history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
TS Eliot's Little Gidding is my favourite poem by my favourite poet. Written in wartime, it conveys a timeless Englishness and a profound sense of landscape and time. Little Gidding is of course the location of a secluded church, home to an Anglican religious community founded by Nicholas Ferrer in 1625. Both the church, the community and the landscape inspired Eliot. Inspired by Dan Pinchbeck's Dear Esther I have set about translating this wonderful poem into a narrated, free-form landscape-based game in CryEngine. The landscape of Little Gidding is developed from Ordnance Survey data (some rough drafts below) and the church is to be modelled in SketchUp using crowd-sourced photography. I'm using the version of the poem spoken by Paul Schofield for the BBC in the 1980s as the basis for the narration. The imagery of the poem will guide development of the landscape and at present I'm considering whether to fragment the poem (Esther style) so that players encounter the verse in random fragments as they explore the landscape, or to create a guided path around the landscape, revealing verse fragments and imagery in correct order. Eliot himself inspires the approach:
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from...
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same
Why on earth do this? Well partly in homage to Dear Esther, which I love, and partly to explore the game form as a method for encountering text and landscape. The idea of uniting Eliot's text with its inspiring landscape intrigues me and I wonder, does such rich text bear mediation in the game form? I also like the idea of subverting CryTek's violent game engine to the purpose of presenting Eliot's most meditative war poem (well poem written in time of war). More later.
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