Grief, Husks, and Materialism?

  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

Wandering is the Point

I'm Ornery

I do not like most video games. They feel too sculpted, too clean, too sterile. Having grown up in controlled and sterilized environments I find myself practically allergic to anyone controlling my environment, nevermind me. This makes communicating any part of my worldview particularly difficult, nevermind sitting down to play some other numbskull's idea of fun. So I am phenomenally picky about video games. They either need to be areas where I can just run around or they need to be sculpted so freaking well that I can just enjoy it, as opposed to realize I've been taken for yet another ride.

And I hate that feeling, on a genetic level.

It's practically enough for me to break out in hives.

No, I don't think it's inherently a problem. Well, the hives part, probably yes. But my dislike of being in a sterile and controlled environment is not a problem, thank you very much.

Which brings us to Dark Souls and the secret area Ash Lake.

Dark Souls is Ornery Too

I have noticed something about "classics", actual classics: I usually have to take a long time to absorb them. It took me five attempts to read Brothers Karamazov, over the course of almost ten years. Les Miserables still sits on my shelf, incomplete. The Solar Cycle was shotgunned through rapidly, which I've been told is not the best way to go about it, but I knew that if I didn't just sit down and do it I'd never get it done. And yeah, that was phenomenally difficult to do, but I did it. It always feels like this wrestling of wills, as I try and get this new viewpoint into my skull and try and figure out what I think of it.

Dark Souls and I seem to have a similar relationship. I'm on year two and my second attempt. It's going better, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that cussing the game out and walking away for weeks was a common occurrence. But I've continued on my way, killing everything in my way indiscriminately, hoping that my zweihander could keep the stunlock going, upping my endurance so that I can continue an onslaught of damage. It's probably not the best build but I love seeing creatures stunned or proned. 

I heard about Ash Lake thanks to my brother-in-law, Kyle. He told me how to get there: strike down not just one but two secret walls, and make your way down The Tree. When you get to the bottom you will be there, at Ash Lake. I had seen pictures of the trees. The dragon. And that path of white sand, cutting through the navy water. I dunno, I just wanted to go. Why not? It was really that simple of a desire. But the barriers to getting to the secret route was.... not what I wanted to do. Blight Town is an awful awful place. I want to get out of here before I even go; poison swamps with fire-bugs? Nope. Nope. Nope. So walking further into that mess? Definitely not, thanks.

Well the other day, while trying to pick a peck of snide, somehow I stumbled acrost that tree, with two false walls inside!

And I thought: why not?

Oh NO.

(For those you who are blessed in your ignorance, that's a basilisk. It has a poisonous breath that kills you and then cuts your health in half until you can get the curse removed)

Yup, got cursed, half health! Now I could either go back or keep trying to go down. I've already got to get all the way back up to the surface to undo the curse. And that means getting back through Blight Town. I mean, that's going to be one heck of a trek and I just... I mean I may as well get to the bottom, right? Basilisks are bad, but they aren't impossible to deal with.

OUCH

So I am totally not at the right level to take those guys. It takes way too many hits to kill these fungusmen things, and so one on one became... impractical. I wound up running through, after several dozens of attempts. I practically wept at getting to that bonfire. I'd finally made it down here! After so many attempts I-

OH COME ON DARK SOULS!

A freaking hydra! Really?? Well, maybe I can just go around and-

Why.

Just WHY

ANSWER ME

Unable to avoid the hydra and unwilling to run back up and brave that tree so soon, I decided to go after the hydra. I figured I either had to git gud or just start over by this point, I was so unwilling to beat a retreat. So I went back at it. I kept dying, but each time I learned a bit more. And a bit more.

And then a head flew off.

And then I had a blind spot in the attack pattern. 

I only died one more time before finally putting the hydra down. I'm still trying to figure out how the heck that happened.

There are a few other creatures hanging around, but it's just white sands, worn away by the black-blue water. All these trees.... and then I found a grove of these trees, rising up out of the water. With a dragon. He shouldn't be here! Dragons are dead in the setting! Like, wiped out. With the exception of the Gaping Dragon (which is certainly not in its original condition) dragons were wiped out by Gwyn and the gods. The dragon was also sitting in front of a bonfire that had been boosted, which means that the dragon is female, given she is the flame-keeper. The idea of picking a fight with this young dragon seemed idiotic. I was cursed and was certain that I did not want to pick a fight at that point, not one I didn't have to. 

Wait, I can enter a covenant with the last true dragon?

Absolutely yes.

Now it was time to go back up; there literally wasn't anything around else here, beyond some weird clam monsters and a few items. Going back up wasn't quite the struggle I thought it would be. I've always found myself overestimating the difficulty of trekking back through an area; I got up pretty easily.

Now to take care of that freaking curse. I found the lady who sells them, and realized I had some farming to do. Not a problem!  I went killed a bunch of undead, over and over and over, until I thought I had enough. So I went back.

I had read it wrong. I needed another thousand. Groaning, I killed the thousand souls I needed and came back.

Now, I'm not entirely sure why, but that actually meant a decent amount to me. That messy little episode in my extended Dark Souls run is something I'm still pondering, days later, trying to understand what had happened. I'm not sure why that is. But it is. If I could find more video games that did that I'd play a heck of a lot more often. 

Whatever that is.