Inspiration: Vermilion
How do you walk into a project?
Architecture often matches purpose. In a careful planning and building process, architecture can take multiple elements into account to help shape the structure. It can look into the location challenges, the surrounding landscape, the natural weather patterns, tools, local materials, and the way a space will be used. From the moment you approach a location, every detail matters.
Places of worship often carry strong architecture, taking that experience a step further into the kind of mindset with which you walk through a place. For example, the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo, has a massive vermilion gate, which has survived since the 1600s. Walking through this gate, called the Sangedatsumon, is a process considered as a cleanse from greed, anger, and, ignorance.
As we walk into projects like bitcoin and nostr, what are the values and principles supporting us along that journey? We may speak of decentralization, simplicity, censorship resistance, ownership of keys, individual empowerment…
Openness
In a similar sense, walking into the first step of this book journey, openness comes to mind as a starting principle. Nothing about this journey would be the same without an open process. The book itself (the digital versions), along with any tools and resources surrounding these efforts will also be free and open to anyone.
Book setting
Have you ever wondered where authors get their inspiration, and why they make specific choices? I hope these continuous behind-the-scenes into the writing of this book will add more texture to your experience.
Japanese gates frame locations in inspiring ways. They welcome you to walk through them to experience something different on the other side. Our frames of mind can also walk us into new knowledge, but it depends on how open we are to learn.
When it comes to the setting of this yet unnamed sci-fi book, what would a future city look like, within a society ruled by control? I’d like it to have a past based on freedom that was somehow lost, yet with the hope for it to be regained with a greater appreciation for what it means.
Imagine a city with four striking gates along the cardinal directions. They shape a foundation built on a forgotten past where the society used to be free, as free as you are to walk through an open gate. When something is not open, however, it tends to decay over time. It loses the possibility of growth and innovation. It loses its free spirit and spontaneity.
It would likely by a place with too many rules, decided for a majority from an elite minority, instead of for the inherent uniqueness of each human being. Too many rules are a creativity killer.
However, rules tend to be bent and broken to benefit those at the top, so the contrasts between the two ways of life should be evident.
Change likely stems from the lives of characters who have seen both sides: the elite and the majority. When you are able to see the contrasts between the two, you may understand both their vices and virtues, so that, given serendipitous circumstances, you may be gifted with the advent of choice. What you do with it will depend on the values you carry within.
Writing: A beginning
It is too early to know whether the following part will make it into this sci-fi book, how much it will change, or where it will fit.
In a city yet unnamed, the four massive vermilion gates, which once stood for truth, courage, and freedom, had become an association to fear. Closed off to keep most on the inside, by force rather than choice, these gates seemed to have forgotten their purpose. Instead of being open and filled with activity, they had almost become walls. Since (some yet to determine unknown event), the city had lost its candor and innovation. What remained of its foundational bones, was the unique vermilion lacquer on its wooden gates, a reminder of a past that could come again.
The words truth and freedom had been avoided in common lexicon for so long that they seemed lost, but not their meaning. Freedom is a natural state of humanity, it cannot be erased from our subconscious though fear may try. Deep within, away from that which corrodes the spirit, we all carry the essence of freedom. We all crave truth. While those feelings seemed to lay dormant, no one could predict the exact place where that spark of change could come from, but it always does.
Would future generations look back in on technology and on those projects taking your meaningful time and be grateful that they were built?