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.

Songwriting as Fairytale

I had a thought today as I continue reading Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.

He mentioned at one point getting lost in the dark forest and finding our way again, and I wondered how that pattern might be reflected in the common pop song structure.

Songs are built on this pattern of repetition and deviation — the deviation makes the repetition all the more sweet when it returns. I thought about how verses could be seen as straying off the forest path into a darker realm, and then the chorus comes in when we find the path again — let’s celebrate! We found the path!

Then I thought about the middle 8 — what some people also call “the bridge.” This is the part where we come across an entirely new melody and total deviation from all we’ve heard before. It’s at this point we’ve strayed so far off the woodland path that we’ve actually put ourselves in danger. We fight our way out (sometimes bridges in pop music end with a cry-out high note, think of Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’) and the return to the chorus is hugely sweeter after that ordeal.

Another interesting thing is that the coda of pop songs is sometimes the combination of the chorus and the middle 8. Which gives the impression that the darkest part of our journey has also become an intrinsic part of it— in fact, it adds to the chorus: it imbues greater meaning and complexity, and adds to the bittersweet taste of the final sing-a-long. It’s like we’ve taken what we’ve learnt in the dark forest and applied it to our path.

Calling this place a “bridge” also makes me think of crossing over. Like a symbolic act of self-sacrifice in the hero’s journey which leaves them utterly transformed, but stronger than ever. Think about when Harry Potter decided to let himself be killed by Lord Voldemort. He crossed over to death, and then came back renewed to sing his final chorus, full of awareness about what lies on the other side of this existence.

Here’s a passage from Dark Ecology which reinforces this idea of how darkness and joy live inside each other, and we need that in order to create a world where the future is sustainable:

"within the melancholia is an unconditional sadness. And within the sadness is beauty. And within the beauty is longing. And within the longing is a plasma field of joy."

I think I could argue that this is a loop — lingering deep within joy itself is also sadness, which within lies joy, which within lies sadness, ad infinitum.