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.” Kojima Connection: I’ll Keep Going.
“Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.” Kojima Connection: Through being his inexplicable, ultimately unexplainable self, Kojima is truly being who he is now.
“How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.” Kojima Connection: Even having insight into the deeper layers beneath imagery, its the interplay and juxtaposition between what is at the surface and what forms the core of an idea/theme that creates something fascinating and worthwhile.
“the question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn't pass, from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, other's time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive, with no memory of anything, no hope of anything, no knowledge of anything, no history and no prospects, buried under the seconds...” Kojima Connection: Apart from the ‘grain by grain’ connection to Blake’s ‘grain of sand’, the imagery of the dead and the thick sludge of time enveloping us, and being neither dead nor alive (between realms)
“Let there then be light, it will not necessarily be disastrous. Or let there be none, we'll manage without it. But these lights, in the plural, which rear aloft, swell, sweep down and go out hissing, reminding one of the naja (a Snake), perhaps the moment has come to throw them into the balance and have done with this tedious equipoise, at last.” Kojima Connection: Equipoise means ‘balance of forces’, and that balance (life, brought by the the first explosion which enabled earth to be in a stable state for millions of years) is now being ‘done with’ by the second explosion, the one which will be our last (life and physics and reality as we know it breaking down). Also, the ‘let there be light, or let there be done’, references Sam’s seeming nonchalance at the events happening around him. More on this later.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.” Kojima Connection: We’ve seen when lining up trailers that some events that begin in one/end in another.
“We always find something, eh, to give us the impression we exist?.” Kojima Connection: What binds us to reality? Does it matter if that’s only in our heads, and in fact, we are adrift?
“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” Kojima Connection: This drips of the imagery of the third trailer - The corpse, the baby, the lights gleaming from the vehicle, the light at the hand-headed colossi’s mouth, and we’re in the darkness of the ocean with Sam.
“The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.” Kojima Connection: The ‘ever-renewing now’ and the ‘ever-creating universe’ is a concept in both physics and philosophy, and ties into Death Stranding’s themes of eternity/infinite variations of the same dimension. Bonus Quantumyth connection: this is the entire premise of QM, that the creation of the world is occurring at all times, with no one ‘creation myth that began it all.’
“Words are the clothes thoughts wear.” Kojima Connection: Just gonna leave this one here…
“I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks.” Kojima Connection: ‘I am all these things in one man’ = ‘all of heaven in a wild flower’
“Art has nothing to do with clarity.” Kojima Connection: Self explanatory :P
“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?” Kojima Connection: Was Sam safe all this time, while the others died around him?
“If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.” Kojima Connection: The answer of why something is worth doing is in the doing the thing itself, and the reason for doing it at all is our nature - as creative-thinking mammals.
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Kojima Connection: How he coalesces his ‘mind mess’ into an actually emotionally resonant and ‘structured’ story.
“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle. I do my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.” Kojima Connection: Warped and intricately interwoven twist-filled narratives that end up telling a linear tale.
“But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.” Kojima Connection: Sam’s nonchalance…
“But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.” Kojima Connection: Third trailer imagery.
“Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.” Kojima Connection: Sam’s nonchalance.
“The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.” Kojima Connection: Ostensibly describes Kojima’s creative/life ethos.
“For to know nothing is nothing - not to want to know anything likewise… but to be beyond knowing anything… to know you are beyond knowing anything.. that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.” Kojima Connection: Kojima is undoubtedly an incurious seeker, as are all his protagonists.”
“The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.” Kojima Connection: What more can be said beyond words already spoken? How can you innovate a new genre in a sea of ‘been there, done that’?
“But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.” Kojima Connection: The Great Light That Devours (The colossus from the third trailer devouring the CDT worker)
“Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed….To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!” Kojima Connection: ‘all mankind is us’ - we are Ludens. We are all experiencing the same thing, yet were doing so differently for every one of us. Kojima wants to channel this symbolically and in terms of gameplay - we will all BE Norman (Sam), as he Reedus puts it.
“what would I do without this world what would I do without this world, faceless, incurious? where ‘to be’ lasts but an instant, where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been without this wave where in the end body and shadow together are engulfed what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love without this sky that soars above its ballast dust what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before peering out of my deadlight looking for another wandering like me eddying far from all the living in a convulsive space among the voices voiceless that throng my hiddenness” ― Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French Kojima Connection: imagery of the third trailer, engulfing, convulsive (the body)…
“The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.” Kojima Connection: Sometimes its not strictly about making sense of something, but feeling what you feel along the way of finding out that you’ll never really figure it out.
“Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.” Kojima Connection: Only when you are silent can you see what the universe is. Sam is silent. Picking up what I’m putting down here?
“Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me, too, someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on.” Kojima Connection: So many things. Growing old, as the pinned driver did. The air full of the CDT worker’s cries. And Sam’s emotionless, non-horrified, almost tired eyes. Could be sleeping, unaware of the horror around him? Could his silence be profound ignorance, or profound knowledge? And then, those who are watching, the invisible figures glimpsed in the rain…
“And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.” Kojima Connection: May as well be a core thought of Kojima in this post-Konami creatively liberated time :D
“Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?” Kojima Connection: ‘You will be able to do whatever you want, and go wherever you want to go.’
“It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.” Kojima Connection: Things neither being or not being there, the insufficiency of words when it comes to exploring the literally unexplored/unexplainably sights and sounds of the universe (As we regularly see realised in his titles)
“What was God doing with himself before the creation?” Kojima Connection: Could we learn that the giant creatures/hand-faces created the first explosion, and have returned, their ‘experiment having run its course’, to ‘pack up the lab’ and ‘shut everything down’?
“No need of a story - a story is not compulsory, just a life. That’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.”
Kojima Connection: Can we say in all fairness that Story is Kojima’s life, and he’s truly simply channeling (unconsciously or consciously)
“I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant” Kojima Connection: Yup :P
“Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?” Kojima Connection: Where else would he put these stories, that in so many ways film, tv and any other medium would fall short in telling them?
“In my head there are several windows, that I do know…but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe?” ― Samuel Beckett, Molloy Kojima Connection: We are single windows (lives, consciousnesses) that are wide opening onto a swirling, eternal universe.
“Confusion amounting to nothing, despite precautions. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else, where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be, nor been.” Kojima Connection: No more precautions need to be taken. He is unconstrained, creatively and in life.
“Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.” Kojima Connection: Even after what seems to clearly be major existential shifts, Kojima perseveres in expressing that journey within himself in the form of Death Stranding.
“But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am. Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say. And seeing what a poor thing I have made, or how like myself, I shall eat it. Then be alone a long time, unhappy, not knowing what my prayer should be nor to whom.” Kojima Connection: First and third trailer imagery (holding a little creature, baby, in one’s arms, and the colossi devouring the CDT worker)
“What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.” Kojima: ‘Betray your audience.’
“To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.” Kojima: Post-Konami Kojima, to a T.
“Form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in plain English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” Kojima Connection: This describes fourth-wall breaking - yes, we’re playing a role within a game, but our doing so in the real world is part of the story. In fact, our playing Death Stranding is it’s story. Can’t wait to see how this concept manifests.
“I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: "Do not despair; one the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned." That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.” Kojima Connection: It cannot be argued that Kojima, creatively liberated as he is, is imagery driven first, and his great appreciation for storytelling takes it from there and embeds the imagery with meaning, as well as mystery.
“That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by....hardly a day, without some addition to one's knowledge however trifling, the addition I mean, provided one takes the pains.” Kojima Connection: This makes me think of Kojima’s eclectic-ness, and how all of his wide spectrum of interests feed into his life and process.
“You may say ‘it is all in my head’, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head, and that these eight, no, six, these six planes that enclose me are made of solid bone. But thence to conclude the head is mine? No, never.” Kojima Connection: Kojima has discussed the idea of originality in interviews before, and he’s expressed how it can be a concern that when you’re in your ‘earth-bound’ or ‘human’ mode creatively, its easy to perceive barriers and limitations. But that’s not who we really are - the self isn’t physical or measurable. As Yoda put it, ‘luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.’ So no, that ‘head’, or when you’re stuck in your head, isn’t you. Your true self has no limitations of flesh or bone, and when you access and express that dimensionless, lawless plane of being, the stories that come therefrom are the truly worthwhile ones…the ones that question everything we think we know.’
“For I shall be far away, in a place where no one will dream of coming to look for me.” Kojima Connection: Mads character, able to hide from The Unseen, where they won’t look for him? Sam, retreating with the Cherub into the ocean?
“But it is useless to dwell on this period of my life. If I go on long enough calling that my life I'll end up by believing it.” ― Samuel Beckett, Molloy Kojima Connection: Kojima on Konami.
“When are they going to stop making me mean more than I say?” Kojima Connection: When Kojima pokes fun at those diving too deep into his works (cough cough :P)
There is an end to the temptation of light - its polite scorchings & consolations. It is good for children & insects. There is an end of making up one's mind, an end of patting the butter of consciousness into opinions. The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgments.” Kojima Connection: This makes me think of Kojima embracing his creative mind mess/chaos and ‘going for it’ with Death Stranding, fully unleashed.
“From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings.” Kojima Connection: from the worst situation (Konami) one emerges a better and stronger, more mindful person.
“The end is the beginning, and yet it continues.” **Kojima Connection: Self explanatory :P
“Infinite emptiness will be all around you - All the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, And there you’ll be - like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.” Kojima Connection: Is Sam privy to the impermanence of reality, and so is able to weather such horrors unaffected?
“Humanity ... is a two-bucket well. While one goes down to be filled, the other goes up to be emptied.” Kojima Connection: Death becomes life, life becomes death. Will this be interrupted, disrupted or tampered with in DS?
“To every man his little cross. Till he dies, and is forgotten.” Kojima Connection: Sam’s umbilical cross scar.
“Dead calm, then a murmur, a name, a murmured name, in doubt, in fear, in love, in fear, in doubt, wind of winter in the black boughs, a cold calm sea whitening whispering to the shore, stealing, hastening, swelling, passing, dying, from naught come, to naught gone.” Kojima Connection: Third trailer imagery.
“That movements of an extreme complexity were taking place seemed certain… And yet, what a simple thing it seemed. That vast yellow light, sailing slowly behind my bars, And which, little by little, the dense wall devoured, and finally eclipsed. And now its tranquil course was written on the walls, a radiance scored with shadow, then a brief quivering of leaves, if they were leaves. Then that too went out, leaving me in the dark.” Kojima Connection: Third trailer imagery (quivering of dying leaves at the beginning, devouring, light eclipsing, the yellow light of the corpse’s mask
“What a weary way, since that first disaster. What nerves torn from the heart of insentience, with the appertaining terror and the cerebellum on fire. It took him a long time to adapt himself to this excoriation.” Kojima Connection: Has Sam beheld the world as it has become, without the laws of physics and time, for longer than the others? Is he an ageless time-traveller, unaffected by death, because he has adapted to the pain and horror and incalculable/unexplainable anguish of this world without any bounds?
“But what's all this about not being able to die, live, be born? That must have some bearing. All this about staying where you are, dying, living, being born, unable to go forwards or back, not knowing where you came from, or where you are, or where you're going, or that it's possible to be elsewhere, to be otherwise? Suppose nothing - asking yourself nothing? You can't - you're there.” Kojima Connection: When faced with such huge themes, such as the nature of reality, it would be easy to not be able to drive forward in any one linear direction in order to tell a story. The enormity of the subject matter has the potential to paralyse you into doing nothing. But Kojima, even faced with these grand ideas, cannot do nothing - He is there, in that moment, having lived the life he’s lived, and created what he’s created, and from that momentum…even more stripped down from that, the momentum we get inherently, just from breathing in and out…we cant ‘ask ourselves nothing’. We have to fill our minds with questions. Its in our nature - we cannot defy it. At least, as far as we know…
“Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn't believe, or we walked together, hand in hand, silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other. That's how I've held out till now. And this evening again it seems to be working, I'm in my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.” **Kojima Connection: Holding oneself in ones arms - the theory of the Cherubs being infant versions of their bearers.
“Why this farce, day after day? One never knows. Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore. Pah! You saw your heart? No, it was living. What's happening? Something is taking its course. What is it? We're not beginning to ... to ... mean something? Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah that's a good one! Hm…I wonder.” Kojima Connection: The child within, the baby inside us all, knows how to live and smile instinctively. It’s only when we become adults that we struggle with meaning - but a child, well, they never question meaning, or even think about it at all. They just are, They just exist in that moment. Maybe it’s these children that can keep us from succumbing to the shadows? Maybe the child abandoned the despairing CDT worker, did its forward flip and recognised its host was giving himself to fear…a fear which is antithetical to what an innocent child is?
“One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second.” Kojima Connection: Gameplay?
“Birth was the death of me” Kojima Connection: Again, Gameplay?
“In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said, it was never enough and always too much.” Kojima Connection: Kojima’s relationship with his audience.
“Here, all is strange.” Kojima Connection: Yup!
“I wandered in my mind, slowly, noting every detail of the labyrinth, its paths as familiar as those of my garden, and yet ever new, as empty as the heart could wish…or alive, with strange encounters.” Kojima Connection: Mads ‘labyrinthine’ quote, and the idea of ever-new, possibly procedural environments and enemies (tied to the idea of eternity, laws of physics being shattered)
“There, at least, is a first affirmation - I mean negation - on which to build.” Kojima Connection: Right now, we can either build our ideas of Death Stranding off we have seen so far, or what we haven’t seen so far.
“Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of myself as being here for ever, but not as having been here for ever.” Kojima Connection: Sam may possibly be someone who has experienced eternity, but may also have been a man once for whom that was not always the case.
“To know you can do better next time - unrecognisably better - and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing that there is not…there is a thought to be going on with.” **Kojima Connection: ‘An explosion, which will be our last.’
What to do now? what shall I do now, what should I do, in my situation? How to proceed? By aporia, pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations, invalidated just as they’re uttered, sooner or later? There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless.” Kojima Connection: The search for meaning and definition which we can all relate to…who knows what Kojima is moving through emotionally and intellectually in order to be bringing us Death Stranding? I cant wait for the 4-disc blu-ray making of documentary of it all :D
“We were all born mad. Some remain so.” Kojima Connection: We accuse children of being mad, crazy, acting stupid/thoughtlessly. But that is the creative spark. Kids are still relatively close and connected to their own creative big bang, aka their birth. They have that ‘sheen’ of madness, which indicates and evokes the madness/chaos they sprang from. The theory is that as we grow more and more distant from that first spark, we being to lose our ‘madness’, our sense of chaos/creativity. This is so for most folks. Not so with others - Kojima has firmly always embraced his ‘original/birthing chaos’, and keeps it close in/channels/taps into it for his creative endeavours, and life in general.’
“I'm no longer with these assassins, in this bed of terror, but in my distant refuge - My hands twined together, my head bowed, weak, breathless, calm, free, and older than I'll ever have been - If my calculations are correct. I'll tell my story in the past, none the less, as though it were a myth, or an old fable, For this evening I need another age in which I became what I was.” Kojima Connection: Could we see Sam narrating his story in the future? Could he finally, by the end of the tale, be allowed to age properly (if his calculations are correct, around his neck)…will he get home? Such will be his myth, the fable of Death Stranding, that will be told in 2018/2019.
“What counts is to be in the world - the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required.” Kojima Connection: I firmly believe that your calling = what comes as easy to you as breathing, and is a labour and chore for almost anyone else. For Kojima, his ‘breathing’ is games development and creativity. For him, its as easy as breathing.
“drill one hole after another into ‘language’ - until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through. I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.” Kojima Connection: Resonates with Kojima’s endeavour to redefine meanings, such as Death having a new meaning.
“I don't know when I died. It always seemed to me I died old, about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to foot. But this evening, alone in my icy bed, I have the feeling I'll be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all its lights fell upon me, the same I had so often gazed on since my first stumblings on the distant earth. For I'm too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tear sings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on unshakable pillars, the fornications with corpses. So I'll tell myself a story, I'll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself, and it's there I feel I'll be old, old, even older than the day I fell, calling for help, and it came. Or is it possible that in this story I have come back to life, after my death? No, it's not like me to come back to life, after my death.” Kojima Connection: I can hear Norman’s Sam saying any of this. Just saying.
So much for the inviolable zenith, that - for amateurs of myth - lies hidden. A way out to earth and sky.” Kojima Connection: Though we may, including Kojima, endeavour to explore these mysteries, they will always be unknown to us - we simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to conceive of anything beyond what our flesh-bound minds can imagine. The act of attempting to defy that sure fills one with purpose though, and truly, who knows if that may end up leading to something new? Faking it till we make it?
“And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant (life) - When to live is to wander, the last of the living, in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes, and the wrecks look all alike.” Kojima Connection: Is Sam unaffected by the CDT worker’s death, because he has seen it an infinite number of times before? Like Rick, from Rick and Morty - numb and uncaring?
“For I had no illusions, I knew that all was about to end, or to begin again, it little mattered which, and it little mattered how. I had only to wait.” Kojima Connection: Sam’s thoughts?
“Whether all grows black, or all grows bright, or all remains grey, it is grey we need to begin with, because of what it is, and of what it can do. Made of bright and black, able to shed the former, or the latter, and be the latter or the former, alone…” Kojima Connection: Perhaps it is a delusion to think we can achieve balance? Did BRIDGES really think they could create stable and infallible passages to other worlds? Its not in our nature to be balanced…
“The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half-light, the states of peace. But the dark has neither elements nor states - nothing but forms, becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming…without love, or hate, or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generalisation and passing away of line.” Kojima Connection: BRIDGES deluded themselves into thinking that by accessing the boundary-free void, that we ourselves could be as free. But no. We are just lost within that freedom now, and now it has seen us, spotted us, and realised we are like any other void plankton…food to be consumed.
“It’s extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.” Kojima Connection: Will Sam’s equations help him to remember who he is, across the dimensions of time and space and memory?
“I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them, I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes…my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil, thought struggles on, it, too, wide of the mark. It, too, seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace.” Kojima Connection: Sam lets the monster wreak their rage on the others, while he retreats with his inner child to the peaceful sea. He does not let thought find him, for a thought would lead to worry, and worry to fear, and fear to terror, which the monsters feed upon.
“It will be the same silence, the same as ever, murmurous with muted lamentation, panting and exhaling of impossible sorrow, like distant laughter, and brief spells of hush, as of one buried before his time. Long or short, the same silence. Then I resurrect and begin again.” Kojima Connection: Sam’s thoughts as the CDT team member is picked out of the air, like a crumb of food, for the colossi. Meanwhile Sam, unaffected, knows…there will be resurrection.
“In a flicker of my lids, whole days have flown.” Kojima Connection: The flickering lights, and the rapid raging of the pinned CDT driver.
“Monstrous extremities, including skulls, stunted legs and trunks…monstrous arms. Stunted faces.” Kojima Connection: The monsters.
“The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.” Kojima Connection: Death Stranding is an expression of an essentially formless, and forever to be intangible, idea…it is one of the many forms that these intangible subjects seek to find relief from their inherent inexplicability.
“And on the threshold of being, no more do I succeed in being another.” Kojima Connection: Kojima, even when pushed to the brink by Konami, cannot be anyone other than himself. The experience has not altered his core, and he proceeds in creating Death Stranding closer to his own core than ever before.
“That is why nothing appears - All is silent, and one is frightened to be born. No, one wishes one were - So as to begin to die.” Kojima Connection: Here Beckett is half mocking, half admitting, the core question of life - why go on? Why keep living? Why **keep coming? Well, because the lead up to death is, ironically, the most beautiful part of life (ie., living life itself)**
“And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling…a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.” Kojima Connection: The inner dialogue of the CDT worker. He knows he’s not ageing, though it feels like it - he is being siphoned of nutrients by interdimensional beings
“And in spite of all the pains I had lavished on these problems, I was, more than ever, stupefied by the complexity of this innumerable dance, involving, doubtless, other determinants of which I had not the slightest idea. And I said, with rapture, ‘Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.’” Kojima Connection: Something all creators including Kojima can relate to…what we depict and attempt to express is infinitely complex, and therein lies the intrigue and the attraction. Knowing we’ll never fully grasp it…keeps us intrigued and humble at the same time.
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