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.

The Slow Curve Back To Björk

In 2015 my interest in Björk finally blossomed. Up until then there was a vague awareness & appreciation. She was on the edge of some large mystery and I wasn’t entirely ready to go there yet, dark weirdness. When the spark finally hit, I was in love: merging sex, death and science with instrumentation that both pulls from imagined futures and romantic pasts. I mean, she dresses like a galactic moth and her music videos are robots fucking. It seemed on a totally different level from any other artist I listened to. I sat in bed one day and watched the entirety of her concert at the Royal Opera House in 2001.

Musically, I was in the middle of searching for an identity. Identities are always flowing and ever-changing, but I felt like I hadn’t even found the essence with which I was flowing. I hung on to Björk and studied her melody lines and the intricacy of her arrangements. I wanted to sound futuristic, like her. But only in terms of sound. My song content was still deeply entrenched in my life, my experiences, my immediate longings. Stories of me.

After a few attempts to get some sort of electronic pop sound going, I walked away and a few years later, picked up my acoustic guitar again. A producer came along and said “hey, your acoustic songs are so good, I want to help you make them,” and I took that as a clue towards my sound. I left my dreams of becoming some incarnation of Björk on the shelf.

In my research for “Wasted Time” (or should I call it Lost Time? I think a name will emerge the more thinking I do), I came across the work of Timothy Morton. I stumbled on him through the Caitlin DeSilvey essay on Rewilding Time, and happily found that there was correspondence between Morton and Björk made public.

I’ve only just started to dip my toe into Morton’s Dark Ecology, so I can’t fully talk about all the ideas yet, cause I’m still trying to understand them. I think the conversation with Björk is helping, though. Also, they say some interesting things about pop music & songwriting:

What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness— from remembering not forgetting . . . The song as entity is a physical being in its own right

And then Morton goes on to talk about how art helps the “almost-now” eco society to “rediscover enchantment”—

our mission maybe is to allow people to feel this and think this with full crystal clarity, not departing from reason for one second, yet allowing the inner space to sparkle madly

Allowing the inner space to sparkle madly. I love that and I feel like songwriting fits in there, rewilding time fits in there, transforming ways of looking at lost time fits in there, moments of quiet and wilderness fit in there.

Look at this beautiful tiny sparkling void, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s beautiful

And they bring up the North!! Talking about it as a realm of enchantment. As a place where society can maybe learn about the sparkling, magical unknown:

there is part of me that just wanted to talk about elves and sprites. . . you can feel these entities coming out of the rocks up here in the north of england, the pools and fountains. whether you like it or not, believe it or not. irish woman i heard once: “sure i don’t believe in them, but they’re there all the same…” bang on… somehow the further north you go the more vivid it becomes. i expect it’s super vivid in iceland?

Also on the table is the idea that thinking the world is separate and evil actually makes you the evil thing. You are the world and to think evil of it is to make evil of yourself! View time the same way! Lost time? Stuck in a sparkling void? Hate the void and you are the hate! Starting to care for the world begins with being caring — caring for yourself. Love yourself = love your neighbour = love the planet. Narcissism and nihilism and finger-pointing break that down.

What about merging with the void? Merging with care & eroticism towards the wilderness of stale, dormant time? Merging with the unknown, merging and caring about the stillness, the staring out to sea from an unmoving chair by the window?

Also, the song Isobel. Leaving it here for later:

The lyrics also relate to sparkling voids / dark forests / being alone:

in a forest pitch dark / glowed the tiniest spark / it burst into flame / like me / like me / my name isobel / married to myself / my love isobel / living by herself

Is Isobel a character of Björk’s personal mythology?

Finally finally finally, I am still figuring out what Object Oriented Ontology truly means in dumb, pop music terms, but here is a definition of it which I think makes it easy to grasp? Maybe?

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is Graham Harman’s variant of the Speculative Realism movement. As an enquiry into the existence of objects it gives objects the same importance as humans. In doing so, humans are not all powerful over objects: we co-existing on planet Earth.

That’s from an essay by Joshua Speer. My understanding of OOO (apart from the fact that I love the roundness of three Os together) is that things exist, and without human interest/understanding/gaze, things still exist and have power, timelines, lives. Everything is an object, even concepts and massive things like climate change or Jupiter. Objects are also created from disparate things which can get lumped together — the human species is an object, with its own interactions with the planet which might seem separate from any individual human who is a part of the species. For example, I’m a human writing on my computer, drinking a cup of tea. But as part of the object “human species”, I’m currently devouring the planet’s resources and wearing away the Earth’s climate. This interpretation of OOO might not be perfect, and will probably develop the more I read about it. Currently reading Morton’s Dark Ecology which is helping with that.

So. Back to the Björk. Morton mentions a coral reef in his final email in the chain:

i think of OOO as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemomes with tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant, could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds of things that don’t add up to it

When I thought of the dark coral reef, I felt it as a place which was deep and secret, which people couldn’t even visit. When we are lonely and within the lake of lost time, we might feel like we’re at a similar place. Not a sparkling coral reef perhaps, but something like it. Something which is unseen by other people, which feels very far away, like the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but at the same time there is something magical and sparkling about it.

I am calling this The Sparkling Dark.

Does being in lost time, the sparkling dark, allow us to access a realm of the magical? Or the mythical? What mundane experiences would back these claims up?

I have got several interviews with people I know coming up, mostly about chronic illness, but also about psychology, unemployment, creativity and recovery. I wonder what we will discover about the sparkling dark then.

To put a very long, rambling story short… from all of this, I realised that Björk is still a huge inspiration to me. She can be an influence even if I’m not emulating her sound. I’m taking a different view now — ecology made pop, art made mainstream, academia in emails about coral reefs and sparkling Nordic landscapes. Philosophy and weirdness and dreaming all whipped up and put on a stage for people to sing and dance along to. That’s what I want to do with this Wasted Time project (which I am now leaning towards calling “Lost Time” instead of Wasted…. ‘wasted’ implies more blame than ‘lost’).

Making the sparkling dark a place to dance in.

Into The Dark Ocean

i’m reeling over this essay about creating personal mythologies by Buster Benson.

He describes the personal myth as a way of looking at the dark, universal anxieties we have as humans and creating stories which serve as reminders to love, look and understand these problems. As Buster writes, the universe is a “dark forest,” and our awareness of this dark forest is our awareness of its mysteries and chilling truths. For example — we can’t stop bad things from happening, we’re all going to die, we may never have the lives we dreamed of living, etc, etc…

Mythology is about creating a sense of connection to the universe, ourselves, and thusly, creating a connection to meaning. Why is this happening? How can I make it make sense for me?

When I started to think about personal mythology, I also thought about personal symbolism — stuff that has specific meaning to us just because of how it shows up in our lives. For example, the traditional symbolism of a horse might be speed, messages, transit, freedom… but for me, horses make me sneeze and I think of my sister’s attempt at horse riding when she was a kid. Horses make me think of the forests by my hometown, trying something you’re not good at, mystery and weirdness (cause horses have this otherworldly quality to them).

Personal symbolism comes up naturally in dreams. It’s where our subconscious speaks to us through visual messages which can only be deciphered by ourselves. I have one dream I remember vividly, which also feels like it serves as the beginning of a personal myth:

I’m at Cape Horn — the most southernly point of South America. I’m standing high on a viewpoint, it’s a blue sunny day and I can see a small town. On the edge of this town by the ocean there’s a scientific research centre. Looking towards the research centre, I can see there’s an expedition of a submarine which is going down and off the edge of this most Southern point of the continent. It’s not a submarine that’s already submerged in water, but instead a vessel that starts on the land and then rolls off the edge of the rocks into the deep. Now I’m in the submarine that’s about to be submerged and I’m terrified to be this far South and going underwater — it feels like I’m heading into entirely unexplored territory with no way back. The water is icy and a deep blue and after the initial stomach-churning splash, we are moving through the water and down, down down… Looking out of these huge glass windows which panel the front of the submarine, I get an overwhelming feeling of the sublime — that experience where you are simultaneously in awe and on the edge of terror, but somehow it feels good. Swimming past us as in the distance I can see a large whale, a whale shark, a giant manta ray, everything is huge and formidable. It’s so beautiful. The terror doesn’t leave but I start to become thankful for being on the submarine, seeing these incredible, otherworldly things.

The ocean in this dream is also like the dark forest, in which it’s mysterious and potentially deadly, but also full of wonder.

Question: can we create personal mythologies that help us out of quiet times in our lives? Can we create personal mythologies around “wasted time” that turns it into something meaningful and full of connection?