/lit/ - Literature

>>12405793
just parse this image for a moment. the Guardian (which, ironically, is the name shared by a major newspaper today, and which is devoted to equally Fellowship-tier press coverage) was like a giant Orc arriving from the future. it arrives, by the way, not *purely* through bludgeoning its way into the world of Britannia, but because it is actively helped in by a cynical cabal of philosophical revolutionaries, who are looking to render what is a four-dimensional vision quest (the Quest of the Avatar) down to something which is socially and politically efficacious. your job, as the Avatar, is to sort this mystery out. Garriott wrote this game in, like, 1992. that's pretty impressive, and i don't think he read a lot of Land or whoever else. he just felt that something was going on, as poets, artists, visionaries and other types often do. a giant Orc, arriving not from the past, but from the future...and this wasn't something that was openly hostile, it was *what the Fellowship wanted...*

Ultima 7: Introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfqOZlNxbfI

i have infinite words to say about Why Ultima Matters, or why Garriott's workaround to his own existential crises led to the creation of one of the all-time all-time great works of art in the modern era. it recently led me down a very deep rabbit hole indeed reading about the symbology of the Ankh ('the Key of Life') and theosophy, and the perennial philosophy, and much else. the fundamental truth in symbols, and their irreducibility to either everyday language *or postmodern critique.* in the end, like many things, that which we can call evil is not necessarily the absence of Good (as in Tolkien) but often as not the *excess* of Good. Peterson has some kind of antenna for this, but more interesting explorations of this can be found in Bataille, but also Baudrillard. Augustine's own tortured project of the saeculum was a kind of way of organizing political life around the emulation of Christ, and Christianity has always had a kind of complicated relationship with the polis as a result. today the dangers and problems inherent to doing so are much more recognizable when understood via the convoluted mechanisms of ideology as either left socialism (communism) or right socialism (fascism). at the extremes, it can be hard to tell the tactics of them apart. which tells us something about the nature of this process itself. one of the things that has always fascinated me, for example, is the fact that you can use the monomyth or three-act storytelling to make a functional piece of propaganda *regardless of content.* the monomyth works whether we are making propaganda about the Third Reich, the Soviet International, or why Facebook Empowers Women...anyways.

(cont'd)