C is for Closer to the Heart

Long-time blog readers will know that I'm a die-hard fan of the Trio from Toronto... the Three Men of Willowdale... the prog-rock band Rush.  Their music is great, but the main draw for me has been the lyrical literature of Neil Peart.

Peart has written thousands of words of song lyrics, and tens of thousands of words in his autobiographical books.  Today, though, I'm focusing on one of his shortest songs -- and one of the few on which he collaborated with someone else on the lyrics (more on that below).  It's the opening number of Side 2 of their 1977 Farewell to Kings album, "Closer to the Heart."

And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones to start
To mould a new reality
Closer to the Heart

There's certainly a manifesto-like feel to it, right?  Crafting a new reality is pretty monumental, and it makes some sense to look to the experts -- the people in the know (not necessarily the people in power) to get it started.

The Blacksmith and the Artist

Reflect it in their art

[They] Forge their creativity

Closer to the Heart

Here Neil harkens back a bit to his quasi-Objectivist roots (i.e., songs like Anthem) to sing the song of the sole auteur, reaching for lonely pinnacles of creativity.  But I think he had broadened his perspective a bit by this time, since the next verse says that

Philosophers and Ploughmen
Each must know his part
To sow a new mentality
Closer to the Heart

I don't think he went to the opposite extreme here, despite the fact that it kind of sounds like "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need."  (And you may still be surprised that I used the letter "C" for this song and not that other famous manifesto!)  But no, it's still individuals he's championing here, and the point of "the Heart" is to work together harmoniously and freely...

You can be the Captain
I will draw the Chart
Sailing into destiny
Closer to the Heart.

Thus, I guess it's only fair that this song be one of the few lyrical collaborations that Neil Peart has undertaken.  The album credits a friend of the band named Peter Talbot with writing the first verse, and then Neil filled in the rest.  I couldn't find much about Peter Talbot online, but I did find one site that claimed he is the same person as John Michael Talbot, a wizened Christian evangelist and songwriter.

I can't vouch for the truth of it, but the timing is about right... he's close to the same age as Peart, and he put out a solo album titled A New Earth the same year that "Closer to the Heart" was written.  (Oh, and when did famous atheist Neil Peart decide to release the single?  Christmas Day 1977!)  A quick look at John Michael Talbot's life and work also conveys a mystical and visionary side, for which Neil has shown some appreciation.  Although the sentiment behind Revelations 21:1 (where "a new earth" probably comes from) is probably one with which Neil Peart doesn't agree literally, it certainly shares the renewal-vibe of this righteous manifesto of a song.

From: The Word and the Pictures, Vol. 2

B is for Ben Franklin's Virtues

After the last post's defiant anarchism, let's calm down a bit.  And there's no better guide to moderation and joviality than Poor Richard himself.

I say the above with a bit of tongue in cheek, since Benjamin Franklin had his own troubles and excesses.  But he spent a lot of his life thinking about the best way to live.  At the tender age of 20 he composed a list of 13 "virtues," and he spent many of his remaining days checking off lists to see how well he lived up to them.

FYI, I've loved the above portrait, by Joseph Duplessis, since childhood... I still have a three-ring binder with this on its glossy cover.  (Hey, it was the 70s... bicentennial fever was everywhere!)  Anyway, that subtle smirk is just so him.  The gold frame that houses this painting in the New York Met is etched with just one word of description: "VIR."  Latin for da man, of which Ben was a unique archetype.

His list of 13 virtues aren't quite an official manifesto, but I'm sure they can be as inspiring and life-changing, if put into honest practice.  Here they are:

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. Tranquillity: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

You can track them yourselves with some modern technology.  Numbers 4, 6, and 11 are particularly troublesome for me.  By the way, you may not have ever heard the word "venery" before reading number 12; I hadn't.  The primary definition is blushingly obvious, but I think it's kind of interesting that a secondary definition is "the art, act, or practice of hunting; the sports of the chase."  Ol' Ben was definitely known to enjoy that art, act, and practice.  :-)

Franklin also tried to order the hours of his days toward specific ends:

I particularly am fond of his morning question ("What good shall I do this day?") and evening question ("What good have I done to-day?").  I wish you all voluminous answers to these, if and when you ask them of yourselves.

A is for Anarchy

Here we go...

The Anarchist Manifesto was written in 1850 by French thinker Anselme Bellegarrigue, just a couple of years after the publication of another famous political manifesto.  Whether or not it was a direct counter-response to Marx and Engels, I'm not sure, but I definitely sense some tension.

Bellegarrigue's manifesto was quite an individualistic and defiant screed.  In my theme-reveal post, I contrasted two basic urges of many manifestos: do your own thing versus be nice to one another.  There's no ambiguity about which side this one is on!

However, Bellegarrigue did try to be careful about definitions.  He started by flat-out rejecting the common interpretation of Anarchism as an incitement to chaotic violence.  In fact, he turned that stereotype on its head by saying that civil unrest was the direct result of governments exerting too much power.  These opposing syllogisms say a lot...

Who says anarchy, says negation of government;
Who says negation of government says affirmation of the people;
Who says affirmation of the people, says individual liberty;
Who says individual liberty, says sovereignty of each;
Who says sovereignty of each, says equality;
Who says equality, says solidarity or fraternity;
Who says fraternity, says social order.

By contrast:

Who says government, says negation of the people;
Who says negation of the people, says affirmation of political authority;
Who says affirmation of political authority, says individual dependency;
Who says individual dependency, says class supremacy;
Who says class supremacy, says inequality;
Who says inequality, says antagonism;
Who says antagonism, says civil war,
From which it follows that who says government, says civil war.

Nope, he didn't like any societal rulers, "from Aaron right up to Monsieur Bonaparte."  He even distrusted the idea of an elected government of representatives...

What is the voter expressing when he drops his ballot paper into the box? By such an act, elector is telling the candidate: I give you my freedom, unrestrictedly and unreservedly; I place at your disposal and abandon to your discretion my intellect, means of action, possessions, revenues, activity and entire fortune; I surrender to you my rights of sovereignty.

I shouldn't have been surprised that his libertarianism became a bit libertine (and thus echoed Rabelais' and Crowley's "Do what thou wilt"):

I am encapsulated within the span of my existence, and the only problem I must resolve is the problem of my well-being. I have but one doctrine and that doctrine has but a single formula, and that formula but a single word: ENJOYMENT.

... Does my selfishness do you some harm? If you say no, you have no grounds for objection, because I am at liberty in respect of anything not likely to do you harm. If you say yes, you are cheats, because my selfishness is nothing more than my assertion of self-ownership, an appeal to my identity, a protest against all overlordship. If you feel harmed by the carrying out of this act of self-possession, by my assertion of rights over my own person ... you are acknowledging that I am your possession, or, at the very least, that you have designs upon me.

For me, this brings to mind Ursula Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed. Reading this novel was the first time I got my head around the idea that this kind of anarchist society might possibly "work" in practice.  Of course, there's a loooong way to go between might possibly and would actually.  :-)

A to Z Theme Reveal

Please, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.  What's that he's saying?  "You can't do a theme reveal post if you've already revealed your theme over a month ago!"  Shhhh, Wizard.

- - -

Starting next Wednesday, I'll be doing A-to-Z themed posts on the theme of MANIFESTOS.  I've posted my calendar on the right-hand side of the blog.  Since teaching will still be kicking my butt quite regularly between now and May, I've given myself a bit more slack: 3 posts a week instead of 6.  I hope you all stick around after the challenge month is over to see how it all turns out.

Why manifestos?  They're tiny packages filled to the brim with passion, meaning, and truth!  Or at least some interesting person's view of how best to pursue passion, meaning, and truth.  As I mentioned a few posts ago, I'll broaden it out a bit to also include some manifesto-ish songs, poems, essays, and codes of life.  Some are just pure linkbait lists from the centuries before BuzzFeed.  :-)

Other notes:

Although I'm avoiding the manifestos that make me sick to the stomach -- and I've definitely come across some that do -- I'm not going to the opposite extreme of including only the ones that I agree with completely.  I'm trying to not shy away from some that I'm not quite sure how to feel about.  My goal isn't to endorse the content of every single one, of course.  Take from them what you want.

I'm also not an expert in many of the manifestos that I'll discuss.  Some are long-time faves, but others I just learned about in preparing for the challenge.

It's funny how many of them can be classified as being on one side or the other of a particular tug-of-war that's been going on for all of human history. The two sides in that war are:

Be nice to one another

versus

Do your own thing

By exploring my 26 chosen examples, I'm hoping to see new ways that we can reconcile those two clashing impulses... or maybe even come to understand them as not contradictory opposites after all?  We'll see!

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.

Taking the A-to-Z plunge!

I have no idea if it was the smart thing to do, but I did it anyway!

I just signed up for the 2015 Blogging from A to Z challenge.  After doing the challenge in 2012 and 2013 (see post summaries here), I took a break in 2014.  Although I'm starting a new job this year, I also had a moment of inspiration a few months ago that pretty much decided the perfect set of topics to write about...

Thus, this year's theme is an A-to-Z of Fiery Manifestos.

"What?" you're thinking, "Is Cygnus going political?"  Although I'll profile a few manifestos that had specific governmental changes in mind, I'm aiming to cast my net much more broadly.  So I'm also including declarations of principles, iconoclastic essays, some awe-inspiring poems and songs, and other sundry "laws of life" that people have felt strongly about over the years.  Not all manifestos are called manifestos.

It's the passion that's the unifying principle, here.  If a person has had enough insight to compress their pursuit of Meaning and Truth into a short document -- and if they do it with enough red-cheeked verve that it inspires others to get off their duffs and change their lives -- then I'm there.  I've always been a sucker for these things.

Right now, I'm planning on breaking one of the cardinal rules of the A-to-Z game: the calendar.  With everything that I have to do at work between now and April, I think it's best to plan spreading my 26 posts over more than one month.  I'll start on April 1st as always, but my current plan is to do 3 posts a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), which will have me hitting the letter "Z" around the end of May.  I hope that doesn't break the brains of the good people in charge.  But, well, being a bit of a rebel certainly fits in with my theme!  :-)

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

Many thanks go out to the Armchair Squid for nominating this little corner of the internet for the Very Inspiring Blogger award.  If you're not reading Squid's insightful thoughts on books, comics, movies, Star Trek, family life, and tennis, then what the heck's wrong with you? by all means go check him out!

Rules!  There are rules, right?

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and link to their blog.  (Yup!)
2. Display the award logo.  (These are easy, right?)
3. Nominate 15 other bloggers (more or less) and provide a link where they may be found.  (Hmm, getting harder...)
4. Go to their blog, leave a comment to let them know they have been nominated.   (Still harder...)
5. Mention three things that inspired you the most during the past few weeks.

Oh, let's do that last one next.

First, there's my lovely wife, Mrs. Cygnus.  While the boy and I have been out in our new, Rocky Mountain Way locale for the last few weeks, she has been back on the east coast, getting the old house ready to sell, finishing up her job, and packing up the remaining stuff to be shipped out very soon.  Inspiring doesn't even begin to cover it.  She'll be rejoining us this weekend.

Second.  I'm teaching 30 undergraduates about outer space this semester.  The room I teach in has an old-style chalkboard (those are getting harder to find these days) and the chalk they give us is quite messy and powdery.  After one class of multiple erasings, it's hard to see the cloudy, almost-whitened board.  They don't seem to regularly wash the things, either, so as the week goes on, it gets cloudier and whiter.  It's kind of a running joke in class.

So what did I find last week when I came in to start teaching?  Three of my students up at the board with sponges and a water bucket they must have "borrowed" from some nearby supply closet.  We had a clean blackboard that day, I tell you!

(Was this strictly "inspiring?"  I don't know, but it sure warmed my heart.)

Third, is something that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.  Sorry!

My nominations:

In recent years, the term "blogging" has seen quite a bit of cognitive drift.  Thus, I'm not sure if many of the places I visit online are officially called blogs or not.  Let me just give you a list of links to some of these fun places, and hopefully they'll make your days better.

• I have no idea what the title Xanthor's Perfect Cromulence means, but it's a Tumblr blog full of retro-awesome science fiction imagery and factoids.
• I know I've blogged about fellow Glass Bead Game enthusiast Ron Hale-Evans before, but I don't think I've pointed you to his Pinboard page, on which he posts daily lists of URLs that he's found interesting.  I usually discover or learn something interesting whenever I catch up on his linking.
• In the "definitely not a blog" department, I've been enchanted by a series of stop-motion animation videos on youtube.  Doctor Puppet gives us new adventures (usually wordless, but narrated) of Doctor Who and his companions, in adorable puppet form.  A must-see for those who, um, put their hand in the hand of the man from Gallifrey.
• Jon Peterson, who runs the blog Playing at the World, is a professional historian of wargames and role-playing games.  He doesn't update the blog often, but each entry is a treasure-strewn dungeon crawl of historical baubles.
• If you're a fan of humor that is sometimes grotesque, usually NSFW, and often head-scratchingly bizarre, please pay a visit to LiarTown, USA.
• A lot of people are already reading io9.com, a blog about "science, culture, and the world of tomorrow," but I thought I'd give them a plug anyway.
• Oh, Porky, where art thou?  For purely selfish reasons, I wish this old-school gaming mogul would start blogging more frequently again.  His insights on games, narratives, philosophy, and cosmic weirdness are beyond compare.

Only seven?  Sorry, that's as many as I can think of right now.  Many of these sites I've never commented on, and I'm probably not going to start because of this award.  Still, by all means visit them and show them some love.

Thanks again for the award, Squid!