dark soul/out of touch

Exile
It takes your mind again
You’ve got sucker’s luck
Have you given up?
Does it feel like a trial?

No to the first question, yes to the second.

That song’s from 2011’s Portal 2, one of the best games ever about being alone and finding the strength within yourself to persevere even when the voices in your head or outside of it won’t stop trying to cut you down. 

These days I still spend a fair amount of time feeling like something of an exile (though I know I’m not alone in that), and I’m playing another game about loneliness and despair, Dark Souls 2. 

A few nights ago, Masha posted a brief journal excerpt by Susan Sontag, in which Sontag writes, “I must dare to be truly unhappy. Desperate. And not save myself, short-circuit the despair.” Masha adds her own note, saying “Recipe for real personhood. I’ve never short-circuited despair. That’s one of the ways I work myself out of it.” And I think this is important. I think we’re often too quick to distract ourselves from real feeling. (I think this is what the vampire Adam means when he rails against the “zombies” in Jim Jarmusch’s new film Only Lovers Left Alive–he means a culture of people who don’t know how to feel real things, who don’t know how to love.)

Sontag writes that “By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. I’ve nothing to write about.” For me, all subjects become one subject. There is no compartmentalization anymore. I can’t separate work from politics from love from art from anything. I don’t know how anyone can separate those things and still be a real person. We have but one heart. The eighth chapter of bell hooks' All About Love begins with these words by Parker Palmer: 

Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as a seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.

I like that in Dark Souls 2, there is no real escape from the despair. You are alone in a bleak and desolate landscape. While so many games get so bogged down in lore, rooting their events to a specific time and place that is not our own, Dark Souls 2’s dreamlike narrative simplicity–a curse, a king, a land in despair, ancient evils that must be overcome–lets your quest in it take on all kinds of symbolic meanings.

You see other players as phantoms; they are vaguely defined, can’t be touched, and disappear as quickly as they appear. Like getting bittersweet glimpses into a life you wish you could be playing a more real part in, but that you just can’t reach. Does it make you feel less alone, or more alone? Sometimes I fall asleep or wake up in this body that still often feels all wrong to me, thinking that the effects of a lack of touch can seep into your soul like a sickness, or maybe a curse. But maybe they can also be healed, someday, if you survive the quest.

You can call on other players for help, and then they can have an impact on your world, but it can’t last. As soon as they’re defeated, or you conquer the area’s boss, your companions are sent back to their own games, their own worlds. And I think about how everything is fleeting, how things end before they get started, how there’s no chance for real feeling, for real love, to take hold in our lives without time. But sometimes it can’t be escaped, the reality of facing time alone with our own soul before we can give ourselves to and find ourselves in others, overcoming despair, finding hope or giving up. I’m not giving up.

“We’re soul alone, and soul really matters to me.”

“Reach out for something to hold." 

image

Into the unknown.