I clearly remember the emptiness of the burial mound at Maes Howe, a place where, on the winter solstice each year, the weak yellow sun shines down the entryway to light a set of carvings on the far wall of the tomb. I played in the ancient homes of long dead farmers, looped in and out of stone circles on wayward paths, and climbed down long dark passages to reach the resting places of the dead. Stone circles mark lands of unknown significance, villages sunk into the soil conceal themselves from ancient winds and humped burial mounds house the dead. Not in the physical form of bones and corpses, but in the heavy stone structures they left behind. The remains of these people can be found all across their rich peat fields. These islands, despite the hostility of their climate - their treeless hills and stormy seas - have been home to people for eight and a half thousand years.
Others are protected by high cliffs, where the waves crash in a powerful chorus. Some of them are low and flat, almost barren. Scattered into the sea like a handful of stones, they stretch away from the mainland towards the great pole beyond. Just off the Northernmost coast of Scotland are a group of islands. I recall something I once read from an interview with William Gibson : “On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I’m interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision.” In memory everything is virtual - there is no distinction between the digital and the analog, the played and the lived. The experiences blend easily, parts of each switching places like shuffled cards. And then it is also adding fabrications, songs, films, games, paintings, poems each one a fragment that might make up a whole. My mind is filling in gaps with variations of that same memory, ones both distant and recent. I have stood on many clifftops, and watched countless waves break, and so when I recall the feeling, the connection, I am recalling a tapestry. My memory of the clifftop is the same missing pieces that have slipped away, details and complexities lost to time and perception. The temperature, the texture, the smell of the image are all absent, all fragmented. Key pieces of information are missing, unable to be represented in this limited visual space. This image is defined by its feeling of fragmentation, incompleteness. The image is from Shadow of the Colossus (2005): A young man stood on a clifftop, looking down at the sea below. I am speaking of my own memories and the image on the screen in front of me. But, like the waves and the clifftop, the connection is there. It is an unfair comparison, of course, this limited digital world held against the unlimited pathos of memory. There is a lightness to everything, an impermanence, as if all the tensions could be reconciled in a moment, like crumpled paper suddenly folded into neat squares.
The visceral feeling of standing both on the clifftop, and imagining yourself buffeted by the waves below is somehow missing, the mysterious ingredients of its make-up out of reach. There is wind, at least a fallacy of wind, and there is the sound of distant waves, but the connection is off, absent. Yet this clifftop, this sea, doesn’t feel right. To me, it’s a familiar connection, one so atomized into the structures of my mind that if it were to disappear from the world I could rebuild it entirely, piece by piece, until it felt right. Either way, it is a connection that is felt, both in the sharp edges of the wind and the distant roar of the breakers. Or the complexity, the hypnotic pattern of wave impact and tidal draw. Perhaps it is the rhythm, the yawning in and out that closes the distance. These details feel close, painfully close.
The glassy shapes traced by swirling currents. The white spray flash-bulb frozen against grey stone. Yet I can make out the marbling of the dark water as the foam traces fractal patterns after every impact. My body, my eyes, the trembling in my legs tells me it is far, too far. It’s hard to calculate the distance from the clifftop to the sea below.
Shadow of the colossus ps2 symbol full#
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console.
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