I find myself increasingly living in a world of text. In particular, digital text. Perhaps it’s getting to me. I’ve noticed that my days seem to feel both long and short. I have my obligations to my Dungeons and Dragons groups, yes, but it seems like so much of my time is spent concerned with that. Am I accomplishing the things I want and need to, otherwise? The past few days I’ve made lists of things I need to do, yet mysteriously not managed to get much further than “D&D.”
The task of late seems straightforward — To write, compile, and make available various texts that exist within the campaign setting. The reality is that there is only one way that I will feel satisfied in my task, and that is to create every text from the game world in real life. Obviously this is a little overboard. I [attempt to] share information with the players in my campaign by making this information available on my website. Maybe I’m just slightly compulsive about having characters be cognizant of major setting features like the dominant religion or prejudices arising from past events.
Ever since I took a course on the Nag Hammadi codices I feel that I’ve become increasingly aware of the sensual properties of books. Reading the Nag Hammadi codices on The Gnostic Society website just isn’t appropriate. So many elements of the text are lost by the point that it comes to your computer screen that it’s not the same thing anymore.
That’s not to say I wasn’t conscious of books as sensual objects before. Like most of the people I associate with, I devour books when I can. I have a great love for illuminated texts, such as those of Blake, but I don’t think it was until I dealt with the Nag Hammadi texts that I realized what I might be missing. Were the Nag Hammadi texts hymns? Sermons? Meditative aids? We’ll never really know. We translate these fragile thousand year old fragments, half eaten away by worms or microbes, place nondescript indicators in brackets where we can’t decipher the obscured or missing words, and send it out over the internet for someone to read in their bedroom. The latter experience has so little to do with how the texts must have been experienced first hand.
In my quest to create my campaign setting for my players I find myself downloading endless images of texts. Ancient texts decorated with dutiful craftsmanship, each page a work of art in text and image. I create texts and have images in my mind of what they look like, their physical condition, how the text is arranged on the page or on the scroll. What other information is contained in the book besides the mere words? Is the text dry and undecorated? Is the text abundant with life and color? Do the text’s other elements tend towards romanticism or the grotesque?
I’ve created some images — In particular I found some images of libraries that I altered in PhotoShop and am now using to evoke the physical space wherein books in my campaign are contained — But creating each codex or scroll in PhotoShop is clearly too much work. So I compromise. The text goes on the screen, the mere skeleton of the experience, and I write a few notes about the text’s condition. In time I hope to have the opportunity to visit each one in turn, making each one into a work. In the meantime I settle, and hope to accomplish more elsewhere. Turn my mind from text, so much text that I can’t escape it, and everything I do requires text.
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