The New Game: Completed

With huge apologies to anyone out there who has been waiting for this, I'd like to bring to a close the TenStones Glass Bead Game that I started in December 2021.  In blog posts since then, I added four shiny stones to the board.  Since I really wanted to post this post today, I decided to sum it all up and briefly present the remaining six stones.  Here's the full board:

 
Going from bottom to top, I'll list all ten of the shiny baubles and give links to the earlier posts...

1. At the bottom is Ad Orientem (move #4), with thoughts about how we try to orient our souls in the right direction.
   
   
2. One up from the bottom is Hozier's Take Me To Church (move #1), which illustrates how "the right direction" sometimes takes the form of an idealized other person.
   
   
3. On the bottom right is O Henry's Gift of the Magi (move #3), further pounding home the point that self-sacrifice is a key that can unlock the doors discussed above.
   
   
4. On the bottom left is the first of today's new beads, which I suppose I can call Inversion (or maybe "The Upside Down").  In life there are often false dawns, feasts of fools, Yin's inside Yang's, and other times when everything seems flip-flopped.  Traditions around the winter holidays include Saturnalia, the Lord of Misrule, and Boxing Day... often with temporary swaps between the people in charge and the ones who do the dirty work.  My mind goes also to Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, who ominously sets out on his journey at dusk instead of the usual dawn.  Or Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do," in which the protagonists flout convention by drinking beer at noon on Tuesday.  The connection to O Henry is "right idea, wrong time."  The connection to Hozier is "no masters or kings, when the ritual begins."
   
   
5. At the center of it all is an enlarged bead in which I deposit Liebestod, the love-death.  (Why was I on such a roll with this loving self-sacrifice thing?) The image includes the alchemical pelican, who supposedly pecks itself to bleed in order to feed its children.  Is this the central heart, the ground-zero, of what it is to love?  Or does it go too far?  In my 20s, I know that I read way too much Joseph Campbell, and he made far-ranging connections between Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, Christian mysticism, and the way that knightly chivalry essentially redefined the concept of romantic love in the middle ages.  Is AMOR an inversion of ROMA?  Don't know, but I suspect that it wins even when it loses.
   
   
6. Above and to the right of center is good old Rory Williams, the Last Centurion (move #2).  Who doesn't love Rory the Roman?  Jerks, that's who.
   
   
7. Above and to the left of center is some combination of Indigo and The Blues.  This was the last puzzle piece to be filled in, and I'm still not quite sure about it.  There's a century of sadness in this musical genre based on flattened notes and minor keys.  I've heard that one reason that the color blue is associated with melancholy comes from certain African cultures in which one wears indigo-dyed clothing when in mourning.  (The image is from an online museum exhibit of those fascinating textiles.)  I'm pretty sure Blue Mondays are a necessary element of the Game, though.  If we have free will, it demands the possibility of mismatches in feelings... and you know where those can lead.  The connections with Liebestod should be clear.  Inversion?  Well, they say Robert Johnson had a similar adventure as did Young Goodman Brown.  Rory the Roman felt down & out quite a few times, too, but I don't think he'd ever think of erasing any of those moments across space & time.  I've said much more on this.
   
   
8. At the top-right is the Freemason's symbol of the Rough Ashlar, the rough-hewn raw material that each of us have as we set out on our moral journey.  Some compare it to "the stone that the builders rejected," which eventually becomes the cornerstone of the temple.  (Jesus wasn't playing around when he whipped out Psalm 118...)  You've got to learn to spot the good stuff when you see it, despite its outer appearances or circumstances.  This also reminds me of that old song "Swinging on a Star" -- yes, the one with the mule and the pig -- which isn't playing around either when it says you can be BETTER than you are.  The link to Rory is the cubical Pandorica.  The link to Liebestod is that all this hewing is what makes you worthy of someone else.
   
   
9. You'll know what's at the top-left if you zoom in on the image.  Yup, it's The Matrix, the movie from 1999 that introduced a lot of us to some interesting byways of philosophy, including the "simulation hypothesis" and transhumanism.  However, here I'm thinking more about the boots-on-the-ground choices that many of the characters needed to make:  Is the life I'm living as real & authentic as it could be?  Are dull illusions better than dangerous reality?  Is that mysterious other person... The One?  The link to deepest Indigo is mostly vibes... the dark glasses and goth discontent.  The link to Liebestod is everything Neo & Trinity did for each other.
   
   
10. Who's that at the top?  If you know your Al Hirschfeld Playbills, you may recognize Dulcinea, also known as Aldonza, the female lead of the musical Man of La Mancha.  I'm not going to provide a full plot summary, or even an opinionated lesson on the importance of this character to the Story.  All that I'll say is she's both subject and object for many of the examples of self-sacrificing love that I've highlighted across the rest of this game board... and, simultaneously, her final line of the play is a white-hot anthem of personal autonomy and individuation.  If you see these as contradictions that cannot possibly coexist, go watch this play.

This Glass Bead Game didn't quite go where I thought it was going to go, but it was definitely worth the exploration.  Seeing this cacophony of specific examples juxtaposed next to one another really does help make sense of the more abstract underlying ideas.  At least for me!