#existentialism
So you have survived another holiday season….
What do you do now?
Your hands are shaking from the coldness of relatives…
You stomach aches from avoiding dinner’s canabalism…
You have waded in pools of familial blood and found it thinner than water and running fast away from your heart…
You are the last leaf in winter, hanging to the tree. You are trembling in the winds of life you cannot avoid, but are forced to weather through until they break you.
You cannot change your family tree. You cannot change anything. Only be changed.
And yet when you found yourself in that downward spiral to the earth you realized it was not the end.
The ice of your father. The howls of your mother. The torrential clawing of grandparents and sibblings. None could break you.
Only set you free.
And I will not tell you winter will not come again… After spring is another fall.
But I will remind you that after fall is another spring.
And one day you will be warm with the love of chosen family. You will be somewhere you chose to be. With people you chose to let change you.
One day you will not be a leaf ever falling through external forces. You will be a person.
Beyond metaphor.
Beyond poetry dressing pain.
Beyond your tree.
Free to roam and move against the breeze and enjoy allseasons.
Do not feel guilt if this coming year does not deliver what last year’s could not. Your love is not an infinite distance or time away.
You are moving against the breeze, and
You are closer than you think.
We have survived another holiday season…
What do we do now?
.
Whatever our winds allow.
When I say “Die Mad”
Its not that I am trying to curse you or command you to die mad
Its that I am literally TELLING you a fact of Life
All things being unchanged…
(including your attitude)
You will
-Infact-
Die Mad
“Individual incident, A rippling pinprick Sticks though the surface. Confabulated stories of past achievements. Darwin laughs in his grave. “Oh, how far we’ve come.” Humanity’s flower buds, Headed for the combine. But in presence of metaphysical drought The rootdragon gasps for breath, Spreads its wings And flies, Unwilling to be harvested. Existential alchemy. Third eye blinded with CO2 casing. The “I” becomes “We”. Personal paradoxes unfold. Individually exist for the herd.”
I tell you, even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
I tell you, even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
(Warning for spoilers to No Man’s Sky)
Today I left my traveller to float for eternity in their cute little space ship a mere 146,933.2 light years from the center of the Euclid Galaxy. From the get go we were told that the goal of No Man’s Sky was to reach the centre of the Galaxy. For the first 60 or so hours of playing the game I ignored this and spent much time exploring every single planet in so much detail other people were probably laughing at me.
I fell in love with space creatures of all kinds. I was seemingly much more lucky than other people that were playing the game - I started on a very lush planet, in a system of lush and beautiful planets and it was probably 3 hyper jumps before I found myself in an ugly and seemingly desolate system.
Some of the space creatures seemed more like space monsters and I was okay with that. It seemed plausible at first. Again, I was lucky that it was many planets until I found myself creatures who’s animation was so weird and ridiculous that it was just ugly.
I fell in love with vista after vista. My favourite part of this early play time was traversing on foot and cresting hills to have my breath taken away from what was revealed beyond. I adored using my jetpack to soar above lakes and throw myself in, plummeting to their beautiful depths.
I watched sunrise after sunrise on a multitude of landscapes and it took me quite a while to feel like this was repetitive or old.
Being a sucker for science fiction and space ships I just couldn’t get enough of this world that was full of them! Space ships and trading hubs everywhere!
I tweeted my experience of No Man’s Sky as I do with many games and you can see all the images and little video clips under the twitter tag #crSky . You’ll probably notice that I went through an entire gamut of emotions and frustrations, from the lack of accessibility, to pure joy, to frustration and finally, boredom.
The longer I played No Man’s Sky the more I got increasingly mad at it. If you play video games you may have even seen all of the controversy over this game. As with anything to do with video games on the internet it all got a bit out of hand and over the top, but as I played I did begin to see where that spark of anger first came to life.
At first I loved it. It was beautiful (not the most beautiful, but with its own charm), it felt close to what I wanted from exploring space - especially finding, naming, cataloguing animals and flying around in a space ship. But then I got so dismayed at the game that all I could fathom was that this game was simply incomplete - that the developers had all of these big ideas but that they just didn’t get any of them finished and that some serious content was lacking. Now I’ve finished* the game I’m not so sure. *walked away from.
The biggest disappointment for me came with the lack of conclusion to following the path of the Atlas. The biggest frustration was the complete lack of instruction or feedback on what was needed from me as a traveller in my journey.
As an example, I’ll tell you about the Atlas Path - the Atlas are a mysterious being or force (you never find out what exactly) that may or may not be the benevolent creators of the universe. Whatever they are or were, they’re long gone, but they’ve left behind a trail for a mysterious group of sentient beings* to follow by visiting interfaces they’ve left behind. *The Travellers - that’s you.
You receive Atlas Stones for each Atlas interface you visit, and in order to ‘complete’ that quest you need pretty much every one. Except you don’t know this and they can also be sold at trade terminals and to aliens for a veryattractive price at a time when earning cash can be a slog. So, I sold most of mine and I got to the end of the Atlas path and I couldn’t complete the quest (!!). A quick internet search revealed that it was okay and I didn’t miss anything anyways, not even any animation… just a little bit of text and no proof that anything actually happened.
This brings me to what made me wary when I first started playing the game - there’s very little animation or real action in the game. Nearly everything is a text based description of what is happening, or simple lore. My initial reaction was what the fuck? did I just pay $80 for space dungeons and dragons with an invisible DM describing everything to me?
To answer this question after who knows how many near-infinite hours of gameplay - yes I did. But I’m not mad about it anymore. In my final two hours of playing the game I had an epiphany and I forgave the creators of No Man’s Sky for most of their transgressions.
I forgave them for forcing me into a colonialist journey of claiming places I discovered that were already settled.
I forgave them for the weirdly uncomfortable mix of sheer beauty, majesty, silliness and total ugliness of the procedurally generated worlds and creatures.
I forgave them for making me feel like I had to spend countless hours searching for a rare random drop of the Atlas Pass v2 only to discover there was literally nothing but some new furniture behind those doors.
I forgave them for not ‘finishing’ the intriguing stories they had begun to weave through this expansive galaxy.
I forgave them for not giving me enough of an opportunity to learn the Atlas language so that I had no idea what the Atlas was saying to me, even though I worked hard and spent days searching for monoliths.
I forgave them for boring me out of my own mind scouring for resources, building up my equipment and cataloguing space monsters.
I forgave them for making me hate entire alien races; I forgave them for making me love another but giving me no substance too.
I forgave them for making the journey to the centre of the galaxy so horrifically arduous and never ending that I simply gave up and left my traveller to float for eons in the vast emptiness of space.
But why? Why forgive a games developer for making a video game that seemingly failed to deliver on every promised front? My personal epiphany was that this is actually not far off what living this role in space would mean to a sentient being. Being completely alone and not even knowing who or what you are, but being told your destiny is to toil and travel and toil and travel and just do it for eternity over and over.
This idea poked into my brain several times while playing, but I kept pushing it back because I wanted more. I wanted to be entertained. I wanted an actual ending to my story; I worked HARD at this dammit, I deserve a good round, proper ending. I spent all this time barely being entertained and I don’t even get an ending?
I read this article from Polygon and I saw what actually happens when you reach the centre of the galaxy and I couldn’t ignore that idea anymore. It’s perfect. It’s almost too perfect. You’re living an infinite loop of difficult hard work and wonder (but also boredom), continually searching for the illusive meaning to your journey. This is existentialism. This is the Franz Kafka video game I always wanted and I didn’t even know it until I finally let go of my traveller and left them to float for eternity in a beautiful expanse of stars.
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
Albert Camus
“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish”
– Jean-Paul Sartre, “Being and Nothingness”
“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
–Charles Bukowski
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
–Charles Bukowski
“If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”
–Charles Bukowski
Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
–Rumi
You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.
–Rumi
“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”— Friedrich Nietzsche
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
Albert Camus
“Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all”
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
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Albert Camus. Shouting is not an argument, denunciation and diffamation an act of treachery to the truth.
