I've talked before about the umwelt of birds and what that means to me. A couple of threads came together for me last week in my brain:
- The feeling of coming 'close' to an animal like that has a kind of sacral quality to me.
- Not 'close' necessarily in the sense of physical proximity, but the sense of briefly brushing close to something other, intellectually and emotionally.
- This isn't -- almost never can be -- more than momentary, transitory. (The kind of connection that wasn't both of those things would feel different anyway.)
- But there's a sense of brushing close to something -- two catenary lines that trend together, briefly, before diverging.
- The briefness, unlikelihood of that encounter is something that empowers it.
- In what will briefly feel like a complete topic shift: I've been playing Wildermyth recently (it's very, very good). And one of the things that struck me about the writing (which is also very, very good) is how well it does old gods and magic -- the feeling of encountering something unknowable and fundamental.
- Writing that sort of thing well is hard. Pull back too much and keep things too vague, and it's very mysterious, but distant and unsatisfying. Dive in too deep, and you've got something that feels close and knowable and not sacral.
- The feeling that Wildermyth creates for me in those moments, like finding a vast stone idol with a crystal heart beneath the mountain, is this feeling of two catenary curves brushing past one another.
- There's enough detail and specificity and feeling that you are seeing something and being seen by it, but without full mutual comprehension.
- There's the sense that this is a meaningful enough encounter that it can change one or both of them.
- But it doesn't seek to explain everything or peel back the veil so far that things become mundane.
- Back to animals: we often, understandably, anthropomorphise them and their behaviour. But that in a way reduces it and distances us from the reality of what's going on -- the complex self and umwelt of the animal when we (try to) discard our human lens.
- But there are those rare moments where you can feel like you're in communion with another being as itself and not solely as a function of projecting human qualities onto it. It's fleeting and fragile but it has that feeling of two objects brushing past one another in deep space, before hurtling off unstoppably.