{"id":16096,"date":"2014-10-17T12:20:44","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T16:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=16096"},"modified":"2014-10-17T12:20:44","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T16:20:44","slug":"the-gods-who-live-in-the-gaps-between-time-and-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/the-gods-who-live-in-the-gaps-between-time-and-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gods Who Live in the Gaps between Time and the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"Opening<\/a><\/p>\n

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

From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Ken Kesey [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

October<\/strong><\/p>\n

I used to think the land
\nhad something to say to us,
\nback when wildflowers
\nwould come right up to your hand
\nas if they were tame.<\/p>\n

Sooner or later, I thought,
\nthe wind would begin to make sense
\nif I listened hard
\nand took notes religiously.
\nThat was spring.<\/p>\n

Now I’m not so sure:
\nthe cloudless sky has a flat affect
\nand the fields plowed down after harvest
\nseem so expressionless,
\nkeeping their own counsel.<\/p>\n

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
\nblow across them
\nas if autumn had written us a long letter,
\nchanged its mind,
\nand tore it into little scraps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Don Thompson [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Edward Abbey [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The Rolling Saint<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for<\/span>
\nfour thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for<\/span>
\nworld peace and eternal salvation.<\/span>
\n—Reuters<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

He started small: fasting here and there,
\ndays, then weeks. Once, he stood under
\na banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting
\nfor nothing—not even to sleep. It came<\/span>
\nto him in a dream: You must roll<\/em><\/span>
\n on this earth, spin your heart in rain,<\/span><\/em>
\ndesert, dust.<\/em> At sunrise he’d stretch, swab<\/span>
\nany cuts from the day before, and lay prone<\/span>
\non the road while his twelve men swept<\/span>
\nthe ground in front of him with sisal brooms.<\/span>
\nEven monkeys stopped and stared at this man<\/span>
\nrolling through puddles, past storefronts<\/span>
\nwhere children would throw him pieces
\nof butter candy he’d try and catch
\nin his mouth at each rotation. His men
\nswept and sang, swept and sang<\/span>
\nof jasmine-throated angels<\/span>
\nand pineapple slices in kulfi cream.<\/span>
\nHe rolled and rolled. Sometimes<\/span>
\nin his dizzying spins, he thought<\/span>
\nhe heard God. A whisper, but still.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Aimee Nezhukumatathil [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

What I Know<\/strong>
\n(excerpt)<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Patrick Dubost (translation by Fiona Sampson) [source<\/em><\/a>])
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

W<\/span>ord broke last week that Myst<\/em> will evidently be adapted as a TV series<\/a>. The original game was so absorbing, so involving<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Still, the announcement has gotten me thinking about Myst<\/em>, for the first time in a long time.<\/p>\n

I played the original game to completion, eventually. And I bought and played “the” sequel, Riven<\/em> — 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.<\/p>\n

One thing I know about the later ones, though: they addressed a user-interface issue which many players had with both Myst<\/em> and Riven<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

I never minded that “limitation.” I liked imagining<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

In short, the original Myst<\/em> may not have worked as a very good literal translation of the visual world. But it was a very good — near-perfect — metaphor<\/em> 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 <\/em>everywhere.<\/p>\n

[back to top<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,247,1393,94,196,1189],"tags":[2512,3902,3903,3904,3905,3906],"class_list":{"0":"post-16096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-02_in-the-news","10":"category-television","11":"category-videocomputer-gaming","12":"tag-edward-abbey","13":"tag-myst","14":"tag-patrick-dubost","15":"tag-aimee-nezhukumatathil","16":"tag-don-thompson","17":"tag-time-and-space","18":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4bC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16096"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16105,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16096\/revisions\/16105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}