Pac-Man
The problem with the past, our past, is that not much more of it is ever revealed to us than we already knew. How rarely is so much as a single simple fact added to our store of what we are aware once happened; on the contrary, each passing day leaves less and less of what we once knew was true and more and more of what tyrannical experience tells us must have been; as sources slowly we cease to be, becoming instead interpreters of our own histories, doomed to the mythologising of parchment pieces scripted in weak tea, and with no hope of any new thing ever throwing a ray of light on those withered memories without instantly crumbling them to dust. And strange! Strange that when we thump our adult ankles against some treasure trove of truth we find in it always contradiction of what we thought then; a misremembered lyric from a long forgotten song, an unseen act, a word. A lifetime’s conviction evaporated in a puff of poetic license! So to find a childish intuition rooted hidden in an unthinkable fact, confirmation of what we didn’t even believe we believed? Well, so I have; this very day, in fact. And thus it runs.
The ghosts in Pac-Man each have unique and individual pursuit algorithms.
If you know anything at all about basic video game mechanics, you will no doubt be tempted to make unkind faces behind my back at this point; if you don’t, you may be tempted to make unkinder faces still. So what that the ghosts in Pac-Man chase you in different ways? So what that one of them pursues you directly, one heads you off, one tries to pincer you between itself and the others? What could any of that possibly mean to anyone?! That’s stupid! You’re stupid! Well, it is; and yet…
The childhood world is so replete with possibilities, everything so heavily laden with the accumulated layers of imagination painted thick with every sweep of a youthful eye, that there are times when growing up seems little more than a metaphorical re-emptying of a long empty toy box; every item scrutinised once again, so much smaller and lighter than before, and summarily discarded as useless. All our long-lisped beliefs are found not to be untrue but, worse, unhelpful; out they go, and with them all the freshness imbued by a heart to which everything is so new, so itself. Oh, and all the human qualities we flung over everything we saw, all the love and fear and friendship and suspicion that lay latent for us in the moon and stars and everything under, all gone, all washed away, never to grow back in them or us! Existence, for once and for all, beats essence; a cuddly toy turns back into…. a toy.
So the ghosts do have personalities. The red one is implacable, the blue one strategic, the pink one crafty, the orange one cautious, all of which amounts to a subroutine or two on a scrapyard circuit board except that I once believed it as a child and stopped believing it when I grew old enough no longer to pour parts of myself into all the empty vessels flocked around me. The restoration of it -not just a childhood drawing, but a scrawling sketch that turned out to be true- gives me pause to think: hope that, like the running rivers and the blowing seeds, our childhood thoughts are not forever gone, but nest anew in some fresh, fledgling heart.