Coming Soon: A New Type of Essays
Last Updated: 2025-03-10 00:00:00 -0500
"In the darkness, the netchiman's wife felt great knives try to cut her open. When the knives did not work, the Dwemer used solid sounds. When those did not work, great heat was brought to bear. Nothing was of any use, and the egg of Vivec remained safe within her.
A Dwemer said, 'Nothing is of any use. We must go and misinterpret this.'"
- The 36 Lessons of Vivec (Elder Scrolls In-Game Book)
So, I don’t think there is is any great lexical depth in The 36 Lessons of Vivec. While the worldbuilding of The Elder Scrolls is excellent, and the writing of the games is arguably rather fine, there’s just not much there there in the writings attributed to Vivec. Even so, this one specific line and the context which surrounds it have been living rent free in my head for well over a decade now. I suppose though, to be fair to you, I’d need to give you some context as to why that is - the phrase, placed in its context, is why the phrase is interesting. Without it, “We must go an misinterpret this” is simply something funny to say to get yourself out of having to give an explanation during the morning scrum.
The 36 Lessons of Vivec are an in-game holy scripture, first introduced in the series’ third entry, Morrowind, and later appearing in bits and pieces in subsequent games. The scripture itself is interesting; there’s a hidden message in the writing of the text and the story deals with a sort of autobiographical mythology of Vivec, who forms one of a triumvirate or trinity of three mortals who are ascended to Godhood. If you want to learn more I highly recommend either playing Morrowind itself or searching out the work of a studied Daedrologist on the subject, but this is enough for me to explain my interest in this one phrase, “We must go and misinterpret this”.
The paragraph I quoted at the start of the article is part of the autobiography. It speaks of an episode that occurred when Vivec’s mother (the netchiman’s wife) was abducted by the Dwemer. In the lore of the Elder Scrolls games, the dwemer were another race of elves - sometimes called the “Dwarves” by other peoples - which were a race of elves posessed of great technological prowess compared to the more magic-focused technological culture of… basically everyone else in the setting. The dwarves arguably were just as magical, a lot of their technology is Clark’s Law Magic, really, but that dichotomy is important to set up the joke here. The real point is, this “technology” of the Dwarves, their ability to manipulate sound, is so important to the series unspoken lore that it forms the core detail to one of the most popular hypotheses to why the Dwarves have disappeared by the time any of the playable games happen: they build a machine that makes them into gods.
So, these dwemer somehow detected this unborn ur-god inside Vivec’s mother and abduct her. They can’t harm her, because she’s protected by Vivec’s magical influence. Then you have all these really highly-educated sort of scholar-mages who observe this - people smart enough to later potentially become gods themselves - and they see the phenomenon and say “We must go an misinterpret this.”
Now, personally, I consider myself a scholar more regularly and consistently than I consider myself to be just about anything else. I am sometimes a programmer, a writer, a maker, a cook, but I am always a scholar. I believe that the various forces of the universe have conspired for boggling years to create a subclass of matter capable of observing the universe - that is, I think that scholarship is natural state of the human mind. As someone once put it, we’re just star-ejecta, a big bag of mostly salty water, which has the curious property of being one part of the universe observing the universe - including itself.
This belief, and the attitude that backs it, is one part of the reason why the original name of Arcana Labs was “Kensho Security Labs”, a part of my general interest in psychology and philosophy, and, critically, the driving force that allows me to do things like learn how to do enough programming to build our Software Projects, work on things like PETI, and just generally be a menace to society. HOwever, because of an early blunder in setting up the site, it always felt that the topics discussed here should be limited to things like those software and hardware projects. Opening us up to writing projects was a step toward correcting that.
So it’s with some pride - and some nerves - that today I also announce another kind of writing will be coming to the site, and to this blog. You’ve had something of a taste of it already when I expounded in the past on topics of technological philosophy, and earlier in this same entry when I discussed the 36 Lessons: critical analysis and essays on things I have read, watched, or even played recently. It won’t quite be to the vaunted level of today’s popular video essays, but I think a lot of my reading lately bears more analysis than would be appropriate in a Storygraph review.
To begin with, in the immediate future, I hope to share something based on Shohaku Okamura’s fantastic book Realizing Genjokoan, which of course I look forward to misinterpreting for all of you just as soon as I can turn the ~20 pages of notes, scribbles, diagrams, and speculation I have on it into something actually readable by someone else’s brain.