The Planets Minerva: Episode 1: The Beach

The burly warrior, Armigus, sits at the bar table waiting for his friend, a tenant of the inn, to join him. The ales have gone to his bladder and so he rises and heads for the back door which leads to the outhouse. He’s aware that folk are glancing his way, eyes drawn to his pronounced mandible and slightly exposed canines. Not all in the city of Renown are entirely accustomed to the presence of orcish half-breeds.

He shoves open the door, feels the cool breeze of late evening and steps over the threshold. His momentum carries him forward even as he loses consciousness.

Gu’ro’Baen has a similar toothy countenance with a slighter, but still sturdy, build. He gallops down the stairs of the inn and as he passes through the doorway to the common room he meets the same blackening fate.

Catherine de Montreard had stepped through a threshold of her own, she is now recalling, and though her mind is fuzzy, as if awakened from a long sleep, plagued by the strangest dreams, she is confident that her locale has significantly changed. The evening sky is still dim but everything else is wrong.

She is without clothing and standing barefoot in warm sand with the sound of lapping waves beside and behind her and before her a cliff face at least a hundred feet high. More immediately before her there is a sword partly buried vertically in the sand and pooled around it is an ample quantity of grey-brown fabric.

She turns to see a wide horizon of sea and sky beyond the threshold from which she no doubt emerged: a scintillating metallic rectangle of little or no substance; perhaps only the glimmer of a portal in the act of vanishing; a tool of some great sorcery no doubt. Through this portal no sign of her origin is visible; only this new sea and sky.

 

To her right another portal glimmers some fifty feet away and before it stands a naked man and before him an apparent welcome package alike her own; sword and cloth. For miles beyond that lies more vacant beach and cliff side, concluding at some far promontory, and beyond that the reddish glow of setting sun.

To her left lies a similar sight; a similar headland in the distance, well beyond another glimmering framework and another man. Further on she spies a fourth station; no living person but just a framework and another arrangement she presumes the same as that in front of her which she now moves swiftly to. She pulls free a hooded robe; only slightly smaller than her ideal, and dons it. There is no belt. She clutches it closed with one hand while examining the sword in her other hand. It is smaller than her own sword and engraved on the hilt are the words Saint Montreal.

The men have likewise equipped themselves and converge on her now and as they approach she recognizes their telltale orcish features. They recognize one another and call each other by name: Armigus and Gu’ro’Baen. They seem as slow and dazed as she feels but attempt an introduction with her which she ignores and instead marches away toward the unattended portal.

She pulls up short though, when a chittering sound alerts her to a presence emerging from the water at her side. The culprit is some unpleasant beast resembling a lobster in some ways and in other ways something insectile or even lizardish. She prepares to defend herself with the sword as the men come swiftly her way. But the creepy insectile chittering noises amplify and suddenly more and more of these creatures begin appearing from out of the sea.

“This way!” cries one of the men. “There appears to be a break in the cliff wall.” And so they flee the chitterers, jogging toward the sun. At the break in the cliff face they find a wide alcove with steps hewn into the rock and earth, arcing upward to the top. They climb these while the sea creatures gather on the sand, clicking and waving their claws. But they do not ascend.

At the top they find themselves on a savannah-like plain. To the west there stands a rocky solitary hill topped by some sort of stronghold and to the north a larger walled community. As they stand taking this in, they grow more unsettled at this unexpected journey and bizarre destination. The air is so much warmer than it should be and It seems like the sky is slowly growing brighter, not darker, and less blue, and more red.

The adventure is inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and this introduction to the campaign comes from the book The Drawing of the Three wherein portals on a beach draw Roland Deschain’s companions from another time and place. The “lobstrosities” come from this same source, modified little. As per D&D convention I assigned these Chitternids all the necessary statistics to conform to the D&D Monster Manual: hit dice, armor class, attack and damage details, alignment, morale etc. As it happened, no battle or further interaction occurred but that doesn’t rule anything out for the future. The players are about nine episodes ahead of us already (by thoroughly arbitrary measurement) and have already encountered beaches several more times.   

Other features from King’s epic series will be borrowed, but the plot is very different.

The Planets Minerva: Introduction

So I’m engaged in a very dynamic and thus far successful Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I am the Dungeon Master - or D.M. (campaign referee), being the one with by far the most experience. The four character players are all somewhere in the 19 to 21 age range; all in university and are blessed with keen intensity, curiosity and imagination.

It is my hope that they will all take a turn being D.M. and creating their own stories of a scope that is appropriate to their more limited role-playing experiences. It would be a delight to see them grow in this capacity.

This campaign of mine, meanwhile, is rather epic. And of course it is only mine in terms of the world it takes place in, the background details and the choices that all of the non-player creatures make. The starring characters belong to the players and as such they are co-authors of this story as well.

The characters, like the players who created them (unimpinged by me), are all young. They are:

• Gu’ro’Baen; a blacksmith and nascent mage/fighter of half-human, half-orcish blood,
• his friend Armigus; a hugely strong fighter, fresh out of the military and also of half-orcish descent,
• Catherine de Montreard; a human ranger,
• and Zontar the priest, in service of Hastseltsi, god of racing.   

I intend to tell their story in this space, likely in more brief, summary form than regular prose, and perhaps also to add optional appendices to demonstrate the geneses and tools behind the results which make up our collaborative story.

The usefulness of this episodic blog pursuit is that it creates a record of shared DM/player perspective for our own use (we each maintain our own records of course). Perhaps it will also be of use to other D&D enthusiasts who may wish to witness the results of a particular brand of D&D: one with an old-school, highly-adaptable approach, loosely based on the original AD&D version, where many of the “rules” are a matter of interpretation by a D.M. who embraces a wide range of tools and possibilities from multiple D&D versions, and who firmly believes that there are no limits other than those of the imagination; and to witness the possibilities in terms of large-scale world-building that is possible when a referee has a lot of time to devote, a lot of experience, a lot of imagination, and a knack for combining original ideas with ideas borrowed from film and literature.

I suppose it may also be interesting to anyone who enjoys telling or reading fantasy stories or who has pondered getting into D&D as a hobby.

Others may learn to skip these episodes!

C is for Cars - no - Creativity. No, Cars!

Good grief. I want to write about both. Cars could instead be Autos or Creativity could be Art but A is long gone in either case. Cars could be Vehicles but I really wanted to do Volunteering. I suppose that could be Helping Hands but I really wanted to do Hugs. Yikes. What a pit of tinkering and negotiation I've fallen into with this A-Z thing.

Okay. I have E still open. Hugs can instead be Embraces. Done!

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes. Creativity. I could talk for hours on this subject. In fact I have talked for hours on this subject. But let me be succinct here tonight, and it doing so, I will speak boldly without the added verbosity that comes with qualifying my opinions. I'll say it once. All that follows are my opinions. Though they are understandings based on very honest and arduous exploration. Here we go:

What makes us human; sets us apart? There is nothing special about the human body. Every feature exists in other species and in some, much superior versions. Intelligence? We are more intelligent perhaps but only by degree. Plenty of intelligence exists in other mammals and perhaps their levels of intelligence are actually superior because perhaps their levels are sustainable whereas our capacity to invent and technologize may very well spell our undoing.

No, it is imagination and creativity that set us apart. It is these that are uniquely human.

Every person is a poet, a writer, an artist, a musician, a dancer, an actor. We all have these rare, strictly human capacities and yet most of us deny it.

"Oh, I have no talent for that..."

Bullshit. We can all do these things but we lose sight of that because we don't practice such art forms for years or decades. And we think we have no talent because we compare our self to the masters of our global pop-culture. We think we can't compete with Stephen King or Ansel Adams or Norman Rockwell or George Clooney but compete how so? For money?

The great money-winners are largely false artists. They only do what is perceived as marketable, which is to cater to the lowest common denominators of the dull masses.

True art is not about money and it's not about pleasing the dull masses. It is about the process. It is about facing the blank page. It is about solitude. It is about asking the big questions or the scary questions and slowly discovering the big answers - or the scary answers. It is about true learning; that which stems from your honest observations and which only can be devised and constructed through sustained contemplation. It is about revelation and enlightenment. It is about real intelligence; about empathy, the precursor to real love.

Most people who have no creative outlets are just part of the big ugly economic machine with no vision for making life better for themselves, other humans and other stakeholders in the planet. They're slaves to their greed and ego. They're all about chasing false promises of happiness, making more money, buying more useless crap and burying it in the ground and training their children to be equally useless in their own lives. With no real intelligence they borrow sound bytes to pass as an illusion of intelligence while they blindly follow the asinine preaching of the so obviously corrupt leaders of society.

William Blake and other poets have claimed, in essence, that mankind will never climb out of this pit we have dug for ourselves until everyone becomes a poet.

Now - that said: There are plenty of exceptions. I know people who don't seem to be creative and yet they are intelligent and loving and contribute to efforts to make the world a better place. How do they do it? I don't know. I don't know everything. I know how writers and artists and musicians do it and it makes sense to me. To you exceptions out there: You have my admiration.

Okay. I think I'm missing a lot here but I've been half asleep the whole time and I must get to bed. I have to be up early tomorrow to go to the Princess of Schools and work with a bunch of excellent kids with their novel reading and creative writing; to hopefully instill in them a permanent habit for creativity and imagination!

Peace.


There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease. A cancer of this planet; a plague.- Agent Smith (film: The Matrix)

For the first time he contemplated, lovelessly but with pity, the lamentable human flock, born to graze and die.
- Georges Bernanos (novel: Under Satan's Sun)

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

Imagination

"Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality."

I stumbled upon this quote from French philosopher Jules de Gaultier and was immediately put off. How morbidly unwise. But in learning that de Gaultier was an afficianado of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, We must interpret that he is referring to escapist imagination and the war against circumstance. As always, with our language of duality, what is true is also false - and vice versa - as you alter the context. This is why, when I find myself in a conversation bearing some hope for usefulness, I attempt to take it to the most universal of perspectives.

In my undeniable living experience I look at all that I once thought was reality and see that it is all illusion. All that I now experience to be true, I never would have discovered without imagination.

Imagination is absolutley key in the war of reality. But it is on reality's side; not against.

Cause Number One and the Number One Cause

Once upon a time there occurred an event;
A singularity; the biggest bang for the buck
Or the snap of fingers if you prefer, of a great creator;
For it all works out the very same!

And this event would be Cause #1
For billions of billions of billions of billions
Of effects
Over billions of years;
Every effect born of millions of causes combined;
Every effect also a cause
For billions of billions more effects;
Causes and effects uncountable.
Every element of reality an effect-cause;
Every one of them natural;
Every one inevitable;
Every one of them owing to Cause #1 at its root.
Every one connected.

Effect-causes spelled unstoppable change.
Effect-causes organized a sea of chaos
Into sets and subsets; formatted a universe
Made of super clusters
Made of clusters
Made of galaxies
Made of systems
Made of spheres
Made of elements
Made of molecules
Made of atoms.

A world of binding attractions great and small
Revolving; everything revolving,
Expanding, contracting.
Dust to dust.
Cause and effect.

Somewhere a sphere
Bearing critical ratio of elements,
A phenomenal collision of molecules,
At a critical distance from a vast hot central sphere,
Through inevitable cause and effect,
Became a blue and white place.

And there it happened.
A miracle of life
At the meeting of layers;
Rock and air,
Pooling water.
A splitting cell.
Cause and effect.

Cellular organization.
Random mutation.
A cause-effect process of natural selection.
A diversity of species; lives of kind.
DNA and sub-code.

Survival instinct knowing no bounds.
Those with domination instinct the great winners,
Those without it, dead, strangled, swallowed.
Survival of the vicious; the parasitic.
Vines creeping; Roots warring,
Fish eating fish; bugs eating bugs,
Herbivores; Carnivores; Dog eat dog.
Viruses and bacteria eating from within.
Thus life: The process of ultimate thievery.
Cause and effect.

Evolution.
Mammals; Brain cells; Intelligence.
Automatons with limited awareness.
Instinctive response.
Cause and effect.

Evolution.
These beasts emerging;
Bipedal; clever.
With greater awareness,
Though still far from complete;
Still so very far.
Perceiving in their limited awareness
That their limited awareness
Is all there is; some full awareness;
Some ultimate evolution or design.

They’re the greatest pretenders.
The great labelers,
Grouping and labeling everything;
The fantasy of generalization making everything seem easy;
The reality of uniqueness dismissed.
Cooperation; strength in numbers;
Ghastly overwhelming strength in numbers!
Victory through cooperation.
Dominance; the ultimate prize
For their kind, they label human.

And then what?
In the face of victory,
Privileged exclusion from the realities
Of the domination quest;
Exclusion from the hunt;
Exclusion from the fight and the flight;
Food and shelter handed down.
The paradox of isolation.
What oh what then does survival mean?
The forces born of instincts need to know!

Instincts turning inward.
Cause and effect.
Individual survival.
Survival within the society.
Ledgers of contribution;
Money the new survival;
Food and shelter a privilege.
Man eat man.

The paradox of cooperation/competition;
However to do both?
Instinctive forces perverting.
Cause and effect.
Necessary duplicity.
Puppets born of reputation and ego;
Pure charade.

The rise of the matrix;
The superstructures that overwhelm
And tell them what things to pretend.
Labels labels labels!
Tribes tribes tribes!
Nations,
Corporations,
Races,
Ideologies,
Religions;
Arbitrary categories
Pretended to be real,
Make everyone a friend;
Make everyone an enemy.

Such pure fantasy can only be pretended
When the reality of uniqueness is dismissed.
Oh the confusion;
Now to navigate?
The domination instincts still thrive,
Looking for victims.
They label them sins,
Pretend the sins are not to thank for their existence,
Pretend the sins do not dominate their living moments,
They ascribe them to a scapegoat and call him the Devil.
They teach this to their children and let the children
Suffer, ever suffer for they each think they are each the devil.
The survival instincts have it covered.
Fight to disallow such crippling despair
Duplicity solves all.
Cause and effect.

Confine it to the greater brain;
The non-awareness.
But oh the self-loathing!
They must ignore those terrifying glimpses;
Suppress the confusion.
For they must navigate the matrix
One way or another
And win their bread;
Oh but not just bread,
But win their almighty material trophies,
For survival instinct knows no mercy;
Only domination.

The structures all demand from them
The appearance of subscription to the rules
And hidden contrariety,
Because in the matrix angels are trodden on
And cheaters prosper.

The dual duplicities:
The lies they tell on purpose
And the lies of the sub-awareness
Tragically mistaken for golden truth.
They think it a matrix of lies and truth,
This matrix of lies and more lies.
Cause and effect.
Puppets tricking puppets.
The matrix weaving layers and layers of illusion
So tightly woven, the pinpricks of truth
Sparkle so rarely just as the tiny volume of light
Out of all stars in the universe
To penetrate a smoggy Toronto night sky.
When finally the young have aged;
Developed sufficient senses,
It is too late; the matrix has snatched them
Through the TV’s and the institutions
And the things you will not hear said;
The endless bullshit eaten and eaten;
The investment in illusions signed and sealed.
Cause and effect.
There’s no turning back.

But wait, there is a second miracle!
Not intelligence but the boon of it;
Imagination! Creativity!
The regard for unvarnished truth.
The capacity to evolve beyond the domination instinct
Simply because they dreamed of it!

Such a phenomenal departure from the nature of life.
A celebration of that idea called love;
That Bordeaux blend of attractions and addictions
Just another label,
But so useful when applied:
Loving kindness; generosity; harmony.

They each participate to some degree; great or small
In living without harming and for that
Every human is beautiful; Hear this, you human!
For that, you are beautiful in this universe!
So fascinating, this evolution, to some.
Some of them scientists; some of them poets, musicians, artists,
Those who engage in true learning; an act of solitude,
Some are the sufferers; forced to bear reality,
Some of them the ancient champions
Of beautifully intentioned religions
Before the inevitable corruptions.
Cause and effect.

They are those who escape the unmerciful web
Of the matrix’ mighty structures
Through rare unexpected circumstance;
Rare causes; rare effects.
Those who embrace the reality of cause and effect,
The reality of uniqueness,
The reality of nature; of inevitability,
The reality that all of one’s frustration is one’s own cause;
All hate, all stress, all fear, all rage,
All intolerance;
All of it the result of one’s own flawed expectations
And flawed perceptions;
The result of all the blaming when in truth
There is no one to blame but the blamer.

For those who fully escape the matrix
There is no confusion but only peace,
No illusion but only freedom,
No sadness but only joy,
No rage but only love; real love;
Not addictive, not of lust,
Not directional but all-directional;
The love that is a state of being;
So awesome; so shockingly euphoric
It is at first devastating
In all but the smallest doses.

And above all there is desire for harmony;
That everyone would give care for all others
And mercy for the less evolved,
Not in the hopes that what goes around comes around
But damn it, for the sheer joy of it!
For that is the ultimate destiny.
All evidence points there; scripture; poetry; science.
Cause and effect.

But where is the road map to that complete evolution;
That ultimate humanity for all?
This imperfect author; flawed poet does not know.
This is the quest; the number one cause.
Flawed versions are written here and there
In the works of poets long dead or just,
In the temples, mosques and churches
So vulgarly and inexpertly taught
By the pawns of old cold organizations.
But while poets survive on the fringe of welfare society
Outside the matrix but privy to its comforts,
Not with false nobility!
Knowing they are cheaters!
But looking to be useful,
Looking to nurture harmony,
Looking for the rare candidate for escape; the next Neo,
They leave their calling cards;
Their hints in these places
Because if just one more can be freed,
By god, It’s all worth it.

Julie, Julia, Me and You

The writing life is a constant bout of amnesia. Each time I return to it after too long an absence I am shocked to discover how joyful it is; how rewarding.

How is it that I keep forgetting how integral writing is to my vitality? Each time the habit derails upon collision with a busy schedule or laziness or a pursuit of some addiction (but really, always some combination of those things), how quickly I forget that writing is my truest companion. Then we're reunited finally and yet again the blank page surprises me, revealing that only here upon this endless white field am I - at home.

And just as this certain knowledge is repeatedly stolen from my wretched consciousness, so is this piece: That the thoughts which spur me to write at any given time are never the meat of the story but only the doorway. Always as I struggle to convert those thoughts to meaningful words, so the real questions emerge and the real ideas follow.

These twin crimes constantly dull the urge to write and I dare not suggest their origin - because I am not a poet of enough merit to slander those ancients before me by denouncing the beast or the pit, nor am I scientist enough to test the tale of genetic sub-code; of a dedication to species, not self, lying at the heart of the master non-consciousness. As I strive to acquire discipline, my only weapon against that ruling force (as mirrored in the messages of poets and Buddhists), I go against the interests of speciesism; I pervert our ruthless core programming.

Yet I sense with almost certainty that both claims, poetic and scientific, are versions of the same truth but written in different languages.

I look at my neighbors and they show me no indication of awareness of this harsh reality. They seem only to circle this great monopoly board that we dare label life and seem only to see through the eyes of their token. They seem to skitter in a constant panic on the surface of life, like those squat little waterbugs. Do they ever stop and peer below?

You have to slow down to see beneath things. But that is what art is all about, isn't it? Literature, music, theatre, film and the visual arts. They are reflection. They are components of real life but rearranged and concentrated. In them we seek to understand the nature of humanity by looking at our communal selves through other perspectives.

Of course there is an endless swarm of "false art." The bulk of action movie material for instance, which is fast and shallow and appeases the dedicated surface-skimmers by speeding them faster and faster along the surface. "What happens next!" is the constant question, never "What is really happening?." And the answer is bullets and fast cars. Things that appease the base instincts but at least let you explore them in the safety of the cinema; not on the streets.

But for those occasions when we bear a little courage; a little bit of respect for our innate complexity of mind, there is the literary fiction and its counterparts in film and other mediums, there is that patient contemplation; that exploration of fragile human diverseness. Here our empathy is awakened and we become someone else for a while and we laugh with them and we hurt for them and we feel connected and we get just a little closer to understanding ourselves and our kind; an infinitely greater adventure, I suggest, than any bank heist.

I just watched Julie and Julia, a true-ish film about a couple of writers with a passion for food (How could I possibly relate?). I quite liked it. Meryl Streep's performance was of Oscar quality in my humble opinion and Amy Adams was perfectly cast. I shed a couple tears in places where no man should be expected to and not because anyone got cancer or anything, but because the human spirit is miraculous and fragile and because it is at once inspiring and pitiable to watch - nay feel - someone clinging to their dreams.

Empathy. I feel it is at the core of our imagination, our creativity, our love. our connectedness. It is the hinge upon which the human being's unique evolution swings. I am in stunned awe of it.