On a Rainy Day Contemplating Other Worlds

Or, why Minecraft worlds are in some sense as ancient as language

If one prefers an imaginal world to the World of their immediate, somatically primordial experience, it means, as far as I can tell, one of two things.

That world is either making it possible for one to remain narcissistically homeostatic, hamster-wheeling after some effervescent succubus¹, or allowing one to participate briefly in reality as it really is- or, at least, more closely. Probably, these are not mutually exclusive, and certainly, the latter is more durable and more important than the first.

Perception is learned. Attentional rigour, and the education of the faculty of taste (the ability to intuit balance and excellence by means of esoteric tells) are some of the main tributaries of the great river of the Humanities.

It seems to me an indisputable syllogism, that everything must be as awesome as possible, because God is as awesome as possible, and thus wouldn’t create things that are less than superlative.

The World itself is prior to, and implies all imaginal worlds. Minecraft worlds or the god-riddled worlds of Percy Jackson, which are both species of an imaginal structure that many adolescents seem to prefer to ‘mundane’ reality, are implicit to the World. More clearly, the World is partly the World, insofar as it is the World-As-Represented. Thus, Minecraft worlds were present already when the World’s terse hair was still being licked, and its knees still thin and prone to buckling.

Thus, any of us who may be yet more partial to the world as rendered in The Wind in the Willows or the Norse myths or Harry Potter can be consoled, in that they must, necessarily, be communicating to us not only something real, but something specular. That is, they are reflections, meagre participations in something that will be four-thousand fold more grand. St. Dionysius the Areopagite tells us that, though God is uncircumscribed and completely unknown in essence, through His energies-in-the-world, He is communicated completely, unchanged. A rock participates in the whole Godhead, though the Godhead is beyond infinite, a blue impenetrable glory forever unspeakable. It is important to note that this does not imply an eventual rejection of the stories we love, like a rocket discarding its fuselage once it has passed through the atmosphere. Rather, it implies that these stories will become eternal moments of joyful communion, their imperfections (which did nothing to aid their charm, but in fact detracted from their radiant selfness) burnt away. They will stand like oaken sentinels, they will wrap our shoulders round like cloaks of porphyry, they will shimmer in the light of a thousand new-born suns, forever more than themselves, forever themselves.

1. Dr. Patitsas reminds us that in the story of our lives this can be economically beneficial. Trauma, for instance, numbs us so that our being is not ontically sundered by experiences of complete horror. The hamster-wheel too, keeps us occupied and drip-fed, where we otherwise might starve and sink into a comprehensive indolence.