The Ode to Joy Game: Moves 6 and 7

All righty then, back to the eternal Game.  (I won't keep linking the posts containing earlier moves, but at the end I'll put up a list of links to the whole thing somewhere up top... maybe I'll change the name of the "Free RPG Adventures" banner to something more like "Free Games 4 U" and categorize this as such.)  :-)

Today I'm picking up the pace and adding two new beads to the network.  They're both on the third row down (or the row right above the central golden thematic bead of Beethoven's Ninth):

On the right, in the 2:00 position up from the middle, I'm taking the Armchair Squid's advice and placing The Olympic Spirit.  I've superposed the 5 rings, which were crafted by the Baron Pierre de Coubertin at the beginning of the modern Olympic era, with the divine eternal flame that links back to the ancient Greek Olympic games.  All this symbolism -- as well as the lofty ideals behind the symbols -- makes the Olympic games much more special to me.

(Despite being a life-long fan of the winter games, this time around I didn't get into the spirit too much... I ended up not really watching any of it on TV.  I was inspired by some of the stories, but I was both incredibly busy with the ramp-up to a stressful job interview last week, and also quite put off by ol' Pooty-Poot.)

On the left, in the 10:00 position from the middle, and directly below the Queen of the Night, I place a quote from my favorite quasi-religious piece of "channeled" automatic writing.  In Chapter 2, verse 44 of Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law, is the text:

"Aye! feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu."

On the surface, this verse seems to be talking about moving beyond traditional religious ideas of the afterlife, and embracing a more pantheistic idea that when one dies, one is dissolved back into the web of atoms and molecules that moves on to create new life.

Specifically, I've centered the image of my bead on the word "rejoice!" in the original 1904 manuscript.  Why?  Well, if you obey the discarnate speaker (who may have been a spirit called "Aiwass," or a piece of Crowley's subconscious mind, or maybe a person hiding behind a curtain in his incense-filled hotel room in Cairo), you will have taken the 65 pages of the original manuscript for this book and arranged them into a grid...

"Paste the sheets from right to left and from top to bottom: then behold!"

If you do that and make a 13x5 grid, or a 5x13 grid, the exclamation point terminating the word "rejoice!" is right at the center of the whole thing.  Joy.  At the center.

You can now see how this links to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  :-)

Other links:  "rejoice" links up to the Queen of the Night, since the verse I quoted above talks about her directly.  "Nu," in Crowley's book, is in fact a name of the Queen of the Stars that personifies the infinite play of matter and energy in the universe.  It links to the Olympic spirit in the obvious sense of individual athletes rejoicing with victory in the games... and also the lesser (or comparable?) joy of just getting to compete at this elite "starry" level.

The Olympic spirit links to Beethoven's Ode to Joy for a similar reason as I outlined above, but also because the OtJ has been used more recently as an anthem of international cooperation -- a key goal of the modern games.  The link to the Japanese Daiku below recalls the globe-spanning choral performance at the opening of the 1988 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, which Squid pointed out was quite sublime.

Remembrance of Toys Past

Maybe it's time for a break in the high-falutin' Glass Bead Game that I've been building.  It's been a while since I've done a fun picture post.  I've also been puttering around airports and hotels with free wi-fi for a few days now, so what's better to pass the time?  :-)

A few days ago, I was distracted by some unexpected search-engine hits that brought me back to the 1970s... the land of my childhood.  There are some games and toys from that period that everyone seems to remember, but there are some (that were special to me) that just don't seem to show up on the "I Love the Seventies" TV specials.  Here, they find a home.

The above was standard issue for the nerdy kid growing up in the post-Watergate, Trek-rerun era.  I'm pretty sure the mini-sized phaser, tricorder, and communicator didn't come pre-assembled, and there was airplane glue involved.  (Contrary to the cliche, I thought that stuff smelled horrible... no apocryphal buzz could make up for it!)

I'm sure you've heard of the 8-track tape machine, but did you know that some of them came with a snarky AI that insulted you if you answered one of its questions incorrectly?  2-XL was billed as a robot that quizzed you and was responsive to your answers.  Actually, there were 4 parallel audio tracks that you switched between by pressing the buttons.  I remember letting them all play through, on each track, just to hear all the funny quips.  Gotta get ones' money's worth, even if means slogging through lots of "Oh, you chose the wrong answer" responses!

Another entry in the "ooh, it's robotic" craze of the late 70s, Big Trak actually let you program in a series of motions, turns, sounds, and light flashes.  The trick was getting it to go from one room to another, without bumping into walls, to pester other family members with its boops and pew-pew's.

I didn't ever own the game Dark Tower, but many of my friends had it.  This was a surprisingly sophisticated combination of a board game and video (ish) game.  It's display was only red LED lights and a rotating screen with little painted images on it (see above), but it kept track of lots of things that made each game a very different experience.  Play it online if you dare!  Most people assume it piggy-backed off the popularity of D&D in the late 1970s, but I think it owes a much more specific thematic debt to Ray Harryhausen's movie epics -- Sinbad, Jason & the Argonauts, and so on.  It's just got that feel.

Well, here's one that lots of people probably remember.  Merlin was a handheld computery device that let you play games, test your memory, and create short programs of musical notes.  (A few posts ago, I mentioned that its list of suggested tunes included my first exposure to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony!)

Micronauts was a franchise in search of a story.  At the time, though, we didn't care about who they were or what their motivations were, we just thought their translucent robotic parts and spaceships were super cool.  Marvel Comics later created a story around them -- they were put into a tiny subatomic world that (somehow) sometimes interacted with our own -- but it was nowhere near as awesome as what we dreamed up.

I'm not sure if the French card game Mille Bornes was a 70s fad or not, but cards of the above trippy vintage happened to be around when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by their colorful iconography.  I don't think I ever played the game as it was supposed to be played.

I remember almost nothing about the rules of Pokeno, but I remember playing it -- along with Yahtzee and, of all things, the Mad Magazine Game -- with my Mary Poppins-esque grandmother back in the day.

Oh, Battlestar Galactica.  Yes, I know you were a cheesy rip-off of Star Wars, dressed up in creator Glen Larson's murky view of some strange Mormon traditions, and marketed to kids my age until the proverbial cows came home.  But you were mine.  Especially after sending away for, and receiving, this cardboard Colonial Viper cockpit simulator.  That silly thing was truly the gateway to the stars for me.  A few years ago, I found it, mildewy and decaying, in my parents' basement.  In the state it was in, it was right to throw it away, but I did my best to photo-document the heck out of it before that...

Is it silly to be focused on nostalgia like this?  In moderation, I don't think so.  The D&D blogosphere deals a lot with the products and experiences of the past, but I think they tend to keep one foot looking forward, too.  Anyway, I hope this little trip down memory lane was fun for you!

The Ode to Joy Game: Half Time

So, okay... five down, five to go.  The Glass Bead Game (here are moves 1-3; here's move 4) plays on.  I was thinking about slowly working my way up the tree, but I decided it might be more fun to stake out new territory, and then fret later about how I've painted myself into a corner...  :-)

I christen the upper-left bead with the symbol of The Queen of the Night.  I've never watched Mozart's opera The Magic Flute from start to finish, but I've always been fascinated by the mythic plot, the garish Egyptoid costumes, and the music.  The Queen of the Night, who has no other name in the opera, is the big bad villain of the story, though that's not known at the beginning.

(Actually, I told one lie above.  In some versions of the libretto, the Queen is referred to as "Astrifiammante," which is (ear-poppingly beautiful) Italian for "star-blazing.")

The opera is almost a protean version of the Princess Bride.  There's the triumph of true love, the redemption of pirates and vagabonds, and -- on the way -- plenty of trials, tribulations, and torture.  The Queen is portrayed as irredeemably nasty as Chris Sarandon's Prince Humperdinck, and she gets what's coming to her in the end.

But... but... I wonder if she gets a bit of a bum rap.  Mozart put in some pretty stark symbolism about the dark night of pre-rational superstition being beaten by the rising sun of Enlightenment-era wisdom.  Okay, yes, the Enlightenment was largely a good thing.  But the day needs the night.  Dreams may be pre-rational and chaotic, but without them (some neuroscientists claim) our mental performance would decline quite rapidly.

And then there are the others with similar names.  You might know that the Virgin Mary is sometimes given the title of Queen of Heaven, but did you know that one of the chief goddesses of Tolkien's Middle Earth was Varda, the Queen of the Stars?  I also must mention Nuit, the divine personification of Infinite Space in Aleister Crowley's modern religious tradition of Thelema.

That's what I think of when I hear "Queen of the Night."  :-)

Links:  There's only one bead that connects to this one right now, and it's Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the central spot.  Aside of the fact that both of these refer to famous and masterful works of classical music, there are also resonances in Schiller's famous poem.  Even though it often name-checks the Christian God, one can't deny that it also comes close to deifying "Joy" as a goddess-like Daughter of Elysium.  She entrances us with her magic, she causes the flowers to bud, she hurls stars around the sky... sound familiar?

"Freude, Freude treibt die Räder

In der Großen Weltenuhr.

Blumen lockt sie aus den Keimen,

Sonnen aus dem Firmament,

Sphären rollt sie in den Räumen,

Die des Sehers Rohr nicht kennt."

("Joy, joy drives the wheels

In the great clock of worlds.

She lures flowers from the buds,

Suns out of the firmament,

She rolls spheres in the spaces

That the seer's telescope does not know.")

More soon, my friends!

The Ode to Joy Game: Move 4

Apologies for the long gap between posts.  When planning updates to the Glass Bead Game I started last time, I was hoping that each post would provide more than one "move."  But if I keep waiting for the crystalline perfection of multiple interconnected ideas, I'll be waiting forever.  So let's keep things moving by filling in just one more cell in the TenStones HipBone board that I set up in the last post....

In the second cell up from the bottom, I place the concept of Laugh Lines.  These creases between the nose and mouth -- which I've learned have an official medical definition that's nowhere as evocative as their colloquial name -- are said to indicate a life spent smiling and laughing.  I was dismayed that a large fraction of search-engine hits on this term seemed to lead to sites devoted to removing these endearing features, rather than celebrating them.

I colored this new cell in honor of the idiomatic phrase "laugh till you're blue in the face," and I also took advantage of the happy (!?) coincidence in English that the lines themselves kind of resemble their own initials.  Visual onomatopoeia?

Links:  The association with Beethoven's joyous golden Ode, and with Japan's optimistic and evergreen New Year celebration, should be pretty straightforward.  The connection to the scarlet passion of Aerosmith's Dream On should be evident if you remember its opening lines...

Every time when I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer...

But what Steven Tyler sang with mock gravitas (he wrote that in his early 20s, for cryin' out loud!), I say with a slightly more experienced smile.  Honor those lines, especially the ones born while guffawing.

- - - - - - -

(I'm still open to ideas on how to continue with this game, and I'm still processing the comments on the previous post.  We'll see how frequently I can update this thing... the next month is going to be a busy one for me, work-wise...)

Shall we play a (Glass Bead) Game?

One thing that's been a constant refrain on this blog since its inception in 2011 has been my wistful (and/or whingy) musing about someday wanting to construct a real-life version of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.  See here for a summary of those initial thoughts.  I haven't had any major insights about how that might come about, but I have realized that progress can come in many guises.  Why wait around for those elusive A-ha design moments?  Instead, I should get down out of the ivory tower and just start playing!

Despite the fact that I'm not sure what my own chimerical game-to-beat-all-games will look like, there are plenty of perfectly fine "game variants" out there that can be used in the meantime.  I've also realized that getting more experience working with them will also help me to build up a database of possible game moves that can only help when I'm designing my own forms.

I've blogged before about a few of these other game variants, and today I'm going to use Charles Cameron's Hipbone rules.  The basic idea is to lay down a pattern of inter-connected regions, like this one...

...then start composing a game by "placing" specific ideas in each circular cell.  The challenge is to make sure that neighboring cells, connected by lines in the diagram, correspond to ideas that can be inter-connected (in some way), too.  The ideas can be words, images, pieces of music, logical arguments, or references to whole other works of art or science.  The connections between the ideas can be whatever you want them to be, but it's best when the connections are interesting or even surprising.

(Seems simple, right?  The initial moves may be... but then it gets progressively more difficult to think of ideas that will mesh well with the ones already on the board.  The last few moves that bring the game to completion can be real head-scratchers.  But when done right... sublime!)

So here's what I'm planning:  Today I'll start the ball rolling by filling in three cells.  What comes next?  I don't know!  Please feel free, dear readers, to make suggestions about new ideas to add, or to point out connections between existing ones that I missed.  As of right now, I have maybe one or two additional thoughts about what to place in some of the other empty cells.  Beyond that, I have no idea how this game will be completed.  The future is wide open.

Okay, here are those first 3 ideas:

In the central spot, which is connected to all but one of the other cells, I place Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  So many superlatives have been spilled in praise of this masterpiece that I hesitate to add more.  Maybe my use of gold for the image of the cell says it all.  I first discovered it as a kid, when this toy came packaged with some pre-programmed bleep-bloop music pieces that included the main leitmotif of the Ninth.  In college, it was like a religious experience to hear the whole thing for the first time.  I memorized the first few stanzas of the choral poetry (Schiller's schmaltzy but earnest Ode to Joy) when taking German.

In the cell "southeast" of the central one, I place the Japanese New Year's tradition of "Daiku."  I just learned a few days ago that it's grown into a pretty core tradition for millions in Japan to listen to, or also to sing along with, the Ninth Symphony in the final days of December.  It's very similar, I think, to the western practice of putting oneself in a hopeful frame of mind by crafting resolutions for the new year.  I used a deep verdant color for the cell because I found a list of Japanese symbolic colors for each month of the year:  January's new beginnings include pine and sprout green.  The connecting link between this cell and Beethoven's Ninth itself is an obvious one, but this phenomenon seems to be a quite unique thing of its own.

In the lowest spot -- which I don't mean to imply is low in importance, but instead can be a firm foundation to all the rest -- I place Aerosmith's 1973 song Dream On.  It was one of their first major hits, and its emotional lyrics still -- after decades of repetition on classic rock radio -- have the power to make you re-examine your life.  Songwriter Steven Tyler once said that he came up with much of this song by thinking about his childhood.  When still just a toddler, he would crawl beneath his father's piano and listen to him play classical music.  The links to "Daiku" are the passion and hopefulness of living one's infinite dreams in a finite world.

Sing with me, sing for the year
Sing for the laughter, sing for the tear
Sing with me, just for today
Maybe tomorrow, the good lord will take you away

For the cell image I used what I think is the most iconic logo from an Aerosmith album, stylized wings that evoke the band name's origin from pictures of aerial ballet, and also may symbolize the flights of dreamy fancy brought to mind by this song.

Okay, that's it for now.  If you'd like to help make this a crowdsourced Glass Bead Game, please chime in with ideas.  Like I said, I've got a few thoughts about my next few moves, but nothing definite.  Play on!

The 12th Regeneration of Christmas

Now we're all about the future.  Just mere days ago, Peter Capaldi took the reins of the TARDIS to become the Twelfth Doctor.  WHO will he be?  We don't know, but being significantly older in appearance than the previous few incarnations, we might be in for some increased space-time gravitas...

In fact, he's exactly as old as the First Doctor was when he originated the part in 1963.  Given that current companion Clara Oswald (who witnessed the transformation from the Eleventh to the Twelfth) is now working at the school where the First Doctor's granddaughter attended, and other companions were teachers, we may see callbacks.

I'm not sure if there are any tea leaves to read in the one earlier episode of Doctor Who that Capaldi guest starred in.  He played a harried Roman pater familias in the doomed town of Pompeii.  I'm more interested in going back to a TV movie that I remember seeing in the dorm as a college freshman... since in it Capaldi portrayed my favorite Beatle, George Harrison!  :-)

According to the cycle we've been following, the Twelfth Doctor is set to be a Zodiacal CANCER.  The urge to compare and contrast with the First Doctor (LEO) is strong, since Leo is the sign of the Sun and Cancer is the sign of the Moon.  Thus, we may see an emotional, intuitive, changeable, exceedingly loving, and over-protective Doctor.

If the above is true, this Doctor is going to be an empath worthy of Deanna Troi.  Thus, he may need the final New Year's Resolution of our cycle, which is to elevate your mood.  Some people with great sensitivity can feel buffeted by the winds of others' emotional lives, so it's worth while to maintain a positive, proactive core.

That's it, folks!  I hope I've lived up to the lofty goals I set myself (here and here).  I've learned a lot about the baker's dozen of Doctors, and had fun pulling together these weird strands.  Now that I think of it, these posts may comprise a strange kind of Glass Bead Game with beads made of time, space, and the stars.

I hope you're all ready to face the new year with wibbly-wobbly energy and optimism!

The 11th Regeneration of Christmas

We're coming nearly to the end now.  The Eleventh Doctor was played by Matt Smith from 2010 to, well, December 25, 2013.  By far the youngest actor to play the Doctor, this incarnation was full of energy, eccentricities, and playfulness.  Smith continued the trend for "New Who" to focus on the (often harrowing) emotional journeys of the characters, and many of his stories feel more like fairy tales than sci-fi.

Apologies for the use of a staged press photo, but I think it captures his character pretty well.  I quoted the word "cheeky" in the last post about the Tenth Doctor, and I think the Eleventh doubled or tripled that particularly British quirk.  In the 50th anniversary special that aired in November, they hinted that these more recent incarnations have avoided grown-up seriousness because they associated that with the dark deeds they believed were enacted by the War Doctor.

For the first time in the history of the show, the human companions tended to be more mysterious than the Doctor himself, and many of the stories dealt with figuring out the puzzles of their existence.  Who was the rogue archaeologist River Song, and how was her fate intertwined with Amy and Rory, the first married couple to travel with the Doctor?  Why did cute-as-a-button Clara appear randomly throughout time before joining the Doctor in the 21st century?  They've answered many of these questions, but who knows what lies in store as we move forward....

Quotations:

"The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant."

"There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are. This is not one of them. This is an opportunity! Whatever happens here will create its own timeline, its own reality, a temporal tipping point. The future revolves around you, here, now, so do good!"

The Eleventh Doctor's identification as "such a frikkin' GEMINI" was what spurred blogger Dawn Ellis to piece together the Zodiacal order that we've been following this fine holiday season.  :-)  It certainly seems to fit, since traits of the sign include "witty, nervous, youthful, lively, communicative, and inconsistent."  Ellis also referred to a Gemini's "ping-ping-ping demeanor" to refer to their tendency to bounce around randomly like in a pinball game.  Yup... I recently saw Matt Smith's Doctor referred to as a "Manic Pixie Dream Boy."  If you've seen examples of that trope in action for the other gender, you'll see how it fits.

So, you can guess what the New Year's Resolution is for the all-over-the-place Gemini, right?  Focus and commit.  Not always easy, but definitely worth it.  You've stored up all the horsepower you'll need; you just have to get all those horses to be pulling your chariot in the direction you want to go.

[See the introduction for more about sources and motivations for this series of posts.]