I was just reading the Yokudan part of The Monomyth, and realized that it probably provides the clearest explanation of the cycle of the Enatiomorph, as well as the nature of what we call "Chim." The key is in the notion of the universe as a snake that is constantly eating itself. The snake's tail is the king; the head, the rebel. The ability to leap out of this cycle of creation and destruction, "moving at strange angles" in order to avoid being consumed when the head came to bite the area in which you exist, is like CHIM. In other words, it is the achievement of independent existence from the universe as a whole, so you can evade the destruction that is the end of one world, and the beginning of the next.

I say it is like CHIM, because "Satakal the Worldskin" implies that it is much more difficult for mortals to achieve this than it is for the immortal spirits. We can't simply go to the "Far Shores" (Aetherius?) and wait out the destruction, for we are far from those shores.

So, basically(really rough defenition, so please dont go into any long posts explaining all the faults of the statment):

CHIM is; For mortals, it is a state of being where you are mantling and or becoming a god and soon becoming a part of Godhead. For gods(like Lorkhan, Daedric Princes, etc) it means becoming the part of the Godhead.

I still LOL at the though that Lorkhan failed CHIM and Nirn came to being because of that. :rofl:
Not that its a bad story, more like an extreme case of irony where a god failed at something, created this Nirn and one of its creations, a murderous and thieving mortal, accomplished what a god couldnt. :rofl:

Mantling isn't really a necessary part of it, as far as I can see. Even if evidently the only people we know of who have achieved it were demi-gods riding on the backs of dead deities. The Moth Priests seem to be having a stab at it, occasionally failing.

And I'm not sure it's possible for gods to have CHIM. There's plenty of hints that the gods aren't truly all that free. "http://www.imperial-library.info/obbooks/songofpelinal.shtml left you to gather sinew with my other half, who will bring light thereby to that mortal idea that brings [the Gods] great joy, that is, freedom, which even the Heavens do not truly know"

This is why the Mundus was necessary. The gods are strictly dualistic. The Monomyth, I recall, states they're made of immortal bits of polarity. The Mundus partakes of both Anu and Padomay. It exists in between the two forces, both of which the Godhead necessarily encompasses, using both as a method of defining himself. That's what makes the mundus special. It's the middle world preparing for the middle way of the Psijic Endeavour.

This is also why Lorkhan was special. Because "He saw the Tower, for a circle turned sideways is an "I". This was the first word of Lorkhan and he would never, ever forget it." ... And, to further Explain: "The Tower is an ideal, which, in our world of myth and magic, means that it is so real that it becomes dangerous. It is the existence of the True Self within the Universal Self,"

The Tower's secret is:

How to permanently exist beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble. This is not an easy concept, I know. Imagine being able to feel with all of your senses the relentless alien terror that is God and your place in it, which is everywhere and therefore nowhere, and realizing that it means the total dissolution of your individuality into boundless being. Imagine that and then still being able to say "I". The "I" is the Tower.

...["The Endeavor is a method of achieving the Tower and then what to do after"...

Or just http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/vehk_teaching.shtml this. It's pretty clear. Apologies for the length of the post. Brevity is a virtue, but I found there was no way around it here.

But, am I right in saying, without sufficient masses of raw, ballsy mythopoeic man-energy, your path to CHIM isn't really going to get anywhere.

Compare blessed Vehk to Crassius Curio.

What power did unfortunate Moth Priest D evaporate by, then?

Eh. It's a philosophical pursuit. I don't expect the insurance salesman who dabbles in yoga to reach Nirvana either.


Misstep. He overthought things, realised the world is schizoid and couldn't reconcile the schism without coming up with zeroes. CHIM defies that sum.

Hm. And the Godhead of TES universe is... who or what?

Everything. The dreamer and the dreamed.

Somehow, the whole 1 and 1, with a zero sum, and inherent ambiguity reminds me strongly of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_unit (Which is ironically given the moniker, "i")



I sometimes wonder if MK wasn't being tongue and cheek with us... The imaginary unit is fundamentally important to solving non-linear polynomial equations, and relies on the idea of a "transcendent" property of a fixed proportion. (Hence, the oddball behavior for "i")


Maybe I should stop before I end up inventing a giant stompy robot.

Yes, I've read the Zhuangzi too. Good, isn't it?

Moving on...

CHIM is an ideal, no? What makes us all so sure that it exists? Who says CHIM is anything more than a idea in the minds of gods and mortals? Does it need to be anything more than something a mortal one day theorised the possibility of?

Or, to keep with these wacky pop culture references - The CHIM is a lie.

Well, Mankar Camoran thinks Tiber Septim had CHIM, with the proof being the de-jungled Cyrodiil.

Apart from that, it's same reason we know http://www.imperial-library.info/obbooks/ is the truth in TES. Other than the obvious, "nothing contradicts it", there's been a gradual buildup of hints on CHIM culminating in outright explorations of the subject, like the http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/5th_era_loveletter.shtml. And I doubt something that fits so well into the metaphysical scheme, held up as solution to both mortal and godly restrictions, about which details has been slowly fed to paint a complete picture of it, is a lie. That would be a betrayal of trust on several levels that no catchy ending song would be able to vindicate.

Right, in the commentaries to the Mysterium Xarxes. I think Camoran is a little mixed up, though. All it proves is that someone around the time of Tiber Septim had some very powerful magic and chose to use it. There is precedent for magic powerful enough to reshape continents in the background; witness the destruction of Thras. There's nothing in the reshaping of Cyrodiil that necessitates CHIM, and the details of Tiber Septim's life are sufficiently dodgy that I would be skeptical of anything he's reputed to have done, much less the claim that he reached the TES version of enlightenment. It's not as if Mankar Camoran has never been wrong.



So I suspected. Yet it seems to me that the games go out of their way to tell us not to trust the books. They include a wealth of things that aren't true, and nowhere is that more evident than in their discussion of cosmology and magic.

Now what I see of CHIM is this. It is a mystical concept held up as a goal by various influential people and organisations within the TES world. Many of them evidently believe it is possible, but at present I see no compelling evidence that they're right. CHIM is a bit of Psijic lore that has been very significant in the history of Nirn, but what basis do we have to believe it is any more than that? It has never been achieved, and one could mount a decent argument that the concept of CHIM is itself incoherent, as it simultaneously involves total dissolution of ego and the ultimate empowerment of the ego; it destroys the very substance it creates. And it is also supposedly a transformative process! Of course, in many ways the point is that it's paradoxical, and I have no objections to paradox as such (silly law of non-contradiction!), but it must be noted that there is a certain conceptual dissonance there.



Nothing contradicts that idea that CHIM is a mere idea.



Meh, I never liked the Loveletter. It tries to be hard to be erudite and just comes off as pretentious, at least to me. I can write obscure, profound-sounding gibberish as well. Look. 'The fivefold submergence of the Aurbis is reference and illumination to the deviant god and his/her parenthetical curse. His/her multitudinous execrations provide the foundation of the codic Aetherius.' It's easy. The Loveletter has interesting material in it, but only in the last third or so, once it gets over its own profundity.

Personally, this has been my biggest problem with TES background. Particularly when you get into the mysticism, while a lot of it is interesting it has this annoying habit of getting caught up in itself. Incomprehensibility is not depth, and there are other, simpler cosmologies that provide equally intriguing ideas without having to cloak themselves in obfuscating terminology. Compare, for example, Liber Chaotica. It basically does the same thing but it's much more accessible. I mean, what's the matter, are the writers afraid those dirty plebs will want to know about their games' plots? Clarity is good. Otherwise you're just failing to express yourself, and that doesn't look intelligent.

But there you go. That's my bias. To me, pieces like the Loveletter are overly indulgent. I was going to add nonsense, but when you cut out all the jargon, it's actually very interesting, and that's what makes it so sad. As it refers to TES, what it means is that, for instance, the mystery of the Battle of Red Mountain is good. The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec are bad. Why? One is a very complex and has multiple interpretations, but it's understandable. You read it, do the work, put together the puzzle pieces, and come to an idea of what it's on about. The other is merely a very long-winded way of saying nothing. One thing I very much dislike is complexity for complexity's sake.

But forgive my rant. That's always been one of my bugbears with TES. Lousy characterisation and excessive amounts of self-indulgent tripe are the two cracks in an otherwise great, atmospheric, and complex fantasy world.



It wouldn't be fair to use meta-knowledge, now would it? Some of these writers have very obvious creative agendas.

From a reader-contract point of view, anything earnestly espoused and self-consistent is true. Honestly. Otherwise you're shooting yourself in the foot every time you read anything. You know many books aren't to be trusted because the untrustworthy books, in some small subtle way, tell you not to trust them. (And honestly, there aren't all that many books that aren't true if you don't include the books that clearly read like fiction.)

As far as CHIM goes, anything that requires such extraordinary effort, both on the part of the writer writing the lore and the reader interpreting the lore, is more than likely true. In other words, similar response to: "Shivering Isles never really happened, it was all a mad hallucination."

Also, Liber Chaotica? Comparable? Erm. I haven't read it, but I've always found Warhammer's fiction pretty mediocre even for fluff, and usually forgettably kitschy. I'd also argue if there's room for ten games on the shelves that are relatively straightforward, there's room for one game that has a fair bit of esoteric stuff in it. It's arguably not as difficult to read once you really get into it.

PS: And no you can't write obscure, profound-sounding gibberish. At least not very well.

Perhaps CHIM is knowing the stuff for Zero-Sum, but seeing 1-1 as not equaling zero, like in some sort of PhD level mathematical theory.

Surely that does not excuse us from a sensible degree of skepticism? If I read Vivec talking about CHIM, all I will then know is that Vivec believes that this thing called CHIM exists and has certain ideas about it.

I'm also skeptical that CHIM is 'self-consistent'. The concept is paradoxical and contradictory. That's the point.



What extraordinary effort is needed to believe that a mystical concept characters talk about is just that: a concept?



Sadly that is true. It does have a few gems, though. Liber Chaotica merely strikes me as an excellent example of a similarly well-developed and intelligent cosmology but one which is presented much more accessibly.



Hey, you're talking to someone who honestly believes that the Silmarillion isn't a hard read. But while I find supposedly difficult texts that like rather easy to adjust to once you get into the swing of it, I still find texts like the Thirty Six Lessons overcomplicated and boring. It's a subjective judgement, sure, but I tend to think that incomprehensibility is a sign of a bad writer.



What, and the Loveletter's 'C0DA translation: if all previous gradients continue along this path, especially given that there is now a centerpoint, impossible Mundus, the process of continuation can be pre-figured.' is any better?

I'm not an idiot, Albides. I can read the Loveletter, and I do know what it means. I know my mythology and philosophy; jargon-loaded as the Loveletter is, I understand it. I take issue with its expression. It is needlessly and excessively obfuscatory. If it were rewritten more sensibly, I would be better disposed to it. I don't like the Loveletter because its command of language is poor. Language is for communication, is it not? Texts like that seem to throw in technical terms not because they're actually needed, but only because it makes it look more complex. Brevity, clarity, and elegance of expression are things to strive for, and I don't feel the Loveletter has any of that.

There's a difference between obscurity for obscurity's sake and obscurity for poetry's sake. To me, the beauty of the language and ideas in something like the 36 Lessons justifies the obliqueness. The knots it tied my brain in the first time I discovered it back in '02 was something that I enjoyed. But to each his own.

Some people love Joyce and think his work is beautiful and poetic and amazing, and some people think it's impenetrable for impenetrability's sake. For me, the relative lack of accessibility of TES lore was one of the things that drew me into it. It was fun to keep digging in and learning about. One persons pet peeve is another man's treasure.

I mean self-consistent in the setting. It openly admits to being contradictory so holding that against it is hardly sporting.


Well, yeah, that actually makes sense.


None at all, but I think you're missing the point. Again, this is no different to saying "The Shivering Isles never really happened, it was all a mad hallucination."


Normally I'd agree - if we were talking forum posts. And I'd also chalk you down a few points for repeating yourself needlessly. But when it comes to fiction, it depends. Because writing does not only mean communicating concepts, but also expressing emotions, feelings, attitudes, psychological landscapes, etc. I take it you don't like James Joyce or William Burroughs or Walter Pater or even Jack Vance's bombast?

Doesn't really matter, though. When looking at a thing like the Loveletter or The Sermons, you should also look to their literary antecedents. In this case it's things like Crowley's rather esoteric http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm or the often convoluted works of http://www.hermetic.com/spare/anathema.html or any number of mystical works by Western occultists. And the reason for their often obscurantist approach (apart from trying to hide their own intellectual poverty if you believe that) is probably the same reason churches are often amongst the grandest buildings and why Joseph Campbell laments the Mass is no longer conducted in Latin. That being that the obscurity and the grandeur is intended to estrange you in a way conducive to a certain type of mood or thought. This is often a function of ritual; an attempt at pitching you as far away from the mundane as possible. Lofty language for lofty subjects. Considering the loveletter is from the same person who wrote the Monomyth and the PGE 1st, both of which are abundantly lucid, I don't think it's just a matter of poor writing so much as it's a conscious choice at achieving a certain kind of effect. These texts are mystical, and there's a reason one of the definitions for mysticism is "obscurity".

And I never said you were an idiot. I intentionally avoided even implying that you "just don't get it" or something like that. You seem genuinely intelligent and I would like to see more of you. And I'm not going to beat you over the head by forcing you to like something you've already stated you don't like. (Here I'd typically put in a snide remark about you liking more accessible stuff, like Warhammer, but I think I like you too much for that.)


Edited for clarity.

I gotta say these are quite boring to me...

Fair enough. Personal preference is quite subjective. I merely find it irritating, personally. The first thing I was ever taught about scholarly writing is 'if you can say it simply, do so. Never use jargon for jargon's sake, but only when it is genuinely required'. That stayed with me. Still, if it doesn't bother you, that's fine; don't let me ruin your enjoyment of it.



It makes sense conceptually, yes, in the setting. I can easily imagine religious sects holding CHIM or some anologue as a goal - it has a good number of parallels with real religious philosophies. I'd suggest Advaita Vedanta as a belief system with some reasonably similar concepts (though cosmologically it is quite different). I guess my instinct is to consider CHIM, and the entire Psijic endeavour, in the same way; a belief system created by mortals in an attempt to explain their existence and its purpose.



Yes, I know. I was overexaggerating to make a point. :shrug:



I think the difference is that we have only heard about CHIM secondhand. We actually went to the Shivering Isles and saw all sorts of things. We have only heard about CHIM, though, through texts and other characters. I would tend to put it in the same category as the Dragon Break; we've heard about it happening but never saw anything definitive, particularly since there's an argument that it's just a timeline slip. While we often proceed on the assumption that the Dragon Break was real, can we know? Does the Warp in the West prove that the Dragon Break really happened? Maybe. It depends.

For me there's an entire category full of things like that; things that we can reasonably doubt the existence of. Now when I say 'reasonably doubt', I don't mean to say that they definitively don't. Only that there's room for doubt.

You might reasonably ask why I don't apply that to all texts concerning things we haven't seen. And in my defense, I do try to be critical of all texts; but the type of skepticism you approach, say, A Brief History of the Empire with is different to that you use when dealing with occult texts. Nonetheless in all cases it is necessary to consider the (in-world, that is) author of the text and their ideas, biases, and sources of knowledge that might affect the texts themselves.



Repetition helps people remember things, and helps convey nuances of meaning. Maybe it's needless, but then again, it's a forum post. I'm not particularly trying to be artistic.



Not particularly. There's an http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrueArtIsIncomprehensible about it. It's a personal bugbear. I agree about how art must convey emotions, attitudes, and so forth, but that too must be done effectively; and, in my opinion, clearly. It doesn't mean everything has to be obvious; the dream sequences in A Game of Thrones didn't make much sense the first time I read them, but even then I felt they were powerful. There's a difference between a passage that inspires emotion and a passage that inspires confusion, if you know what I mean. I suppose some people like these works, but I don't.



Evidently that's what he was going for, but unsurprisingly I'm not a big fan of Crowley. There's no reason for sacred texts or texts concerned with the occult to be obscure. The gospels are quite clear. The Laozi is filled with complex layers of meaning but isn't obscurantist. The Chandogya Upanishad deals with a lot of these subjects and it doesn't seem to be feel the need to be convoluted to the point of near-incomprehensibility. As such I think it's evidently possible to write texts concerned with this sort of thing without being excessively impenetrable. I find Crowley and his ilk bothersome for that reason, and thus, I find little to like in texts like the Thirty Six Lessons.



I don't feel that is necessary, as you'll see in the examples I just noted. You can discuss lofty subjects without such needless obscuring the very truth the text is getting at. To some people it might create that impression, but to me it is nothing more than irritating. It gets in the way of its own meaning, and I very much dislike it when texts do that. If it could reasonably be written more clearly, then I would think it should.



That doesn't mean, though, that I don't think that it's not a bad choice.

Though I'm curious where that is in the definition of mysticism? I see no reason you cannot have highly mystical texts written in more accessible language; which is why I've named texts that do that very thing.



Okay. I read your last post as being a little patronising, that's all, but it's very easy to mistake tone on the internet, so I won't hold that against you.

As for Warhammer, well, I like all sorts of things. I'll admit that Warhammer isn't very original or well-written most of the time, but then again, I first became interested in it due to the hobby aspect. Fortunately, when Warhammer does get good, it's good (Liber Chaotica, the Vampire Genevieve, also some of the WFRP material), but you're right in that most of the time it's not fantastic. Which is fair enough. It's a flawed setting. So is TES. I like to focus on the good.

That's fair, but still think it does a lot to contribute to a certain type of mood. That's partly why I enjoy these texts. It's also why I often find source-books so disappointing; they're written to be accessible and they come off as humdrum, like very long prologues or fairy-tales. Without the art on every other page, there's no sense of mood. This even applies to some of my favourite settings, like World of Darkness and Tekumel. The former comes across as adolescent fantasies, the latter is a little too dry in an encyclopedic way. But both are quite fascinating worlds.

Different strokes, as they say. I'm not trying to change your mind on how you feel towards the obscure texts, just trying to explain how or why they're written in that way.


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mysticism. I'm not saying mysticism has to be obscure, only that they're evidently associated with each other because of a history of being difficult, dealing as they do with transcendent strains of thought.


I'd say there's a difference between sacred texts and mystical texts. The gospels might be clear, but the Kabalah and stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkaba certainly aren't, despite being derived from the same source. The Nag Hammadi library runs the gamut from being accessible to being utterly bewildering. And I thought I shot through the idea that the style is "needless" though, any more than it's needless for churches to have their own distinct architecture. The Loveletter is intentionally imposing in order to estrange or alienate individuals, and is part of a tradition of exclusivist (esoteric) literature, and seeks to recapture that dusted stuffiness. Points for mentioning Laozi, though. I just don't think it's right to shrug away this (very old) technique because others say the same stuff clearer.

I'd say that there isn't much difference because CHIM is something that the texts have invited you to participate in, like a quest. To take away the joy of discovering what CHIM is all about by dismissing it and its purported affect on the world is exactly as unsatisfying and dishonest (in a manner of speaking) as dismissing a full blown plotline.

I've genuinely enjoyed this conversation, though. It's good to talk to some who can express things clearly and accurately. I haven't had such a polite, civil discussion like this in ages. Maybe I've been here too long and am surprised to find someone this genteel.

Yes, and while I found apples quite easy to eat once I adjusted to them I still spill juice all over me whenever I try and eat an orange...

Yep, but that would be boring. The need of thought and translation gives us something to do with the text when we get it - if we were told everything straight up in the primary sources there would be no need for this forum... besides, as for the Loveletter it's written for folks that are familiar with all the jargon, I'd imagine a deep discussion among physicists to the normal person would seem highly obfuscatory as well...

Yes, but did you ever learn anything about writing poetry??? Because I'll assure you the same standards do not transition between the mediums - if it did nobody would read the poetry, or rather, it would not be poetry...

Devil's Advocate: One could point out that real poetry doesn't necessarily rely on jargon, and the beauty of poetry would be one of those "genuinely required" caveats. I'd guess Daebryn would maybe follow the same tenet as Victorian architects on this one. "Ornament construction, do not construct ornament." Personally, I was always taught poems are the purest expression of the writer's craft, since they must be succinct, and everything has to be arranged perfectly, with not a word or sound out of place, doing in ten lines what novel does in thousands. But then there's more than one type of poetry.

Granted, but my point (though I admittedly didn't specify) was more targeted at "if you can say it simply, do so" than whether or not to use jargon. In this case we're more in the realm of philosophical poetry, and while being intentionally obscure is not the goal, if you're going to be simple it is to create a certain effect not to fulfill Occam's Razor - besides, there's almost always more than meets the eye even in the simplest of philosophical poetic expression. Eloquence is always an added bonus, I'll follow the humanists here...

The WoD is... problematic. I have found the nWoD to be much better with myth, though. The point of a sourcebook, I tend to think, is to give you the tools you need to develop its world further. No book can give you everything; so they must give enough to give you a feel for the universe and leave the rest in the reader's hands.

Still, I think it's fair to say that that is a problem with a number of sourcebooks. Too much dry, OOU information and not enough really inside it. It fails to make the setting come alive. If I may dare refer to Warhammer again, this is the difference between what, say, the Hordes of Chaos or Daemons of Chaos army books tell you about the nature of Chaos, and what Liber Chaotica tells you; the former being 3rd person omniscient descriptions of Chaos, which is pretty boring, and the latter being the research of a scholar grappling with Chaos and a slew of relevant documents he's included. Instead of simply being told what it is, it brings the world alive much more to instead read notes on an interview between that scholar and a cultist, or a master wizard's notes on the origin of magic, or the private journals of a religion's high priest, or a myth told by northern tribesmen about the end of the world, and so on. That immerses you in the setting much more and makes it all that much more powerful.

And, to be fair, this is one thing TES does fantastically. They don't tell you about the world from some distant omniscient standpoint, but throw you right in the middle of it and let you find out all sorts of things by researching IU texts. I fully approve of that. I'm merely not a big fan of the more obscure texts. You might ask why I don't leave them to the people who do like them and focus on history and culture, which are also things I'm interested in and which TES has plenty of information on. But the infuriating thing for me is that I'm also absolutely fascinated by mythology and philosophy, and these are exactly what the more impenetrable texts deal with, such that if you want to get anywhere interesting on the subject you really have no choice but to deal with them.

So occasionally, when I do get interested enough, I take down some of these texts and I do puzzle through them and work them out. And then I find I've ended up basically retranslating them into something that I find more or less comprehensible, and I get fed up with the whole thing and swear off TES for a while. That's why I've been here since '05, when I first got into Morrowind, but still don't have any stars. The ideas are great but such is the expression that I can't investigate them for any significant period of time before getting jaded and tossing it out.



Certainly transcendental doctrines often become very obscure, but to my mind that's a failure on the part of its practitioners. It's very easy to over... well, I was going to say over-mysticise, but that sounds odd since we're dealing with mysticism. Over-obscure, I suppose; to make these things much less clear than they should be. Plain-language mysticism is fine. I personally love the Zhuangzi, for this as well as for other reasons.



Meh, I mention it because I'm actually much more familiar with Asian traditions of this sort that I am with Western mysticism. The gospels weren't a fantastic example, but I'm not very well qualified to talk about Western mystical and hermetic traditions.

Now admittedly there might be a disconnect here in that the very texts I dislike are clearly aiming for a very hermetic style. My preferences are just in other areas. In fairness the texts do achieve that style quite well... I just don't like that style at all, and consequently don't like the texts.



To which I would say - exactly! I dislike it when a text is clearly trying to hide its meaning from me. Why on Earth would you write something to not be understood? It's my major gripe with that whole style. It has so much to say, but the style deliberately obscures the content. It seems so elitist.



To be clear, I have no opposition to exploring the concept. As I said, I'm really into these ideas. I just try not to worry about their objective reality too much. The concept does not need to be instantiated to be fascinating, does it?



Thanks. I'm pleased to actually get into a decent discussion about TES background (or, I suppose, meta-background?) that hasn't resulted in everyone throwing enantiomorphs and monomyths and such at each other. The accepted wisdom of this board can seem rather stifling at times, if you know what I mean.



Hey, I like depth. I'm all for depth. I just find it aggravating when I have to read the whole thing over half a dozen times, print it out, scribble lines and arrows and notes all over it, and end up retranslating the thing into sensible English. My objection is all that tedious monkey-work it makes me do before I can get to what's actually interesting. And usually the content is interesting. I feel like I have to battle the text to make it surrender its secrets, though, and I personally find that boring. It's not genuine thought, if you take my meaning, it's just annoying make-work I need to do before I can start really thinking about the ideas it presents.



Yep, I did a little poetry. Note that some of the texts I've mentioned are highly poetic (the Taoist classics and the Upanishads, specifically). Again, I like poetry and am all for it. Let me give you a TES example... I like The Song of Pelinal. It's great. We need more texts like that. It's also about as obscure as I'm comfortable with.



As I came to think of it when I wrote it, what poetry does is capture a single moment. It's hard to write a poetic narrative; a poem is all about revealing a single moment in time and conveying all the attendant emotion. A good poem leaves you with a sense of wistfulness for that moment, though I'm not sure I'm expressing that right...

Of course, as you say, there are different types of poetry. That doesn't apply to narrative forms of poetry. I have to say, though, that when I look at the likes of a Shakespeare play or Homeric epic, I see poeticism but not a poem as such. At its core it's about elegance of expression.



Hence my praise of the Taoists and Upanishads.

The fact that you're using that many words to talk about something so simple automatically means you're doing it wrong.

CHIM. Four letters. Easy, easy concept. Break the fourth wall and self-actualize through pixellated philosophy. Turn the wheel sideways. THAT'S IT.

If you're saying it's just breaking the fourth wall and realizing it's a video game, I gotta say that's very boring and somewhate cliched to me.