Rock, Star, North.
In the summer of 2015, in pursuit of the virtual sublime, I set out on a journey, modelled on Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, around the mountainous game-world of Grand Theft Auto V. This poem is a brief chronicle of my travels.
All the stars are being overwritten
by cloud from the south, a flat circle
pressed in thick, slow drifts. I stick
left-stick right-stick
as if in a dream, to the summit-path.
Everything somnambulantly seems.
Rock, the sense of a star, north.
Various shades of dark blue. I fancy I
see Zeus emerging from the magnitude
of cloud but it is only my fancy.
I know there to be no Olympians here.
I am the only god or human present
in all the Tataviam Mountains –
their contours, corries, plateaus and arêtes
their dirt paths dug for motorbikes and bloodbaths
their overhead helicopters, random events
and infinite coyotes by the Land Act Reservoir –
at this late or any other hour.
I don’t know where the city went
nor do I wish to know. I count
my hundred bones and nine orifices
and think of Bashō, the haiku master,
poet-saint of journeys, who left
the courts of Edo for the narrow road
to the deep north. Once, among mountains
not at all like these the only moving things
were the poet and his brush, and these his words:
How many cloud shapes
Capped the peak before the moon
Rose on Moon Mountain?
I ask the same of my moon – my perfect
rendered moon – and the answer is the same
though it is not the same moon.
Rock is the path that I follow, the polygonal grove where I pause
Star is the extraterrestrial beauty, the azure, the iris, the awe
North are the poets, the footsteps, the journey, the taste of the blood that I draw
O evening eternal
are you animal, vegetable, mineral?
You are all mineral, and I the vital part
merging with (surging within) the mineral dusk.
I think of Wordsworth, poet-saint of nature,
who rolled around in Earth’s diurnal course
and whose words are my talismanic beat:
laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
[…] with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
By the power of the last of this zaffre, this
synthetic blue, I call on you Wordsworth,
and Bashō I call on you too! To guide me,
make me lost. Teach me to be silent.
My footsteps slow but constant. The life
of things, to see, to be the most of it
a part, to be its client. A host
of white and yellow flowers.
Rock is the square, the thumb on the button, the neurons that trigger the tiniest motion
Star is the jump, the something-not-human, the phantom limb made tangible twitching
North is the press square to jump, the distance between them, that holds and keeps separate, that severs and binds them
Here be the haecceity of night-time
and here the second summit where I rest.
All existence but bare rock, stars,
blips and a steep road north.
I think of empathic words, Nan Shepherd,
poet-saint of mountains, who said:
I like the unpath best
who went not up but into, who said:
What more there is lies
within the mountain. Something
moves between me and it.
Rock, the sense of a star, north.
To wit, to find a footing on this earth
and with it truth.
■
God, what the fuck am I doing?
Rock, Star, North
It is Saturday. I’m thirty. I’m inside when it’s sunny playing
Rock, Star, North
playing Grand Theft Auto V on the PlayStation 3 in
Rock, Star, North
in my flat in Garnethill and my friend just called to say
Rock, Star, North
to say he’s in the park and I should come they’ve got the slackline they’ve got
Rock, Star, North
they’ve got beers and Robbie’s coming with the barbecue and languistine and
Rock, Star, North
and it hasn’t been this hot since last July you realise Calum it’s been
Rock, Star, North
serious the park is hoaching get off your arse and join us man or
Rock, Star, North
Rock. I cannot come.
I am locked in a very serious enterprise.
These red eyes and clammy thumbs bely
a spiritual numbness, a metaphysical malady I wish to remedy.
Star. Leave me be with my avatar.
All my Kelvingrove love has been lost to Los Santos.
North. Come forth into the light of things.
Sing some body electronic.
■
Cuz GTA I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
GTA playtime 92 hours 45 minutes 42 seconds
GTA 76.46% complete
GTA 26,665 shots fired
GTA 1858 miles travelled
GTA 72 million 639 thousand 9 hundred dollars
GTA 457 headshots
GTA 2163 kills
GTA 320 warning stars evaded
GTA 538 warning stars attained
GTA 366 cars stolen
GTA 232 cops killed
GTA 25 hours 27 minutes 32 seconds driving cars
GTA 1 hour 59 minutes 33 seconds flying helicopters
GTA 27 minutes 33 seconds riding bicycles
GTA 42 minutes 28 seconds sailing submarines
GTA 4692 car crashes
GTA 7170 near misses
GTA 462 thousand dollars spent on healthcare
GTA 317 dollars spent on bail
GTA 67 thousand dollars spent on car mods
GTA 47 thousand dollars spent on clothes
GTA 175 dollars spent on hairstyles
GTA 180 dollars spent in the strip club
GTA 3 thousand dollars spent on taxis
GTA 5.1 million dollars spent on property
GTA it’s all not real it’s none of it real!
Playtime 92 hours 45 minutes 42 seconds
Playtime 92 hours 45 minutes 44 seconds
Playtime 92 hours 45 minutes 46 seconds
GTA I can’t stand my own mind!
GTA your machinery is too much for me.
GTA you made me want to be a saint.
GTA there must be some other way to settle this argument.
■
On the first night of my journey, having left the noise of the city far behind me for the silence of the Palamino Highlands, I found myself nestled under the shade of some red rock counting the flat swaying flowers in the dusk, their colours all reds, oranges, purples, blues, counted them as if a flock of sheep and I their keeper. Growing sleepier, I turned to face the path I’d travelled, and there found the city glittering in the night-time when came the shock of an epiphany, seeing suddenly the reds, oranges, purples, blues in the city lights, the self-same hues as animated the flowers by my side. Alone on that great span of mountain, I sensed the code behind this world as an algorithmic Pan, a unifying force, connected as if by a thousand bluetooth membranes to the controller in my hand. Pan, here, who could have known this! In terms of parodying the Romantic tradition, this is an unexpected bonus.
■
Let me explain. I am a pilgrim
without faith. I have only this game
– Grand Theft Auto V on the PlayStation3
developed by Edinburgh-based company
RockStarNorth over 5 years
at an estimated cost of 265 million dollars which
since its release in 2013 has become
the biggest and fastest selling entertainment product
in any medium – book, film, album, TV programme –
of all time ever, with 75 million
regular players all over the globe –
imagine: this world, 31 square miles in size
a hyperrealist caricature cartography
of Southern California, a faux-map realer
and more strange than its territory
folded back into a disc tray, forever; imagine:
every gangster film you’ve seen and never seen
on a feedback loop, with boosted pitch and gain
conceived of a Hobbesian liberty of violence
grown in a chrysalis of ironic self-reference
and born in an HD frame;
imagine: this on hundreds of thousands
of flat-screen televisions in every home on earth;
and imagine its players: each one alone
a hundred thousand vast solipsisms
a hundred thousand singular dreams
in identical sleeps; imagine: the kills
that are not kills, the thefts that are not thefts,
the handbrake turns, insane stunt jumps,
polis, gangsters, gas station attendants
tourists, farmers, taxi fares and hipsters;
the ak47 at the beach
the jumpjet stolen from the army base
the rain reflecting all the city streets
and the ludicrous contortions of a demi-face;
imagine: all these deaths that are not deaths;
imagine: all these souls that are not souls;
imagine these suns which are warm and are cold.
And imagine the sunsets, the cloud shapes capping peaks
the hills that rise insensibly and leave
the eye a vast uninterrupted prospect
imagine: the summits, the silence,
imagine a taxidermist’s wings
imagine: the unpath, the hidden tracks
imagine: to see into the life of things.
I am a pilgrim without faith.
And this
is the greatest piece of secular fiction
ever created. Once, I was told that God
can be known to exist on account
of the existence of altars. So too can truth
be known to exist on account
of the search. For I decry
those godless poets who surmise
that language is a viral force to be treated
with suspicion – it’s all too much
unmaking of what’s already broken.
As if you could imagine a night
without a star (a starless night is still
defined by its starlessness), or a rock
without its scissors to smash, its paper
to be smothered by. As if north were
not magnetic. As if we could live
without myth. (I tried it and felt empty.)
Beauty is not adventitious but essential
and as we make the world from the parts
we are presented – a circle, a triangle, a square,
an X – so everything that lives and acts is
wholly adept to the myth-stuff. Truth is
beauty; beauty just a line drawn north
and the sense of a star from a place of bare rock.
Rock is the world, and we thrown in its being, its presences, absences, voids and revealings
Star is the word, as if in the beginning, the utopian name, perfect like Eden
North is the poem, the call of a longing, the broken language that sings their division
Now the game comes with a map
mocked up like something from the Lonely Planet
detailing the fictional city of Los Santos and
the surrounding countryside which together
comprises the game’s virtual world. Upon that map
are marked numerous points of interest –
safe houses, gun shops, police stations
etc. – and among these little icons are eight
mountain peaks, unique among the markings
insofar as each is like a poem i.e. they have no function
no quantifiable function at all: no product,
no cash, no minigames, no camouflage
no routes of escape.
These are the game’s places
on the edge of placeness; where the air is thin
with silence and every past and future mission
recedes into the sea-mist; these hills whose
unpaths reveal this cosmos at its unbloodiest
and perhaps most beautiful. Among them I
am making my own game within the game,
its objects: beauty, truth. Its method: to ascend
all eight peaks with only my Virgils to guide me
according to the following rules:
one: to enter no vehicle; to travel only and always on foot
two: to kill in self-defence only
three: to be, as Shepherd wrote, ‘the instrument
of my own discovering’, to train ‘the eye to look,
the ear to listen, and the body to move with the right harmonies.’
Rock,
Star,
North.
■
For I am like a vampire
grown weary of blood, who counteth
the steps of a sun.
I have been dead many times
and I am not alone here,
severed from and tied to the one with whom
I spawn and respawn and re-
Ah,
hear them, the tentative movements!
The small stick shifted away from
the body and the thumb di-dumming its metre
with you, dear Trevor, my swift-footed avatar!
Your coffee brogues, uncanny rocking to-and-fro
your features pursed in a tight grimace
to think you were a man once, died, and were reborn
as vacant as the stars above this place
so that you might find grace, and I
this gaze of cold command. My palms are warm.
I cradle all our distance in my hands.
O gentle-hearted Trevor, whose sociopathic
ramblings are as a sweet familiar balm
in this feigned and lonely wilderness!
Our eight fine functionless peaks we will cover
with the lines of the poems we are writing together
to trace the divine at the heart of this matter
to find… no wait. No heart. No matter. No divine
or a bad letter. Never mind.
Die.
Respawn.
Start again.
Dear Trevor,
I want nothing less than the virtual sublime,
what Burke called ‘the strongest emotion
which the mind is capable of feeling’.
I may not get what I want but I trust you, Trevor
to take me beyond every waypoint
to anoint me in the dew of the Palomino Highlands
to baptise me in the salt of the Alamo Sea
to show me the frisson of a rainstorm over Heart Attacks Beach
to bathe me in the river at Zancudo
to make the mountains sing, each to each.
I rock, you star, north: our expanse.
I confess I love you Trevor
I cradle all our distance in my hands.
■
One night, camped out in the Tonga Hills I centred my sniper’s scope on the city below. The barrel was as empty as my heart; I was a vessel. The distant caw of a crow, somewhere coyotes, moon daubed in a trickle of clouds. There was the city, rendered as if from the 80s: crude blocks of colour parading in mute regiments, intimating something like agency beyond the stars. Friends, I thought, we’ve been playing our games all wrong! As Pac-Man’s mazes only lead to more mazes, let us rather glimpse the cherries through the bars. Not up the mountain but into it; not the points but the taste of the fruit. For it’s this momentary peace when the ghosts turn blue I long for – that millisecond clinamen when neither chased nor chaser. Give me the beauty of cherries – mosaic square pixels who conjure a perfect roundness, red as Stein’s rose, that sublime stalk-bitmap. As dawn breaks over the hills, all games are present. Rock in my hand. Rock whom nothing can cut. Rock. I write on the paper which smothers you, which gives you form, which envelopes. Star. City. Cherry. North.
■
Cuz I was born in the year of the Super Mario
of Sony Walkmans, wrestling, dayglo
Chicago House and Detroit Techno
Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’
of Usenet, Arpanet, Skynet, Carcanet
when Pluto was definitely still a planet
of the last thousand days of the Berlin Wall
of the first recorded use of the word ‘lol’
of simulacra, ZX Spectra, miracle Japan
the rise and rise of Derrida, the rise (but not the fall) of Paul de Man
the age of 8-bit irony fresh-facing ends of history
and whose too-crude naivete looks so glib in retrospect.
But I digress. I was a child of my time. And the only line
I cared to draw from myself into the world
was from a red-brick cul-de-sac in Bolton
direct to the Mushroom Kingdom, via my friend
next door’s big brother’s bedroom. There, while the brother
danced to early hardcore and raved about the Bolton Wanderers
me and her hit the power button, each with a controller
in our tiny hands, faces stuffed with flying saucers, holding our breath.
Move right. Move left. A to jump. B to run.
Press start. The music comes. World 1-1.
I never made it home for tea that night.
I’d leapt into a world with just two thumbs.
Later, age eleven, twelve, thirteen
I’d go with my parents for walks on the beach
and as the wee waves lapped on the rustic shore
and the firmament blazed all pastel and ochre
I’d bathe in those twin iridescences, so far
into an oneiric picture of a world not there
but not not there either; it glowed between the sun
and the sand among my toes. I’d fall so deep
into that daydream that when my parents
called I never heard them. On the way home
I told them I’d prefer a mind-made virtual sunset
to any meagre thing that God or chance made.
Twenty-odd years and four generations later
the eagles of Mount Chiliad and the gulls of Garnethill
flock together in my bedroom, while I –
a thirty year old adult human being man –
am still dreaming of impossible sunsets
and the computable infinities of sand.
I think of my friend Gregor – he’s north now
making multiplayer space operas in Reykjavik.
I remember how (’tis a dozen years’ since!)
we spent six months among infinite riches in a little room
trying to score 100% completion on San Andreas
and if that wasn’t love then I don’t know what is.
Rock is the life, a red brick cul-de-sac, a seagull in Garnethill, a friend in Reykjavik
Star is the game, its impossible eagles, its idylls and portents, the sense of an epic
North is the playing, the fragment, the story, the unmaking and making it, the glitch and the journey
■
Perhaps you will never be worthy, GTA, of your quintillion sunsets
but I can write your litany despite your silly mood.
You tried to make me a natural man
turned god: nasty, brutish and grand.
But time is a flat circle; X marks any spot we choose.
I do not beat the game but find its beatitude.
And why? Cuz I believe – no – long to believe
that everything that lives is holy, whether real or dreamed
and everything that’s holy must be the north between
this rock that star for which we need
an attunement of the thumb, the eye, the ear.
I’ve come into the light of things, all
bleeds into the other; trigger dint.
So many miles to go before I sleep
in a world where miles are instant
and blood makes no footprints.
Rock,
Star,
North.
Calum Rodger