The Gods Who Live in the Gaps between Time and the World

[Image: opening scene from the classic computer game Myst, as rendered in the later so-called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition. (Click to enlarge.) For some wool-gathering about Myst, see the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.

(Ken Kesey [source])

…and:

October

I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.

(Don Thompson [source])

…and:

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

(Edward Abbey [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Rolling Saint

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for
four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for
world peace and eternal salvation.
—Reuters

He started small: fasting here and there,
days, then weeks. Once, he stood under
a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting
for nothing—not even to sleep. It came
to him in a dream: You must roll
on this earth, spin your heart in rain,
desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab
any cuts from the day before, and lay prone
on the road while his twelve men swept
the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.
Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man
rolling through puddles, past storefronts
where children would throw him pieces
of butter candy he’d try and catch
in his mouth at each rotation. His men
swept and sang, swept and sang
of jasmine-throated angels
and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.
He rolled and rolled. Sometimes
in his dizzying spins, he thought
he heard God. A whisper, but still.

(Aimee Nezhukumatathil [source])

…and:

What I Know
(excerpt)

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.

(Patrick Dubost (translation by Fiona Sampson) [source])

—

Word broke last week that Myst will evidently be adapted as a TV series. The original game was so absorbing, so involving for the player, that turning it into a passive medium where you just watch things playing out on screen strikes me as deeply dumb. Maybe they’ll go all the way into “This idea will be so cool…!” territory and cast it with Lego actors.

Still, the announcement has gotten me thinking about Myst, for the first time in a long time.

I played the original game to completion, eventually. And I bought and played “the” sequel, Riven — although I don’t think I ever finished that one. (You need to set aside a lot of time for games like these. They’re not easy to come back to if you leave them behind for a few days, let along a month — you keep losing your place.) The game developers came out with a couple other sequels and/or improved versions; I never even attempted to buy, let alone start, these later releases.

One thing I know about the later ones, though: they addressed a user-interface issue which many players had with both Myst and Riven. See, when you played the original games you couldn’t look all around the world. You could move forward and back; you could turn 90 degrees to the left or 90 degrees to the right, and move forward and back from there. You didn’t have a single 360-degree rotating-panoramic view of the world, that is; you had four separate static views of the world at 90, 180, 270, and 360 degrees.

I never minded that “limitation.” I liked imagining what I’d see if I could just turn my head 27 degrees to the right, but I knew it would have to be less interesting — of less consequence — than what I could see at the compass points.

In short, the original Myst may not have worked as a very good literal translation of the visual world. But it was a very good — near-perfect — metaphor for how we interact with the world. There’s too much happening. We can’t attend to everything, so we pick and choose what’s “important” according to whatever criteria may rule a given moment. The catch, as this post’s theme may suggest: you can’t choose what’s important unless you first look everywhere.

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