The Greenness and the Greyness

 My daily routine lately has a new element: about two hours in the late evening of video games. It's the first time in years, as best I can recall, that I've actually played a full contemporary video game through from start to (almost) finish. And I don't regret it. For months, I was casting about for some gratifying way in which to introduce some ludic element into my life. I tried watching sports: I couldn't stand so many pizza commercials interrupting the game every thirty seconds. I tried watching TV shows—some were better than others; and when I came to a bad one, it turned me away again. 

At long last I found a game. It has now lasted me for several months. I am only able to devote an hour or two in a given evening to it, so I have managed to stretch it out since all the way back in the previous semester's exam period. Now, though, as I say—I am at last nearing the end. I can sense it impending. And yet, I do not want it to come. This one game is the only thing I've found after months of searching that serves this particular need. Once it is over, I will have to begin the quest anew. I will need to find something else to plug the ludic gap in my life, which I need to quiet my brain before its nightly slumbers. 

And so, I keep delaying the inevitable. This is somewhat easy to do, as I know the final quest in the game involves an insufferably difficult boss fight. It will not be much fun to play. And before I have to face up to it, I still have various side quests to complete, in which I can rack up enough experience points and health potions to be ready for the final battle. And so, I can tell myself, my procrastination is justified. Yet—even as I've found a way to prolong the game, it is less fun now that I have done so. Part of the pleasure of any video game is the sense of making progress. If the pace slows, my enjoyment does too. 

And so I find myself getting depressed whenever I play the game now—the opposite of its intended effect. I am lingering in a sorrowful liminal state, trying to ward off the end that I know must eventually come. And it was in this mood that I was reading Gerald Murnane's rather mysterious unclassifiable novel, Inland—which, among other things, reflects back upon the author's Australian childhood. And there—without in any way going to look for it, or expecting to find it there—I read a passage that strangely coincided with my sorrowfully dilatory mood. 

Murnane writes in several portions of the novel about his memories of the liturgical calendar, as he experienced the passage of the church-year in his Catholic upbringing. One change in the seasons that he particularly dwells on is that which comes with the transition between two liturgical texts concerning the parable of the fig-tree. The first text, Murnane recounts, conjures a leafy-green image of the fig tree in full bloom. The second uses the tree as a warning: a reminder that even this verdant and budding thing will soon enough be blasted and decayed—because the end of the world is nigh. 

It is in the brief pause between these two passages—between the "greenness" of the fig-tree and the "greyness" of coming death—that Murnane is inclined to linger. He tells us that he has found this same pause in the years since, every time he has approached the end of a book or heard the penultimate movement of a piece of classical music. During this moment, he writes, one knows that "the larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time." But even as one knows this, one still dithers in the pause. One does not want the greyness to come. One wishes the greenness to last forever.

And one may even, as Murnane tells us, delude oneself for a time that such a subversion of the liturgical order is possible. "For an absurd moment within that moment," he writes, "the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the other is the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over by the green." 

So it is with me, as I roam about the game's open world, completing more minor challenges, collecting more experience points—but really, in so doing, merely dawdling; merely putting off the inevitable ending one day more. I know the final "battle" must come—the final boss battle, that is. I know that the solemn themes of the main quest must at last be wrapped up. But can't they wait just a little while? Cannot we prolong this pause before the final confrontation with Ranrok in his dragon form? Cannot we stroll around the Highlands just a few days more, confronting poachers and finding hidden field guide pages? 

I hear tell that at the end of this game—which I have not named because it is associated with She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named—the seasons of the game's open world finally transition from winter (in which I've been trapped for the last several weeks of gameplay at least) to a verdant spring. So, in a sense, the game does reverse the passage of the liturgical year, in just the way Murnane tells us we sometimes "absurdly" hope. The greenness does indeed outlast the greyness. And, so long as I dawdle and dither before that final boss confrontation, I remain trapped more in the greyness than the greenness. 

And yet, even that green outcome—that final cutscene that will follow the completion of the game's last battle—will in truth be a kind of greyness. It will be an end. An annihilation. A microcosm of death. And so I keep putting it off for one day more. An eschatology of gameplay. For, much as we may say that we have made our peace with mortality, as Diana Athill once wrote, we still don't mean today. "Not yet," she recalls thinking, each time a plane engine makes a disconcerting sound mid-flight. As Anna Akhmatova once wrote: Is today really the date?/ Please go away, wait/ Till another day... [D.M. Thomas trans.]

Just so. Not today, Ranrok. Not today, death. Give me—give us all—one day more. Let the greenness linger. Let the pause in the final movement remain just a little while longer—before the final battle begins. Before the final cutscene plays.