Spelunky

There is no saving. There is no level the same as any other, but neither is there a level much different from any other. Level by level you go down as far as you can into the cave, until you die.

It's easy to die in this world composed of limited elements lifted from Indiana Jones. There are snakes (you hate those), homocidal Oriental musclemen, rolling balls of stone twice your size released when you steal a golden idol, bats, spiders, animated skeletons, and most lethal of all (because easy to forget), arrow traps.

To replenish your life, there are damsels. From the corners of this infinitely rearranged maze, these blondes scream "HELP!" They go limp when you carry them in your arms, and sometimes limper when you throw them into the paths of arrows to disarm traps or at creatures to bludgeon them to death with her body. If dead they are excellent body shields, if alive, they are cashed in for longevity at the maze's exit. She walks through the doorway, and you gain a heart: You can now be hit once more before dying. Where they go is unknown. When you go follow through that same door, you enter another, deeper maze.

So long as you live you may acquire money. On the surface this is your only desire. Your greed for gold coins, idols, and gems is as insatiable as it is casual. It is, seemingly, your reason for exploring. You use your ingenuity to access the riches scattered throughout the caves. When you die, none of this capital is preserved.

When you die, the path you have forged through the cave is not a path at all, because you can't retrace your steps. Nothing you did matters any more. Yet you continue to spelunk, the reborn you. What carries over between your numerous deaths at the bottom of each new but very similar cave? You learn better how to navigate these caves, to go further down into the world that never translates.

While it becomes a familiar background, you nonetheless attune yourself to the sonic quality of the caves. Unlike the caves themselves, their sound repeats. Each iteration is a perfect reproduction of the previous. What you attune to is the difference when the cave's patience with your presence is running out. Sound slows down, distorts. At first this is not alarming, or even noticable, because the cave's sound is defined by an eery bending of square waves. After the first time you die from a haunting of a cave ghost, the ambiguity turns over: The mundane bending sounds like it might be the end of your days. You develop an anxious ear. The familiar repetition is ever on the brink of an intimation of doom. You begin to really listen.

The Forest in the Garden

Ought to be a whole hierarchy of smaller chairs scattered throughout the bamboo garden, running the gamut from toddler-sized to ant-sized. I've ruined the illusion of scale of course, though I doubt it was very convincing. The chairs don't quite look like the kind you sit in. The irrigation gadget, if you can see it, might give it away, or the size of the lion statue, which may somehow look the size that it is. People worry about including scale references in photos in a technical or scientific context, but there are so many clues that to truly confuse the eye an extraordinary level of control over the scene is necessary. It works best when there's hardly a scene at all. The bamboo, conrete patio "stones," chairs, lion statue, soil, cement wall, fallen leaves, and irrigation lines provide a thicket of contextualizing scale data.

I rarely speak in that kind of "ought," don't generally look at something and imagine the way I wish it were. I'm not a visionary. One needs visionaries, but they can be exasperating company, never stopping to see or accept anything, always moving themselves into the scene to fix it. A visionary rejects knowledge. My silly little dream of what I want this cafe patio to be replaces what inspired it, the two undersized chairs. Of course, dreams of what could be are hardly the only things to swoop in to mediate experience. It's not that the visionary gives up the object (whatever that is) but gives up thinking, delays it. He is constantly dreaming up ways to improve the world and persuing those ways, so that he need never arrive. The thinker, on the other hand, is constantly keeping action at bay through contemplation, adjusting his understanding of the world to it. The world will happily never meet the visionary's expectations, and the thinker's understanding will happily never meet the world. Both are deeply entrenched. Neither ever reach anything because their criteria are broken, but then if they did reach something, then what? There would be nothing left to do or understand whatever the hell I'm going on about.

The Hotel

I used to take the elevator up to the top floor, but the last time I did one of the hotel staff finally did something about it. He was very apologetic. His first sentence began with a conciliatory "I know". I don't remember what else he said. That he can't have non-guests up here, probably. Which led us into the elevator together, trying to make small talk. He kept apologizing, and I kept saying I didn't hold it against him, or mind much. Every time I go up I know I'm not supposed to be there. That's why I go. The view is wonderfully removed from the street. It is relaxing, or I think so until I'm up there, fidgeting. If it weren't illicit, I doubt I would go.

I haven't been since that run-in with him happened. Maybe there's a camera, or one of the guests was particularly uppity and told him. Or maybe he just noticed me, clearly out of place, entering the elevator. Anyway, I no longer want to take the risk.

The southern side of the building is very warm, when the sun is out. That side is perpendicular to the main drag, and my route to the grocery store goes along there. It's a half-block of quiet heat. The whole building is painted a very bright beige, which looks yellow at some times of the day. The rest of the time it looks awful. Brutal. Without discrimination--as if every detail has been ignored. The sunlight reflects off of this nearly white surface, creating a kind of solar oven near where it intersects with the sidewalk. If the wind is coming from the north, the massive edifice blocks it. In spring I can here receive an early summer. Then I get to the corner of both the building and the street, and everything floods back: wind, traffic, tourists, cold.