How does it feel to wonder
How does it feel to know who we are
I cannot find one answer
I cannot find my way back to when my sun died
My sun died
How does it feel to wonder
How does it feel to know who we are
I cannot find no other
I cannot find my way back to when my sun died
My sun died
Now that it falls we live with you
Now that I feel the same with you
Now that it falls we live with you
Now that I found the way there
My sunlight
- Caspian, Gone in Bloom and Bough
I've not written anything for the blog for the better part of the month. Part of that is I've been working on my game design. I'm currently working on a game called Crescendo, which is my take on the personal development/mythological arc that Burning Wheel currently has a strangehold on. I'm also developing a game called Zebedee, which is an attempt at the stories presented in John Wick, Taken, Peppermint, etc. So it's not that I've not been writing. Crescendo currently sits at 58 pages with no examples or advice for playing the game written, nevermind a bestiary, and I'm nowhere near the end of even getting the basic rules down. Zebedee is at 10 pages, again with no examples or advice. Zebedee is that much closer to completion, but any further writing on it will need to wait until I’ve done a proper alpha test and make sure the darn thing works. I should also do a vertical slice on Crescendo and make some of the systems I’m thinking of will work. So I am hard at work.
But I can't seem to touch this blog.
And that has to do with this... grief... that I've been trying to understand. I start writing and it just swallows me up. It's not depression, just raw emotion. This sense of raw loss, something primal, something so large that, when I try to write about anything else, I can't. I literally can't.
Screw it. Fine. I’ll write about it.
The first time I really noticed this grief was when I was I was finishing a book of The Solar Cycle. Wherever Wolfe was taking me, I didn't want to, couldn't, leave it. I'd buy the next book out of sheer desperation to go back to this... Dream... that I had been shown. A world that I know to be true, somehow. It’s one of those things that is not a memory, but feels like one, a place that is ever present, even if I must labor to be present to it. Ending the Solar Cycle was like no longer being present to this place I had found within myself. I almost didn’t finish Book of the Short Sun because I didn’t think I could go back. And that was so terrifying that I almost gave in.
But I didn’t.
I went on to Homer, knowing that I needed to be a different person to return to the Solar Cycle. I couldn’t just stay there, inside the shell, I had to go out, I had to see different places, had to feel something new. And the Illiad was doing that… or so I thought. I’ve been having an oddly similar time. I just… go. I’m there. Wherever it is, I’m there. I finished the Iliad and immediately went on to the Odyssey without a second’s thought. I thought pretty seriously about checking those books from the library but I wanted to take my time, to not feel the pressure if I needed to go on reading digressions, which is what I do a lot. So I bought the Odyssey.
The Odyssey is almost finished. And I feel it again. This deep, soul-wrenching, grief. A phantom pain that rocks me all the way down, begging and begging to stay. And I don’t know what to tell it, besides to go the Aeneid. Finish the trilogy and whatnot.
I’ve begun to realize that it’s not nostalgia I feel, but a yearning for being able to see the gods, to see Athena wink at you, to realize that the Claw of the Conciliator is just a thorn, and all thorns are sacred, and to close my eyes and see the swift sunrise. Wolfe just showed me that this place, this Waking Dream, was real. It had never left. Nostalgia is a yearning for a golden past, something that can never come to again. That’s not what I’m feeling. What I’m feeling is a yearning for a now, a return to a Now that is beyond what my sick and messed up body can give me.
In fact, the further I dwell on this feeling, the more I find myself looking at trees and rivers, wondering if in fact the prickles I feel when I'm alone with them are more than just a response to nature, but a response to person, to being. A few years ago I was standing alone in a prairie and I realized that the presence was that I felt was identical to holy people I had met; a radical acceptance that transcended. I knew then I was not alone, but simply with beings that do not operate as I do. That diversity, true diversity, is to be found by sitting down at a creek with the forest, the rocks, the insects, whatever else is there, and be like them, for a little while. As I walk through the world now I can't help but hear what Wolfe wrote:
"You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism
doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final
summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that
matter."
Those words were especially loud as I went on a walk last night with my family. We walked under trees three hundred years old and I couldn't help but feel their age, feel they were aware, and be grateful that they were. And for one second I wondered if we were being watched, by all the trees. It was a feeling I could not shake, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't see any indication, nothing I saw would have told me that we were being watched. But I couldn't shake it.
And then I realized it was the Waking Dream I had met with Wolfe. It was the exact same feeling.
I've no idea what's going on, but something is shedding, like a husk off a plant. I'm going to keep chasing it. Hopefully it'll sound coherent, one of these days.
You and I were standing outside the house where this all started
Love was not enough, but I know we'll make it through
You don't have to believe me, you don't have to say you will
These days are far and few between, and I don't want to waste them
Someday you will realize you don't need it anymore
Someday you will realize you don't need it anymore
Covet, Parachute
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