Front Porches + Cosmic Wonders

"Dare to explore every gap between the stars / And constantly worry you missed a few"

Last month, I returned to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (don’t worry, my other photos were even worse). I first visited HoER in May 2021, shortly after their post-lockdown reopening. Prop clues and other touch-based areas were replaced by QR codes, because at the time it made sense to make sure people weren’t standing around breathing on each other while examining something small that everyone needed to put their hands on. For whatever reason my phone wasn’t having it, so instead I slipped into a sort of flowstate, absorbing vibes and minutiae and reactions, brain acting as stomach, paying attention to one thing or another by a logic I was learning as I went along.

I got the gist, and I told myself I’d look up the specifics later. Eventually I did, brain acting as stomach once again as I devoured the history, lore, and artistry of every Meow Wolf exhibit during a sleepless midsummer in Sweden. It was something I needed to do, but it spoiled a lot of the fun of discovery for future visits to future Meows Wolf.

Meow Wolf is a series of immersive art exhibits in the US. Their house art style is family-friendly psychedelia, telling alt-science fantasy stories with tongue-in-cheek commentary and puzzles, all contained in their own multiverse. (They got going before ‘multiverse’ became synonymous with the sulfur whiff of cultural fracking and emotional-investment burnout.) They’re an art collective-turned-B Corp that doesn’t always do right by its workers and its artists, but Meow Wolf exhibits are the result of the passion and imagination of its workers and artists. They’re special to me for various reasons, most relevant being that I often think about Meow Wolf as I try to define the cosmic mystery.

House of Eternal Return is their first permanent exhibit, located in Santa Fe, known for a maximalist approach to design and storytelling (and for George R.R. Martin’s financial support). The exhibit tells the story of a family with strange abilities of cosmic implications. The house is transplanted in space and time. There’s a walming in the dining room, a warping in the bathroom, and where is the hamster? (Where ISN’T the hamster.)

What happened to the people who live here? The clues scale with the scope of what the audience is dealing with. At first, when you’re familiarizing yourself with the Selig-Pastore household, the clues are in papers and diaries and weird, fiddly DIY tech (including a newspaper prop that was so perfect, someone in my group thought another guest had just brought a newspaper in with them and left it behind). Once you get some grasp of what forces the family members are tangled with and you follow them beyond the house, the clues become more environmental. Eventually, the influencing forces are of such cosmic scale that the story is communicated via animation. There’s a lot to discover, but not a lot to double-guess—Meow Wolf doesn’t mess with red herrings. They’re here to overwhelm and awe.

So last month, when I revisited HoER, I went with a group of SFF writers who hadn’t been to the exhibit before. I couldn’t go back and see the House for the first time all over again, but I did get to experience the curiosity and surprise, as well as the narrative and design analysis, of thoughtful people with different approaches to storytelling. I heard one scream in absolute delight at what’s inside the fridge, I commiserated about the Meow Wolf hangover (the sensory burnout is not to be trifled with), I confidently shared a very incorrect version of the grandfather’s backstory.

I was also delighted to observe something I hadn’t noticed during that first visit in May 2021: collaboration between strangers. For a while we were moving through the exhibit at a pace that kept us close to an attentive family. They were eager to share the combo to a safe, happy to read interesting details from a diary, so gracious with their clues. I saw people helping others find small wonders. I kept pulling members of my group into nooks I remembered—and was shocked when someone in my group told me about a guy who ungenerously opened the safe, looked at what was inside, then pointedly shut it right in front of them. I saw HoER the way I think its creators wanted it to be—collaborative in creation and collaborative in exploration.

(Last December, I went to Omega Mart in Las Vegas and didn’t experience any collaboration there, but it’s got ‘wait for someone to free up a computer’-based gameplay that doesn’t really allow for trading notes in a meaningful way.) 

 I found myself thinking about perspective and identity in game environments. Especially in a game that’s a cosmic mystery. Many cosmic mysteries are driven by atmosphere and tone, particularly the tone of a perspective character’s interiority. Tweak this, and the same plot is an urban fantasy or a speculative thriller.

In June, we talked about Norco. While the player chooses nuances and motivations, Norco is a pretty on-the-rails investigation with heavily-authored characters. Kay is the recipient of surreal prophecies-slash-inevitabilities, and she goes places and feels things and talks to people in a set sequence. The game lies in figuring out the next step in that sequence, though a few choices do have dire consequences for Kay’s future. This suited Norco, which, among other things, explored the effects of other people’s choices and ambitions upon Kay’s life.

Unless you’re LARPing a distant cousin or Charter authority (in which case you’re already well into the mystery), you’re not assuming the role of an authored character. HoER isn’t the Star Wars Hotel: enjoyment isn’t tied to familiarity with the story or the lore. HoER is a sprawling art exhibit that includes paintings, animation, sculpture, live video, insanely meticulous props, maskwork, interactive light and sound puzzles, arcade games, dioramas, a laser harp, and way more. (Lucius Selig’s cult props are a favorite, but this visit, I was particularly entranced by The Ancestral Crypt by Lauren YS aka Squidlicker.) If you focus solely on the art in House of Eternal Return, the name sufficiently communicates the context: the mundane pulled into a metaphysical snarl. The gravity of cosmic horror, with more possibilities than fear.

Since we’re talking about art as an expression of the cosmic, let’s talk about cosmic mysteries that exist on the total opposite end of reality from HoER—those cosmic mysteries involving a fictional work of art. In which the investigator’s or the victim’s relationship with that art is the closest we’ll get to knowing it ourselves, and some of the mystery seeps from that gap between experience and experience-of-experience.

Apart from Irena Rey, I’ve recently read Catherine Lacey’s alt-history Biography of X and was fortunate enough to borrow a copy of Arkady Martine’s limited run sci-fi novella Rose/House. Characters in these books express awe, love (and sometimes scorn) toward the artist at the story’s core. In cosmic mysteries, these complicated, very big, very human emotions provide a counterbalance to a character’s attempts to express cosmic dissonance—that uncomfortable feeling that the world you perceive is a tiny fraction of what’s really around you.

HoER is an attempt to depict that entirety. It’s somewhat overwhelming (which does make it uncomfortable for some guests, myself included). You’re driven to know what happened to the various members of the family, but the point of HoER’s cosmic mystery is to tinker with your sense of scale—not to argue that the small and personal is irrelevant in the ebb and flow of larger forces, but to anchor them amid the cosmic. And to see some cool art. Atmosphere is essential to a cosmic mystery, and the artwork of HoER is intended to evoke curiosity and wonder. There are characters with idiosyncratic interiorities and devotions, but in terms of checking boxes, it’s enough to bring those feelings out in its guests.

In most narratives, the cosmic is a siren song, fascinating and fatal. The ‘reward’ for seeking the unknown too successfully is to be devoured by it. The Seligs and the Pastores aren’t doing great, but in HoER (so long as you’re all right with Meow Wolf’s house art style), you’re balancing their fates with your personal curiosity and delight. You’re having your own experience with the multiverse, and, generally speaking, it’s not an experience of cosmic horror, but cosmic wonder.

Both are necessary for a cosmic mystery—a siren song still needs to be a song. But it’s more common to see momentary wonder used in the service of greater horror, not the reverse. I’ve set aside a lot of titles because they felt more cosmic horror, and so far none due to an excess of wonder. I’m sure this is because horror has a different relationship to plot, tension, and general seriousness than wonder. I’m reminded of the end of Disco Elysium, in which a marvelous vision caps off a bleak confrontation at the end of a long investigation rife with social failings and haunting revelations. I’d like to come back to this relationship between horror and wonder, and for now, I’m glad that Meow Wolf’s approach has made me think about it.

You’ll notice that I’ve yet to include a spoiler warning, or dig into the specifics of a certain scene or moment. The fun of House of Eternal Return lies in putting together the little details, and to be honest, the story’s great cosmic core isn’t so unique that it’s worth breaking it down for analysis and building it back up into some larger argument, because saying it here is the most boring way you could learn about it. I’ll never tell anyone to travel anywhere for anything without knowing them better. If you’re at all interested in the specifics of the Seligs and the Pastores and their worlds beyond, and you don’t see yourself being in Santa Fe, go ahead and spend an evening diving into the videos and fan theories and the credits section of the official site yourself, and let whatever catches your attention guide you from there.

CLUBHOUSEKEEPING

The Cosmic Mystery Club is creeping its tendrils beyond Substack. I wanted some way to track and share my search, so after some mulling over the benefits and drawbacks of various tracking platforms, I set up a Goodreads account here. Any books or graphic novels that I read for the sake of finding more cosmic mysteries, I’ll add to the bookshelves and, hopefully, to the Cosmic Mysteries list—please add to this list if you spend time on Goodreads. Please also feel free to suggest titles right here in the comments below, especially if it’s something new!

NEXT MONTH

Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.

This may be due to all the Animal Well I played last week (with no answers to its mysteries in sight), but I’m in the mood for architecture worship and deep waters. So next month, we’re mapping the Drowned and Derelict Halls of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi to explore how a howdunit might work in a cosmic mystery. See you then.