![]() ![]() 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. This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. ![]()
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