Memories have been on my mind of late. I don't think it is an age thing, though I am ripe for that midlife, "what doe sit all mean, what have I done" bullshit. I think my living with the mentality that I'm not going to get much older than this might insulate me from a lot of that nonsense.
No, I think it has more to do with the circumstances of my life colliding with my creativity. My kids preparing for a new stage in their lives. The sadness and grief that just hit our family. This time of year that always sparks reflection of not only the recent past, but years past.
All those things were happening while I was writing and rewriting two issues of Yggdrasil MGZ simultaneously. All those things bled directly into those works as you would expect. All of that mix together unlocked some thoughts I had brewing on memories that I hadn't expected to surface.
Bear with me. This may zig and zag a little...
I'm the oldest of my generation in my family. When you fall into that group, you get exposed to the older generations in a specific way. You get wrapped up in the fabric of their stories differently. Your memories are sharper somehow. More connected to that past. Those ghosts feel more real.
Those memories are history. History of your people but also history of their place. In my case Chicago on the north side. Of the old country; Hungary, Austria, and Poland. It is all intertwined with the myth and magic a thousand times more potent and interesting than anything we put into fiction or games.
The stories of terror in coffin factories. Of selling gas during the Great Depression because you didn't have a car. Of surviving the Nazis. Of Uncle Mike being gunned down on the street.
And they are stories. They are history. They are our truth. History isn't what happened when by whom, but the lived experience and the narrative we share of our time surviving it. It's our memory of the moments.
But that is the thing. Memories are faulty. They shift and change. They evolve to be what we as individuals and communities need them to be. Certainly something happened a certain way, but at a remove, those details begin to matter less than the purpose holding on to those memories serve.
In that way, memory is like grief. We carry both with us far longer than we realize. Both define us in ways we don't fully understand. Both can suddenly be gone and stop mattering and then just as suddenly return because you smell peanut butter cookies baking on a winter morning.
Let me zag now...
With all of that bubbling up in my head, I started thinking about our cultural obsession with exacting history of nonexistent things. Every property has a fan wiki trying to capture the truth. The sacred canon law. The most holy catholic catechism of whatever pop culture thing you are playing, watching, or reading right now.
While I find that horrid, what might be worse is the amount of work that goes into creating the official bible of games, shows, etc. Every fantasy or science fiction world has a history timeline modeled on the Forgotten Realms or Star Trek. The details are exacting. The contradictions are smoothed down or excised like cancer.
There can only ever be one truth.
I have been called up to jury duty something like five times in my life. It might be a record. For some reason I keep getting pulled in to do my civic duty. Most of the time it is boring, but one time I got to serve on a case.
Again, bear with me. This is relevant.
If I learned anything sitting on that case, there is no such thing as truth where people are involved. Perception is subject to where you are standing and all the bullshit you bring to the moment. Sure there are facts, but all facts are colored by what we perceive them to be.
It is like the old joke, three Polacks at a table means five opinions on the subject.
We know this to be very real. We know it in our gut. As rationale people we may not like that reality isn't an absolute, by the numbers, 1+1=2 equation of human activity, but too fucking bad. And yet, in all of our most human activities, our entertainment, we try to make it as inhuman as possible.
In my books I have a quote at the front from Bartol's Alamut.
Nothing is true; Everything is permitted.
They are the motto of the supreme Ismaili, but I have made them my own. Sure, it sounds cool and somewhat nihilistic. The reality, though, is it illuminates a fundamental creative maxim I believe to be true. Certainly as true as my perception makes it.
At the very least it is my first commandment.
I mean, I have created copious amounts of art and writing all related to each other over the last thirty years... Fuck, I'm getting old... There are contradictions in the works. Particularly in the writings. Which thing is true?
Does it matter? Has it ever mattered for anyone's work? Be it me or George Lucas?
Time for us marches forward, so the places in the past no longer exist. That means history is really just memories of places that don't exist. So all of these things we cling to. These truths. These demands for linear order are an illusion we impose upon the world to make ourselves feel like we have control.
That control is where all my problems stem from. That control is where the nostalgia bullshit comes from. Where conservatism springs. That need for a perfect ordered structure of the world, from beginning to end is where I find myself repulsed by popular culture and gaming culture in particular.
There is a reason why everything feels so formulaic. A reason art, books, movies, and games have failed to capture our imagination of late. The reason is the wider us. The royal we. The rewarding of the controlled carbon copy has just made a sea of more carbon copies in a perfect line as far as the horizon.
I don't know if things are too far gone. All of this order is perfect for the future the techno barons want to usher in. We have built them the perfect field to plow. Their tools work best when everything fits nicely into their boxes and we just keep giving it to them.
They made it easy for us to not see the prison walls. They made it easy to create art with digital tools. To share it on the internet for everyone to see. To get validation with the click of a button. But it is just more order. More structure.
More control.
We once had a world that was messy. You had to do hard things. You had to string together disparate ideas to find answers. You had to sift through different perspectives, different memories to find truth.
It is probably time for us to start doing that again. Time to rethink how we use what has been given to us. Rethink how we look at the entertainment put in front of us. We have to do something.
The other path has led us here and here sucks.
