my brain is a xanadu

Not too long ago, a friend of mine used a computer analogy when talking about her mind, what kind of “hardware” she’s running in comparison to everyone else. And now I think about that sometimes, when considering the particular gifts of certain people I know. A quick wit, or a remarkable ability to break systems down into their components and understand how they interact, or whatever it might be. Killer apps and processing power. And where does my mind fit in? What kind of hardware am I working with?
I read a lot of writing that makes me envy the writers’ abilities to synthesize information and ideas incredibly fast and in incredibly complex ways and promptly deliver a clear, well-argued, appropriately complex, well-supported reaction. (It may look effortless to me from the outside, but I’m sure it doesn’t always feel effortless to them.) There are rare occasions on which I feel like the machinery of my brain whirs to life in response to something and reacts in a way that is fast and sharp and clear as a crystal. But more often than not, I feel like it takes days, some program running in the background as I do other things, my brain turning something over and slowly building some kind of reaction to it that takes on a shape that isn’t fully known to me until I finish writing whatever it is my mind has been cobbling together. And sometimes I think this laborious process shows in the writing itself, how it feels weathered and rough-hewn, which often is just the way I think it ought to feel.
Last night I replayed the third act of Kentucky Route Zero, and I was again enchanted by the clunky old computer that holds the key to this step of Conway’s quest to find an address somewhere along the mysterious titular route and make one final delivery. The computer is called Xanadu, and if my brain is a computer, I think that’s what kind it is. It may not be the most powerful computer around, and it’s definitely not the easiest to use, but it’s crackling and haunted and alive.

Sometimes its output is unintelligible…

and sometimes I can’t produce the results I’m hoping for…

…but there’s still this feeling of potential in the air, and every once in a while, as I explore the worlds within worlds…

…wandering the neural pathways shaped by memory, shaped, like Kentucky Route Zero is shaped, by things like road trips across America and early adventure games…

…as I rummage through its memory banks and feed it different inputs and bang away at the keys, it produces something I wasn’t sure it was capable of producing.
When you use the Xanadu in Kentucky Route Zero, there’s this great sound.
It’s like you can hear that the machine has a soul. It’s mechanical and spiritual and so, so alive. It makes me feel like within this busted old computer, there’s no telling what might happen or what might be possible.
Maybe Xanadu is a self-indulgent reflection of its creator. Junebug seems to think so.

And perhaps some of my writing is pretty self-indulgent, too. If you say it is, I won’t argue with you. I don’t know if it is or not. All I know is that a lot of it is for a very particular kind of reader, someone for whom games are not just collections of components to be examined and evaluated on their own terms but are also works that give us experiences through which we can think about aspects of our own lives.
The Xanadu is a machine protected by passwords…

…and sometimes I think there are parts of me that are locked away, too, and that those places can only be opened by the right people, people who know the passwords without even knowing that they know them.
The Xanadu is a machine obsessed with the past. It is stuck in the past literally and figuratively, outdated hardware programmed to consider and reconsider moments long gone. Replaying them, resimulating them, over and over again, as if trying to find a way to change the past, but it can’t be changed.


You may wish and wish and wish that there were any other option but there is no other option and there never will be no matter how many times you replay the game, no matter how many times you run the simulation.
Nowadays I’m so used to technology that it usually feels mundane to me. What Kentucky Route Zero as a whole and the Xanadu in particular do is make me feel the magic in the machinery again.

It makes me feel as if there’s still something holy and enchanted about it, like there was on that day so long ago when I first touched the keyboard of an Apple IIc in my classroom as a storm raged outside, and as I gazed at that green screen, it was like a lightning storm was happening in my brain, and I was touching a gateway to wonders unknown.
There are reasons, I suppose, why we replace things sometimes. Reasons why we’re not still doing work on Apple II cs. They are stuck in the past, and can’t meet the challenges of the future.
But sometimes I want to embrace the musty, clunky hardware of my mind, because there is an aura of magic to it, buried under the layers of dust. I don’t always know how to use the damn thing, with its obtuse software and moldy, frazzled circuits and haunted memory banks and puzzles and passwords, but I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got, and somewhere buried under all that stuff is the capability of sometimes producing something beautiful.
Notes
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