Keep on the Borderlands
Over the weekend, for the first time in my life, I went to a Renaissance Festival, in Crownsville, Maryland, on the outskirts of Annapolis. The boyfriend of a friend of mine was working there, selling roses. I wasn't especially eager to go, but it seemed as good a time as any to face down my fear. I'm unnerved by places where people aren't ashamed to put their inner fantasies or enthusiasms on display — where they don't hesitate to lace up a corset or put on a pair of elven ears and parade around as a kind of play version of themselves. Of course these enthusiasts have no reason to feel embarrassed, but I find myself becoming embarrassed for them, which is about the lamest way for me to be ashamed of myself — through proxy disavowal.
I was expecting to be waylaid by juggling jesters spouting pidgin Elizabethan and accosted by wandering minstrels playing lutes, but it turns out that a Renaissance Festival is more like a conventional amusement park, only it doesn't have any rides. It just has the other stuff: the food stalls, the kitschy shops, the fairground stages with regional performers. While there were a fair number in crypto-medieval costumes (some of them seemed more steam-punky), most people were dressed ordinarily — though I did begin to question why I regarded people wearing Redskins jerseys as "dressed normally" rather than as their participating in an equally far-fetched fantasy.
There was also lots of medieval costumery for sale. It wasn't too hard to figure out how that sales spiral worked: You come to the Ren Fest to buy clothes to wear to the Ren Fest next time. But there was no need for me to interpret that so cynically, as if it was a big scam. Being there felt far less coercive than being at a football stadium. Despite all the wooden swords and demon masks, and all the booths devoted to hatchet throwing and blow-dart shooting, the atmosphere was markedly mellow. Despite the somewhat laborious outfits many were wearing, people seemed very relaxed in general. I thought about taking some pictures, but it seemed rude. I wasn't offering anything, not even the basic implied sympathy, in return.
Maybe it is possible to identify too much with people who try but don't quite succeed. Pity short-circuits empathy, precluding the possibility of assessing or appreciating a particular performance, even if it is just a performance of a fantasy self. Yet I still feel called upon to judge, without having wanted that responsibility. It's easy to forget that people who eagerly put themselves in a position to be judged typically aren't seeking a fair and honest appraisal. I think of this as the "talent-show delusion."
At the Renaissance Festival I ended up feeling way less judgmental than I anticipated. I felt sorry for myself in a more direct way, left out of the experience. I tend to be envious of people for whom a distant approximation of their fantasy is sufficient for them to enter into it. They don't need castles with real moats or people in real suits of armor to make their joyous imaginative leaps. My imagination tends to work in the other direction, not filling in the gaps between fantasy and reality but widening them, scrutinizing the scene for inadequacies that may have been overlooked. So rather than surrendering to the collective spirit of fun, I generate weirdly defensive fantasy scenarios of my own: I picture a guy climbing out of a Toyota Tercel, in his leather doublet and velvet tights with Nike high-tops; or pimply teenagers wearing clumsily made angel wings that will never allow them to fly. It's not enough, I think, to feel medieval just by eating a roast turkey leg. To me it seems shabby and compromised to drink Coors Light out of a pewter goblet, or to watch some heavily tattooed guy in a kilt bleat tunelessly on the bagpipes. Incongruous elements destroy the already delicate illusion. It's like seeing a Times Square Elmo with their headpiece tilted back, revealing their human face.
For a moment, these sorts of thoughts make me feel sad and superior. Then I feel like Peter Cook in Bedazzled, a devil compelled by his own egotism to spoil other people's pleasure. I end up being suspended between participation and regret, like someone who's consented to go out for Karaoke but won't allow themselves to sing into the microphone. (I experience a similar anxiety at protests, especially when there is chanting. I feel like the person who is pretending to sing "Happy Birthday" at an awkward office party.)
My problem is that I can't imagine being secure enough in myself that I would have the luxury to pretend to be someone else. I can't afford to suspend disbelief, especially about myself. It feels like belief is all I have holding my sense of self together. Being able to pass as myself, to attract no suspicions about the stew of half-baked ideas and petty resentments swirling in my head, is as much of an achievement as I dare hope for. In my mind, I've framed passing as myself as a kind of pleasure, maybe even the only pleasure. I feel like I am always looking to my phone for this feeling.
My extreme discomfort with role-playing did not stop me from being obsessed with role-playing games when I was young — Dungeons and Dragons, mainly, but I owned the rulebooks to at least a half-dozen others: Boot Hill, Runequest, Gamma World, Traveller, Call of Cthulu, etc. etc. I had a bookshelf full of them, but I never actually played any of them. It wasn't merely that they were incredibly complicated and required hours upon hours to play; I also couldn't imagine asking any of my friends to try to play them with me. They seemed to me to be above such intense and juvenile games of pretend, far too "cool" for anything involving 20-sided dice and battling orcs and gelatinous cubes. That is, they were focused on different sorts of pretense.
The basic set of Dungeons and Dragons came with a module called The Keep on the Borderlands, an introductory game scenario for beginning Dungeon Masters to learn how to run "campaigns" for their players: "If you plan to play in this module and participate in the fun of adventuring, stop reading now," its introduction read. "The information in the rest of the module is for your Dungeon Master or DM, so that he or she may guide you and other players through a thrilling adventure. Knowing too much about the contents of this module will spoil the surprises and excitement of the game." The introduction then described a bit more about the world according to the module:
As you build the campaign setting, you can use this module as a guide. Humankind and its allies have established strongholds — whether fortresses or organized countries — where the players’ characters will base themselves, interact with the society, and occasionally encounter foes of one sort or another. Surrounding these strongholds are lands which may be hostile to the bold adventurers ... There are natural obstacles to consider, such as mountains, marshes, deserts, and seas. There can also be magical barriers, protections, and portals. Anything you can imagine could be part of your world if you so desire. The challenge to your imagination is to make a world which will bring the ultimate in fabulous and fantastic adventure to your players. A world which they may believe in.
This totally confused me at the time. I didn't realize that role-playing games worked that way, that one person was a sort of referee that administered the game for the other players and that the game itself had no objective, no way to win. It was ultimately more about collective storytelling than dice-rolling or strategy.
I wanted no part of that sort of imaginative collaboration. Even then, I'd spent far too much time alone in my imagination to want belated company. But I was very drawn to the idea that you could simulate a world entirely through charts and probabilities and taxonomies and numbers. So I eventually latched on to computer role-playing games like Ultima III, where you didn't play any roles at all but instead managed a roster of made-up characters all by yourself, and moved them across a two-dimensional map, searching for runes and time portals and that sort of thing. I didn't want to be part of a collective fantasy; I preferred navigating a programmed world. That way I could "participate in the fun of adventuring" and be a "Master" of it at the same time. It didn't matter if I believed in it; it was hard-coded to work.
But I still kept reading the D&D modules and all the other RPG rule books, content to imagine privately what it would have been like to play them. These were utopias I wanted to preserve by keeping them strictly imaginary. I kept amassing more books, more dice, more tablets of hexagonal graph paper, but ventured no closer to launching any campaigns. I didn't give myself permission to cross into that terrain. "There can also be magical barriers..."
The cover page of The Keep on the Borderlands described the titular castle as "an interesting area for characters to base themselves in before setting out to explore the Caves of Chaos." Reading that description now, it seems like a perfect inversion of the experience of adulthood. You actually live in caves of chaos and spend most of your time trying to find your way to some "interesting area" to take refuge. I wanted to believe that the Renaissance Festival was that sort of place for the people there, even if it wasn't for me. I was glad we left before it got dark.