I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) recently, the long-running Square Enix MMORPG. In the latest expansion, Shadowbringers, you’re summoned to The First, a world in which the balance of Light and Dark has tipped too far in favour of Light and the end of the world isn’t too far away.
A calamitous ocean of Light has engulfed most of the world and destroyed it, but for now the Light remains frozen at the border of Norvrandt, the last inhabited region of The First. It appears as a vast wave of incandescent ice, looming, temporarily frozen but ready to drown the rest of the world and I’m suddenly reminded of the opening of my favourite poem, The Double Shame by Stephen Spender
You must live through the time when everything hurts,
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat, frozen
White heat, frozen. The Light engulfing Norvrandt. They appear as much the same thing in my mind’s eye.
The Double Shame is a poem in which the narrator confronts their own ‘end of the world’ in the form of a marriage break up. I’ve carried it around with me ever since I discovered it (when I was about 20, at the end of a long relationship with a girl I’d known since school), especially because that opening line is so powerful. It’s like a spell, an incantation: you must live through the time when everything hurts. It’s confident there’s life after that painful time when the world is made of glass and ready to shatter. When the endless summer stops you must go on anyway. I often repeat it to myself, and life continues. I think the people of Norvrandt would appreciate those words too. Of course, they also have a certain hero on their side.
The rest of the poem is just as powerful but not as reassuring. The narrator enters a wistful reverie, and the poem captures the shadowy feeling within a household that is one short while all the furniture and clothes are still set out. Ultimately, though, the narrator is forced to confront themself and their true weakness is laid bare. The life-affirming words of the opening have a counterpoint of endemic tragedy:
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.
I am skewered by those words every time I read them – bitter but also fair, they were the truth when I was breaking up with my girlfriend all those years ago, and they remain the truth about every failing since. My heart on the page, printed in words that stare back at me as much as I stare at them. Fuck.
Then it’s time to go back and read the first line again.
The Double Shame
by Stephen Spender
You must live though the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments,
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.
Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows reddest in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and spring
of her who was different in each.
Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and stare at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless –
Here birds crossed once and a foot once trod
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.
The story of others who made their mistakes
And of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
The story life writes now in your head
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being transcendently living and dead
In your history, worse than theirs, but true.
Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic sublime with your tawdry despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.
fresh static :: olaf quintessa 