The Phoenix
I am the past, and the future. I am an echo that travels in both directions. I am reborn, the Phoenix, the same each time and altogether different. Sometimes five years, others fifty. And I remember. The past is a mantle I wear, one that speaks to me, mocks my helplessness. The cycle consumes me, becomes me. I rise, live and fly only to fall again and again. I flee from the life I led, and will lead again, only to be remade from the ashes. Always remade, reborn. Connections are severed, but new ones will replace them. I think that I must have been human, for I bewilder myself just as they do. We share the same insatiable desire to belong together. To fit together. But they have the guarantee of closure, of a final answer.
I do not return from whence I came, except for now. This time, I cannot explain why, but I have fled, fallen, and come again. I circle now, in shadow and secret. Stalking, I observe. They are changed. Though I have been thoroughly remade, they are the ones who are different. I am who I always was, they have become who they were going to be. Yet for me, they are only who they were. The memory stalks me, as I stalk them. I am their past too. The ghosts of what once was are my retinue, and I the eternal king of memory. Of the dead past.
Where they have grown, as humans do, I turn circles. My fractal personality only repeats itself.
I have not been away long, but I only recognise what I remember. The names and faces are the same, but the people that carry them have gone far and wide. I did not witness these changes, I only see the results, through the fog of my memories. The sometimes, often, opaque fog across my eyes. I can only detect the traces of the presents that wreaked their effects, they seem like so many fairy tales. To me the past is more real, the past that I now wear. The past that is, to them, so distant.
Why have I returned this time? What connection binds me here? Of course, the past. But that past belongs to someone else. Who I am now and who I was then have never met, though we are one and the same. How can I hope to return, when the shape of all things has changed? I do not fit. I am of a different age, removed from the ravages of their time, I have not worn smooth like they have.
Yet...
Here I am, now. The past is with me, and affects me. I did not have the memories then, that I do now. I cannot be the creature I used to be, for that reason alone. How have I changed? My centre feels unmoved, yet some changes must have occurred. I am older, I have seen things I had not seen. Heard things I had not heard. I know what I did not know.
Do I live in the past, or the present? Do I know myself, or but the memory of myself? Perhaps this is the reason, I see the changes in others but refuse to admit that I myself have changed. How do I measure it? How do I be sure of it?
The Orthodoxy of Videogames
A certain chunk of videogaming culture is evolving into a monstrous brotherhood which increasingly resembles a kind of religion--or a cult, if you prefer. I do not claim that all members of the videogame industry, media or playing public are part of this cult, but only that this dangerous and outspoken fraternity is increasingly vocal, visible and concentrated. They present a more coherent group than do gamers who are not this way, and therefore threaten to represent us all. I for one, protest. The following is a conceptualisation of my fears, which have not sprung out of my imagination, but from simply observing the hideous, masochistic thrashing of videogame culture over the past few months. The villain is not "videogame culture" in so far as any such thing can be said to exist. It is not even videogames, as objects. It is the people, the vile, bigoted, hateful people who are hell-bent on maintaining their own idiotic, sheltered state of ignorance that are the problem.