Aura describes a sort of horizon, a circle of definable space but whose detail and reach is ambiguous. In IF a room is structural device: we know we are in rooms, as in the space outside an Inn. This is a room, but it isn’t experienced as one. As noted, there is the suggestion of distance, a hint at an ability to penetrate, but what does the distance look like: is there a wood line, evening clouds, breaks in the snow. We have an Inn, a post, a few directions.

Aura is what we add to fill in the picture on our own, the spatial fill-ins we bring to the digital world.

I perceive a larger space because of the aural mix, the growl of engines, the screech of tires, the aggressiveness of the opponents machines rushing up, coming beside, or going past. This design gives an impression of behind, sideways, and ahead just as a silent window in a room gives a greater sense of perspective to an otherwise abrupt space.

In T.I.M.E. – Early American Anomalies a work of interactive fiction by Christopher Coonce-Ewing, the player is a history corrector whose mission is to prevent disturbances to the American time-line. As with most IF, the space of the world is designed in text and code, in this case TADS, rather than with graphics. The IF world is programmed into existence for functionality and usability on the computer and the player/reader must engage the world with simple commands, such as go north, and interact with objects in the environment to ascertain an objective. Interaction with the space of IF can lead to multiple readings of a narrative and multiple re-readings depending on the choices a reader/player makes.

Here is an example of such a designed area from Coonce-Ewings work, the initial Chamber area

The Chamber
This is the T.I.M.E transport room, called ‘The Chamber’ by those who work here. The room is stark with harsh light falling from the ceiling. The far wall is a curtain of shimmering quicksilver.
Sitting on the metal table is a mission briefing, a temporal timepiece, and a silver coin.

.Here the stark Chamber avoids topographic vividness in its description for practical, we might call them kairic reasons. The description or placement of objects in the room is more kin to an architectural blueprint or a 2 (I could even argue 3 dimensional) map than a typical description in fiction. The room has orienting depth and stretch. The quicksilver wall is at a distance from the position of the first person player yet the position of the table is indefinite. Thus the rooms topology is amorphous. The room may or may not be square. The player thus orients to the objects in an amorphous Chamber but can gather some spatial orientation via the description of place and position.

In another area inside the primary world of the game where most things happen, we confront a different textual design of (digital) space.

Outside the Inn
You are currently outside an Inn, in what looks like the early evening. A light snow covers the ground. The wooden sign creaks in the gentle evening breeze. A lone hitchpost (currently unused) stands in front of the Inn. The road goes north and south, the Inn is to the east and a field of corn to the west. The sounds of people come from inside the inn.

Interestingly, in this space we have aura and object. The aura comes from early evening. The objects are the hitching post, Inn, the road and the wooden sign just to name a few, and not to mention the object that the reader has to probe for. Aura and object form a part of the space here, but a sense of distance forms an added shape to the written world. North is distance. Distance allows for the ability to move, which is what the reader will perhaps do. In fiction, north may simply provide a sense of direction (an orienting point) or placement, but in IF north is orientation, placement, and penetrative or a path through or into. North says you can go there.

Today’s supreme court ruling comes as no surprise to me. Legal space, like a fog, will and should extend into the legal issues around warfare. This is essay at SSI (links to pdf) has some relation, but I’d claim two issues:

1. The supreme issue today about war is not how to fight, but when to fight.

2. Defining war is also key to number one: here the war simulation is relevant. I don’t think you can have a war on terrorism, which is part of the locus of the court’s ruling against the administration. There is a spatial question here. War is a circle (theater) and a modus and a force. But how to define it from the point of view of al Qaeda?

This is sort of an off handed remark, but it would seem that Neha knows exatly why “place” is important and how different kinds of spaces push, pull, draw, and create tension. I believe she’s moving back to blogger.

Place is a particular kind of spatial definition and awareness, non-generalized, locatable, emotive; place is source and destination. It’s a nice reading chair, a pleasant spot under a pine tree, the space around a grave site of a loved one, it’s that one spot in the Seattle race that gives me headaches. Place is different from what Edward Casey in his book Remembering: a phenomenological studylikes to talk about as “site.”

All weblogs are “places” rather than “sites” or should be. Casey argues that we really really need “place.”

I have the sim, the room, but I also have the poem, set on the page printed and ready to go. There are more to read and cover, but Im going to begin with Neha Bawas poem Untitled, a poem about a womans reflections. Untitled is a seven stanza poem that focuses on multiple places in a persons life through sustained imagery and narrative repetition. Heres the first stanza.

Once she was sixteen
reading short stories aloud
in her tiny blue walled classroom
when she saw her brother standing in the doorway.
Father had sent bhaiya for her.
It was time now for her to look pretty
with flowers in her hair
and kohl in her eyes
so she could be sent away
to her new home.
Ma had bit her lip when she was sent away to a new life. (1-11)

The first stanza begins with a girls age, a factor of time. The girl is sixteen and reading short stories aloud in a room described as small and blue. The speaker doesnt tell us what the girl is reading but we know that shes engaged in a storywhatever it may bebut is also about to be pushed into one, a story that she herself had no hand in writing but may indeed have to read. In a way, the memorial, recollected spaces that the poem deals with read with a particular melancholy. The girls brother comes to propel the girl from one story into another, described in terms of banishment. The girl is in a particular state of waiting, almost statuesque in her still posture of reading again the blue background of the walls. The first stanza contains, therefore, two possible narratives.

The second stanza, however, retreats back into the girls past thus into another memorial context. The transition is indicated by the concentric Yesterday, a framing devise for successive examples of youthful exuberance, freedom, and a carefree dance of childhood. Yesterday she was a little girl / playing hop-scotch barefoot / on dusty streets, unmindful / of the drop of perspiration . . . (12-15). In addition to play and unmindfullness, the girl laughs at the antics of the boys slipping on their marbles. This stanza transitions in both time and place, taking the girl away from the period when her brother comes to get her, years later, it would seem, as if the girl of stanza 1 is herself involved in a retreat into memories of days less constrained by the coming responsibilities of marriage. Memorial distance, or its imagining, can be taken here as a question of time in formal terms. Both the first and last stanza repeat the word once: Once she was sixteen of line 1 and Hands leathery, the wrinkles carved by time. / Hands that once churned butter, chopped wood, and came together in prayer of lines 40 and 41.

Stanza 2 gives the reader play and laughter. Stanza 3 snap-shots onto the girls relationship with her grandmother. The girl rushes to receive sweets and bracelets after bending over a pile of red chillies [sic] in the verandah, /
picking out the ones grandma / would want to grind in to dinner that night (19-21). These are memories. Yesterdays. What separates the past from the present is a strange silence in the poem. The word silence in brackets forms a stanza of its own after which the melancholic voice propels the reader into the girls present or now:

Now all has changed.
Shadows that dance on the mud caked walls
by the light of an oil lamp
are the memories of her loved ones – those who passed on
and left her here, alone.
Those who had walked away
were the ones she had nurtured
since they had been placed into her arms.

She sits in the light of late afternoon
tracing the shadow of the window with her old fingers.
Her face is weathered, eyes filled with memories that spill out in tears.

Hands leathery, the wrinkles carved by time.
Hands that once churned butter, chopped wood, and came together in prayer.
Now they lay by her side,
resigned, aching to feel.

The shadows on the wall are the memories . . . These shadows play like a memorial geography of events, relationships, and resentments (. . . those who passed on / and left her here, alone. / Those who had walked away . . . (31-33). The woman sits in light. She, therefore, must be surrounded by shadow and darkness.

The poem can be divided into topological elementsinto its experiential spaces and times: past/childhood/whimsical action (plucking the chilies happens in a youthful space)/what was and present/age/melancholic reflection (numbed hands occur with age)/what is. Ironically, the shadows on the mud walls for the adult are memories. Yet the poem is structured by memorial image. The poem, therefore, can be read as one of the shadows on the wall or those shadows given verbal poetic form. The poem itself, as a literary space, develops by placing the images into a series that step from past to present, image to image, context to context, and ends on the image of the still hands aching to feel.

Untitled is verbalized memorial space where past and present overlap onto particular memories which form the poetic story of life for the woman. For her, there is no other life (no other memory), no alternative childhood that can make sense. The final stanzas are emphatic about positioning the woman in a place where she can be seen, in the light, but what she sees are shadows, what she traces with her wrinkled fingers is her story. In a way, shes gone back to that small blue schoolhouse room, reading a story, but in a different time.

While working on a few entries on language and designed space, Spinning hits with this and uses language to create two spheres.

The Mrs. started in just as I happened by their side window, and eventually the kids were screaming too. It took a while, and she went over all her complaints that I’d suspected she was feeling. They’d had to move here just this spring because their home had been practically leveled and would take too long to rebuild. The grocery is too far away now, and while they’re further from the traffic, she doesn’t like the closeness of the neighbors with their lights shining in their yard late at night, and sounds of tv’s and supper dishes clanking as if they were right in the next room.