Quest #xx

Crow was sitting on the edge of the bed when Max woke up. "You looked restless. Your leg was kicking like you were dreaming of being trapped."

Max stretched.

"What's on your mind this morning?" Crow asked.

"One of the things Morganfokker and I used to talk about, in one of our histories, between sessions," Max said. "About how to find the gods hidden all around you. Sometime later The Professor would ask me, or I would imagine having a conversation with him in which he would ask me: why do you think that they are hidden?

"But they feel hidden to me, or maybe I just think they’re hidden, and that’s the point, and what’s the difference?" Max sat up and pulled on a t-shirt.

Crow shrugged. "I see the gods hidden among and within us when I wonder what our society would look like if we substituted compassion for self-interest. Every time I hear people use the language of capitalist economics to describe their relationships I think I see one of the hidden gods, shaping and directing and guiding and confining our lives. The way that the patterns of response in language of the person confronting the stigma of mental illness map onto the media’s portrayal of political discourse that maps onto the way we discuss it over coffee. Where real oppression lives and real freedom?

"Maybe in the way we respond to dreams," Crow continued. "The way we prioritize certain spectrums of continuity, waking consciousness, over discontinuous (or less continuous? dreams can recur), and what about when we remember a dream when we’re waking? Or any memory? What do we allow to dictate our response? Things from the past, or the future or that happen to us when we’re asleep? Or from others’ pasts – the lives of ancestors, their own questions and answers designing and growing the culture we participate in, other hidden gods controlling the whats and whys of our daily lives.

"Why you will wake up and get about of bed. Why you will sit in front of a computer. Eat what you will eat. Say what you will say, to yourself or your roommate or partner or family. Dream what you dream."

Max rubbed his eyes. "In one of the iterations of Cube I once wrote 'my arbitrary particulars seem vast' and 'all the things I will never get to be but I will get to be me'. I guess maybe The Professor contacted me for the latter and Morganfokker abducted me for the former."