One of the moments I enjoy most in a game is that just before a combat encounter happens. In these moments I plan my approach, my position, look at the lay of the land, look at how the enemy is forced to approach me, consider how I can take this moment and this position to gain the greatest possible advantage. In these moments I can see it all, I know everything that’s going to happen before it happens, my awareness is complete. The actual encounter is, if I’ve planned correctly, a mere formality.
This is the ultimate power fantasy: The fantasy that you know what the fuck is going on and what is going to happen next.
As I approach some increased awareness of the quirks of my perspective, my personality, my peculiar chemistry as described by spectrums and scales and initialisms, I notice this need for comprehensive premeditation. I just need a plan, right? I just need to know what’s going to happen when I do this, so I can have the correct response in mind. I need to know. I need to control the encounter. I need to cover the possibilities.
How sad that the possibilities are always so impossible. They await, many-manifold and burgeoning on infinity, a choking hazard. So I choke, and do nothing. Choosing not to play may seldom be a winning move, but even more rarely is it a losing move. Variations on this story are told every day.
Your life is shaped by the obstacles you swerve around, your routes are planned and your roots planted in the shadows of the sun you avoid. I fell into the artist’s life because creating art is the place where I am in control. Inversely, when one is of the audience, art is also a place where you can cede control to an artist, a moment of release from one’s own control. Art’s got me coming and going, as someone desperate for control, as someone desperate to avoid the pressure that seeking control brings. I’m trying to make my little worlds, but even here the possibilities are impossible. I have such an obligation to this diorama, an existence that hinges on my enthusiasm. How could I assign myself such a dire responsibility? If I imagine a man in my dream and forget him on awakening, is that murder?
The world is a haunted place, and the only home for ghosts is in portraiture.
Understanding, knowledge, control, these things are forms of unattainable perfection. Understanding is superficial, knowledge is abstract, control is impossible. To yield these illusions, though, to cease questing after understanding, knowledge, control… is impossible. Who can cede that much ground? Who can surrender their fate to, well, fate? Not me.
I keep seeking the Icarus high, the perfect moment suspended in time, when all is understood. I probably always will.
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