“Where Shall Wisdom Literature Be Found? An EarthBound Essay”

And like Ness (and Ninten before him), here you are, able to communicate with old dogs like me. Care to read my thoughts about this particularly scrumptious mashup of quotations?

But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? 

– Job 28:12

Show me the wisdom of the world

Tell me the secrets of the heart

And the sweet mysteries of love

– “Wisdom of the World,”

MOTHER arranged album. Catherine Warwick/Keiichi Suzuki. Lyrics by Linda Hennrick

They are very dear to me, these works cited. And because I believe other people might feel the same, I wanted to sit with them awhile, to share some of the ways in which these words and these games have fed my soul.  

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

What little I do know about wisdom and wisdom literature, I have pieced together from the usual places–fragments of memory, snippets of songs, a Bible verse out of context, a garbled tradition–and from an unusual one, the video game EarthBound. In many ways, it was EarthBound that pointed me back towards the rest. 

There was the moment when I first heard the word “wisdom.” It’s one of the clearer early childhood memories I have, actually, which makes me think there’s a good amount of invention and fabrication that has gone into it. We are sitting together. It’s evening and the lamplight shines on the table and stretches up the wall towards the cuckoo clock. My brother is a baby, so maybe he’s gone to bed, but I’m big enough to sit up and be read to or to pretend to read books myself. The story mentions something about a wise person. It could be the three wise men of the star or a wise old woman in a fairy tale. I ask what that word means, and on hearing the answer, remark, “One day, I’ll be wise.” Which is a preposterous thing to say. Everyone chuckles at me. I don’t really get why at the time, and I don’t mind. But it’s stuck with me, the memory and its truth: wisdom is worth aspiring to. Even if aspiring to it is quaint or ridiculous, at least it makes people laugh. It strikes me that Itoi, in crafting EarthBound as video game wisdom literature, is very aware of this connection between wisdom and humor, a naive wonder and a willful intellect. 

The Magi recur as characters in video games, their names clear references to a story greater even than that of Chrono Trigger or Xenogears. Wisdom is frequently a stat–boosted by apples, no less, in Wild Arms. And yet EarthBound goes the furthest in pointing out this seeming paradox of wisdom: that it is simultaneously worth seeking the world over for it, and it is right there, everywhere we look. “Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets,” as Proverbs 1:20 has it. “All of the world’s cultures–Asian, Middle Eastern, European/Western Hemisphere–have fostered wisdom writing,” Harold Bloom says in the opening of his book on the subject (the italics are his, or his publisher’s). Close to the start of the western philosophical tradition, Socrates takes the cake for wisdom by the oracle’s own attestation, and he can only understand such a thing being possible insofar as he is willing to admit how little he knows (see Plato’s version of the story). So EarthBound, in Itoi’s wisdom, presents its great moments of profound insight juxtaposed with the most quotidian and downright silly self-reflections: when drinking coffee in a hot spring with the Mr Saturns, or tea with the shy Tendas; with the guru meditating at the back of a cave in the desert guarded by monkeys; speaking to a bee-like being in the glow of a meteorite; battling a Starman DX in the bowels of Stonehenge, or his master in a bizarre netherworld. 

In my streaming discussions of EarthBound on Twitch for Signum University, we’re just about to face Giygas and conclude the game. What better time to write my term paper than at the end of the course? But when I sat down to write, pretty quickly my own pretensions and my tendency to ramble on in a pseudo-academic vein got the better of me. The essay started as a simple follow-up to an article written for NES Pro Magazine, “In the EarthBound Beginnings…There was Shigesato Itoi.” That piece, in turn, augmented and flowed out of a long-running podcast project, Bookwarm Games: EarthBound. Illustrated transcripts from the podcast have been graciously published on The Pixels, with further course material hosted on Video Game Academy (including the director’s cut of the present post). But in what follows, I’ll be brief. Not quite as brief as Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist would have it, perhaps:

…the most important text in the literature of alchemy contained only a few lines, and had been inscribed on the surface of an emerald.

“It’s the Emerald Tablet,” said the Englishman, proud that he might teach something to the boy.

“Well, then, why do we need all these books?” the boy asked.

“So that we can understand those few lines”

But then, the screen you’re reading this on might not be too much bigger than an emerald.

Wisdom of the World

Very early in the game, EarthBound’s wise-old-man figure, Buzz Buzz, points out the importance of wisdom, alongside courage and friendship, to Ness, Pokey, his neighbor/enemy, and the player. The conceptual equivalent of the Triforce driving the adventure in the Zelda series, this mysterious being’s message from the future might be easily forgotten, were it not closely echoed in EarthBound’s own main McGuffin, the Apple of Enlightenment. Let’s take a moment to consider each, and see how they root the game in global traditions of wisdom literature.

In the original MOTHER 2, Bunbuun, the Japanese onomatopoeia for Buzz Buzz’s name, is “actually a rhinoceros beetle (or not),” while the Apple of Enlightenment is called a “prophecy-telling machine” and “The Apple of Wisdom” in Tomato’s literal translation. That seems promising. Still more helpfully, his Legends of Localization volume explains:

Throughout the game there are mentions of a prophecy given to Giygas by something called the Apple of Enlightenment. General information about the prophecy can be surmised from bits and pieces of the game’s script, but the full details are never revealed in the game. The official MOTHER 2 guide provides those details, though! Below is a translation of the discussion between Giygas and the Apple of Enlightenment, which is described as an ‘ultra-prophecy device’. Q: PROPHESIZE FOR ME. WHEN WILL MY PLAN REACH FRUITION? A: THAT CANNOT BE PROPHESIZED. YOUR QUESTION IS FLAWED. Q: THEN I WILL ASK AGAIN. WHEN WILL MY PLAN TO COMPLETELY RULE THE GALAXY SUCCEED? A: IT DOES NOT SUCCEED. THE PLAN ENDS IN FAILURE. (187)

Wisdom found, right? A whole Apple of it. And questions answered–albeit in such a way that Giygas decides to set the events of the game in motion based on what the Apple tells him. It’s Deep Thought meets Oedipus Rex.

Q: WHAT HAPPENS IF I GO BACK IN TIME AND GET RID OF THEM? A: THE RESULTS OF TEMPORAL INTERFERENCE CANNOT BE PROPHESIZED.

As much as wisdom literature stands to teach us, no amount of that wisdom will get through to the reader unwilling to hear their truth. Yet prophecies and oracles are true not because people heed them–as often as not, we fail to–but because they reflect a wisdom beyond our ken. That is the voice we catch echoes of in wisdom literature the world over. Wry, exasperated and compassionate, a little cheeky–it is there in Job, Proverbs, the short, memorable Book of Jonah, and it’s all there in the storytelling persona Itoi adopts within EarthBound.

If we are like Giygas, impatiently demanding discursive answers to our greedy questions; or if we are like Pokey’s mom with respect to Buzz Buzz, carelessly swatting down messengers like Tomato (aka Clyde Mandelin) who bring us new knowledge about it all these years later, we would be better off playing or replaying some other game. If we are like Ness, though, these questions set us on a journey here and now to grow in “wisdom, courage, and friendship,” and to find “Your Sanctuary.”

Does a place called paradise

Wait beyond the azure skies

Bright as day?

Look into your crystal ball

Read the future in the stars

Does it say? – “Wisdom of the World”

Call me Pollyanna, but that’s why I believe. 

Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.