Across the American Nation so the first day of highschool begins under streetlight. And while waiting at the bus-stop you find yourself a little surprised at all the main arteries’ streams of headlights.
The traffic signals seem a little brighter, and when you shuffle into the backish section – a few seats before the end, left side, deep blue for a faux-leather and padding felt ripped and peaking – so the dew sits outside your window view to split the lightstream as blobby streak flares. Something to stare through as each car passes by.
The original ceremonial deboarding and the formless student body shuffling into the central gate; so it shakes you so deeply knowing how insignificant you’re about to become, not that significance was found in middle school. Clinging onto the backpack straps for any centering, but this is the point of no return and you’re entering a section of the Real World you only read about, forgot about, feeling yourself leaving everyone behind. The point where you’re no longer understood.
An endless string of lockers forming a tesseract accrued and reached in each year; how foreign and familiar at once, and foreign once more upon graduation. If you drag your hand along while walking the hall you’ll sense some of them rattle, others sturdy tight: could this reflect the owner’s fate?
And while all this happens maybe you pop on a tune. While all this happens you begin to inscribe the moment into the lyrics’ lettering; while you take the very first First Period seat you find yourself staring ahead anticipated and entranced until the buzzer hits. Until you shove your earbuds away since feigning ignorance wouldn’t probably work anymore.
When these moments surface once more, one cannot help but eventually think that, yes, it was the music that was the cause, and the rest of it the effects. To no longer be background music, but the very vehicle by which everything happened. Delivered unto the scene.
That however incidentally you chose each song, however it came up, so it rips apart the fabric and reaches 20, 50, 100 years beyond. The insanity heightens itself when the music was just a random group, just a couple of friends deciding to make an album – but that album has somehow inexplicably altered the course of your life. Changed the course of your history, and history more.
The revelation doesn’t end there: one can only wonder how each of your own actions makes it own butterfly across, or the actions started by the song. How first order effects summon second order summon third order. One can only wonder how a stray sentence has shifted things drastically. That Perhaps you’re joining along a larger wave only privy to the council above: a secret federation spanning every nation in its borderless devoted listeners marching in tune to make their voice known.
To hear someone say to you that you’re more than enough, plenty, boundless: that all that self-improvement stuff is if you’re interested, but the afterlife angels will embrace you all the same, return waiting.
Where someone shows you some optimal DotA 2 builds for mid lane since that was the most fun. Where someone lends a game which flickers deep up randomly whatever the occasion, like Banjo Tooie’s carnival world with the long walk in darkness.
A teacher that encouraged you to express yourself finally: a faculty member that suggested you’d probably enjoy going to this college; a friend that nudges you to ask out the girl you’ve never think would want anything to do with you.
If one could ever join such a beautiful connection and domino effect upon others – to pull out of Future’s bag some diamonds to praise, people to praise, lives to praise – if one could ever tie such red strings through over a hundred years or more, how could you possibly see it as anything less than magical?
Cloud Atlas explores this over several hundred years, a dance of centuries. And the Go! Team or the Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt summon immediately in front of mind: just a bunch of people who decided to jam something up, and it feels a little ad-hoc, yet acts as an adhesive toward this fantastical story right now unfolding. The Go! Team immortalized itself with the nascent LittleBigPlanet gamers, locking in a 2000s aesthetic they’ll carry into the future.
And the Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt ripples are something we can watch unfold together. Right now, today. Maybe you’ll join the wave.