Real Life Rabbit Holes
The World of Szukalski
When I’m speaking to groups eager to know more about Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), I often begin by trying to explain how the name isn’t really a very good match to the experience offered by many ARGs. For one thing, they don’t look and feel like what most people think of as a game, and the good ones aren’t really about alternate realities at all. Instead, they try and make you feel as if you’ve just wandered into a new and exciting part of your own reality that you never knew existed, like you’ve rounded a corner and walked smack dab into the center of a mysterious and thrilling adventure.
Sure, many ARGs do incorporate fantastic themes or concepts into their story, such as advanced AIs from the future or mystical beings who can grant wishes and the like, so as to give the initial appearance that they may be set in some alternate world or reality. But the goal of the creators and the art in making a well-crafted ARG is getting the players to accept and believe that such things can indeed happen right here, in their own real world. That’s when the Alternate Reality Game becomes powerful and meaningful for the participants, and the experience transcends the realms of gaming and storytelling.
It’s exactly that feeling in the beginning of an ARG that engages and hooks me, when I find a wonderfully deep and well-made “bubble of reality” perfectly enmeshed with my own slice of the real world. That feeling doesn’t happen very often in the real world for me anymore, although I’m also certain it’s the same thrill I used to get when I’d discover like the ideas and fictional worlds of Michael Moorcock or when I saw the original Star Wars movie for the very first time. So when that very same feeling did happen recently in my real, everyday world, it was an amazing and almost surreal experience. I fell through a real life rabbit hole into the worlds of Stanislav Szukalski.
Szukalski, not to be confused with Szulborski, was a sculptor, painter, and philosopher, who was celebrated as Poland’s Greatest Living Artist at one time, before spending his final years penniless and unheralded in Southern California, drawing maps for an aerospace company just to survive.
Oddly enough, I had never heard of Szukalski despite our common Polish heritage and my taste for eclectic and often obscure artists, and was actually introduced to him by a fan of my work who asked me in Szukalski was a creation of mine, perhaps someone I created for use in one of my yet to be unveiled Alternate Reality Games. After all, they explained, there was such a similarity between the names and some of the crazy undertakings that it seemed logical (to them) that Szukalski might be part of some fictional backstory I had created for a future ARG character. As in any denial about a yet-to-be-done ARG, I’m not sure the player actually believed me totally, and I had to laugh as I went off to look into this “Szukalski guy” the person had brought up.
It was when I started this research that I had that “falling through the rabbit hole” experience, where I sat literally for hours searching out and reading thoroughly enything and everything I could find about Szukalski. I’m pretty certain that my mouth was hanging open in amazement for at least half of that whole time, too. I admit to wondering at least once if this was indeed part of some elaborate and beautifully constructed alternate reality game, even though I knew that I had no hand in it.
According to a website declaring itself the “official online source for all things Szukalski”, Stanislav Szukalski was born in 1893 in Warta, Poland, where at the age of six he carved a figure so realistically into a pencil that he was hailed as a local art prodigy. Szukalski immigrated to Chicago as a teenager and by the 1920′s two large monographs had been published about his work. Lured back to Poland in the 1930′s by their declaration of him as their Greatest Living Artist and the offer to dedicate an entire museum to him, Szukalski returned to Poland just as World War was engulfing the country. He fled the country during the German Siege of Warsaw in 1939, leaving behind his entire collection of life work, almost all of it either destroyed or stolen in the process. He didn’t know it yet but his legacy had also been pretty much destroyed along with his works.
The handful of sample images I posted above barely begin to introduce you to the breadth and scope of his work and although much of what he created has been lost, there are still some wonderful images to be found on the Internet to give a glimpse of the visionary and transcendent nature of his creations. Interestingly, while a majority of the physical items he created may have been destroyed, the things you’d suppose would be more ephemeral and fragile, the creations of his mind as embodied in his philosophical and scientific words and writings live on.
One concept in particular, a creation he called Zermatism, based on Szukalski’s theory that all human culture and language derived from a single origin on Easter Island after the biblical Deluge of Noah, still has advocates and followers, often garnering heated discussion to this day. Szukalski’s pseudoscience filled 39 volumes, and puts forth the argument that all languages derive from a single source, which he calls the Protong, and that all art is a variation on a few themes inherent in and embodied by a handful of universal symbols.
Unfortunately, some of the philosophy of Zermatism, such as his claims that the diversity in modern humanity was the result of “pure humans” interbreeding with a race of Yeti, quickly led many of his contemporaries to label him crazy, in no uncertain terms. Undeterred, Szukalski passionately defended his ideas no matter how wrong others thought they were. In fact, he often attributed the rejection of some his ideas to the fact that many people couldn’t understand his intense passion and commitment.
And so I’ve spent the last couple of weeks exploring the world of Stanislav Szukalski, feeling much more kinship to him than our common Polish heritage could create. There are many things in his ideas as expressed in Zermatism that I don’t agree with, and some of his pseudoscientific arguments don’t stand up to the discoveries and advancements man has made since his time, but there is an undeniable noble spirit and visionary mind expressed in much of his work, and a fascinating story about the whimsical natures of fame and fate for anyone just interested in a few hours diversion from reality.
Just like an ARG, I’ve poked and prodded the new world I’ve found, sending email to websites and “authorities” I’ve discovered, following up the slightest leads and new bits of information with hours of intense Internet searching, and grinned in sheer wonder and delight at the depth and drama of the world of Stanislav Szukalski. And, in the true spirit of ARG synchronicity, I couldn’t stop laughing when I learned that one of Szukalski’s own handwritten works / journals was entitled World Remade.
I work so hard some times to try and make the ARG experience real for players; it’s truly wonderful when the same feeling manifests serendipitously in my life.
