04.01.04 - 1:17 p.m.

I'm half-through with Grendel by John Gardner, a novel I should have read years ago, and one that has long been on my must-read list. For whatever reason, it's never on the top of my mind when I go to the library or to Border's, but this time I remembered it, and lucky that was. If you haven't read Grendel, you should, but only (of course) if you've read Beowulf and care about things like time and space and intercessions and hypocrisy and conversations with god.

This passage struck me as the perfect comment on the essential distance between all people, and the essential nihilism is rather compelling - as nihilism often is, to people who want to sever bonds and eschew responsibility - but if ... mm, but the nihilism also provides some important perspective and distance that could, perhaps, help to preserve some shred of idealism... doesn't it?

I listened, felt myself swept up. I knew very well that all he said was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer burgeoning, waltz to the sickle. Yet I was swept up. "Ridiculous!" I hissed in the black of the forest. I snatched up a snake from beside my foot and whispered to it, "I knew him when!" But I couldn't bring out a wicked cackle, as I'd meant to do. My heart was light with Hrothgar's goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty ways. I backed away, crablike, further into darkness -- like a crab retreating in pain when you strike two stones at the mouth of his underwater den. I backed away till the honeysweet lure of the harp no longer mocked me. Yet even now my mind was tormented by images. Thanes filled the hall and a great silent crowd of them spilled out over the surroundeing hill, smiling, peaceable, hearing the harper as if not a man in all that lot had ever twisted a knife in his neighbor's chest.

"Well then he's changed them," I said, and stumbled and feel on the root of a tree. "Why not?"

Why not? the forest whispered back -- yet not the forest, something deeper, an impression from another mind, some lives thing old and terrible.

I listened, tensed.

Not a sound.

"He reshapes the world," I whispered, belligerent. "So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold."

A little poetic, I would readily admit. His manner of speaking was infecting me, making me pompous. "Nevertheless," I whispered crossly - but I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whiseering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words -- changing nothing. I still had the snake in my fist. I set it down. It fled.

"He takes what he finds," I said stubbornly, trying again. "And by changing men's minds he makes the best of it. Why not?" But it sounded petulant; and it wasn't true, I knew. He sang for pay, for the praise of women - one in particular - and for the honor of a famous king's hand on his arm. If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art's fault, not the Shaper's. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?

and:

"Why can't I have someone to talk to?" I said. The stars said nothing, but I pretended to ignore the rudeness. "The Shaper has people to talk to," I said. I wrung my fingers. "Hrothgar has people to talk to."

I thought about it.

Perhaps it wasn't true.

As a matter of fact, if the Shaper's vision of goodness and peace was a part of himself, not idle rhymes, then no one understood him at all, not even Hrothgar. And as for Hrothgar, if he was serious about his idea of glory - sons and sons' sons giving out treasure - I had news for him. If he had sons, they wouldn't hear his words. They would weigh his silver and gold in their minds. I've watched the generations. I've seen their weasel eyes.

Why am I half-connecting all this with roleplaying? Well, because it would be pretentious and pompous for me to sit here and discourse on god or sex or any of the world's great mysteries, the ones I'm never going to solves, lacking scale and shape and reason and omniscience enough to manage it. And also, because, you know, roleplaying is on my mind again after a long absence. I often have to think about things to want to do them, to imagine them and settle into into place in my mind, like a two-year-old with one of those foam-shape puzzles, the ones five-year-olds love to solve because they are large and obvious and so easy for them to master and feel unutterably superior to those crazy little two year olds, who don't know nothing, nothing at all.

I think my problem with returning to roleplaying stems from the deep disconnect between my ridiculous optimism and my rampant cynicism. For optimism - well, I never just write a character, I sort of dream them for a while, let them percolate in my subconscious until their half-spoken words are just beneath the ebb of my own consciousness, a constant, pronounced undertow. I walk differently and think differently and feel their peculiar imagery: these are the streets, this is the way light shines for her, this is the vast expanse of his rage. But there's inevitably some sort of barrier between my imagination and my fingertips, the intruding layers of consciousness that strain the pulp of all this imagination until there's only a few thin, uninteresting words, flat and pale and much too two-dimensional, and never what I meant to say, and never quite enough. In part, I think they're never enough for everyone else, or that's what I half-verbalize, but mostly they're not enough for me, because I am a particularly demanding and critical taskmaster.

The cynicism is almost as enervating. First, there is constant, inevitable Mary Sueism in roleplaying that cannot be escaped, ever. As taken as I am by my characters, so are other people essentially taken by their own characters. And rarely do the twain ever meet. Of course, Mary-Sueism also leads to another particularly polluting strain, rampant bad-assery. Not everyone, after all, can actually be a bad-ass, and most ice-bitches really are strutting old softies at heart. In earlier years, new characters were sometimes a revelation, but these days they most often seem like cacaphonic repetition or preening peacocks bad-assing their way around town. (And take the word badass and cut it into two: bad and ass.)

Except, of course, I should be allowed to be a bad ass. Maybe it's all the fine print, all the extra words, all the choking layers of data and restrictions that you know will never be completed or fully rendered, accurately drawn, because very few people are actually interested in spending too much time fawning over someone else's creation except in proportion to the amount of time they spend fawning over your own - and I'm as guilty of that as anything. Maybe I'm just overthinking this all. Maybe my stuffed sinuses have started impinging upon my brain.