Ten Years of Weird

I'm interrupting our regularly scheduled programming for a quick anniversary acknowledgment.  This blog passed its official ten-year anniversary more than a year ago (the first post was on January 2, 2011), but I assert that today is an even more special day.  Exactly ten years ago today, I began my first April A-Z challenge.

Even though that wasn't even my first month-long blog challenge, I still see it as the birth of the true voice of this blog.  Prior to that, I had been focused much more narrowly on the two original topics of the blog: old-school D&D and Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.  I think I even tried to always "pay the Joesky tax" (does anyone even remember what that means?!) on RPG posts, too.  But on April 1, 2012, I began to mentally remove those fetters.  That's when things really started to bloom.

To be clear, there's nothing at all wrong with my original topics.  I keep pondering & writing about them quite a bit.  But I think I really needed the freedom to more completely follow my weird, as they say.  (Note this internal blog link is from December 2011, so I think these juices were stewing prior to that fateful day exactly a decade ago.)

In April 2012, and over the next few years, I met quite a few fascinating people, one of which I count as one of the most important people in my life despite having never met in person.  I've gone through a lot in the last decade -- a new job, moving across the country, loss of a parent, hitting my 50s -- and this blog & its people have been lifelines at times.

I can't promise a return to super-active blogging over the next decade, but I still value this place and the chance it gives me to, well, be Cygnus!

Orienting us to Move 4 of the New Game

The Glass Bead Game that I've been constructing on the blog now plays on.  With the pacing of these posts, it may keep playing on through all of 2022 and into 2023... but no matter!  Ideas are eternal.  Today we see a new one posted into the foundational circle at the bottom of the board.  There's a stylized picture of a rising sun that, to me, evokes the Latin phrase AD ORIENTEM.

There are quite a few religious (and other) traditions in which the participants all face themselves in a particular direction as they pray or do other important things. In Christianity, that direction has traditionally been the East.  The original reasons for this choice are probably lost, but there are many possible explanations having to do with the past (the direction of Eden) or the future (how Jesus will approach Jerusalem in the second coming).  There are also modern-day controversies about whether the priest in the mass should face the people (ad populum) or join with them so everyone faces the east as one Body of Christ (ad orientem).

I'm sure many of you already know that in Islam, there are daily prayers that must be said while facing the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca.  There have been times in the past when the exact direction of this Qibla was not known precisely, and in some parts of the Muslim world they used other estimates like the closest of the four compass directions (i.e., facing due East isn't a bad guess if you're in Egypt), or the direction of the rising/setting of the bright star Canopus.

In Judaism, some pray facing the direction of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  In the Baháʼí faith, some pray facing the shrine of Baháʼu'lláh in the north of Israel.  In the much more recent tradition of Thelema, there are ceremonies in which one must face Aleister Crowley's former manor Boleskine House in the Scottish highlands.  (Fans of Led Zeppelin sometimes treat that place as a kind of Mecca, too, since Jimmy Page owned it from 1970 to 1992.)

For some reason, there's one other piece of trivia that sits in the same corner of my brain as the above:  In Major League Baseball, there's a rule that says baseball fields should be oriented towards the east/northeast, so as to avoid the glare of the setting sun interfering with the players' vision.  Not all parks obey that rule, but they trend around the recommended value as a statistical average.  There may be no direct supernatural questions of faith involved, but the Field of Dreams can be a sacred space, too.

How do these bits of worshipful wayfinding relate to the interconnected cells on our GBG board?  Hozier's Take Me To Church is certainly an exhortation to reorient one's soul to face the divine beloved.  As mentioned in the previous post, one cannot mention The Gift of the Magi without thinking of "his star in the east."

We'll continue to see where this all leads, but it's clear that we must always pivot to face what life throws at us.

Myrrh, uh, Move 3 in the New Game

The Great Big Glass Bead Game (GBGBG) plays on.  Please see the first two moves here and here, and apologies for being a bit tardy with my anticipated posting schedule of one move per week.  I also feel a tinge of regret for not starting this whole schmegegge a few weeks earlier, so I could've synchronized this move more closely with the Christmas season...

The new image, placed in the lower-right corner and connected to the previous two moves, represents the 1905 short story The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry.  Even if you've never read it (which I hadn't before now), you've probably seen its core plot played out in other books, movies, or TV shows.  There's a poor couple who love each other more than anything.  The husband sells his gold pocketwatch to buy his wife some stylish hair combs.  The wife cuts her long hair and sells it to buy him a special chain for his watch.  Irony -- especially the kind that tiptoed over the tightrope between comedy and tragedy -- was what paid the bills for Ol' Henry.

I suppose I'd never really wondered why this story had this particular name, but in the final paragraph, it's made clear.  One can attribute the invention of the Christmas present to those three Wise Men of the East.  Henry layed it on a bit thick, but his last few sentences do deserve to be better known:

And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Okay, so how does this relate to the other ideas placed on the board earlier? Linking Henry to Hozier is pretty straightforward, I think... self-abnegation for the beloved is a clear and common thread.  Likewise Rory the Roman.  He sacrificed 2000 years for Amy, and it should be noted that she sacrificed a lot for him, too (see: The Girl Who Waited).

There's one other tenuous, but sparkly, link.  Those two millennia in which Rory waited took place in an alternate timeline.  One key difference with our own was that there were no stars in the night sky, because the universe was in kind of a slow-motion collapse.  But the collective unconscious of humanity held on to some shred of memory of the stars, since the existence of underground "Star Cults" was mentioned briefly in hushed tones.  I can't help but think of the Magi's 

Star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright

which symbolized so much about this underground cult that started growing, right around the time Rory began standing guard.