Out Of Bounds

A couple years ago I played through Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2. The soundtrack is something I still listen to when I want something cosy on in the background — it has a mix of magic and nostalgia and weirdness to it that I really love.

Something I’ve been thinking about is the videos on Youtube that show you how you can break out of the boundaries set by the Kingdom Hearts games to explore parts of the maps which aren’t meant to be explored. I really love the settings of these games, especially Hollow Bastion with this sublime (in the terrifying, eerie yet beautiful sense) castle which haunts the horizon. You can’t ever reach that castle, you can only progress through to another part of the game where you’re in the castle. If you walked right up to that castle as you see it, then you would find a warped, lo-resolution version of it with nothing inside.

Here’s a video where the player does just that:

The weirdness and beauty of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be… that doesn’t even truly exist, or so you told yourself… Diving headfirst into an illusion so much that you run right up to it and peek beneath the surface. I like that. It’s a kind of trespassing, isn’t it? But how can it be trespassing if nobody exists on that plain to police you?

How does this relate to Lost Time? I think it brings in ideas of the Sparkling Dark, for sure. The gorgeousness of being lost, outwith your loop. The isolation of it, too. The videogame wants you to follow a certain path and has boundaries and limits. It’s designed to lead you in a certain direction. Sometimes you have to absolutely glitch out and jump into thin air to reach a place where you’re inside yet outside the game. Do you want to be there? Maybe not… but the view is beautiful, and the chance to explore is so inviting.

How could art create that feeling? How could a performance do that? Could you show the bones of a song being made and performed and allow the audience to veer it away from the intended conclusion? Could you let people get up and walk around, on to the stage, as you are performing? Could you do a live poetry-writing session where people add directly to your words and contribute as you write, changing the intended outcome?

And animism. That castle is talking to me. It being there is saying something. Always when I played the Kingdom Hearts 2, there’s a place you can walk to, to see this burnt-down castle on the horizon that can’t be reached. When I would take my avatar there to look at it, it would feel so significant. An image that spoke very clearly. What it was saying, I’m not entirely sure. But it was being said.

Rewilding Time

I’ve started to think about how the quietest places in the world are the most precious. When I say quiet, I mean places that don’t have a lot of residents, that aren’t built up with cities. Wild places.

Think about the Arctic or the Antarctic, or the ocean. Actually, it was this campaign to help protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in America which first got me thinking about this.

These places are precious because they’re filled with wilderness. Because the creatures and geography within them are becoming endangered. Because they run within their own time, yet the changes within them are a reflection of humanity’s time on this planet. Surely if the size of these places shrink, then the number of years before climate catastrophe shrinks, too.

WILDERNESS X SLOWNESS X TIME X HUMANITY X QUIETNESS

And what is it like to live in places either nearby or which have a similar wildness to them. Does it feel slower? Does being closer to nature make you more accepting of life’s seasons? I wonder what it’s like to live in an area like the Arctic Circle. Are people happier there?

And what about in Scotland — a country with many rural communities, such as those on the Hebrides. What is it like to live out there, or move out there from an urban area. How do we measure time with nature in Scotland? How is nature a measure of our own lives, and our time?

These questions of time and conservations have got me thinking of the phrase, “Rewilding Time.” So far I’ve found one academic article by an Associate Professor of Geography at Exeter University, Caitlin DeSilvey. I’m yet to complete reading the article but through her I also discovered a project called “Heritage Futures,” which focussed on heritage and related fields, and the ideas of conservations, uncertainty and transformation.

There was one quote on a post concerning rewilding which made me think about the question of nature, time and humanity being reflected in their quietest landscapes:

“to let go of nature would be to let go of the self that is projected everywhere around it.”

Letting go of nature is allowing it to run its course on its own terms. To stop trying to control it. To let go of time is the same thing — allowing it to run its course. This involves letting go of a projected self, too.

I’m starting to think that there is a parallel between time and nature and the way the human ego interacts with it.