Take yourself a length of river as you would a length of ribbon, the reeds and uprooted trees on the embankments, the boggy smell of the opaque water and the rocks which puncture its surface, and then join the ends of your river together so that it flows forever back into itself: here is a place I have visited. You might picture a kind of waterwheel, but the river I have in mind runs not on an outer surface but within--a cylinder which, by spinning as it floats through outer space, generates enough centrifugal force to simulate a gravitational pull that’s relative, at all points of its circumference, to a center of rotation, the river on its inner edge held down by the same torque to which its flowing water ostensibly contributes. (Or something; I’m more of a humanities guy.) Such a construct is common enough across science fiction literature, films, and games--the torus-in-orbit tapped in 2013 (Elysium), 2007 (Halo), 1970 (Ringworld), and 1937 (Star Maker), to name only a few. Hell, doughnut-shaped space settlements were being conceptualized as early as the 1920s, and were being taken seriously by the aerospace engineering community just six years after the first moon landing. The “Stanford Torus,” as one project proposal was known, seems awfully aligned with the kind of homework a nerd like Kubrick was doing near-concurrently when he elected to spend a sixth of his 2001 budget on a vertically-mounted, 40-ft-diameter hamster wheel which allowed him to convey zero-g without CGI or green screens. 

Genre-fic touchstones and NASA experiments aside, I’m partial lately to the 2021 DLC to 2019’s Outer Wilds, which for USD $14.99 augments the game’s solar system-in-miniature with what is surely our most dynamically interactive version of these centrifugal stations--a cyclical river, a raft upon which to navigate its infinitely looping waterway, abandoned structures rich with mystery dotting its shore. While playing I often glance up from the gutter and outside the massive disc’s two transparent caps, windows of impossible strength which give a nice view of the same sun this waterlogged magnifying glass orbits and occasionally eclipses.  

That sun explodes twenty-two minutes after you begin the game; the premise is to explore its solar system before getting Groundhog Day’d and beginning anew. The game’s developer calls it “a narrative adventure game that just happens to take place inside a (miniature) astrophysics simulation.” Its complexly simulated gravitational forces should be felt firsthand, and going in (literal) circles within the torus-river has some strange side effects. Certainly the corridoric nature of the centrifugal-station prompts a more direct awareness of the kind of orbital movement to which we are at all times subjected, the (comparably) small torus in-game offering what is really only a much less deceptive version of the experience of standing “flat,” in reality, upon what we know to actually be quite round. Whether one flows along this simulated river or not, embodying a first-person perspective as it completes a full circle is no different from sitting still upon the earth while it completes each 24-hour rotation upon its axis. Both of these shapes orbit a much larger sun; we don’t need a clock’s hands, or meditative practice, or a bad day job, to take notice of temporal circularity, after all--the sun is reminder enough. The torus-river, however, triples and destabilizes the familiar closed-loop of passing time, concentrically augmenting the 1) timeloop with 2) what’s orbitally infinite and 3) what’s infinitely tidal. Rafting along a river forever is one thing; simultaneously being pulled away from rather than towards some distant geometric center--what is a planet but the discarded, inside-out donut-hole of a torus, brother?--means, hypothetically, changing your perceptive relationship with time by way of your perceptive relationship with gravity. 

Time exists only because we can measure the movement of objects; gravity’s relationship with time offering a particularly thorny conundrum here, or so Einstein revealed to us. He also viewed games as the most elevated form of investigation. And with a game like Outer Wilds, one must distinguish between games which contain puzzles and games which are themselves puzzles: simplistic acts of observation and deduction take the place of diegetic logic problems, number-crunches, or sokoban blocks. While the gameplay loop here (ha) consists of omnidirectional jetpack/spaceship traversal, actual progression is only ever limited by knowledge gates: narratively and interactively, the game places the player within a closed loop and asks them to break it with their curiosity. Once they’ve inferred the relationships between these places, there is nothing stopping them from exiting the cycle merely by linking the clues together all at once.

Like this. Consider our own Nile Valley, a narrow strip of oasis buttressed on either side by vast, arid desert, the bounties of which led to the creation of the world’s first nation-state; to its construction of what remained for forty-four centuries the tallest building in the world; and, in divine kingship, to the longest-standing political and religious system in human history. Life in ancient Egypt so revolved around this river that its citizens oriented themselves not to the north but to the south, from which it flooded annually, and often referred to their own land as “the two banks.” Their regional dominance relied upon innovations in irrigation; in growing surpluses of wheat, flax, barley, linen by controlling cyclical floods, which likewise reinforced a particularly sturdy belief in reincarnation--the notion of time as a series of repeated cycles constantly reinforced by these seasonal patterns. And if their most complex and enduring feats were beholden to the belief that rulers could carry any entombed objects on to the next life--the monarchy was particularly adept at emphasizing ideology through architectural vocabulary--then they were even more exacting with the logistics demanded by such projects. Our oldest preserved sundial dates from the 13th century B.C., a chunk of limestone inscribed with black ink found in the Egyptian city of Thebes, almost certainly created for tracking the hours of the workday. Any number of the carpenters, potters, smiths, bakers, cooks, or brewers involved in the construction of tombs, monuments, and pyramids might have attuned their day using the shadow cast by such a device. Likewise, iconography was paramount for systemic control, with hieroglyphics now considered alongside Sumerian or Akkadian one of the oldest written languages, and religious figures such as the moon-and-sun-eyed falcon deity Horus constructed prominently almost everywhere. Egyptology’s most famous discovery, near-concurrent with our oldest sundial, is the nearly intact tomb of Tutankhamun (King Tut, colloquially). His sarcophagus is enclosed in a matroyoshka-like series of four nested, gilded shrines, the second of which is inscribed with passages from the funerary text now known as the Book of the Dead that are not found anywhere else. 

Among these inscriptions lies our earliest known example of what we know best by a Greek word: ouroboros. This symbol reappears with the Greek alchemists of Hellenistic Alexandria, most famously in a pictorial papyrus from 300 AD next to the inscription ἕν τὸ πᾶν (“The all is one”). The snake-eating-its-tail proliferates elsewhere like hydra-heads, reference points becoming near-impossible to trace. In the Pistis Sophia, a third-century Gnostic dialogue between Jesus and his disciples, Jesus notes that “the outer darkness is a great dragon whose tail is in its mouth, and it is outside the whole world, and it surrounds the whole world.” Neat. Skipping past the Norse serpent Jörmungandr, Quetzalcoatl, Iranian Mithraism, all of Hinduism, Nietzsche's Zarathustrian version, and Jung’s adjacent ramblings, the symbol appears famously in the Atalanta Fugiens, an “emblem book” prepared in 1617 by a physician to Emperor Rudolf II; in Sir Thomas Brown’s 1656 philosophical medical treatise Letter to a Friend--that the first day should make the last, that the Tail of the Snake should return into its Mouth precisely at that time--; in a Lutheran pastor’s 1734 treatise on vampires. Ditch the visual iconography and we see the essential metaphor at work in elder divine geometry and contemporary applied physics, not just the water cycle but mechanical systems--electrical circuits being closed loops, just like steam heating systems. Any circulation--blood through veins--becomes serpentine; toroidal. In 1861, the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé had a dream-vision of the ouroboros which resulted in his world-altering epiphany about the symmetrical ring structure of the molecule for benzene: applicable to all aromatic compounds and thus an inflection point for applied chemistry. The closed-loop serpent of the Renaissance alchemists leading us to refined petroleum, explosives, rocket fuel. Would that the Egyptians saw their grand theo-logistics project culminate, millenia on, in ourobori suspended in our atmosphere, in Outer Wilds, its monument to their transmigratory waters resonant beyond interstellar travel and the interactive elegies which it inspires.

What is a tail-eating serpent but a torus?  A torus but a closed spiral?