heroic journey

Yesterday a former colleague asked me what I’m playing now that I have a little more free time on my hands. I said that I’d gotten back into Dark Souls 2, and that, given the dreamily communicated nature of its quest, which allows for and even encourages symbolic interpretations, the game seemed especially appropriate amid the recent upheavals and new uncertainties of my life.

In a post in June, I said of the game:

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.

Today, I finished reading the book Communion: The Female Search For Love by bell hooks. The penultimate chapter begins with these words:

Women who choose to love must be wise, daring, and courageous.

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All around us the culture of lovelessness mocks our quest for love. Wisdom is needed if we would restore love to its rightful place as a heroic journey–arduous, difficult–more vital to human survival and development on planet Earth than going off to slay mythical dragons, to ravage and conquer others with war or all other forms of violence that are like war.

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Wisdom is needed if we are to demand that our culture acknowledge the journey to love as a grand, magical, life-transforming, thrilling, risky adventure.

The journey continues.

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