Joel Haver and the art of pause

Pause is ebb to any flow. It usually distinctly differs from the content it is framing. You are now working your way through a piece of content: neurons are firing, eyes are darting, perceptual hypotheses are formed, falsified, and validated, dozens of levels of context are maintained to figure out the message of the paragraph in all its surroundings, including cultural intricacies of hints and subtexts, possible political and cultural meaning and your own emotional response, which has the capacity to overthrow all other contributing systems, especially in cases when a sentence becomes quite so overloaded with clauses that you start noticing signals of frustration from your working memory, nudging you to stop battling this overgrown monstrosity.

And then there’s pause. Nothing happened in between there and here. That nothingness gave you a breather to finish all the processes that drag along with cognition, like a trail of smoke drags with wildfire. This is how pauses usually work: they are high contrast. But recently I have discovered the youtube channel of Joel Haver, and he showed me a completely different view on pause.

If you know what RPG means (not the grenade launcher), you might enjoy the whole 20-minute playlist:

Or if you don’t have that much time, just the third video: it still illustrates my point.

They are quite inventive with the tropes in these, and the animation is honestly hilarious, but the most important thing for me is the role of pause. It isn’t something coming after the content. It isn’t a preface either.

Somehow, they are making it the main event.