Star Trek, RPG Dice, and STEAM

A few weeks ago I saw an interesting Venn diagram posted on Twitter by someone named Christine Liu:

In hindsight, I guess it's not surprising to see so much overlap between science and art... after all, the education acronym STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) includes them all.  I just enjoy seeing these intersections, and I guess I've tried to make the central region of this diagram a focal point of this blog, too.

(Sometime, ask me about a talk I heard at a conference a while ago about how astronomer Johannes Kepler got the idea for one of his eponymous "laws" of planetary motion.  The answer, I say in Buzzfeed listicle mode, will surprise you!)

Today, though, my thoughts about this STEAMy synergy turn to the world of dice.  If you're coming here from the RPG world, you know all about them.  You may know that a two-handed sword does 3d6 damage against large opponents, and no speed factors will tell you otherwise.  You may have been inducted into the illustrious Order of the d30.  You may have scratched your head about the fairness of some very non-Platonic Zocchi dice.

But did you know about how Vulcans use them?

Almost 30 years ago, Star Trek: The Next Generation brought back Leonard Nimoy as Spock.  That episode may have been a bit underwhelming in some ways, but it showed some interesting aspects of alien cultures that fans had been hungering to see for years (well... this fan, anyway, he said pointing two thumbs inward).

In the episode, a Romulan kid shows Spock a set of little dice-like blocks that supposedly convey "the syllabic nucleus of the Vulcan language."  In an episode of Star Trek: Picard from just a few weeks ago, those dice showed up on the desk of a Vulcan admiral.  Since we never got a good look at them, I always just assumed they were either cubes or four-sided dreidels (since Nimoy had a history of using elements of his Orthodox Jewish heritage in creating bits of Vulcan culture).

But no!  An enterprising (heh? heh?) fan found pictures of the actual props from 1991 and posted some detailed shots...

Click to enlarge... it's only logical

There are some shapes here that RPG veterans have probably not seen:

1. Okay, we do have one bog-standard D&D die, an 8-sided octahedron (d8) on the left of the image above, with slightly sawed-off corners.
2. There's also a square pyramid (5 sides), at the top, which I don't think is useful for dice-rolling at any aspect ratio.
3. But then we come to the truncated octahedron (14 sides), on the bottom.  Essentially keep sawing off those corners of the d8 until the triangular faces erode into hexagons.  A Google image search for "d14" seems to bring up a few manufacturers that use this shape, but it's not employed by many games.
4. Lastly, the one that surprised me the most: the rhombicuboctahedron (26 sides) on the right!  There's kind of an architectural mini-majesty to that shape, which I don't think I'd ever taken notice of before.  No less than Johannes Kepler himself gave it that Greek-derived monster of a name, but if you were around in the 1980s you may remember it as Rubik's Snake.

However, if you were around during the ancient Han dynasty, you may remember either the 14-sided one or the 26-sided one (with 8 of its corners minimized to give it 18 rounder sides) as dice for the Chinese board game Liubo.  Some random examples from Google image search...

Anyway, 8 + 5 + 14 + 26... I guess there must be 53 unique syllables in the Vulcan language.

Where was I going with this?  Oh, the ART of it all.  It's kind of amazing how these uniquely deterministic 3D geometries can be used (hacked?!) to give our brains randomized input that assists in our creative endeavors, be they games or divination or actual art pieces.  They all have the capacity to instill wonder, push boundaries, and do the other stuff in the middle of that STEAM diagram at the top of this post.  Occasionally one also finds designers of Glass Bead Games employing randomness as a spur to creativity, too!  I keep ruminating on becoming one of those designers someday, so these posts are a set of running notes that may someday be assembled into something bigger....

She's wayfinding

Long-time readers will remember frequent commenter Suze, whose blogs were the stuff of legends and lore.  She's got a new online home now, and I'm still figuring out how to get it to appear in my Blogger Blogroll of Bloggerifficness.  (I think it's working now...)  Two weeks ago was the launch of her first published book, Kyle Finds Her Way, with Harry Potter publisher Scholastic!

The author herself pegs the recommended age range as 1 to 92.  If you like earnest slices of life from a middle schooler learning how to navigate life's starry expanse, while not getting into too much (or too little) trouble along the way, this book is for you.

I was privileged to read Kyle's story in draft form back in April 2013, back when I got the email saying that

First draft of the first book of my Middle Grade series now complete at 42,989 words.  Pop-Rocks-covered strawberries for everyone, on me -- the next big thing in Junior High libraries the galaxy over.

Never underestimate an author who likes pop-rocks-covered strawberries, people.  And I just realized where my extra copy is going.

I still haven't finished reading the final published version, but I went back to my email archive to find out what I said about that first draft.  I can quote snippets such as "warmed my heart" and "wonderful story" and "Hooray for Devil's Dinner!" (though I'm not sure that part survives into the final book).  I can't find any words from 2013 that really do proper justice to this kind, thoughtful story, but maybe I'll edit this post once I come up with some new ones.

Alchemy: can an app make art?

I've talked a bit about the dream of making a real-world version of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.  The goal of this game is essentially to make art out of art... and out of science, and just about anything else.

In order to juxtapose and transform ideas of all kinds, one needs a common language.  Hesse was vague about the symbols and glyphs he imagined the Game Players using (i.e., definitely not literal beads!), but he knew the game's "language" had to be able to describe just about anything:

"A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game's symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations."

Some modern-day Game designers have tried to punt on this issue in a clever way.  In our internetworked age, don't we already have a universal language?  Consider computerized 1's and 0's:  they can be combined to form ASCII characters, or full-color bitmapped JPGs, or nice-sounding MP3's.  Any existing work of art or scientific theorem can be reproduced with just the right combination of on's and off's.

That may be the practical answer, but it doesn't seem like the most elegant one.  I guess I'm still hearing the same inner voices that compelled Leibniz and Wilkins back in the 1600s.  Couldn't there be a universal way of more directly symbolizing all the disparate ideas that the human mind can dream up?

The reason I'm writing this post is that I've come across something kind of new (but also kind of ancient) that has me thinking more about this issue.  Insight has come from an Android app!

Someone named Andrey "Zed" Zaikin created Alchemy, a game in which

"You have only four basic elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. Combine them and their products to get more than 300 new elements. You can create a Life, Beer, Vampires, Skyscrapers and much more."

(Note: this post is not an advertisement.  Although I've searched for many details about this game, I haven't yet downloaded or played it.  I can't vouch for the product itself.)

It's such a simple concept, but it's a fantastic example of building an ontology of ideas out of just 4 fundamental concepts.  At the risk of "spoilers," let me just give a few examples of the successive build-up of complexity that it allows:

lava = earth + fire

stone = lava + air

sand = stone + air

beach = sand + water

Of course, you can eventually get to Gold -- as well as Yoda, Batman, and the Kama Sutra -- but I won't say how.

However, I'm not quite sure where to go from here.  (I guess I say that a lot in these kinds of posts!)  I'd pay good money for a dictionary of thousands of concepts, each constructed in the above way.  Especially if those concepts included the basics of music theory, narrative tension, postulates of pure math, foundations of modern science, and so on!  Am I up for writing such a thing myself?  Probably not...

...barring any future thunderbolts of polyfugual enlightenment, of course!  :-)

T is for Taliesin

I'm not talking about the 6th century poet and singer (and likely model for the D&D class of "bard").  I'm thinking more about the fact that the famous 20th century architect Frank Lloyd Wright was so charmed by fanciful stories of this early creative genius that he named several of his studios and schools after "Taliesin."

Wright himself was also quite the creative genius.  I don't know too much about his life, but I know he put a huge emphasis on cultivating harmony between humans and their environment.  He also thought a lot about educating the next generation of architects and designers.  He wrote quite a few bombastic tracts -- both for the public and for his students -- but the most pithy and manifesto-like seems to be a list of 10 fundamental principles for exceeding in his craft.  There is some variation in lists to be found online, but the following is taken directly from his 1932 autobiography, page 464...

FELLOWSHIP ASSETS

I.  An honest ego in a healthy body -- good correlation

II.  Love of truth and nature

III.  Sincerity and courage

IV.  Ability for action

V.  The esthetic sense

VI.  Apppreciation of work as idea and idea as work

VII.  Fertility of imagination

VIII.  Capacity for faith and rebellion

IX.  Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance

X.  Instinctive cooperation

It's pretty advanced... many of these terms have specialized meanings in architecture, and it probably takes decades to really internalize and understand them.  Over and over he emphasizes "organic" design.  In another teaching document for Taliesin fellows, An Extension of the Work in Architecture at Taliesin to Include Apprentices in Residence, he explains this organic impulse in more detail...

"Constant working contacts with the nature of structure and materials, the ground, and of nature-growth itself are the only reliable texts to be used in this connection. Only as these are the actual forms of daily experience directly related to daily life and work are they the texts we must now use to begin again at the beginning."

...but I must admit to not quite digesting this, either.

Wright was probably the model for Ayn Rand's über-architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, but Wright famously distanced himself from the connection, saying "I deny the paternity and refuse to marry the mother."  :-)

I'll just leave you with a sketch of my favorite Wright design, the Ralph Jester House (also called the Arthur and Bruce Brook Pfeiffer House), which sadly was never built...

Head for the roundhouse, Nellie, they can't corner us there!

S is for the Surrealist Manifesto

Hey, finally, something with "Manifesto" in its actual name!  You thought I forgot about those, didn't you?  :-)

The first Surrealist Manifesto was written in 1924 by André Breton, whom I profiled first and foremost in my 2013 April A-Z posts.  I've got a soft spot for Breton's romanticism and crazy creativity, even if he sometimes took it to extremes that I'd shun.

His 1924 manifesto begins with some thoughts about how life, for most adults, tends to make one kind of dazed and anesthetized.  Only children and the insane seem to be able to see through the thick fog.  Art should be an escape from the fog, but in Breton's time there was an ascendancy of ultra-realistic novels that plod on and on with piddly details...

And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés.

He takes a swipe at Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as an egregious example.  (I admit, I could never get through it.)

But then he goes into psychology and Freud... concentrating on the idea that DREAMS can sometimes tell us truer truths than the boring stock catalogue of normal waking consciousness.  That's what art can be like, he ponders.

We really live by our fantasies when we give free reign to them.

Then he's got to define his terms.  This search for a new reality above (sur-) the workaday world now has a name:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. [...] Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

The remainder of the manifesto gets crazier and crazier... I won't quote more of it here, since you should go and experience it for yourself.  Suffice to say it gives you the tools you need to never be bored around boring people, to catch the eye of desired members of the opposite sex, and to properly usher in death when it's time.

What I do want to do is to list some of my own favorite surrealist tools, many of which have a heritage that goes back to Breton and his merry cohorts:

1.  Hypnagogic States:  When you're just at the threshold of falling asleep, do you sometimes hear voices?  If you catch it at just the right state (which, for me, is very rare, but I've experienced it) the voices can be crystal clear and just as audible as if someone was in the room.  The words are usually random and dreamlike, but sometimes insightful as hell.  I've used them in poetry.  I once heard a phrase that reminded me of a famous tomb inscription in Westminster Abbey, but with a more familiar subject: "O Rare Breton!"

2.  Semi-Automatic Writing:  This phrase without the "semi" has many possible definitions.  I'm thinking of the thing where you just sit down with a blank pad of paper and a pen, and set a stopwatch for 5 or 10 minutes.  Then just start writing out your stream of consciousness.  Write down absolutely everything that comes to mind, with no editing or censoring.  Go as fast as you can, and don't stop until the time is up.  Afterwards, you'll either want to burn the paper, or treasure it away for the rest of your life.

3.  Tzarization:  This is often called the Dada technique, pioneered by Tristan Tzara.  I'll let him define it:

"The poem will be like you."  Aren't they all?

4.  Juxtapomo:  The surrealists liked to make startling compositions that mashed up things that usually didn't belong together -- but still had enough in common to make you think -- like, say, a fish and an umbrella.  But is that really all that different from Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which I've blathered on about on this blog to no end?  :-)

D is for Dorian Gray

True confession time: I've never read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  I enjoyed Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, and have heard great things about his only novel.  (Though some online plot summaries make it sound like a veritable chemistry lesson of Victorian potions and poisons.)

After the novel initially appeared serialized in a magazine, Wilde republished it in 1891, putting back in the naughty bits that the magazine censors cut out.  He also added a manifesto-like preface, which I'll include first as a verbatim page view -- to preserve his strange indenting typography -- then later call out some choice quotes.

All art is immoral, but you should still click to enlarge.

I find it a bit incoherent and dream-like, but I think that's part of Wilde's overall charm.  This preface sounds a bit like a mathematical proof, which starts out with a postulate,

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

and ends up with a conclusion,

All art is quite useless.

Q.E.D.?  But there are winding byways in between that shouldn't be missed, such as...

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

Wise words for all works of art, and for Biblical exegesis, too!  :-)

Wilde also treated this fugue-like series of propositions as a quasi-legal defense of his subject matter, which tended to go beyond the prudish norms that were supposed to constrain a respectable upper-class artist like himself...

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

My favorite part, about critical responses to art,

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

kind of sounds like something that Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole) would have said in his memorable soliloquy from the end of Pixar's Ratatouille, doesn't it?

I aim to be in accord with myself.

Wind's in the East

A few days ago I finally saw Saving Mr. Banks, a recent quasi-historical look into the meeting between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins.  

Forewarned: This post really isn't a review of the movie; more so a smattering of my impressions, and some hints about other things it spurred me to think about.

I've got Suze to thank for putting this on my radar.  For a good stretch of time in my single-digit years, Mary Poppins was my favorite movie.  In those pre-VHS days, I was lucky that the Disney classics were on a near constant rotation in the 99-cent matinee theaters, so I saw it many times.  At age 6, of course I identified with the Banks children, and I had a magical nanny figure in my own life, too.  It probably wasn't until I saw the movie again in my early 20s that I realized that Mary Poppins had another reason for blowing in with the east wind: the redemption of the father.  I don't think it's exaggerating to say that this realization held lessons for me that I continue to draw from, especially now as a father myself.

If all Saving Mr. Banks does is to convey a bit of that to its audience -- and to highlight the wonderful (and absolutely unabashedly unsubtle) ways that the music of the Sherman brothers accomplished it back in 1964 -- it deserves as much praise as I can give.  But I think it does a bit more, too.

It's cliched to talk about how our lives are enriched by stories.  This movie, I think, pierces to the heart of this cliche and shows how it works, and why it matters.  Telling stories remakes the world.

There are two senses that the above is true:  In a literal way, when people hear stories that uplift them, they can be inspired go out into the world and do things they might not have done before.  Even apocalyptic dystopias can cause people to work hard to make sure the bad stuff doesn't happen.

The second way is more subtle.  Stories shape our surreality, and literally change how we think.  Last year I began reading Douglas Hofstadter's newest book that suggests the making and manipulating of analogies is the core activity of the human mind.  He starts with the simple ones, involving single concepts and phrases, and then goes on to say that fictions and narratives are just extended versions of the same thing.  I suppose this is also related to the "scripts" of Transactional Analysis, which I mentioned in my last post.  (Many others have realized this, too; see hints of it in the "Darmok" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in J. R. R. Tolkien's classic essay "On Fairy Stories.")  I'm convinced that any Glass Bead Game worthy of the name is going to have these ideas at its core.

Back to Saving Mr. Banks, there's also another level of "remaking the world with stories" here, in that the actual, real-world interaction between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers didn't quite go the way it did in the movie.  Much like Travers may have used Mary Poppins to remake her troubled childhood, screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith did some remaking of their own.  But to valuable effect, I say.

(And, much like another recent controversial bit of historical storytelling -- the tale of Giordano Bruno in the new Cosmos TV series -- I'm less upset about the inaccuracies than I am that some of the most "prickly" and avant garde aspects of their lives weren't highlighted.  Travers, like Bruno, was far weirder and cooler than her depiction made it seem!)

You go, Ginty!

Vermeer's Game

On my drive home from work today, I heard a fascinating interview with the director of a new documentary about some strange methods possibly used by 17th century artist Johannes Vermeer to create his masterpieces.  The idea is that he may have built some complex combinations of mirrors and lenses to project images onto (or near to) his canvases to aid in the construction of his famously photo-realistic renderings of life.

The radio interview is here, and additional information about the documentary is here.  The NPR reporter was almost aghast at the insinuation that Vermeer may have "cheated" somehow using these techniques.  The director retorted wonderfully:

"Art is not sports. Art is an activity in which one human heart communicates to the other human heart. If Vermeer used this method, which Tim believes pretty strongly he may have used, that makes Vermeer better, not worse. What this means is that Vermeer was not only someone with wonderful and beautiful ideas, and someone capable of miraculous compositions, but that he was willing to put in the incredibly intense work to translate those ideas to paint on canvas. And it's very possible that Vermeer himself may have invented this device."

One thing I forgot to mention:  the director is the guy on the right...

...and it was rather surreal to hear the voice of the normally silent partner of the two talk about this project.  It is also quite spot-on for these particular stage magicians (who often delight in the deconstruction of their craft) to be interested in these techniques.  Is it too much of a cliche to say it?  I'll say it.  "It's all done with mirrors," after all.  :-)

I can't help but think about possible links between Vermeer's mirrors and lenses and some other famous optical marvels of that time period.  It was probably no coincidence that the 1600s also saw the development of the magic lantern -- an early version of the slide projector -- which was used not only in stage shows, but also in spooky initiation rituals and spiritualist seances.  Earlier this year I talked about the fictional (?) and magical (?) "looking glasses of divers virtues" described in the anonymous Rosicrucian manifestos of the early 1600s.

And, of course, there's the Glass Bead Game itself.  Although the game itself is supposed to be a highly abstract symbolic presentation of complementary and contrasting ideas, Herman Hesse described its origins as a set of colored glass beads strung on an abacus-like set of parallel wires...

"The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so on. In this way he [the creator of the game, Bastian Perrot] could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another."

I've always loved the subtle ways that the concepts of reflection, refraction, and the focusing of light (through those colored beads) could be used as metaphors for the infinite alchemy of ideas made possible by something like the Glass Bead Game.  Well now, I've just got to create the darn thing...

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Surfaces and Essences

For the first installment of the Armchair Squid's free-for-all blog book club, I've been aiming to profile the new book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking.  Problem is... I haven't finished this sucker yet!  It's almost a running gag that Hofstadter's books are long; this one clocks in at 592 pages and I've really only gotten to 135.  I considered switching from reading to skimming, to get further by now, but I don't want to short-change it.

I'm still thinking this book will be important in my ongoing quest to build a real-world version of Hesse's Glass Bead Game, so I'm intending to do a mini "progress report" with today's post, and just keep reading at my own pace.  The full review will come at some point.  :-)

Ah, Douglas Hofstadter.  He's becoming an internet meme for being the patron saint of "meta" (i.e., self-referentiality taken to the Nth degree).

His books have been considered difficult, but mind-expanding if approached with effort and earnestness.  Gödel-Escher-Bach (1979) won many awards for its mix of musings on intelligence (natural and un), complexity theory, and deep connections between far-flung fields.  G-E-B gave me an important weapon in my arsenal of Glass Bead Game concepts: it showed that the idea of "rising tension, followed by release" is central to a huge number of different kinds of human-created works of art and science -- especially sequential works that one experiences linearly in time.  I've blogged about that here and here.

Surfaces and Essences may be just as long and involved as G-E-B, but I think it's central thesis is much simpler to communicate:  Hofstadter and Sander claim that just about every step in a human being's thought process is governed by the making and manipulating of analogies.  They use a pretty broad definition of an "analogy:" any way of comparing something to something else, or noting that an idea has some commonality with another idea.  (They talk briefly about the formal logical kind of analogy -- sometimes known as the SAT analogy -- but these "jewels of precision and elegance" are only a tiny subset.)

The early chapters are full of interesting linguistic examples that show how we use words and phrases to help us define mental categories.  Once we have these (usually fuzzy-edged) categories swirling around in our brains, they help us approach new and unfamiliar situations.  When we see something new, we search our storehouse of categories for something similar to compare it to -- i.e., we search for apt analogies -- so we can make sense of the new data.  This is usually done unconsciously, all the time, as we navigate through life.  In some cases, the new data cause us to refine or redefine our categories; this happens much more frequently when we're very young and still learning to speak and understand others.

Above I mentioned "words and phrases," but it goes beyond that, to full stories.  Those can be useful categories, too.  If you see a colleague at work whom you know wanted to get a big promotion, then didn't get it, and then feigned relief at not having to go to boring meetings with all the higher-ups, you may recognize that immediately as an example of Aesop's fable of the fox and the sour grapes.  But making that connection is a very subtle thing.  Nobody can figure out how to teach a computer to recognize that kind of non-surface similarity, but our minds do it constantly.  Hofstadter and Sander go further to actually define sentient intelligence as the ability to size up a new situation quickly by identifying concepts that get to its core (i.e., that separate the relevant wheat from the useless chaff). In other words, intelligence is the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies!

Like I said, I'm only through the first few chapters.  There will be many more examples to come, and I'm especially excited to get to the chapters about how scientists, mathematicians, and artists have created super-insightful analogies that have rocked their fields to their foundations.  I'm also looking forward to the chapter titled "How We Manipulate Analogies," because I'm really wanting to know how I can exploit this knowledge to create a better Glass Bead Game!

More on this later!  :-)

T is for Tyagi and Catherine

My original idea for the letter T was to write about (Pierre) Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), famed philosopher and theologian.  However, aside from having my mind gently expanded by reading a few bits of his writing, I really didn't know too much about him. It was feeling like more and more a chore to compose that post.

So, I didn't.  A week or so ago, I realized that there was a husband and wife pair whom would make a far more exciting subject for this post.  I've had a bit of interaction with them over the years, and I think their stories are completely and utterly charming.

So let me introduce you to Tyagi Morgoth Nagasiva and Catherine Yronwode.  They've been married for 13 years, which is easy to remember because their marriage ceremony straddled the millennial midnight from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000.

I think I've talked a bit about my early introduction to the modern-day occult scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  In short: Usenet!  I was amazed to see that the gathering places for alternate religions (alt.pagan, alt.magick) seemed just as popular as the places devoted to more traditional faiths.  In those early days, you couldn't go far in those circles without encountering Tyagi (who sometimes went by Tagi, Thuyagi, and a few other iterations).  A prolific writer of FAQ (frequently asked questions) documents and a tireless asker of Socratic questions, Tyagi knew how to get to the heart of the matter.  Many of his weird writings are archived online.

He was one of the first to realize, I think, that one can forge deeply personal connections online by being radically open with one's experiences.  We heard about the burgeoning relationship with his Holy Guardian Angel (who often took on the form of Hindu destroyer goddess Kali-Ma).  I also recall a story about a time his bicycle was stolen, and he put a curse on whoever stole it.  However, he asked the spirits that whatever punishment was effected against the thief would also be enacted on him, too.  In the big scheme of things, he thought, that's only fair.

Catherine Yronwode (pronounced "ironwood") has been writing in various counter-cultural venues since the late 1960s -- Rolling Stone, Whole Earth Catalog, etc. -- and since the 1970s has been a major player in the comic book industry.  Always iconoclastic, she famously advocated for the liberated 70s version of Wonder Woman to go back to her more traditional (mythic, yet BDSM-inspired) roots.  I first encountered her writing in the editorial pages of the mid-1980s series Miracleman; she was a co-founder of the indie publisher Eclipse Comics that took on Alan Moore's other controversial deconstruction of the superhero genre.  Those editorials were sometimes simple slices of life -- expressing worries about deadlines getting met, for example -- and sometimes they were venom-filled invectives.  Consistently, they put an intensely personal face on the business of how comics get published.

You see where this is going, of course.  Catherine and Tyagi met online around 1994 (quite early in the history of internet romance, I think) then met in person a few years later.  The rest is history!  :-)

L is for Lorq and Lobey

(This post is meant for Saturday, April 13... sorry if it's showing up early in your time zone, but I'll be away from the computer for most of Saturday.  Have a great weekend, everyone!)

The alphabetical format of this challenge can sometimes be a little limiting.  I really wanted to include science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in my list of inspiring creators, but I already had rock-solid people for "S" and "D," as well as for "C" (since Delany's friends call him "Chip").  Thus, I choose to bend the rules a bit and use the names of the protagonists of the only two Delany novels that I've read.  I intend to read more, but believe me, I don't need to read any more to know the dude is amazing.

"Colors sluiced the air with fugal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse's face. Electric arpeggios of a neo-raga rilled."

That's from Delany's novel Nova, and it is a description of one of the most nuanced and fascinating side-characters in all of sci-fi (Pontichos Provechi, "the Mouse") captivating a crowd by playing his "sensory syrynx."

So far I know only Nova (1968) and Delany's previous novel The Einstein Intersection (1967).  He was already well respected as a science fiction author by the late 60s, and he surfed with the cresting New Wave movement and started to explore many other themes, including alternate forms of sexuality, in the 70s and 80s.

At first glance, the two L-named protagonists couldn't be more different from one another.  Lorq Von Ray, from Nova, was a wealthy, battle-scarred starship captain who was caught up in a grand feud with a rival noble family.  Lo Lobey, from The Einstein Intersection, was a semi-humanoid blob of a creature who came from a tiny village on a strange planet, long abandoned by its original inhabitants, named "Earth."  However, they both were the heroes of their respective mythical journeys, in which they had to strike out on their own (though helped and betrayed by a colorful cast of characters) to achieve their quests.  Delany doesn't just give plain old allusions to classical myth -- he seems to recognize the point at which the reader recognizes them, then gives us a wink and a nod, then twists them into something new and surprising.

Both books present the reader with significant gaps.  Sometimes we're not sure what's happening when it's happening.  Sometimes, two thirds of the way in, some small fact is tossed out that makes you reevaluate everything.  But it's done in such a way that you're definitely not annoyed -- puzzling it out (for me, at least) was a lot of fun.

The ending of Nova made me laugh out loud, and it lifted my spirits for days afterward.

You've been seeing a lot of occult material in my posts this month, and you may be surprised to see some here, too.  In Nova, the educated people of the 32nd century regularly employed Tarot cards and other forms of divination to help them meditate on their past, present, and future.  Not to magically predict stuff, but to provide them with a symbolic language they can use to meditate on their lives.  See this dialogue between the skeptical Mouse and the more worldly Katin...

   The Mouse dared half the distance of the rug. "You're really going to try and tell the future with cards? That's silly. That's superstitious!"
   "No, it's not, Mouse," Katin countered... "Mouse, the cards don't actually predict anything. they simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations--"
   "Cards aren't educated! They're metal and plastic. They don't know--"
   "Mouse, the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot present symbols and mythological images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history. Someone who understands these symbols can construct a dialogue about a given situation. There's nothing superstitious about it. The Book of Changes, even Chaldean Astrology only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than guide and suggest."
   The Mouse made that sound again.
   "Really, Mouse! It's perfectly logical; you talk like somebody living a thousand years ago."

You know, there are Zombie Tarot decks, Star Trek Tarot decks, Wizard of Oz Tarot decks... even Sailor Moon Tarot decks. I think a Delany Tarot would be quite fascinating!

I is for Ithell Colquhoun

Photo by Man Ray

"Who?" you may ask?  Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) certainly isn't a household name, but she was one interesting person.  She was a surrealist artist, author, playwright, poet, and secret magician.

(I hope I'm not getting too repetitive with the surrealists and the magicians... I've gotta go with where my passion lies!)

I first came across Ithell's name as the author of a biography of S. L. MacGregor Mathers (who was a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn).  That bio also is part auto-bio, since it describes her own attempts to contact the various offshoots of this fin de siècle occult club in the 1930s and 1940s.  She met enough of the movers and shakers to eventually be given a rather important painting of Mathers (well, important to this small community) as an inheritance.  When it arrived at her house, it had a major impact...

"In a surge of strange emotion I kissed the portrait's lips; then, crouching on the floor beside it, I burst into tears.... During subsequent days the painted figure changed from angel to knight; later I saw in it the face of a martyr."

Her prose could run a bit purple, but the feeling and intensity was honest and unmistakable.  See also her description (from a recent collection of her magical writings) of the process of ceremonial magic initiation:

"Our Order is now about to bring light into the tenebrific estuaries of the occult and to illustrate the Stygian recesses of this material world with an ineffable golden effulgence of spirituality. It is a process comparable to the rising sun at dawn casting its rays on the opaque waters of ignorance."

She also joined up with Aleister Crowley's (*) Ordo Templi Orientis for a while, and she was one of the few to write a detailed thesis describing its ultimate secret practices.  Actually, this manuscript, "Liber Plenitudinis Lunae sub figura XV, Notes Towards the Apprehension of the Secret of the IX Degree O.T.O.," is one of the few bits of occult secrecy that hasn't yet seemed to show up online.  I'd love to someday get my hands on a copy.

Her life as a painter was also quite lively.  She met Dali, Breton, and many of the other surrealist masters, and kept painting over 7 decades.  Have a look at a tiny sample...

L'Ascension

Judith showing the head of Holofernes

Dark Fire

Title unknown

I've read that Ithell Colquhoun invented several new surrealist composition techniques known as graphomania, stillomania, and parsemage -- but I have no idea in the world what those mean!  :-)

- - - - - - -

(*) Happy Third Day of the Writing to my Crowleyan peeps out there, by the way!

F is for Florence Farr

Florence Farr (later Florence Emery) was a rare bird in the Victorian England of her youth and the Ceylon of her later years.  She lived from 1860 to 1917, and was an actress, a suffragette, a teacher, a muse, a playwright, and a renegade spell-caster.

I discovered her in relation to the last item in the above list.  She was a member of the famed Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  Her skills as an actress were put to good use in the ritual temple; fellow initiate William Butler Yeats noted that her resonant voice could bring shivers to the entire room.  Like many other magicians of the time, she wasn't satisfied with the "curriculum" of their little club, and branched out with her own experiments.  She collected select friends together to engage in clairvoyant scrying to make contact with ancient Egyptian forces and masters who would impart their wisdom.

People may read the above and giggle a bit at the implications of schoolgirl seances and Ouija boards, but it was pretty serious business for Farr and her associates.  She wrote in an internal Golden Dawn document that

"It is the object of our lives as initiates to bring this Will to such a state of perfection, strength, and wisdom, that instead of being the plaything of fate and finding our calculations entirely upset by trivial material circumstances, we build within ourselves a fortress of strength to which we can retire in time of need."

Magic = depth psychology!  The results of her private workings, in a sub-group she called "The Sphere," were eventually the subject of envy from the other Order members who weren't invited.  It's amusing to read the letters of those outraged occultists, who disparaged her work in one paragraph, then in the next paragraph complained that she wasn't sharing the results of that work with the rest of the class!  :-)

The actual content of her visions was often quite artistically striking.  An example from A Dialogue of Vision (archived with some of her other works here)...

"I see a track of the red footprints of birds, leading to a wonderful sun; flights and flights of heavy bodied birds fly in circles round it. I count seven flights. In the sun is a cauldron where the black and white natures are melted. The pathway of red footprints means blood sacrifice, threefold renunciation, three passions for stripping the soul naked of its ignorance and illusions. One passion is love of the mystical sun. One is the passion for shining wisdom and one is a passion for energetic action. The gods never follow those paths. They are only for souls incarnate. Incarnation means a fusion of worldstuff and consciousness. In a god’s consciousness nothing exists because everything subsists. It is impossible to be conscious of omniscience because it is omniscience. So that in our sense a god is unconscious."

She also distilled these insights into avant garde plays, usually with Egyptian themes.  A modern production of these plays was discussed here; all proceeds went to breast cancer research, which is what took Florence Farr from the world too young at the age of 56.

E is for Emmanuel Radnitzky

Emmanuel Radnitzky, better known as Man Ray, lived from 1890 to 1976.  He was a surrealist visual artist, who not only painted and sculpted, but also pioneered some wild and crazy techniques in photography.  In addition to innovative composition, he also played around with exposing images on photo-sensitive surfaces, creating eerie X-ray like images that he called "Rayographs."

He's probably best known for his prolific photographic work, which includes portraits of nearly every major artist of the early 20th century (i.e., his pals), as well as some iconic and much-pilfered images, like the lady violin and the glass bead teardrops seen in my mini-collage below.

He also constructed some innovative 3D pieces.  The eye on the metronome seen above was one kind of goofy example -- and his original photographs of his own sculpted creations are interesting in a "meta" kind of way, too.  He designed chess pieces that are simultaneously abstract, beautiful, and functional, which have long fascinated me since I first spied a set in a museum.

But, oh, his paintings.  Those are what really made me a Man Ray fan.  I'm just going to include thumbnails (fair-use-sized, I hope) of some of my favorites.

La Fortune

Jazz

Les Beaux Temps

Imaginary Portrait of the Marquis De Sade

A l'Heure de l'Observatoire - Les Amoureux

B is for the Bobs

No, not these Bobs...

But these:

On the left is Bob Haney (1926-2004), a prolific and wildly creative comic book writer who did a lot of his work for DC Comics in the 1960s and 1970s.  On the right is Bob Ross (1942-1995), famed host of "The Joy of Painting" on PBS and art instructor to millions.

Why these two?  I couldn't choose just one bearded Bob!

I discovered Bob Ross around 1989, and -- like many others -- found his show to be an oasis of tranquility and optimism in a weary cosmos.  "It's your world," he would say, "so you can do whatever you want with it."  That was precisely what I needed to hear at the time.  His technique was both egalitarian and odd; he'd cover the canvas with a solid coat of paint (a technique he learned from a mentor, Bill Alexander) and use a combination of knives and big 2-inch brushes to blend and scratch for 30 minutes until a magical nature scene appeared.  But the real Joy in the Joy of Painting was Bob's soothing voice.  There's a kind of trance-out phenomenon that can happen when you're in the presence of someone with this kind of voice... it's no coincidence that Bob seems to be the patron saint of a group of people who aim to study and reproduce this phenomenon at will (Google the acronym "ASMR" if you dare).

On the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum was Bob Haney, who is kind of the patron saint of gonzo craziness when it comes to "Silver Age" superhero stories.  He co-created the Teen Titans, Sergeant Rock, and everyone's favorite chemistry-themed superhero, Metamorpho the Element Man...

You may have thought I was kidding?

 A few other highlights and factoids from the blissfully logic-free Haneyverse:

• Did you know that Batman and Wonder Woman once met an army of gorilla surgeons?
• Or that there was an alternate future in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne have rebellious Super Sons named, um, Clark Jr. and Bruce Jr.?
• Or that Catwoman was once an ambassador to the United Nations?
• Or that a two-foot tall alien invader elf was once defeated by a guitar that shoots laser beams?
• Of course you knew about the classic comics villains Dick Dragon and Ding Dong Daddy. 

Hmm, I've discovered it's not easy to explain Bob Haney stories in single-sentence bullets.  Chris Sims, the world's foremost Haneyologist, spent some more time making summaries of other Haney gems here and here.

Haney did have a serious side, too.  His moving, 4-page story Dirty Job won several awards.  (You can read it in full at the above link, but scroll slowly to not spoil the ending on the last page.)

In the end, I'm not 100% sure why I paired these two very different Bobs together.  Both are known for their words and images, I suppose.  Maybe, like pickles and peanut butter, they really DO go well together despite all appearances!  :-)

Fossil Angel Harmonies

Okay, it's looking like I'm not the riddlesmith I thought I was.  My original idea was to put all the explanatory stuff below into the previous post, but then I tried to be too tricksy for my own good.  :-)

Answer time.  Who was my haiku describing?

left at the crossroads

by science, she takes a right

and calls herself art

She is magic.  And she seems to be in real need of some adaptability...

When I was traveling last week, I finally settled down to read an 11,000 word essay that has been circulating on the interwebs for a few years.  In 2002, famed, crazy-bearded graphic novelist Alan Moore wrote Fossil Angels, a poetic, polyphonic polemic about many things, but mostly about how the modern "occult" community has made itself irrelevant by tying itself too tightly to nostalgia and empty ritualism.

(There's a "modern occult community," you say?  They're not huge, but yes...)

Moore's suggestion?  A bit too gleefully, he suggests that "What this place could do with is a good insurance fire."  Let all that crusty magical tradition and OCD-ish superstition burn itself out, he says, so that the resulting black loam of raw ideas can recombine in a new kind of natural selection (super-natural selection?) to form something new and vibrant.

That something new, he suggests, should look more like ART than like religion or science...

"Art’s only aim can be to lucidly express the human mind and heart and soul in all their countless variations, thus to further human culture’s artful understanding of the universe and of itself, its growth towards the light. Art’s method is whatever can be even distantly imagined. These parameters of purpose and procedure are sufficiently elastic, surely, to allow inclusion of magic’s most radical or most conservative agendas? Vital and progressive occultism, beautifully expressed, that has no obligation to explain or justify itself. Each thought, each line, each image made exquisite for no other purpose than that they be offerings worthy of the gods, of art, of magic itself."

It's ironic that modern-day magic (which is all about transformation and polymorphous change) has fallen behind in adapting to our current circumstances and knowledge.  Science and technology took over many roles that used to be filled by a more magical way of thinking, leaving it at the crossroads of irrelevancy.  Turning itself into art may be just the amrita it needs...

I'll give you two other quotes for flavor, but, if it's your Will, feel free to read the whole thing!  :-)

"If magic were regarded as an art it would have culturally valid access to the infrascape, the endless immaterial territories that are ignored by and invisible to Science, that are to scientific reason inaccessible, and thus comprise magic's most natural terrain. Turning its efforts to creative exploration of humanity's interior space might also be of massive human use, might possibly restore to magic all the relevance and purpose, the demonstrable utility that it has lacked so woefully, and for so long. Seen as an art, the field could still produce the reams of speculative theory that it is so fond of (after all, philosophy and rhetoric may be as easily considered arts as sciences), just so long as it were written beautifully or interestingly. While, for example, The Book of the Law may be debatable in value when considered purely as prophetic text describing actual occurrences or states of mind to come, it cannot be denied that it's a shit-hot piece of writing, which deserves to be revered as such."

and

"We could make this parched terrain a teeming paradise, a tropic where each thought might blossom into art. Under the altar lies the studio, the beach. We could insist upon it, were we truly what we say we are. We could achieve it not by scrawling sigils but by crafting stories, paintings, symphonies. We could allow our art to spread its holy psychedelic scarab wings across society once more, perhaps in doing so allow some light or grace to fall upon that pained, benighted organism. We could be made afresh in our fresh undergrowth, stand reinvented at a true dawn of our Craft within a morning world, our paint still wet, just-hatched and gummy-eyed in Eden. Newborn in Creation."

I can add nothing.

Lost Cover Art: Bantam's Hesse

Astute readers may recognize my Blogger avatar as being from the cover of a 1970s-era paperback edition of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.  The editions of nearly all of Hesse's books that I own are from this time, when the English translations were published by Bantam Books in the US.  Fresh from Hesse's rediscovery by 1960s hippie culture, the back covers of this time gush about how "The Hesse Phenomenon" appeals both to the underground and to the establishment, man!   (Well, without the "man.")  :-)

The art on the front covers of these Bantam paperbacks has always intrigued me.  They were usually done up in a lush, Romantic style, which contrasted with their stark white backgrounds.  The images ran the gamut from the dull and dreamy to the surreal and freaky, but there was a unity of style that (to me) suggested they were all done by one artist.  For fun, I rounded up as many of them as I could find via Google Images and assembled them into a collage...

Click for bigger JPG image

The bigger JPG image isn't that much bigger, so I also put a higher-resolution PDF version on Google Docs, HERE.

The 15 images are in as close to chronological order as I could figure, with three multi-decade anthologies all put on the bottom left.  In any case, the top two rows are in exactly the order that Hesse published them, so it was totally not my doing to artfully arrange the oddball blue-covered version of Siddhartha right in the center!  :-)

Out of the 6 or 7 of these that I've actually read, it's interesting how my perceptions of the books are flavored by these images.  The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), for example, can be pretty dry in places, but those floating beads and the colorful scene behind Hatty McMustache, there, help fuel the imagination.  This seems related to an ongoing discussion in the RPG blogosphere about art in game books, too... Is it just extraneous fluff, or does it serve to get those creative juices flowing?  A little bit of quality is worth tons of page-padding quantity.

But the big question is: Who is the artist (or artists)?  I wish I knew!  The books themselves don't give any attributions for the cover art.  I did find a web page that claims the artist for the covers of Demian, Beneath the Wheel, and Narcissus & Goldmund was someone named William Edwards.  However, such a common name brings up many hits that makes it difficult to learn more.  My two favorites -- Journey to the East and The Glass Bead Game -- do appear different enough from those other three that they could conceivably be from a different artist.  If anyone reading this has additional information, please comment or contact me.  I'd love to give proper attribution for my own avatar!  :-)