The Black Omen: Objects Without Time

My parents were pastors on staff at a church while I was growing up. For those who aren’t familiar, this often means spending a not-insignificant amount of time with and around people who know who you are, but that you don’t know and, usually, don’t like all that much. It’s even worse when those people have kids of their own, because then they quite explicitly expect that you and these other kids will inevitably “play” together.

When you are on one of these excursions into a stranger’s home, the post-dinner “play” time is basically a total crap-shoot. You never know if you’re going to visit with a kid who has cool toys and shit, or if it will be the lamest hour and a half of your little life.

So, what I remember about Ronnie Hersh, is that he looked like a 42 year old car salesman at 13. He slicked back his hair, and wore polo shirts with khakis and one of those weird fabric and metal looped belts that absolutely do not work. I have no memory of what his parents served for dinner or of a single topic of conversation or of literally a single other event that transpired. Except that he has an enormous battleship on a high shelf of his wall. Next to that was a white and brown teddy bear. Those must have been the first things I saw because my memory only houses two other objects: A small TV and a SNES.

Immediately, the sight of the SNES felt like a lifesaver. I had one too and knew that we could easily pass the time together, maybe even have fun, despite not really knowing each other outside of attending the same church our parents took us to every week. The problem was that he only had one game. A game that I had never heard of: Chrono Trigger.

When I talk about physical media to my daughters, I know how old I sound. “There is just something magical about the feel of new plastic. The tiny piece of foil tape holding a VHS clamshell together. What it was like to hold a CD jewel case in your hand at Border’s book store, listening to short samples of the tracks, trying to decide where to drop your allowance. The vacuum sealed cellophane around a fancy ‘collector’s edition’ DVD release. The smooth, clean shape of a video game cartridge before you’ve ever had to blow onto the chip.” Yes, these are the sounds of a man turning into dust before your very eyes. I can’t help it. 

We develop relationships with objects, they become the facets of our memories. The object is that which all memory orbits, and, thus, in some tangential ways, so too does history. There’s a whole science behind it, we call “archeology”—send teams of people to the far flung corners of the world to find, excavate, preserve and study the objects left behind by the past. The objects are like carrier waves of what has touched them, who has touched them, and this touching goes both ways between the objects and ourselves. It also goes both ways through time by effecting our memories, effectively altering the past just as much as the future.

Chrono Trigger is a game in the genre known as JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game). It has well known tropes, archetypes and stories. In the most basic sense, they are usually about unwitting, unknown people from small insignificant villages, adventuring and growing in power as well as knowledge, to eventually save the entire world. If you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy game, this game was published by the same company. If you google “Top 10 SNES Games” it will be on the list. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that I was playing what would be later considered a classic. 

There are endless YouTube videos you can watch that can, in great and exhausting detail, tell you what Chrono Trigger is about. For the purpose of this essay, all you need to know is that Ronnie Hersh put the game on for me to try that night, and, I was at first intrigued by that simple JRPG formula. There’s a reason it still works. However, after the first hour of our parent’s conversation in the distant living room flew by, the game bore its real teeth and sunk them into my boyish brain. Time travel.

Video games are worlds, much like our world, about objects. You find them, you collect them, you use them. You upgrade things, you buy things, you destroy things. Every essential scene may shift on the characters and the dialogue—but the conflict at the center is almost 99.9% about some stupid fucking magic rock. Fetch quests. Puzzle solving. All standards. Chrono Trigger isn’t any different in that regard, but there does exist a certain quirk or “mechanic” to the game that ignited my imagination in a way no other game to-date ever has. 

But I will get to that in a second, because, truthfully, this essay is supposed to be about my feelings and reflections on starting and running a literary magazine during the year-of-our-lord 2021 and I haven’t figured out how I’m getting there yet. But I will.

Because it has been fucking wild, ya’ll. It was a year ago this very week that my friend Tony Wade messaged me, saying that he was preparing to move and found a copy of my first full-length poetry book, “Mongrel” , while boxing up his book shelf. He sat down with it, read it through, and just had to reach out to me. That conversation led to our mentor and friend Maj Ragain—the great poet from Olney, Illinois. It inevitably led to what stirred in us and became the decision to “do something”, and then quickly evolved beyond “doing” something into “making” something. Making. An object. A physical thing. A piece of detritus you can find fallen behind a bookshelf when you move. A mystery for the future to unravel.

Why is it important to us to make a thing?

From the very start of “Chrono Trigger” you come across these black magical chests that, when you attempt to open them, play a spooky jingle and tell you that the contents are inaccessible due to some strange magical energy or forces that keep it locked. For my Legend of Zelda fans out there: this hits very different from a simple locked chest in the Forest Temple where you know a key is hidden nearby—sometimes in the very same room! This game doesn’t tell you anything. Fucking nothing. It is the JRPG equivalent of negging. The only clue whatsoever, and you don’t know it at the time—a small symbol visible on their front. But you have to imagine there must be a way to open it.

As you traverse up and down the timeline of the brightly colored and pixelated world of Chrono Trigger you eventually end up in a past age where the world’s population is divided in half. One part lives on the cold surface of the earth, scraping by, and the other lives above the clouds on floating rock-cities, imbued with magical and technical marvels. It is in this section of the game you come across that symbol. Nothing tells you “hey, these are for those chests.” But it’s what happens next that is what all this essay has led to for me.

Since you can travel through time, many of these chests can be encountered at different points in time, but they are the same physical objects. You are presented with an unspoken choice: to open it as soon as you encounter them from this point forward, or to wait. That’s right. Wait. The game teaches what was one of my first encounters with delayed gratification. If you open the chests immediately you are certainly rewarded with some cool items that will be useful in the game, but if you wait, and travel further into the future of that world and open the chests later—the contents of the same chests are of a significantly better grade.

The game itself is full of other examples of this type of subtle story telling. There a magical shell you leave behind in the past and retrieve in the future, restored to its full power. There is a massive lifeless desert that can be transformed by a robot in your party of characters if you lose him from your party temporarily—the desert becomes a forested paradise 900 years later. There’s even a section of the game where the main fucking character of the game, the POV sprite that you’ve been playing as, sacrifices himself to save the rest of the team. Here, you have the choice to play the rest of the game without that character, or you can revive him later and bring them back. 

There are all these types of tradeoffs constantly being presented to you, and as I sat there on the edge of Ronnie Hersh’s bed, I had no idea that by now, at 36 years old, I would have played through that game perhaps 10-12 times. But at the center of the game’s story, is your group of character’s trying to save the world, and they do so while encountering and interacting with the objects and people of that world as they change across eons. The antagonistic force in the game exists on the other end of the spectrum.

The real threat to the planet is a creature living in the planet’s core, slowly feeding off of it until it is strong enough to emerge and destroy it. It has big Marvel’s Eternal’s (2021) energy. The civilization of people who could wield magic and had technology in the deep past, the same people who created the magic sealed chests and even the mechanism by which time travel is possible in the game—they want to tap into this creature’s power and live forever. They build a fortress called the “Black Omen” that serves as the final dungeon of the game, and was their conduit for accessing the creature’s energy. 

Fascinatingly, the Black Omen, once it is revealed in the game—it then exists at every point in time you can travel to, forward and backward. It is truly an object without time. It is something profane. It does not age. It does not change. No matter when you decide to go inside it, it is the same.

Ultimately, I started this essay wanting to talk about our first year as a literary magazine. The first year of Olney. I ended up writing about a late 90’s video game. Perhaps something in all that speaks to why we wanted to create a physical/print magazine when it is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. We wanted to created an object too, something that could exist in the world, something that could be touched, lost, found, forgotten and rediscovered—it’s meaning and value reshaped as time passes.

I’m reminded of the last time I took a trip to the Rock ’N Roll Hall of Fame that is not far from me in Cleveland. There was a small exhibit for The Door’s Jim Morrison. Hanging behind glass was a small red colored, battered book. The description said it was a copy of one of his self-published books of poems. I have thought about that artifact often over the years. It was one of the first things that inspired me as a writer to “just make the thing”, and even now with Olney as we are finishing work on Issue 3: Winter, I am thinking of this still. I wonder what second hand shelf, what attic box or closet floor it might find someone in.

Make the thing. Create the object yourself. Damn right—it probably won’t be easy, but put it out into the world and let time decide what it is. You don’t need magazines or journals or presses to give you permission. If Olney can be anything to anybody now and going forward, I hope that it is something that inspires people to make their things and find their validation in the work itself.