Excerpted from the “Mardi Gras 3000 Sourcebook” (which is a free download from www.windstormcreative.com/fandom/mg3ksb.htm):
“Though I’ve lived in America since I was four, I was born near Kapan, Armenia, and while I was a small child, my parents traveled quite a bit. My earliest memories aren’t of the anticipation of the night before Christmas or pony rides at a birthday party but of walking, on hot summer nights on cobblestone streets in Josefov, hand-in-hand with my father, or riding a massive roan-colored horse, my back to my mother’s chest, across what seemed an endless expanse of deep green plains spotted with snow-white stones. It never seemed like we had much money but we had family every where we went. Looking back on those times now, I understand why nothing has seemed to hold my interest for long until game design (which is in itself an “endless expanse”).
“Another early remembrance was of a great clock with many overlapping faces, brilliant colors, arcane symbols and multiple hands which, in my twenty-plus year old memory, seemed to move with incredible and erratic speed. Someone told me it was a “celestial” clock but it wasn’t one of my parents as they never could place where I would have seen such a marvel.
“The Mardi Gras 3000 Terrapyres were formed first in my mind when I began thinking about the MG3K universe and I knew that their opposing race needed to be as ethereal as Terrapyres are grounded. The other race needed to be mysterious, maybe even a little bit scary. I immediately thought of that clock and the word Celestial stuck. But I kept coming back to the clock. Where had I seen it? Who had been with me? Why didn’t my parents remember it? It really haunted me.
“Eventually, what human memory couldn’t supply me, the Internet did: Constructed in 1410 by the clockmaker Mikulas of Kadan in collaboration with Jan Ondrejuv, professor of mathematics and astronomy, the Astronomical Clock is part of the Old Town Hall building in Prague. A wonderful detail of the clock’s face became the image for one of the Celestials’ Outpost cards.”
I have seen these few paragraphs reprinted on no less than a dozen websites. I’m not sure why this glimpse into the flashpoint of the Celestials is so popular but I do know that inspiration can come at any time.
As children we see and hear so many things. What do we remember? My mother once shared with me a moment when I was very young (about two) when she was holding me on her lap and singing to me while we sat and looked out at the vastness of an unbroken sea. She started to cry, silently, tears running down her face and into my hair. She realized that this moment, which to her was so powerful and important, wouldn’t be remembered by her toddler daughter. I was too young.
And I don’t remember the actual event. I only remember being seventeen and her sharing the story with me. I remember the way her voice cracked and she looked away. I remember the image she painted in my mind with the unconditional love and the pure desire and sorrow in her voice.
Or maybe....
Maybe we remember everything. Maybe that day, in my mother’s arms, before the endless sea, on a shore far from home, in a country where we didn’t speak the language, maybe that moment shaped, indelibly, who I am today. Maybe feeling safe in her embrace, maybe knowing the beauty of her singing voice, left a mark not on my memory but on my person, my whole, my soul.
I’ve read that what occurs in the first five years of life shape everything of what a person will be. I’m not sure I believe that entirely as I’ve known so many people who faced such unspeakable hardships when they were very small yet have risen above and beyond that past (though perhaps they were strengthened by it). But what if we are formed by the events that come before we can hold them in our memory? What if, like lines of code, those unremembered moments build our program and create the algorithms that everything else, everything that comes later, that is remembered and achieved, is analyzed with and ruled by? What if who we are is made of not what we remember but what we have “forgotten”?
If you knew it was true, would you draw your infant son into your lap more often? Lay on your belly in the cold grass with your three-year-old and count the ants? Would you turn off the TV and gaze into your child’s eyes, memorize your moment together, even as that moment is making him the man he will grow to be?
The sweetest parts of my life, I suppose, are the parts I have forgotten. And I’d have it no other way.
E.J.
