Finding Something Like a Sweet Spot

[An atypical image for a Friday post here… For the last several months, I’ve been playing a CRPG (computer role-playing game) called Divinity: Original Sin II. It’s one of those looong, immersive games in which your character, in the company of optional others, must explore terrain, battle monsters, find treasure, and so on. The “land” you’re exploring, Rivellon, consists of several regions which are quite complex in terms of their variety and the ingenuity with which various features are hidden — too complex, really, to carry all around inside your (well, my) head. The image here is screen capture of an interactive map of Fort Joy, the game’s first major region, courtesy of the mapgenie.io site; different types of “people” and experiences are indicated with different types of icons — helping me sort out and remember what I need to do next, what I should avoid for now, and what I most enjoyed (or didn’t, haha). And yes: the “interactive” element of the map lets me zoom in and out, and show/reveal any or all of these features, so I’m not overwhelmed with everything at once. I can’t tell you how much this map has helped preserve my sanity.]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future… Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you’re overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can’t understand them for the life of you, even though you’ve tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you’re the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don’t have to tell me your name. You don’t have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you’re finding life to be the one thing that’s trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back.

(Henry Rollins [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

In Perpetual Spring

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

(Amy Gerstler [source])

…and:

Once more I’m encoded to fear dying and to sense I never will.

Yet an otherwise banal moment may all at once suffuse me with strangeness when I realize: “This is a day I didn’t think I’d have.” All the days since [my night of near-death at Chaco Canyon] have been those. At any odd moment, a room’s most prosaic object—a terra cotta pot, for example—may say: “This light from red clay is light you might not have been around for.”

If Chaco gave me that, it also gave me the dark twin to go with it: “nothing matters.” In a healthy sense, the latter realization doesn’t cancel its sibling. Their two ways of looking differently at the same thing may amount to no more than seeing the evanescence of what’s cherishable—except that to leave one’s own body out of what went into its deepest knowledge yields a wisdom thin as paper. It takes the actual, that full flood of bodily terror, long continued, to widen the pupil of one’s inner eye. Once it has, we forget—though never completely, and rarely for long. Out of the trivial chaos of an afternoon, rain on a manhole cover may suddenly give back the sweetness of existing.

The glossy black tip on a magpie’s wingfeather can do it. Checking the body for deer ticks can suddenly bathe one’s calves and thighs with gratitude. Iridescence in sun-stricken paint on old cars. Sweetness of the plainest, most everyday faces. Richness of one’s boredoms, their motions and textures. Of a bank teller’s eyes that, for a half-second, look into mine with normal and therefore intricate brilliance.

(Reg Saner [source])