loneliness, or the ultimate behemoth
"the cosmic wheel sisterhood", clarice lispector, & vulnerability
Anxiety spawns in loneliness. So much so that therapists will often ask someone seeking help for anxiety to consider H.A.L.T.—as in, are you hungry? angry? lonely? or tired? Because if you are one or all of those things, you’re in a psychic breeding ground for worries to take over.
Loneliness, in other words, leaves anxious people like myself vulnerable.
When I’m anxious, I like articulate my anxiety aloud to someone I trust. I try to preface it by saying, I know this is irrational. Because I know it logically, but not emotionally. Anxiety that’s spoken into the world can lose its emotional power over me. This usually helps me to feel better, but it’s not foolproof.
Recently, I’ve revisited the writer Clarice Lispector’s quote about loneliness and intimacy with the self, and I’ve been thinking about it in relation to both anxiety and my latest obsession, a narrative adventure video game called The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood:
“Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.”
I’ve written here before about the allure of both tarot and video games. Each provides a comfort in times, especially in times of anxiety and loneliness. So yes, of course I dived into The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood and of course I dived in hard.
A brief synopsis of the game: Fortuna is a tarot-card-reading witch who lives in a floating house in deep space (stick with me, I know it sounds wild). Fortuna is a bit of a Cassandra—she is exiled because she predicts the inevitable end of her coven. She is doomed to float alone through space for centuries with only her collection of “interactive fiction” for company (which…nice meta-commentary there). Decades pass, and she grows desperate to escape. Fortuna then summons a demon called a Behemoth, who looks like an overgrown lobster-eel-thing.
This is a problem, however, because summoning a Behemoth is Very Illegal in this coven. The Behemoth, named Abramar, helps Fortuna to reconnect with her coven sisters and rework her tarot deck, but this connection comes at a very high cost. Secrets come to light (both Fortuna’s and the secrets of her friends and colleagues), and some could very well contribute to Fortuna’s ultimate downfall as the future she once predicted threatens to come true. I as the player decide Fortuna’s fate (there are 10 possible endings) by helping her to make decisions, the majority of which are in relation to the “intimate glory” of how she interacts with her Behemoth and the coven she tries desperately to rejoin.
To be a self-aware woman is to be lonely. Much of what we know of Fortuna’s own self-awareness (and sometimes lack there of) comes when she confides in Abramar about just how isolated she has felt while in exile. She is shunned because of her ability to see the cracks in her current social system threatens the utopia she lives in. Fortuna elected to become a witch because she wants to believe in magic and something bigger than her life on Earth, but is punished when she calls out the issues within the coven itself. It’s a familiar storyline for many of us who feel alone in our fears for the future.
And this loneliness doesn’t end when me and my Behemoth start to work together. No matter what choices I make for Fortuna in the game, I end alienating her from someone—either one of her friends, or her former mentor, or her lover, or her sister—and there’s no way to avoid that pain. Isolation is inevitable no matter how much I try to avoid it.
In other words, Lispector’s “intimate glory,” which threatens to turn painful and wretched during Fortuna’s exile, requires Fortuna and I to walk a tightrope together—one wrong choice will inevitably lead to suffering. The Behemoth might be named Abramar, but it could very well be named loneliness. Speaking it into existence brings Fortuna the power to change her situation, but it also leaves her vulnerable in a new way, one that could lead to her death.
It’s interesting to note that CWS, a game based on the power and terror of disconnection amongst women, was so successful the same year a movie about a doll swept our cultural imagination. Hell, America Ferrera’s monologue in last year’s mega-hit Barbie, as Feminism 101 as it was, spoke to both the unrealistic expectations we women face that often contribute to our loneliness. Womanhood is full of contradictions and the result is a life spent never measuring up to what everyone else wants you to be.
I’m far from the only person to call this out. Writer Tessa Kaur at TheGamer explains this beautifully, comparing CWS with Barbie’s narratives of both sisterhood and motherhood:
“…The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is radical in a way Barbie could never have been. Where Barbie is driven by the need to cater to an audience with a low-level understanding of what it means to be a woman as well as a corporation that has to approve its message, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood has clear, strong leftist values and is unashamed to say it. It is openly queer, intersectional, and has a far more nuanced representation of feminism and womanhood that extends far beyond the most basic explanation of how women are oppressed by patriarchy.”
As Kaur notes, this is a particular kind of loneliness that “extends far beyond the basic explanation.” But CWS proves that even in a deep space coven (yes, I know it sounds ridiculous) full of women and genderless beings, far from the reaches of patriarchy, the threat of abandonment and exile can silence us and keep our most important feelings inside
Part of the game’s central tension is Fortuna’s desperation and loneliness, which drive her to make the cataclysmic decision to summon Abramar. By doing so, she releases that anxiety of hers (that she’ll always be alone, that she won’t survive in exile) out into the world and it manifests in a physical being, one that mostly helps her but also might harm her.
In other words: speaking her anxiety out into the universe does provide her with connection, but that’s only one stepping stone towards resolving her issues. And as those who have played the game through multiple times know, that doesn’t keep Fortuna's fate from getting tangled up with some other witch’s ill intentions.
Single-player games that explore loneliness and self-reflection are always powerful because, by their very definition, they must be played alone. I have to reflect on the choices I’m making and why. The game itself is a self-aware interactive fiction (complete with choose-your-own-adventure books, which is so meta I had to laugh). While the game’s dialogue more expressly dives into depression and self-harm (which, trigger warning if either is a sensitive subject for you), it is anxiety that creeps into what Fortuna wants to say, as well as her desire to be forgiven, embraced, and perhaps even loved.
It is nearly impossible while playing CWS to not be reminded of the times in which I myself have been lonely, and might have called upon behemoth-vices of my own, even if others cautioned me against it. And that is kind of the point. Loneliness creates a breeding place for anxiety, and anxiety unchecked makes us act crazy. It is connection (however vulnerable it may feel) that, even when it fails, offers us a promise of hope.
When Fortuna has flashbacks to her time as a human, before she became a witch, the memories she revisits are moments of connection with other people. When she is alone, those moments take on a new meaning, one that is steeped in vulnerability, strength, and maybe, just maybe, a different kind of magical connection.