//essays//
Spring 2013
The Golem of Prague and Pop Culture:
The Migration of a Myth
Kalman Victor
Two months ago, Moonbot Studios announced a new creative enterprise: The Golem, a crossover game for Mac, PC, and Linux, in which the player pilots the Golem of Prague in an attempt to defend the country from the invasion of Cesare Borgia, a 15th century Italian nobleman. But this game has loftier goals than a mere adventure story. As Bohdon Sayre, the Lead Technical Director at Moonbot, said in an interview, the player is asked to follow the golem as he “learns about his place in the world.” Moonbot is a small, independent media company that seems to fall through the cracks of the standard categories for different creative engines. They have spearheaded the creation of films, books, apps, games, and, as they say on their website, “whatever tickles [our] fancy.” The project, which has already raised over $77,000 on Kickstarter (just shy of their $750,000 goal), has an all-star cast of designers, writers, and programmers. Among them, the author, illustrator, and filmmaker William Joyce, who recently received the Academy Award for “Best Animated Short Film” for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.
Though the Kickstarter campaign has ended, Moonbot has announced their plans to continue making the game, having secured funding from “a more traditional source.” Their website and Kickstarter page (now defunct) feature Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro passionately urging would-be donors to support, “some of the finest storytellers in the world” to make The Golem project a reality. Del Toro wouldn’t be the first to argue that “transmedia” like video games are living extensions of the literary world. By appropriating a celebrated monster legend, Moonbot seems to insist that their latest endeavor—in one of the most modern creative vehicles out there—is heir to the long tradition of adaptation and re-adaptation that help define and shape myths as old as that of the Golem.
To accurately gauge where Moonbot’s vision fits into the grander scheme of the Golem legend, we must examine the history of the original legend of Rabbi Judah Loew’s Golem—the one being adapted by Moonbot—and understand the story’s themes. The version of the Golem myth with Rabbi Loew and Prague at its center is said not to have begun oral circulation until the mid 18th or 19th century, with the first printed version of The Golem of Prague appearing in Sippurim, an anthology of legends about the Maharal (another name for Rabbi Loew) published in 1847, almost 250 years after his death.
Tracing the Golem back to its earliest mentions in Jewish texts, we can see that it has roots as far back as Talmudic-era Babylon, around the 3rd and 4th centuries C.E. In most versions of the Golem story, inanimate matter is brought to life via some archane incantation, ritual, or the invocation of a sacred theonym for the Old Testament God. While the description of the creation of Rabbi Loew’s Golem does share a lot in common with traditional depictions of the monster, the legend itself is very unique, especially in the way the Maharal interacts with his creation. In the story as its found in Sippurim, the Maharal is said to have had the ability, using the force of Kabbalah, to “bring to life figures formed out of clay…who, like real men, would perform whatever task was asked of him.” The Golem of Prague relates what happens when one of the Maharal’s “homemade servant[s],” brought to life by a scroll containing God’s ineffable name placed in his mouth, runs amuck. The Golem cannot speak, but can understand speech, and the only maintenance involved in its upkeep is the periodic removal of the scroll from its mouth before the Sabbath to de-animate it in time for the Day of Rest. The Maharal forgets to do this one Friday afternoon and his golem begins terrorizing Prague. Right before the Sabbath begins, when creation and destruction are forbidden under Jewish law, the Maharal is able to snatch the scroll from the Golem’s mouth, causing his creation to collapse into a mound of clay.
Almost every version of the Golem myth that describes the process of making a golem underscores the creation by speech or letters, and The Golem of Prague is no exception. It is also clear that the ability to make a golem is strongly correlated with piety within most traditional texts, and in the Babylonian Talmud, the one reference to a golem is situated right next to the study of Torah, depicting learnedness as a perquisite for such a powerfully holy act. The Maharal was himself a famously learned and pious man. The Golem is the symbolic embodiment of the link between divinity and creative expression, as engendered through human intellectual mastery. The Maharal’s use of the scroll draws upon a Jewish prioritization of learning and textuality as a means to transform inert physicality into something that is living, an outgrowth of spiritual deference to God. While the mystical texts agree that golems cannot speak and are soulless figures, the act of golem creation nevertheless exhibits how faith and spirituality, grounded in textual learning, possess a manipulative power over the physical universe.
Gershom Scholem, the father of the academic study of Jewish mysticism through its texts, explains how the “tellurian [earth-based] soul” of the Golem represents a raw, elemental consciousness discussed by often by mystics. Like Adam in Genesis 2:7, born when “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” the Maharal’s Golem is fashioned from earth. Moreover, the relevance of the Sabbath in the original myth makes strong statement about the parallelism between divine creation of humankind and human creation of material things. But life is more than its physical form: just as God uses speech to create the universe, the Golem is made animate by an intellectual, metaphysical endowment of speech. And, just as Creation requires punctuation and renewal, so did both God and Golem on the Seventh Day. Through the creation of a golem, the dichotomy between the spiritual and physical can be dissolved into one: faith, piety, and religious devotion can become powerful forces to affect conditions of the physical world, and humans can begin to share in the divine experience of creation, attaining a new level of closeness with God.
It is no coincidence that the Golem story emerged in connection with the Maharal when it did, so many years after his death. In the early 18th century, Hasidism emerged as an increasingly popular Jewish movement, focused on ecstatic Kabbalah and the quest for individual religious experience. In opposition to the traditionalist and intensely academic Judaism centered in Lithuania during the 17th and 18th centuries, the objective of Hasidism is to extract meaning and holiness from the regularities of daily human experience. The Maharal became a religious icon to both Hasidic Jews in Poland and their more Orthodox, legal-centric counterparts in Lithuania, because of his appealing view of Jewishness as possessing an intrinsically “chosenness” or “holiness” that helped them cope with the harsh realities of anti-Semitism and displacement in the Diaspora.
The Golem myth is absent from Hasidic lore, having been almost exclusively popularized among Bohemian Jews who lived far away from larger Polish mystical regions. Perhaps the Jews of modern-day Czech Republic clung to the myth of the Golem as a part of the Maharal’s influence because, as Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz says. “Modern man, alienated from the Divine, is afraid of the theological implications of his creative powers; the medieval masters due to their sense of closeness to God, were able to strive towards and achieve aims that are beyond the modern frame of mind.” The Golem emphasizes, at bottom, a creativity sprung forth from piety and religious identity—something that the Maharal represented for generations of Jews as both a scientist and a religious scholar. These Jews, craving vivid mystical experiences, took solace in the belief that spiritual fulfillment could ultimately be found in the devotion characteristic of great individuals in this world. Crucial to a Jewish sense of meaning and purpose were questions of spirituality that were indeed addressed in the flowering language of Hassidism, and represented a gap in the Maharal’s more traditionally intellectual theology that the Golem legend came to fill. The mythology of golem creation in fact defies this presumed literary-mystical dichotomy, representing religious experience as a partnership with the divine in the act of creation, but entirely predicated on the possession of vast Torah wisdom and Talmudic learning. Requiring of the creator a greatness achieved only through cultivation of the intellect, animation of the Golem in fact represents a consummate animation of the self: quasi-divine powers are granted to those with great human wisdom, and in a way that offers a retreat into a personal spiritual realm undisturbed by social intolerance and historical persecution.
With these lessons in mind, fast-forward about 150 years, over a span of history replete with numerous rehashings of the Golem legends. Films, comic books, poems, and novels have incorporated Rabbi Loew’s golem into their plots and narratives since the first written version of the myth in 1867. In some, the Golem protects the Jews of Prague from a pogrom; in others, he takes on a Frankenstein-esque quality as an expression of a creation’s distance from its creator and its feeling of loneliness in this world.
Moonbot is inviting us to contribute our own creative rendition—in the form of a video game. Adam Volker, the studio’s Creative Director, and Bohdon Sayre, their Lead Technical Director, described the team’s motivation for making the game as an effort to place the “the first great monster story” in an “epic video game” format, but also to place the golem in “really delicate situations” where he negotiates who he really is. Where a “giant created for war” looks to “gain a soul.” While they’ve certainly taken their own artistic license, for example, by using Cesare Borgia (who died in 1507, 13 years before Rabbi Loew was born), as the villain in their game, those sorts of embellishments are nothing new to the ways in which legends—in Judaism as in many cultures—are handed down. Just like others before them, Moonbot has embarked on the dual quest of preserving the essence of the tale’s meaning, while also changing its content to suit the demands of the surrounding cultural matrix. Preserving the archetypal soul-yearning of the Golem legend in a new medium, Moonbot seems to be dead-on in their attempt at situating themselves as next in line in the literary genealogy of the Golem. Moonbot wants to make players “feel a wide range of emotions.” Their vision involves the player “learning the golem’s capabilities at the same time that this creature is learning them,” attempting to, “create [a] deep connection between the golem and the player.”
Moonbot seems to be up on the trends of the times. If you’ve stepped into a movie theater in the past few years, you’ve undoubtedly seen a preview for a Hollywood remake of classic stories and fairy tales, includingSnow White and The Huntsman, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Jack the Giant Slayer, and other flashy but similarly vapid remakes. We Americans cling to these stories, whether the originals found in Grimms’ Fairytales or their Disney counterparts, as the embodiments of childhood innocence and nostalgia. While Disney did tone down the originals (most of the Brothers Grimm stories involve some dark or gruesome lesson for naughty child through murder, revenge, disfigurement, and more) they did manage to make the German folk tales compiled by two anthropologists newly beloved for generations of children, renewing their place in our cultural lexicon and that’s what it’s all about.
What are we to make of Disney, of Hollywood, of Moonbot, of the popular culture’s retrograde obsessions? In serially “modernizing” classic legends, are we doing them creative justice, as Moonbot contends, or, missing the point entirely? Are we sacrificing the original, potentially meaningful content of our literary heritage in favor of the superficial glitz and indulgent special effects of these contemporary spectacles?
The question, of course, isn’t a simple one, and the answer is no less complicated. Myths and folktales reveal a lot about the cultures that produce them, especially in how they evolve and are re-imagined. Much of contemporary art and film revolves around our relationship to the past and how the art situates itself in reference to tradition. While there is certainly much to say about our pop culture’s specific re-renderings of the classics, perhaps there is more to say about the broader historical trajectory of these myths and how they act as a historiographical barometer for more profound cultural, political, religious, and philosophical trends.
Studying folklore, though, is not necessarily as easy as the Brothers Grimm made it seem when they published their famous anthology in 1812. Delineating what is borrowed and what is added in a new version of classic legend can be a real challenge, and the larger the historical and literary scope of the myths and their transformations over time, the larger those questions loom. When does an adaptation cease being an adaptation and become its own work that speaks to the contemporary audience?
There’s not necessarily a formula to answer these questions. It seems that it’s up to each of us to gauge the fine lines between bastardization, adaptation, and new creation. Moonbot’s case for their video game as the latest link in a long folkloric chain seems somehow more compelling than other, cheaper members of its class, such as the forthcoming Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (2014), in which an old woman lures teenagers into her suburban homestead with an irresistible strain of marijuana so that she can eat them and preserve her youth. If we examine the fascinating history of the Golem legend, whose various versions throughout time paint a rich picture of the interplay between religion and literature—both theological and folkloric traditions—we can better appreciate high-minded claims like Del Toro’s that Moonbot has, “the capacity to turn The Golem into an incredible world, an incredible adventure,” that lives up to its artistic legacy. If we are first determined to learn from the past, then projects like Moonbot’s seem justly to preserve the historical value of such myths by propelling them into the future. As consumers of culture, we can then judge for ourselves whether our culture’s obsession with revamping the classics stands in beneficial relation to the history before it.
Although it’s certainly not instinctual to give intellectual credence to video games— the same medium that delivered classics from PAC-MAN to Grand Theft Auto—we are overdue to see the lessons of history and legends interact with our modern identities in a real, interactive way, rather than suspending in the past, or ripping them off to create self-indulgent, visual orgies, as Hollywood so often does. The spiritual lessons of the Golem tale itself, and those derived from its historical trajectory more broadly, need not remain relevant only to one generation. The quest for meaningful creative expression, the quest to find our own roles and identities in a modern world rife with alienation, subjectivity, and solipsism, the quest to find a “soul,”—these are far from dead. The Golem, within the broader framework of the Maharal’s cosmology, provides us with important food for thought about the ability to create meaning and channel it through personal outlets for self-expression, whether they be in the synagogue, in the studio, or on the sofa, playing a video game.
After all, the story of the Golem, is, at its core, an embodiment of humanity’s capacity to live and experience the world on its own terms, building fulfilling realities against the rich backdrop of our cultural ancestry. It seems like Moonbot wants to enter a discussion as old as culture itself using their own artistic means and perspective to revive a dormant Golem. Maybe, if we open our eyes and ears, and, yes, rev up our X-Boxes, we can learn a lot from what they have to say.
Though the Kickstarter campaign has ended, Moonbot has announced their plans to continue making the game, having secured funding from “a more traditional source.” Their website and Kickstarter page (now defunct) feature Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro passionately urging would-be donors to support, “some of the finest storytellers in the world” to make The Golem project a reality. Del Toro wouldn’t be the first to argue that “transmedia” like video games are living extensions of the literary world. By appropriating a celebrated monster legend, Moonbot seems to insist that their latest endeavor—in one of the most modern creative vehicles out there—is heir to the long tradition of adaptation and re-adaptation that help define and shape myths as old as that of the Golem.
To accurately gauge where Moonbot’s vision fits into the grander scheme of the Golem legend, we must examine the history of the original legend of Rabbi Judah Loew’s Golem—the one being adapted by Moonbot—and understand the story’s themes. The version of the Golem myth with Rabbi Loew and Prague at its center is said not to have begun oral circulation until the mid 18th or 19th century, with the first printed version of The Golem of Prague appearing in Sippurim, an anthology of legends about the Maharal (another name for Rabbi Loew) published in 1847, almost 250 years after his death.
Tracing the Golem back to its earliest mentions in Jewish texts, we can see that it has roots as far back as Talmudic-era Babylon, around the 3rd and 4th centuries C.E. In most versions of the Golem story, inanimate matter is brought to life via some archane incantation, ritual, or the invocation of a sacred theonym for the Old Testament God. While the description of the creation of Rabbi Loew’s Golem does share a lot in common with traditional depictions of the monster, the legend itself is very unique, especially in the way the Maharal interacts with his creation. In the story as its found in Sippurim, the Maharal is said to have had the ability, using the force of Kabbalah, to “bring to life figures formed out of clay…who, like real men, would perform whatever task was asked of him.” The Golem of Prague relates what happens when one of the Maharal’s “homemade servant[s],” brought to life by a scroll containing God’s ineffable name placed in his mouth, runs amuck. The Golem cannot speak, but can understand speech, and the only maintenance involved in its upkeep is the periodic removal of the scroll from its mouth before the Sabbath to de-animate it in time for the Day of Rest. The Maharal forgets to do this one Friday afternoon and his golem begins terrorizing Prague. Right before the Sabbath begins, when creation and destruction are forbidden under Jewish law, the Maharal is able to snatch the scroll from the Golem’s mouth, causing his creation to collapse into a mound of clay.
Almost every version of the Golem myth that describes the process of making a golem underscores the creation by speech or letters, and The Golem of Prague is no exception. It is also clear that the ability to make a golem is strongly correlated with piety within most traditional texts, and in the Babylonian Talmud, the one reference to a golem is situated right next to the study of Torah, depicting learnedness as a perquisite for such a powerfully holy act. The Maharal was himself a famously learned and pious man. The Golem is the symbolic embodiment of the link between divinity and creative expression, as engendered through human intellectual mastery. The Maharal’s use of the scroll draws upon a Jewish prioritization of learning and textuality as a means to transform inert physicality into something that is living, an outgrowth of spiritual deference to God. While the mystical texts agree that golems cannot speak and are soulless figures, the act of golem creation nevertheless exhibits how faith and spirituality, grounded in textual learning, possess a manipulative power over the physical universe.
Gershom Scholem, the father of the academic study of Jewish mysticism through its texts, explains how the “tellurian [earth-based] soul” of the Golem represents a raw, elemental consciousness discussed by often by mystics. Like Adam in Genesis 2:7, born when “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” the Maharal’s Golem is fashioned from earth. Moreover, the relevance of the Sabbath in the original myth makes strong statement about the parallelism between divine creation of humankind and human creation of material things. But life is more than its physical form: just as God uses speech to create the universe, the Golem is made animate by an intellectual, metaphysical endowment of speech. And, just as Creation requires punctuation and renewal, so did both God and Golem on the Seventh Day. Through the creation of a golem, the dichotomy between the spiritual and physical can be dissolved into one: faith, piety, and religious devotion can become powerful forces to affect conditions of the physical world, and humans can begin to share in the divine experience of creation, attaining a new level of closeness with God.
It is no coincidence that the Golem story emerged in connection with the Maharal when it did, so many years after his death. In the early 18th century, Hasidism emerged as an increasingly popular Jewish movement, focused on ecstatic Kabbalah and the quest for individual religious experience. In opposition to the traditionalist and intensely academic Judaism centered in Lithuania during the 17th and 18th centuries, the objective of Hasidism is to extract meaning and holiness from the regularities of daily human experience. The Maharal became a religious icon to both Hasidic Jews in Poland and their more Orthodox, legal-centric counterparts in Lithuania, because of his appealing view of Jewishness as possessing an intrinsically “chosenness” or “holiness” that helped them cope with the harsh realities of anti-Semitism and displacement in the Diaspora.
The Golem myth is absent from Hasidic lore, having been almost exclusively popularized among Bohemian Jews who lived far away from larger Polish mystical regions. Perhaps the Jews of modern-day Czech Republic clung to the myth of the Golem as a part of the Maharal’s influence because, as Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz says. “Modern man, alienated from the Divine, is afraid of the theological implications of his creative powers; the medieval masters due to their sense of closeness to God, were able to strive towards and achieve aims that are beyond the modern frame of mind.” The Golem emphasizes, at bottom, a creativity sprung forth from piety and religious identity—something that the Maharal represented for generations of Jews as both a scientist and a religious scholar. These Jews, craving vivid mystical experiences, took solace in the belief that spiritual fulfillment could ultimately be found in the devotion characteristic of great individuals in this world. Crucial to a Jewish sense of meaning and purpose were questions of spirituality that were indeed addressed in the flowering language of Hassidism, and represented a gap in the Maharal’s more traditionally intellectual theology that the Golem legend came to fill. The mythology of golem creation in fact defies this presumed literary-mystical dichotomy, representing religious experience as a partnership with the divine in the act of creation, but entirely predicated on the possession of vast Torah wisdom and Talmudic learning. Requiring of the creator a greatness achieved only through cultivation of the intellect, animation of the Golem in fact represents a consummate animation of the self: quasi-divine powers are granted to those with great human wisdom, and in a way that offers a retreat into a personal spiritual realm undisturbed by social intolerance and historical persecution.
With these lessons in mind, fast-forward about 150 years, over a span of history replete with numerous rehashings of the Golem legends. Films, comic books, poems, and novels have incorporated Rabbi Loew’s golem into their plots and narratives since the first written version of the myth in 1867. In some, the Golem protects the Jews of Prague from a pogrom; in others, he takes on a Frankenstein-esque quality as an expression of a creation’s distance from its creator and its feeling of loneliness in this world.
Moonbot is inviting us to contribute our own creative rendition—in the form of a video game. Adam Volker, the studio’s Creative Director, and Bohdon Sayre, their Lead Technical Director, described the team’s motivation for making the game as an effort to place the “the first great monster story” in an “epic video game” format, but also to place the golem in “really delicate situations” where he negotiates who he really is. Where a “giant created for war” looks to “gain a soul.” While they’ve certainly taken their own artistic license, for example, by using Cesare Borgia (who died in 1507, 13 years before Rabbi Loew was born), as the villain in their game, those sorts of embellishments are nothing new to the ways in which legends—in Judaism as in many cultures—are handed down. Just like others before them, Moonbot has embarked on the dual quest of preserving the essence of the tale’s meaning, while also changing its content to suit the demands of the surrounding cultural matrix. Preserving the archetypal soul-yearning of the Golem legend in a new medium, Moonbot seems to be dead-on in their attempt at situating themselves as next in line in the literary genealogy of the Golem. Moonbot wants to make players “feel a wide range of emotions.” Their vision involves the player “learning the golem’s capabilities at the same time that this creature is learning them,” attempting to, “create [a] deep connection between the golem and the player.”
Moonbot seems to be up on the trends of the times. If you’ve stepped into a movie theater in the past few years, you’ve undoubtedly seen a preview for a Hollywood remake of classic stories and fairy tales, includingSnow White and The Huntsman, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Jack the Giant Slayer, and other flashy but similarly vapid remakes. We Americans cling to these stories, whether the originals found in Grimms’ Fairytales or their Disney counterparts, as the embodiments of childhood innocence and nostalgia. While Disney did tone down the originals (most of the Brothers Grimm stories involve some dark or gruesome lesson for naughty child through murder, revenge, disfigurement, and more) they did manage to make the German folk tales compiled by two anthropologists newly beloved for generations of children, renewing their place in our cultural lexicon and that’s what it’s all about.
What are we to make of Disney, of Hollywood, of Moonbot, of the popular culture’s retrograde obsessions? In serially “modernizing” classic legends, are we doing them creative justice, as Moonbot contends, or, missing the point entirely? Are we sacrificing the original, potentially meaningful content of our literary heritage in favor of the superficial glitz and indulgent special effects of these contemporary spectacles?
The question, of course, isn’t a simple one, and the answer is no less complicated. Myths and folktales reveal a lot about the cultures that produce them, especially in how they evolve and are re-imagined. Much of contemporary art and film revolves around our relationship to the past and how the art situates itself in reference to tradition. While there is certainly much to say about our pop culture’s specific re-renderings of the classics, perhaps there is more to say about the broader historical trajectory of these myths and how they act as a historiographical barometer for more profound cultural, political, religious, and philosophical trends.
Studying folklore, though, is not necessarily as easy as the Brothers Grimm made it seem when they published their famous anthology in 1812. Delineating what is borrowed and what is added in a new version of classic legend can be a real challenge, and the larger the historical and literary scope of the myths and their transformations over time, the larger those questions loom. When does an adaptation cease being an adaptation and become its own work that speaks to the contemporary audience?
There’s not necessarily a formula to answer these questions. It seems that it’s up to each of us to gauge the fine lines between bastardization, adaptation, and new creation. Moonbot’s case for their video game as the latest link in a long folkloric chain seems somehow more compelling than other, cheaper members of its class, such as the forthcoming Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (2014), in which an old woman lures teenagers into her suburban homestead with an irresistible strain of marijuana so that she can eat them and preserve her youth. If we examine the fascinating history of the Golem legend, whose various versions throughout time paint a rich picture of the interplay between religion and literature—both theological and folkloric traditions—we can better appreciate high-minded claims like Del Toro’s that Moonbot has, “the capacity to turn The Golem into an incredible world, an incredible adventure,” that lives up to its artistic legacy. If we are first determined to learn from the past, then projects like Moonbot’s seem justly to preserve the historical value of such myths by propelling them into the future. As consumers of culture, we can then judge for ourselves whether our culture’s obsession with revamping the classics stands in beneficial relation to the history before it.
Although it’s certainly not instinctual to give intellectual credence to video games— the same medium that delivered classics from PAC-MAN to Grand Theft Auto—we are overdue to see the lessons of history and legends interact with our modern identities in a real, interactive way, rather than suspending in the past, or ripping them off to create self-indulgent, visual orgies, as Hollywood so often does. The spiritual lessons of the Golem tale itself, and those derived from its historical trajectory more broadly, need not remain relevant only to one generation. The quest for meaningful creative expression, the quest to find our own roles and identities in a modern world rife with alienation, subjectivity, and solipsism, the quest to find a “soul,”—these are far from dead. The Golem, within the broader framework of the Maharal’s cosmology, provides us with important food for thought about the ability to create meaning and channel it through personal outlets for self-expression, whether they be in the synagogue, in the studio, or on the sofa, playing a video game.
After all, the story of the Golem, is, at its core, an embodiment of humanity’s capacity to live and experience the world on its own terms, building fulfilling realities against the rich backdrop of our cultural ancestry. It seems like Moonbot wants to enter a discussion as old as culture itself using their own artistic means and perspective to revive a dormant Golem. Maybe, if we open our eyes and ears, and, yes, rev up our X-Boxes, we can learn a lot from what they have to say.