Dark Days?

Where has the year gone?  Today is the winter solstice, and I thought I'd revamp a quote-post with some wise words (not mine!) from the first year of this blog:

On this darkest day of the year (at least for those of us north of the equator), I thought a few inspirational words may be in order.  This was written by someone named "Knight Monk" in a LiveJournal group a few [2023 update: so so many] years ago.  I'm not omitting any intro; what follows is the entire post:

I am writing about more than sunlight, you know... although the swift-passing window of the Winter Day is no small matter either. These are the shortest days. And for many they are filled with hectic activity. For others they are cold and barren desert of Depression. Lao Tzu writes: "Movement overcomes cold."

Translating this into one's own practice means that during darkest days of Winter, instead of hiding under a comforter and napping all day, one should keep active. Do many things even if you feel like sitting still - this is how one makes it through the worst Winters, even the most terrible Winters of the mind.

 The converse also holds true. During the hot days of Summer, or even the most hectic and anxious times of any season, one should seek to still the mind and body. "Keeping still overcomes heat."

The words hold not just literal truth for the thermostat of the human body. Properly applied, the words can govern our moods. They put into the hands the reigns of the intellect. Anxiety and panic are also ruled by the still Player.

I wish everyone actively contemplative Dark Days and a fantastic New Year!  I'll try my best to finish that solo GBG, honest!  ;-)

Dinners with Erik and Andre

At some point, I'm really hoping to surprise everyone by bringing this ol' blog back to vibrant activity again.  We'll see if 2023 is the year for that.  Soon, I definitely plan to complete the "New" Glass Bead Game that I started in... um... December 2021.

For now, I've got two parallel quasi-reviews to share in this post.  I feel like the two things I'm discussing -- the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre and Erik Hoel's 2021 novel The Revelations -- sort of rhyme with one another in some abstract analogical way.  I'm definitely recalling the late Charles Cameron's concept of "Double-Quotes" here.  After both, I'll muse about the why and how of this pairing.  But first, let's get to them:

Dinner #1: Andre and Wally

A few months ago, I recommended this iconic 1981 movie to a friend.  I'm forgetting the key detail of why I thought this particular movie was the ideal thing to recommend at the time, but I haven't forgotten her response: it was a strong dislike of, and visceral aversion to, the guy who did most of the talking: Andre Gregory.

Okay, that meant I had to rewatch the whole thing, then.  I idolized this movie when I first saw it in my mid-20s.  I remember being kind of envious of the life Andre led.  Spiritual experiences that make you feel truly alive?  Hey, I want that.  Seeing through the hypocrisy and shallowness of the world?  Yeah, man.

But now, in my mid-50s, I definitely saw it with new eyes.  I got the feeling Andre was leaving out some key details -- like, how okay was his wife with all this spiritual gallivanting?  It really looked like he was describing a combination mid-life crisis and nervous breakdown.  Despite the guy trying to get away from it all, it still really seemed like he retained many of his upper-class NYC pretensions.  "40 Jewish women?"  The suckling teddy bear?  Blech.  If you don't know what these phrases mean, please don't feel the need to find out.

After talking through those weird experiences, Andre pivots onto a tangent that could only be described as self-loathing and resentment.  THEN it's all the fault of a shadowy dystopian government or something?  Our man Vizzini eventually gets up the gumption to poke some holes in the most excessiest of Andre's excesses, but it still doesn't shift away from the overall feel that the audience is supposed to end up nodding along with Andre anyway.

Now, I'll say, starting around 1:22:40, there's a bit that still enthralls me.  Andre gets optimistic about rebuilding the human spirit on a small scale.  Repairing the world through art and constructing a new language of the heart.  His focus on movements like Findhorn pointed me in some inspiring directions, back in the day.  But I think one can work to build these kinds of things without all that other self-indulgent crap.  :-)

Dinner #2: A Neuroscientist's Paean

Right around this time, I was in the middle of reading Erik Hoel's newest novel.  I admit to being suckered in by the author's Substack post about the publishing process... which maybe was his secret plan all along to boost readership.  I'm still not 100% sure about whether I can actually recommend this novel to others, but I can try to say some spoiler-free things about it.

There were things that definitely weren't my cup of tea.  The main character was unlikable, somewhat by design for sure... but the author was also going for some undiagnosed mental illness that made it a bit hard to step into his P.O.V.  The main female character seemed to be a bit of authorial wish fulfillment (brilliant scientist... but with a history as a fashion model...)  There was ample discussion of the animal research done in the neuroscience lab, which carried definite squick factor.

However!  Hoel's choice of narratorial voice was nothing short of fascinating.  I don't think I've seen "omniscient third person" done so... omnisciently!  We spend a lot of time in the main characters' heads, but we randomly bop into the heads of a dozen others, and also into the "heads" of some animals, plants, and inanimate objects.  And those unannounced "bops" go deep, even if they're brief.  All befitting for a novel about consciousneess, I guess.  At one singular place in the book, the narrator pivots briefly -- but hard -- to second person.  That kind of floored me.

Hoel also drops adjective non-sequiturs, about once per page, which often had me scratching my head.  Why that word in that place?  Again, because everyone's thinking about consciouness and the mind, these often feel inexplicably right.

About the actual content of the characters' discussions about consciousness... interesting to say the least.  I prefer the times when they're just talking to one another about these ideas, rather than when the main character is just thinking about them.  (The Joycean stream of consciousness has a bit of an undertow.)  For a few months after finishing the novel, I was continuing to follow up on various bread crumbs of theories and ideas on the internet.  The author based some of it on his own experience as a neuroscientist, and he knows academia, for sure!  So, while it maybe wasn't everything I hoped it would be, I'm still glad I read it.

- - - - - - -

So, why this pairing?  Both the movie and the novel are about people who think deeply about what it means to be human in this modern age.  They both ask tough questions about how we can better understand our inner natures to figure out how to live better.  But they also both show (maybe unintentionally?) how we can never fully purge ourselves of the full range of foibles and rough-edged imperfections that make us human in the first place.

Humanism

Although I've got some other ideas for posts more relevant to the topics of this blog, I just wanted to take note of an inspiring exchange I saw on Twitter.  Specifically, I wanted to preserve a bunch of the life-affirming responses to the following question:

(If for any reason the above image isn't viewable, the question was "What makes you feel love or appreciation for humans?")

~ ~ ~

Loyalty, courage, intelligence, dedication, wit, and discipline, plus, the power of facing unpleasant facts and daring to know... Hopefully with enough joie de vivre to enjoy the fruits!

There are actually a lot of people who quietly get up every morning, go out, and help others.

The dissenters and oddballs and those who know so much of our social life is theatre. One smirk across a room, sharing an unspoken observation or bit of humour, is a gold mine of renewed faith.

The ability of humans to recognize humanity, and the human capacity for empathy over sympathy. Speaking and seeing beauty and joy in stereotypical "ugly" can transform the environment in a room.

Authenticity, loyalty, competence & a general good nature or humor are the easiest ways to get me to appreciate another person. Trustworthiness & accountability will earn my respect. Excellence gets my admiration. A mysterious mix of all of those things (sometimes) leads to love.

I think if you see everyone as a divinely inspired soul — and have transcended all the culturally-induced silliness like race, gender, etc. — the kindness and empathy just flows from you.

Magnanimity.

Observing them demonstrating love or appreciation for other humans or animals in general, and me, in particular.

How they are in a crisis. True natures appear. Usually for the better.

The ability to find joy, connection with others and nature in the midst of the brutal fleetingness of our existence.

Kindness.

I love that we are all made out of bits of stars that exploded billions of years ago, yet our warped time scale is all we can manage to wrap our minds around. It makes it easier for me to understand how irrational we all are and how slow society and cultures move.

The fact that we’re are all far more similar than we are different. We all suffer from the human condition. We all have potential. We all fall short of it. We all struggle and try. How can we not have love for each other?

Children playing and laughing.

Intelligence, skilfully applied that helps our species to one degree or another. Don't care about sinners and saints. I care about the person who makes a better world.

Disgruntled tired old man still petting the kitten even though he hates cats. The mail man that leaves treats for dogs. The woman that cleans and refills her bird feeder. Even though only one bird comes. Sometimes when you observe you see humans want to connect. Even if its small.

Having gratitude for all the things miniscule and humongous that touch my life just by knowing someone. It reminds me that love is great. Especially when it's reciprocated.

Noctology

Okay, I know the worst thing you can hear from someone is "Hey, let me tell you about this dream I had last night."  But in this case, I hope you'll indulge me.  If anything, it's given me some cool stuff to think about.

In the dream, I was at a middle-school reunion.  That in itself probably seems kind of odd to many readers, since those don't seem to be common.  In the late 1970s, I think some administrators in my school wanted to out-Montessori the private schools or something, so they created a weird experimental class for some of the 5th and 6th graders.  Lucky me.  That first year, our teacher looked and acted like Annie Hall.  The second year, our teacher was an ex-priest who yelled at us a lot about our apathy.  We didn't really learn a whole hell of a lot, but I'm still great friends with many of those weird kids.

Okay, the dream.  I could name the four classmates I was sitting with at this imagined reunion, but I won't.  In that bit of subconscious reality, we had all become scientists of some kind, and we had just (in an hour or two of chatting at the reunion) made a major collaborative discovery about how the human brain works.  We managed to prove, conclusively, that the brain actually does make a permanent record of everything it experiences -- both external perceptions and internal trains of thought -- and that aging does not degrade that record in any way.

Unfortunately, we also proved that it's completely and utterly impossible to retrieve those records past a certain point.  Something about the brain carefully laying down layers of cells on top of one another, and you'd have to destroy the brain to peel them back.

But still, we showed (somehow!) that nothing is ever really lost.

The actual first moments of my dream were maybe just 10 or 20 seconds of happy chatting about the fame and fortune that would soon be coming our way, once we published our amazing discovery.

I didn't mention that the reunion wasn't just for our little nerdy group.  There were hundreds of people there from many other classes and years at the same school.  Jocks, too.  Dreams can be very cliched, can't they?  The jocks mounted a kind of mock "attack" on the nerds.

It was actually just a jokey pantomime of an attack; nothing truly dangerous.  Although it was meant in good fun, it still impelled our group to laugh along for a second or two, then grab our drinks and find some more peaceful place to chat.

Dreams being what they were, we found ourselves in a much older and decrepit part of the building hosting the reunion.  It essentially was a huge rickety barn filled with junk.  Have I been watching too much American Pickers?

Ever the nerd, I sought out the piles of old books.  In waking life, I've been working a lot on my teaching, so in the dream I found all kinds of useful resources.  Old textbooks.  A module for teaching the stuff that I'm teaching right now, but with the theme of the Netflix show Stranger Things.

I also found a set of astronomy books, but they were filed alphabetically under the letter N.  The reason is that some of them had the title "Noctology."  The study of the night.  I swear to you that I had never heard that word before, and a Google search tells me that not many other people have, either.

That's essentially the dream.

And I'm absolutely entranced by the idea of being a full-on Noctologist.

Sure, I've always been a stargazer.  Readers of the blog have seen plenty of sci-fi fandom here, and a bit of actual astronomical musing, too.  It's under the stars, and only under the stars, where I feel an immediate emotional sense of divinity. I look up, remember what it is I'm looking at, and I think "Oh yeah, that's right. I love you. How could I have forgotten since the last time I was out here?"

But noctology isn't quite the same as astronomy, is it? About 25 years ago, I was introduced to the folk singer John Gorka, and saw myself in "Good."

I am good at night
I am good at night
Sun don't fit me right
I tried with all my might
I am good at night
I am good at night

There are plenty of other musical paeans to the dark side like this.  One that I think is kind of interesting is inserted subtly in just a single line of Poison's hair-metal ballad "Every Rose Has Its Thorn."  You remember the line, don't you?  "Every night has its dawwwwn..."  For years, that line just passed over my head.  I assumed it was just conveying that old saw about it always being darkest before the dawn.  But look again, in context with the rest of the verse.

Every rose has its thorn
Just like every night has its dawn
Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song
Every rose has its thorn

Each line begins by talking about something good, then says how it can be ruined by one little flaw.  The night is the good thing, and the dawn is the flaw!  Good old Bret Michaels... closet noctologist.

I wonder how much more I should explore noctology as a frame of mind.  I kinda sorta started already a few years ago, with some thoughts on cosmicism.  There are traditions -- both real (Judaism) and fictional (Tolkien's elves) -- that start the new day at sunset rather than sunrise.  There's Mozart's star-studded Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute.

Technically, she's the villain, but she's also enough of a force of nature to snag the only slot for opera on Voyager's golden record that was sent out into the darkest reaches of space.

Nocturnes and aubades.  Night owls and early birds.  Nuit and Hadit.  Cherry red and midnight blue.

There's a lot there to ponder, and I don't have a crisp ending to bring it all together.  Maybe coming up with the perfect words is a concept more appropriate for the stars.  The night is okay with letting stuff happen, then layering it over with other stuff.  Nothing is ever really lost, after all.

Mathematical Rebirth

It's been a busy spring, but I want to be sure to post to the blog when there's something I'm excited about.  Given that this something has to do with games, spirituality, and math... I think it counts.

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I became obsessed with a little book in my school's library.  Rebirth: The Tibetan Game of Liberation described a strange cousin of "Chutes and Ladders."  Seemingly originating in the 13th century, this was a game of 104 squares that essentially led you from hell (at low numbers) to heaven (at the top).  You started out near the middle, at square #24, and you rolled dice to determine where you go next.  You can go up or down, of course.  Each square has its own unique set of rules for where the dice take you next.  You can get stuck in some squares for a long time.  The closer you get to Nirvana at the top, the less of a chance you have for going back through the nasty stuff at the bottom...

"Playing" this game is supposed to be a meditative exercise that gets you thinking about your karma, and about how all the ups & downs of life are just transitory distractions from the important things -- well, the important things if you're a Buddhist, anyway.  :-)

I've never been a Buddhist, but I was obsessed with this thing as a kid.  Along with D&D's systematized lists of gods and outer planes, I suppose I was eager to find some mathematical rigor in the often woo-woo world of spirituality.  I copied out the board onto a large piece of cardboard.  I still have it, 40 years later.  Here's a piece...

A few days ago I got to thinking about this game again, and I looked up some details online.  For the fun of it (shut up), I wrote a computer program to simulate the square-by-square rules and was thus able to run thousands of random games.  It was cool to learn that the most probable number of "turns" was about 93.  The shortest possible game I think runs about 18 turns, and the longest ones that my computer churned through were about 430 turns in duration.  Oh, the wheel of karma can sometimes be cruel.

I was also curious about how the game tended to progress from the lower to the higher levels, so I made a graph of 200 random games, with time normalized such that the longer and shorter games all are squeezed into the same start-to-finish range:

I find it interesting that there's such a tight cluster of activity in the lower realms (below about square #26) in the first third of the game, then the probabilities spread out to nearly everywhere.  Once you're about two thirds of the way done, though, you rapidly converge on the higher nirvanas and make increasingly steady progress to full enlightenment.

I also found an article by someone named Jonathan Doner, which proposed that the overall concept of this game could be "reskinned" straightforwardly to other spiritual traditions.  (I'm so doing that.)  The article goes on to talk about how playing the game could be a useful means of general education for an enlightened citizenry -- a possible path to the ancient Greek concept of paideia, perhaps.  For sure, it reminds me of the lofty sacramental goals of my own little slice of nirvana: the Glass Bead Game.  We'll see where this leads....

Both/And

Hey, do you remember when I was doing the April 2015 A-Z on Fiery Manifestos?  Nearly every day I was struck by the dichotomy in these things... some were championing the right to be independent and

"do your own thing,"

and others were all about the interdependency of a world in which we all ought to

"be kind to one another."

My mind was reeling, going back and forth between these seemingly incompatible utopian goals on a daily basis.  It's also easy to see them in the eternal war of words between opposite sides of the political spectrum.

However, on the drive home from work yesterday, I think I figured it out.  You want to find your purpose?  Your True Will (or maybe the Will of God)?  Find yourself the path through the forest of life that maximizes both goals.  Forget about trying to meet in the mushy middle between the two.  Build up both sand-castle peaks as high as you can.

(Enough metaphors for ya?)

Once you find that maximizing path and start walking along it, you'll not only be independently doing your thang, but you'll also be in service to others and making their lives better.  You know, in that way that only you can do?  If you're building up only one of the two sand castles, and not the other, you may not be on that path yet.

I think this could be a sublimely practical compass.

Cthulhu fhtagn!?

I've recently had a chance to fill in a huge, yawning gap in my geek cred.  Up until this past month, I'd never actually read any H. P. Lovecraft.

I've always known the tropes... In the 1980s, I practically memorized the "Cthulhu Mythos" section of the original D&D Deities & Demigods book.  I got the joke about "Uhluhtc" (oo-loo-tec) in the original Heavy Metal movie.  Heck, I own the game Call of Cthulhu, and I even consulted on a supplement for CoC back in the 1990s!

Artist: Erol Otus.  I'm trying to illustrate this post without any tentacles.

So shame on me for taking this long, for sure.  What spurred me to start reading wasn't Lovecraft himself, but rather a short story from 2014 by Ruthanna Emrys called "The Litany of Earth."  (Online in full here.)  It's powerful and very well-written.  I resist saying too much more about it because I'd like people to read it without preconceptions, as I did.  Suffice to say that it provides a new perspective on the Lovecraftian world that genuinely surprised and charmed me.

This story also got me to seek out more information about cosmicism, a (sorta kinda) real-world attempt to broaden Lovecraft's ideas into a coherent and satisfying belief system.  Despite its stereotypical veneer of bleakness and existential nihilism, there seems to be some raw material for a more positive and optimistic path; see here, for example.  I was already familiar with Kenneth Grant's mind-bending attempts to do something vaguely similar, but it was nice to see a few more modern, less occultish, perspectives on it all.

Virgil Finlay

However, the rub:

Nearly all of the ideas that fascinated me -- both from Emrys' story and from the cosmicistical writings I found on the web -- were extrapolations from Lovecraft... not really taken directly from what he says on the page.  His stories are powerful and interesting -- and I do intend on reading more of them to complete my education.  But after reading a handful, I'm learning that Lovecraft's well-known reputation for bleakness and terror is well justified.

I'm hoping to find some small kernels of hope in the remaining HPL stories in my queue.  I might give Derleth a try, too.  But I'm starting to suspect that Lovecraft may be a bit like another early 20th century thinker who ushered in some scary new ideas: Aleister Crowley.  Both kind of serve as anti-prophets -- i.e., conveyers of wild thoughts that spurred on others in unique ways, but who ought not to be "followed" too slavishly or literally.  That way lies, well, the mountains of madness.

Back to Erol Otus

W is for the Wilburys

Well, it's all right, riding around in the breeze.
Well, it's all right, if you live the life you please.
Well, it's all right, doing the best you can.
Well, it's all right, as long as you lend a hand.

Is 1989's End of the Line a manifesto?  Glob if I know... but I do think it fits in with my theme.  It seems to encapsulate the hard-won wisdom from the lives of Bob, Jeff, Tom, George, and Roy, which is nothing to sneeze at...

You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring
(At the end of the line)
Waiting for someone to tell you everything
(At the end of the line)
Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring
(At the end of the line)
Maybe a diamond ring.

To quote a recent D&D blog post from Joe Bloch, "There's no DIY unless YDI."

But I really love how maturity and moderation seep through this song.  Yes, you've got to go out and do all the things.  But there are no guarantees that the results will be what you hoped they'd be.

Well, it's all right, even if they say you're wrong.
Well, it's all right, sometimes you gotta be strong.
Well, it's all right, as long as you got somewhere to lay. (*)
Well, it's all right, every day is Judgement Day.  (**)

Hmm, I still don't quite hear those exact lines.  (*) has always sounded to me like "...someone to lay with," and (**) really has got to be "...every day is just one day."  But the sentiments are pretty similar, no matter which lyrics website you believe.  :-)

Well, it's all right, even when push comes to shove.
Well, it's all right, if you got someone to love.

I won't quote the whole song.  Their mini-homage to Purple Haze was fun.  But I do have a special love for the above couplet because it was one of the last things Roy sang,

Well, it's all right, even if you're old and gray.
Well, it's all right, you still got something to say.

And that one because it was George,

Well, it's all right, remember to live and let live.
Well, it's all right, the best you can do is forgive.

And that one because I'm still so far from achieving it.

I had a big ending planned for this post, in which I'd compare the "life is a journey" metaphor in this song with some other ones that use the same idea.  But, eh, maybe another time... or in the comments.  (What are some of your favorite songs about the journey of life?)  For now, I'm going to go riding around in the breeze for a bit.

  

Well, it's all right, even if the sun don't shine.
Well, it's all right, we're going to the end of the line.

R is for Russell

(This post was originally titled "L is for Liberal Decalogue," but Luke bumped it.)

The topic of today's post has been called a micro-manifesto of sorts.  In philosopher Bertrand Russell's autobiography, he tucked in his own version of the 10 commandments... not so much a replacement for the Mosaic law, but a "liberal" supplement for the modern scientific age.  It was originally printed in the New York Times in 1951.

Epistemological Mack Daddy

I put "liberal" in scare quotes above because it's meaning has drifted quite a bit over the decades.  I just checked the holy OED, and the meaning of the word that I think Russell had in mind was "favorable to, or respectful of, individual rights and freedoms."

As a college kid in the 1980s, I had a copy of these 10 commandments taped up on my desk in the dorm (next to these lyrics).  Just reading them again brings me back to those heady days, when I was just starting to think about a career in science.  Here they are:

- - - - - - -

The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

- - - - - - -

Again, there's that tension between rival themes.  So much of the above is about doing your own thing, no matter what the authorities will tell you to do.  But there are hints about a need for some moderation.  He warns us not to be over-confident or arrogant enough to impose our way on others, even if we are in the right.  Just a pinch of be nice to one another, in other words.  :-)

A few other thoughts:

• From the appearance of the word "husband" in #4, it's interesting that he may have been writing this for a female audience.
• Many online commentaries on #5 make it clear that he's talking about authority as something distinct from expertise.  The latter is what scientists (ought to) convey to the public, not the former.
• #10 seems a bit out of left field to me.  I wonder if this envy is something that Russell struggled with himself.
• I don't think I'll ever fulfill #1.  There are some things that I know.

P is for Pressure

My original plan was for today's post to be about this guy...

Jack Parsons was a real-life rocket scientist, and he was also friends (frenemies?) with yesterday's subject and with L. Ron Hubbard.  He wrote some rockin' tracts on liberty, but after Monday's exposure to Crowley's OZ, I'm a bit freedomed out.

Instead, I'd rather talk about someone with an even better moustache...

What can I say about my main man, Farrokh Bulsara?  There's no need to biographize, is there?  But in 1981 he and his band mates teamed up with David Bowie to create Under Pressure, a mini-manifesto of compassion and fiery love.

Pressure, pushing down on me
Pressing down on you, no man ask for.
Under pressure, that brings a building down
Splits a family in two,
Puts people on streets.

The lyrics come back again and again to the plight of the homeless, but sometimes I wonder if they're also meant to stand in for the rest of us.  We all sometimes feel "the terror of knowing what the world is about."  Especially when we're too busy, too under pressure, to see the answer that's right in front of us.

Turned away from it all like a blind man
Sat on a fence, but it don't work
Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn
Why?  Why?  Why?
Love... love... love... love... love

It might have been this song that got me to thinking about "love" as something tangible and real.  Not just some fuzzy emotion or feeling.  Okay, not something like an apple or the Boston Red Sox, either.  But maybe more like "pi."  There'd be something special about 3.14159265... even if no human ever had ever calculated its digits.  But if pi objectively exists, then certainly must love.

Kind of corny, right?  Freddie and David acknowledged that, too.  But it doesn't matter, in the end.

'Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night;
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves,
Under pressure.

We might not ever eliminate the pressure, but we can take ownership of our share of it.  The light of love helps push back the edge of the night, too.

I is for Independence

I think today's post might be the most explicitly political of my A-to-Z series, but since the topic is about 240 years old, I don't anticipate it stoking up much heated partisan argument....

It may be naive American parochialism, but I have an unabashed love of the Declaration of Independence.  Although it's been drilled into the minds of schoolchildren for centuries, it's still very much a fiery manifesto.  Have we always upheld its words?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

No, but our own failures should not detract from the worthiness of the ideal.  The original abuses that led to rebellion and revolution were laid out "to a candid world" in the Declaration, and capped with an air-tight conclusion,

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Although on the face of it this conclusion may not be controversial, it's the application that's tricky.  What happens when some people think the situation applies, and others don't?

Thomas Jefferson wrote the original draft of the Declaration in June of 1776, and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia proceeded to do lots of editing by committee.  That's not usually a good thing.  However, it did prune away some of his more flowery flourishes (like shouting "our everlasting Adieu! eternal separation!" to Great Britain).  Unfortunately, the need for compromise between all 13 colonies also pruned away Jefferson's strong language against slavery.

My own connection to the events of July 4, 1776 is inevitably tangled up with the celebration of the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.  For those of you who weren't alive or old enough to know, the bicentennial was everywhere.  As a 9 year old kid, I couldn't help but get swept up in it.  Around that time I grew to love the musical 1776, which attempted to tell the story of the drafting and adoption of the Declaration as accurately as possible... with people breaking into song and dance for no reason.

Whovians will know that Ben Franklin there was the narrator of Tom Baker's imported adventures on PBS

Being that the bicentennial was also taking place within a decade of the Apollo moon landings, the patriotic imagery kind of got mixed up a bit.  At times it seemed like we were we celebrating our ultimate independence... from the Earth's gravity!  :-)  Still, I loved the lunar-themed reverses of the silver dollars from that era...

And how could I forget the anthem of the time, written (ironically?) by two Brits for their American friend's newly formed tennis team?  I've always identified with the lyrics -- especially since I spent many of my formative years in Philadelphia itself.  The analogy between America's independence and the hard-won freedom of a lone young person, striking out into the world, has always been with me.

The whippoorwill of freedom

G is for G'Kar

Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of the sci-fi TV show Babylon 5.  It was a weird show... part action adventure, part philosophical and political intrigue, and part break-your-heart melodrama.  It pioneered the use of long, planned-out story-arcs that are much more common these days.  Creator and writer J. Michael Straczynski also loved him some long, eloquent speeches that could double as manifestos.

Toward the end of the series, the main characters were involved in creating a new Interstellar Alliance, to help rebuild the galaxy after some awful wars.  It was natural that they turned to the tragic, messianic figure of G'Kar to write the preamble to their new constitution.

Without further ado, let me give you G'Kar's "Declaration of Principles:"

The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
The language is not Narn, or Human, or Centauri, or Gaim, or Minbari.
It speaks in the language of hope.
It speaks in the language of trust.
It speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion.
It is the language of the heart and the language of the soul,
But always it is the same voice.
It is the voice of our ancestors, speaking through us,
And the voice of our inheritors, waiting to be born.
It is the small, still voice that says
We are one.
No matter the blood
No matter the skin
No matter the world
No matter the star,
We are one.
No matter the pain
No matter the darkness
No matter the loss
No matter the fear,
We are one.
Here, gathered together in common cause, we agree to recognize this
singular truth and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another.
Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us and each voice lost
diminishes us.

We are the voice of the Universe, the soul of creation, the fire
that will light the way to a better future.
We are one.

What more can I say?  In the dark days after 9/11/2001, I posted excerpts from the above on an old web page of mine.

- - -

Oh, I can say one more thing:  Another reason that I loved this phase of Babylon 5 was that the Interstellar Alliance ended up being the new home of the Rangers, an elite chivalric order of space-faring warriors.  Sorry Klingons, the Rangers were just too cool for school...

Entil'Zha veni, baby

Time... to play

As I've been planning out the posts for my April A-Z adventures in the realm of fiery manifestos, I realized that I hadn't found any that are specifically about role-playing games.  There's no shortage of passionate commentary about them -- see, for example, Alexis and JB and Cyclopeatron.  But I've been looking for something that mixes the passion, the old-school spirit, and some decidedly new-school futurism into something that might catch fire as a 21st century gaming manifesto.

I haven't found that yet, but I did just find the seeds of all of those things in a recent, excellent post by Noisms, titled Storytelling and Immersion, or We Are Ahead of the Curve.  Go ahead and read it; it's not long.

The references to Willy Wonka and Blade Runner were fun, but the eye-opening idea for me was that the key to a decades-old goal of web enthusiasts -- i.e., the promised land of hypertext and social 2.0ness and interactivity of every kind -- may have been already been invented back in the 1970s by some wargamers in a basement in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.  Dungeons & Dragons, and all its descendants, found an engaging, fulfilling way to combine "...the very participatory aspect of games with the narrative absorption of storytelling" (to quote the Frank Rose interview that Noisms came across).

I won't get into the details of precisely how D&D-type games "generate" engaging and immersive stories.  Suffice to say that not everyone agrees about how to best accomplish this!  Often times the best stories emerge in ways that the players never imagined they would.  Many game masters attempt to manage the narrative beats of rising and falling tension, only to have their players come away with a wildly different take on the emotional roller-coaster that was played out in real time.

All this makes me also want to think about the possible intersection of RPGs (role playing games) with GBGs (glass bead games); the twin celestial luminaries that I aim to follow with this blog.  I've done much less cross-comparison than I've wanted to... this post is only the 3rd in the history of this blog to use both the RPG & GBG topic labels!  But I'll definitely be thinking more about this in the weeks and months ahead.

The Meaning of Liff

I'm thoroughly enjoying the book that I'll be reviewing for Squid-man's Cephalopod Coffeehouse next week.  While reading, my eyes stopped on a short snippet that probably won't make it into my review, but I wanted to explore it a bit anyway.  While still keeping the identity of the book secret, I can share that isolated sentence:

"Only a space-faring culture could truly transcend its environment, and join others in giving a purpose to creation."

I'm sure I've talked about that first part before -- i.e., my hope that humanity will indeed follow this path and at least make the attempt to seed ourselves elsewhere.  It's the second part that struck me, though.  "Giving a purpose to creation."  It implies that there is no imposed, absolute purpose to creation, and we have to do that job ourselves.  Certainly not a new idea...

But it's still controversial.  On the surface, it seems to disagree with most established religions, which come packaged with tons of absolute purpose.  I really don't think there needs to be a contradiction, though.  With just a bit of leeway, the process of figuring out your purpose maps pretty cleanly onto the idea of "discovering God's plan for your life."  Much like the idea of natural rights in law, the details about who or where or whence it comes from don't seem so important in the end.  The key part is that your purpose isn't handed to you by other people.  It's your birthright to discover and follow, all by your lonesome.

On a whim, I wandered a bit through Wikipedia's article on The Meaning of Life and found several close parallels to the above ideas.  Like I said, not new.  :-)  That article didn't mention Crowley's Thelema, though, which apotheosizes the phrase "Do What Thou Wilt."  The twist is that you've got to think reeeally hard about what your true will is, and you'll eventually find that it's best when tempered with love.  It ends up being deeper and more subtle than something you can articulate into a few sentences, though trying to do that is helpful.  Sometimes, experience and hindsight helps you see it more clearly than anything else.

As I read over the above, it kind of sounds like I have it all figured out in my own case, doesn't it?  Nope!  :-)  But I do try to keep my compass needle pointed in the right direction with some prayer-like words.  A Thelemic colleague of mine came up with the following four aspirational phrases that occasionally pass through my brain...

Lead me to the Light of my true will.

Strengthen me to embrace every experience of Life.

Fulfill me in the rapture of thy Love.

Awaken me to the knowledge of Liberty.

I've got to say, though, that since I'm not sure to whom I'd be addressing these words, I don't use them all that frequently.  Something that feels more natural to me is the following, which I pieced together from several different ideas, starting with the Buddhist concept of dedication of merit:

May all be loved.

May all find liberty.

May all become co-creators of the cosmos.

That covers all the bases, doesn't it?  :-)

- - - - -

Postscript:  I wanted to squeeze in a reference to Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy somewhere, but didn't manage it.  Also, for completeness, the title refers to this and the image to this.

Post-postscript, 10/20:  As I reread my final prayer after thinking about Squid's recent post on the plight of the Palestinians, I'm thinking... #FirstWorldProblems.  Maybe there should be a line at the beginning that asks first that "May all be safe and sound."

Love and the Fight

October is here, and it's treadmill season again.  This morning, while marching up an endless incline, I received an interesting juxtaposition of music from the ol' MP3 random shuffle.

First, Uprising by Muse.

Second, Come and Get Your Love, by Redbone.

If you know the songs, you'd probably think it might be somewhat jarring to segue from hard-driving V-for-Vendetta-style rebelling against the Man, right into a groovin' 70s Native American love-in.

Strangely, I found myself not being jarred at all.  It kind of worked for me.

For the rest of the day, I wondered why.  I'm still not sure if I have an answer, but I think it tells me that our yearning for love and our yearning for justice are related to one another very deeply.  It tells me that Aleister Crowley's statement "Love is the law, love under Will" doesn't mean that love is a second-class emotion, under the thumb of one's intentional volition.  Very much the opposite.  Instead, I think it means that you can only have real love if you have the freedom to will it into existence.  The freedom to say "yes" or "no" when it comes a-callin.  But sometimes that freedom must be fought for.

This also reminds me, for the umpteenth time, of my dissatisfaction with Neil Peart's Clockwork Angels (both album and novel).  I hate to belabor this point yet again, but it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that the author of 2112 -- a triumphant and tragic Uprising of its time -- has changed so much that he lets the bad guys go their merry way.  I don't see the need for such a strict either-or, here.  Turn the other cheek or be consumed by the dark side?  Please... it's possible to fight for freedom and live a life of love.

I don't think the above contains any sparkling new insight on humanity and the world.  "Cygnus: master of the bleedin' obvious."  (Fawlty Towers quote)  But it's not every day that the random music shuffle gets one thinking about such things.  Might as well document it.  :-)

Can 30 year old ad copy make you cry?

Although I haven't yet discovered any new Electronic Arts ads, like the one that I blogged about earlier, check out what I did find, in the September 1983 Scientific American...

Click for big ideas

Yup, the original.  Bagged in the wild, two months prior to the appearance of the Bill Budge follow-up ad that I posted earlier.  Its full text is archived HERE by Chris Hecker, who was kind enough to link to my previous post.

Is it a coincidence that my nostalgia for this heady era of "retro-computing" shares similar space in my brain with a love of fantasy role-playing games of the same era?  My own (still-unfinished) contribution in that arena is called Homebrew '82, after all.  What the two things share is a fierce Do-It-Yourself ethic that may still exist in some places, but has been largely supplanted by many more people that are happy with just buying stuff and using it OTS (off the shelf) or playing it RAW (rules as written).

Yes, yes, I know.  "In my day..."

But there are other, possibly more timeless, connections.  The EA manifesto above says that what they're after is "Something along the lines of a universal language of ideas and emotions."  But how is that any different from this...?

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

That's Hermann Hesse, from The Glass Bead Game.

That's what I still think is possible to create, now, a mere 30 years after Bill Budge put on that silly leather glove and began to remake the world.  Computers may help make it easier to accomplish, but they're just tools.

Let's get building!  :-)

False Start Friday 2: Electric Boogaloo

Last week I took the plunge and discussed (for the first time ever, I think) some old and ambitious plans for a world-spanning novel.  At the heart of that novel was going to be a rediscovered ancient manuscript called the Theothany that described the death of the Greek gods.

FYI, I honestly don't know how I would have inserted these ancient words into the "present-day" action of the novel.  It probably would have been too ham-fisted just to include the whole thing, in feaux epic-poem translation, but I would have hated to give only small pieces.  Like I said last week, a huge majority of my research time was devoted to the ancient manuscript instead of to the story of my idealized alter-ego.

Anyway, after digging through my Theothany notes, I found my detailed (and dot-matrix printed!) outline of the ancient manuscript, dated September 24, 1989. I didn't read it last week, but I did now.

Urgh... I think I just rolled my eyes almost as much as I did in my last post.  Bloated and disjointed to say the least.  But I'll press on!  ;-)  Hopefully my fortysomething brain will mold my twentysomething thoughts into something that makes a little more sense as I summarize...

Live from New York, it's the fire bearer!

It starts with Prometheus.  You know his deal: bound to a rock and tortured for crimes against the gods.  Not only for giving fire and forethought to mankind, but also for refusing to tell Zeus the name of the woman he will impregnate with the son that is fated to dethrone him, as Zeus overthrew his own father.

I have in my notes that Prometheus said he wished to become mortal at the end of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, to end the pain of the torture. So, in my alternate take on the story, I had Zeus grow exasperated enough to eventually grant that request: "Sure, BE mortal. Try to lead men as I lead the gods and see what I have to put up with!"

Prometheus is released, now mortal.  He still has his memory and knowledge, so he doesn't wander far before people realize he's special.  I noted in my outline that this occurred in 1464 BC (der... why so exact?) so it turns out he gets crowned king of Minoan Crete.  His people appreciate his limited future-sight, but they remain distant from him because of his sullen and solemn nature.

A wandering dude soon appears at Prometheus' court.  He is Senenmut, recently exiled from Egypt because of some intrigue with the queen.  He's traveled far, and he's learned many things.  He knows that many past generations of gods have come and gone throughout human history. He teaches Prometheus about their eternal cycles.  They become friends and initiate a cultural renaissance (giving rise to the Atlantis legends, to boot).

Prometheus eventually finds a wife and has a son.  The son, Glaucos ("bright one"), dies from some malady, and Senenmut uses his Egyptian healing arts to bring him back.  But one of Hades' minions sees that the butterfly-like soul of Glaucos started to enter the underworld, but then flitted back up to the world of the living.  Hades reports this anomaly to Zeus, and Zeus thunderbolts Senenmut for messing with things he shouldn't.  This brings back all of Prometheus' prior rebellious rage, and he swears a very loud and vocal oath that all of the immortals will DIE on this very spot within the next 1000 years.

Zeus no like that, so to punish this whole Minoan renaissance, he thunderbolts the island of Thera, whose volcano is known to have destroyed said civilization.  My notes have some suggestions for Prometheus to survive this devastation, make it to the island of Samothrace, start up their mystery cult, and live out the rest of his days in exile.  Kind of anticlimactic, though.  But Prometheus and Senenmut (the latter becoming the model for legends of the healer Asklepios) live on as shades in the underworld, and hold their grudges.

Anyway, flash forward to 456 BC.  Two men have re-sparked Zeus' fear of being overthrown.  One is the playwright Aeschylus (whose entire Prometheia trilogy is conveniently lost to us), who was accused of revealing the secrets of mystery religions on the stage.  The other was a brash Olympic athlete named Brisos -- my notes mention similarities to this guy, who I recall being very full of himself.  Brisos was a distant descendant of Achilles, and thus a carrier of the blood of Thetis, one of the possible fated mothers of Zeus' dethroner.

Long story short: Zeus thunderbolts these guys, too.  Sigh. I said it was disjointed.  Now there are FOUR ghosts in the underworld who are carrying a torch (pun unintended) for the death of the gods.  Their hopes are to be fulfilled by young Socrates.

Bogus.

The infamously disagreeable philosopher is contacted by the ghosts, who can't accomplish much in the living world in their ethereal state.  Socrates has some ideas of his own, too.  He proposes they find a temporary ally among the gods who would be a natural supporter of mankind's bid for "independence."  That ally ends up being Pallas Athena.  She has a soft spot for Prometheus (who helped her be born from Zeus' skull), and is well balanced in her wisdom.

Socrates travels around and uses that persuasive rhetorical power of his to convince Greeks to elevate Athena to a more prominent position in their worship.  Over years, they do, and she absorbs this new power and sets herself up on another mountain as a rival to Zeus.  Guess who begins to become increasingly jealous?

Zeus eventually destroys Athena (gah, I repeated that trope a lot).  This causes Metis -- the mother of Athena, still tucked away inside Zeus' head -- to freak out.  "That's enough!"  Zeus' head throbs and throbs, and eventually explodes him with a golden light.

What emerges is a golden, youthful god, the second child of Metis, whom Socrates (seeing this in a vision, I think) recognizes as Phanes of the Orphic mysteries. Phanes had some primordial "Logos" action going on, since he actually existed before any of the other gods, but was also ever-new.  Phanes extracts the immortal "ichor" from all of the gods (including himself) and disperses it, much diluted, to all of humanity, present and future. This is a kind of "grounding" of the heavenly energy back down to the earth.

Socrates wakes up from his vision, and the world looks fresh and new.  No more gods -- we must be our own inspiration from now on.  His final line is "I have so much to learn...."

--------------------------

Like I said, not too polished!  I probably tightened up the plot in a bunch of small ways in the act of typing out the above, and I can think of many more things that could be done to improve it.  But do I want to?!?  I should make it clear that I was hugely inspired by Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.  At the time, I even memorized the final few stanzas that began,

This is the day, which down the void abysm

At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism...

Yes, yes, Romantic angst mixed with Nietzsche's "Gott ist tot."  Fun for 1989-me; much less my bag in 2012.

False Start Friday: The Theothany

A certain desert lily has thrown down the gauntlet and issued a challenge for people to post bits of their shelved and dusty writing projects on Fridays in November.  Although I'm not a fiction writer in any sense of the word, in my college days I spent a number of years fervently taking notes and building the superstructure of a "great American novel" of sorts.  These notes just celebrated a birthday that would make them of legal drinking age in most US states, so maybe it's time to air them out and see what they contain.

I should warn the reader that I only wrote a teeny, tiny bit of actual prose for this book -- and this post won't present any of that!  The inch-thick folder that I've been looking through contains outlines, bits of plot and character, and even some poetry.

So... gulp... here it is:

Alma-Tadema FTW

The Theothany.

That title is meant to be an ancient Greek neologism, the flip side of Hesiod's Theogony, which dealt with the birth of the gods.  My term deals with their demise (theos + thanatos), and thus is a closer cousin to the Norse Gotterdämmerung.

There was a Greek myth component to this novel, but that was just one part of it.  The main action was supposed to take place in the present day, with a protagonist who was a thinly veiled surrogate for myself.  (I was entranced by Joyce's fiercely independent alter ego at the time...)  But the "twist" is that the action takes place in a slightly alternate world than our own.  In the late 1970s, archaeologists in that world discovered the manuscript of an ancient Greek epic poem -- also called the Theothany and reported to be a lost work of Aeschylus -- in which the death of the gods is starkly portrayed as something that happened literally.

The discovery of these ancient words changes history, but only subtly.  The first chapter of the book was going to be a "show don't tell" example of that divergence:  After reading a published translation of the ancient Theothany, an infamous individual goes further off the beam and kills himself before, in our world, he would have killed John Lennon in 1980.  I researched Chapman's mental illness quite a bit and attempted to weave some of it into this chapter, with his own final thoughts interleaved with the lyrics of Lennon's Starting Over.

(I think Zack Snyder did something eerily similar in his 2009 movie of Alan Moore's Watchmen.  The introductory montage showed the introduction of "real" superheroes into that alternate world with Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A Changin playing in the background...)

But most of my book was going to be about the protagonist, who in my Joycean fog I gave the provisional name "Finn."  We see a bit of his time in college in Philadelphia, but then something happens in his life that makes him reevaluate his path.  Inspired by Lennon's further alt-history activism in the 1980s, Finn joins the Peace Corps and begins an international journey that forms the backbone of the novel.

There's love, there's loss, and there's an ending in which, naturally, our hero finds himself among the ruins of Greece.  Through it all, there are parallels between Finn's present-day travails and the events of that ancient manuscript.  (If I ever would have started writing this thing, I feel I would've gone overkill on those parallels!  Learning the finesse of "less is more" is something it took me much longer to do... in many aspects of life.)

I think I'll save the scary/fairy-tale details of the ancient manuscript for next week's False Start Friday.  Despite my desire for parallels, it really is a Different Thing than Finn's journey.  For now, I'll just reminisce about some of the other characters that continue to call to me for attention...

• In Philadelphia, Finn is dragged to see an avant-garde play at a dingy little theater. On stage, he first spies Tamara Albayeff, free-spirited girl of Kalmyk Mongolian descent, who is to be the love of his life.  Yes, I think she was a "manic pixie dream girl" long before they were a thing.  "Tara" initiates Finn into the wonders of life, shares her quirky spirituality with him, and dies an untimely death later on in the novel, after Finn meets up with her again in a foreign land.
• Finn is initially good friends with his slightly older cousin, Shandon Corrigan.  (Actually, neither of those Irish names are Joyce-inspired... so there!)  Shandon starts out as somewhat puckish comic relief.  He's the one who introduced Finn to things like Monty Python, SNL in its early days, and prog rock.  But, much like Loki in the Norse myths, his trickster side gradually grows darker.  When Finn runs into trouble and turns to his cousin, he is disappointed at the nihilistic way Shandon retreats from challenges.  (Shandon is partly inspired by Svidrigailov, the disturbing "shadow" of the protagonist in Crime and Punishment.)
• I'm not sure at what point Finn meets South African Betty Botha, but it's lust at first sight. Outwardly she's blonde and bubbly, with many other personality traits that make her endearing.  However, eventually conversations turn to certain topics, and the bigoted opinions she shares with a fraction of her 1980s countrypeople make themselves known.  Actually, Betty is the result of my trying to understand the lyrics of a song by the Housemartins called Johannesburg.
• I was toying with the idea of Finn's uncle (his father's brother) being an Apollo astronaut.  The old family story was that the uncle hated the idea that the only non-astronaut's name to be left on the Moon for posterity was that of the despised Tricky One.  So he smuggled up something else -- maybe some immortal words of Hunter Thompson or Ken Kesey?  I never decided.  However, Finn's experience of the uncle was always filtered through the bitter lens of his father, who was the brother who always worked harder and never got the rewards.

Upon looking at the sheer number of cliches in the above list, I realize that a builder of realistic characters I'm not.  :-)  My high-minded goal with this book was to reconstruct and present a new mythology for a new, god-free world.  Yes, I was full of Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, and Neil Peart's early lyrics, and was convinced that the only good god was a dead one.  I'm certainly not that twentysomething any more, but I still do think a healthy D.I.Y. approach to spirituality is what's called for.  I'm still hard at work reconstructing, is what I'm saying.

I admit that I never worked out Finn's final scenes in Greece.  After all the adventures and heartbreak, I imagined a "rock bottom" which at some point would drift into the surreal and hallucinogenic.  A temptation in the desert, complete with a dragon or lion (like St. Jerome -- or Eustace Scrubb)?  Maybe the astronaut makes an appearance?  Some unfinished part of Tara's philosophy gets cleared up, surely.  There's definitely a deep connection to the distant past, via the ancient Greek text that I probably spent 80% of my time thinking about, despite it being a small part of this whole story.

Which probably sets things up for the next False Start Friday.  In a week, I hope to talk about this putative lost work of Aeschylus, and just maybe post the epic-poem verse that I toyed with that started it off...  :-)

My Theothany notes are dated between 1987 and 1991.  In 1992, I started graduate school in earnest and also realized that if I ever wanted to really write a novel, I'd have to put in thousands of more hours honing that very specific craft.  Many other aspects of life got in the way of that, but I'm happy to have spent the time thinking and dreaming about this particular little world and its denizens.

Why are we here, part deux

Okay, maybe not why, but more like when.

Earlier I splurged out some thoughts on some possible ways the Sun and Moon may have teamed up to help get life started in the tidal pools of young Earth.  But that's a separate issue from why WE are here -- we humans, who come pre-packaged (these days) with all this culture stuff piled up around us.

And we can also wonder "why now?"  There have been true homo sapiens walking around for something like 250,000 years, pretty much identical to us in terms of anatomy and brain size.  The Neolithic revolution could have happened at any time, but it waited until about 10,000-12,000 years ago. Agriculture, animal domestication, and the development of towns and cities took off like a rocket.  Other things like writing and commerce came not too long after.

It's probable that the end of the last ice age had something to do with it.  With more opportunities for movement and resettlement, formerly isolated peoples may have found new ways to interact with one another and share their cultural developments at a faster pace.

Or maybe the aliens came down to teach us?

No, I'm not really going there.  But I do want to bring up a kinda-sorta related idea proposed in the 1970s by archaeologist George Michanowsky.  He made note of the fact that there was a very bright supernova that exploded in the southern sky approximately 11,000 years ago.  It would have been much brighter than the planet Venus -- maybe almost as bright as the Moon -- and it would have shone for several weeks before fading.  There's no doubt that it would have been a shocker to ancient peoples.  Michanowsky wrote a book that described various ancient inscriptions that may be dim memories of people observing this event.

Michanowsky was also a bit of a mythmaker...

"The psychological and possibly environmental impact of the Vela starburst triggered a development in their culture that, in a short time span, made them something entirely different from what they had been before. For better or worse, humanity had thus quite suddenly bitten into the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge."

"My research indicates that this heavenly event became the source of the creation myths, the cosmological concepts, and the cultural traditions of much of our civilization."

Too far?  Maybe.  But it's still fun to think about, and a nice reminder that we're not isolated from what goes on out there in this huge, awe-some (literally!) universe.