The Big Picture and the Closeup

The cave journey Vollenweider and friends charted out felt less sinister and dangerous than the cave journey the programmers responsible for Adventure contrived, but they each appealed to the same place in my head. Jointly these two creations, the game and the album, served as the perfect expression of the computer journey I embarked on at that point. You venture into mysterious places, develop new skills, and bring back all sorts of treasures from those mysterious caves we now call cyberspace.

From the Normandy invasion in June 1944 to October 1944, there were 152 U.S. rape trials by court martial in the European Theater of Operations; in 139 of those cases the defendants were “colored.” In the years 1944 and 1945, 29 GIs were hanged for rape; of them 25 were African Americans. And the U.S. invasion force was 90% white. This begs the question what on earth was going on.

The bargain I’d made with myself at the beginning of all my running around was that anytime I wanted to I could always turn around and rejoin my life’s earlier course. But when I decided I wanted to, I found anger was blocking that path back. These songs may not have been precisely applicable to our situation, but they were precisely applicable to my mood. I knew how things were supposed to go, and if they weren’t doing that, there had to be an explanation, and I was going nuts trying to find it.

Williams provides a musical metaphor for that wonderful dream we’ve all had sometime, in which we learn to fly. And that dream is in turn a serviceable metaphor for the erotic ecstasy of Superman and Lois. That was how I wanted to think of myself then: freed from the bonds of conventional morality, accompanying professional success with sexual release, floating high above everything.