Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall

I refuse to steal a title from a Bowie song no matter how justified it may feel

I think we forget how restlessly inventive we are. I think we fall back on old ways and old ideas more often then we have to, and shun our own brilliance to adapting and devising.

Not merely in technological matters, either. Sure, we invent new devices...coiled filaments that glow as electrical power passes through them, bullets without cases, bombs that can be targeted at a distance, a means of replicating the DNA of another, machines that can store information and simulate reality, even artifacts that hurtle through the debris choking space near our Earth, creating communion between two distant points on that fragile azure ball we live on. And all of these things are amazing. But they are not the be all and end all of our inventiveness.

Humans bristle when confined to old ways. They grow agitated when told there is but one way to do something, or when expected to parrot in agreement when told of the correct solution to a problem. More than two thousand years ago, at a time most of us are told no such artifact could exist, the Greeks were making use of a sophisticated star-mapping mechanical calculator. Two thousand years before that, the Egyptians had figured out how to use crocodile shit as a prophylactic. 13,000 years ago, a sophisticated stellar calendar was in use in France, in a region in Europe where, according to the same folks who deny that the Greeks knew how to make machines, there was no society to be making use of that calendar.

Humans invented the words of every language in existence. We came up with the concept of divinity (I do not believe that we invented divinity, but whether or not you do, you have to accept that humans can, and did, conceive of it, in all its forms) and then actually managed to create the concept of atheism. What's even more amazing, some human somewhere managed to create the concept of admitting ignorance. We actually know that we don't know things. Wrap your head around that one for a while. A human somewhere realized that human intellect has flaws using that selfsame intellect. In other words, our minds contain the seeds for their own future development, a self-diagnostic ability of almost paradoxical brilliance.

Every religion. Every philosophy. Every city. Every device. Every poem or story. Every language. All the accumulate flotsam of our all-too-short tenure on this planet as thinking beings. Some human or humans created it, shaped it, changed it, conceived it, recreated it. We are dancers, and one of our dances makes new things with a frenzy and a zeal unmatched and unheard of on this planet, so far as we know. Much is, of course, lost. For all we know, we are but the latest to rise from the evolutionary ferment to scratch our heads as we stare into the night sky. What am I could be said to be the primary question of any sapient being. Humanity seems to be determined to discover as many possible answers as it can, from artist to murderer, from parent to wanderer, a painting as big as forever created with a mutable palette.

A self-loathing recluse from my home state created a new religion as an aside for his goal of creating stark tales of existential horror, a mythos suited to a basic cosmological conceit, that the universe is far vaster than we can understand and that entities exist that view us with absolutely no regard or favor at all...as less than ticks to be swept aside as their hour comes round again. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos now inspires stuffed toys. I own several. Despite my appreciation for his bleak tales, I'm also enamoured of the mind that saw his idea and decided it would make a good toy. The whirling perversity of the human makes me sick with loathing and inspires the only optimism I can muster, the idea that we simply will not accept any final point, no terminus to development, no end to what can be done. We are told you can't do that, and for good and for ill, we do it.

This will either kill us or save us.

There are paradoxical things...for instance, contemplate this: if Saddam Hussein does not possess weapons of mass destruction, then when the US Military (a military composed of men and women who believe themselves to be in defense of myself and my fellow countrymen's lives and liberty, and thereby to be respected for that even if I disagree with the uses of that defense) attacks him, they will roll over his armed forces. If he does possess them, then we can expect him to use them against said armed forces, causing massive casualties. So if the President is telling the truth, he may well be sending hundreds of thousands of our soldiers to their deaths. If the President is lying, our soldiers will have no difficulty at all in overthrowing Hussein and will with any luck suffer minimum casualties...but we will have had no justification at all in overthrowing Hussein. We are thereby placed into a situation where we must hope that our leaders are lying to us and acting immorally, for the sake of our fellow citizens who will die if they are in fact being accurate. It is a strange thing to think about. To wonder what would be worse: is my nation to be an aggressor invading another for insufficient justification, or is it to be stunned by the use of atomic or bacteriological weapons against its military or even itself?

One atomic weapon in the trunk of a rented car driving into a city could well render September 11th moot. As it is, much of the world already believes that the thousands dead that day did not justify the thousands who died in Afghanistan, few of whom were Al-Qaeda, which has not been much affected by it...but what would one do, nothing at all? It is inconceivable that nothing should have been the penalty for such an unsurpassed act of evil. (Recently unsurpassed, at any rate. When talking about atrocity, there's always a bigger one somewhere in the world.) We had to do something. Yet, in the end, we didn't. We bombed those who had already been bombed by so many others, we overthrew one government and replaced it with another to no real effect...we displayed none of the creativity that we have so often showed before. Unless one counts deciding on September 17th, 2001 to attack Iraq in regards to actions it didn't commit as inventive. Which I suppose it is.

Compare this to the brilliance with which the FBI found Mir Aimal Kasi. Whatever your feelings as to the way they accomplished it, the fact is that the FBI was able to find one man in Pakistan and bring him back to the United States to face trial. How did they accomplish this? In part by being inventive, by refusing to accept that it could not be done and also refusing to confine themselves to the means they had previously employed. Kasi was, of course, nothing like the murderers of September 11th in that he was one man, alone, without the logistics and support network of Al-Qaeda. However, in some ways, that made finding him harder. And yet we accomplished it, whereas in the case of Al-Qaeda, we have made a lot of noise and stirred up a lot of dust and done nothing. It confuses me. This is a consideration merely of the creativity of the contrasting events, and not of the morality of either...it is almost as difficult for me to feel sympathy for Kasi as it would be for me to weep if we dragged Bin Laden in chains into the Hague and tried him. This doesn't make the US infallible.

Our tools are as advanced as any in the history of the world. Did we forget that we made them? The brilliance that created them does not have to stop with mere mechanistic tinkering. We do not merely create weapons. We certainly have, a great many times in human history, done just that. The stone axe. The spear. The war-chariot. The bow. The sword. The longbow and dane axe and crossbow and stirrups and the trebuchet and cannon and the personal firearm...the list is long, and stunningly inventive in its way. But we also created crop rotation and the printing press and diplomacy and international law. Everything that exists in this world that does not predate us is affected by us. Medicine and agriculture and debate and genocide and war profiteering are our creations. We starve one another and feed one another. We offer one another a helping hand and grind our boots into each other's faces. We reach crisis points...many times in the past, we failed to act in the best interest of all, and nations fell, civilizations were wiped out, and the long slow climb back to a community began again, often times made out of the ruins of the old. We could be at such a time again, as we were sixty years ago, as we were twenty years before that...there is a fractal nature to our history, a constant tension between forces that we affect through the intensity of our minds and hearts, the willingness to seek out new ways, to invent our way around difficulty. Sometimes this is seen in the spectacular effectiveness of our panoply and armament. Sometimes it is seen in the men least likely to do so reaching out and planting the sword in the earth.

Sometimes we forget this. We forget that we can choose how, and where, and when, and why to use our fearsome genius towards innovation. It does not have to be limited. We do not need to restrict ourselves towards the solutions of the past. Every situation is new, even as it carries a resonance from past events...and we can change, and adapt, and devise novel approaches to these crisis points, on the macroscale of world events and in the smaller scale of our own lives.

I have seen a child use a kite strung with fishing line to provide a cat with a safe means to escape a rooftop. I have seen a woman turn her back on the hate and bitterness of her entire family to provide love and support to her friends. I have seen a man who could build a gas turbine engine based on a plan in his mind twist the word of God itself to justify xenophobia and fear. We are a relentlessly innovative people. We do not have to fall back on the methods of the past merely because they have been established. It does not follow that we should shun all tradition, either, but just because you have a sword it does not follow that you must use it. Furthermore, if you do use it, it follows that you should use it well.

Often, we forget how good we are at creativity. Often, we twist that creativity into shortsighted uses. Sometimes, we do neither, and the world changes. I think the world could use some more change now, and I think we can still do it. Our rapacious desire to answer the question What are we can still be displayed in dizzying variety, in ways we have never seen before.

I refuse to steal a title from a Bowie song no matter how justified it may feel

I think we forget how restlessly inventive we are. I think we fall back on old ways and old ideas more often then we have to, and shun our own brilliance to adapting and devising.

Not merely in technological matters, either. Sure, we invent new devices...coiled filaments that glow as electrical power passes through them, bullets without cases, bombs that can be targeted at a distance, a means of replicating the DNA of another, machines that can store information and simulate reality, even artifacts that hurtle through the debris choking space near our Earth, creating communion between two distant points on that fragile azure ball we live on. And all of these things are amazing. But they are not the be all and end all of our inventiveness.

Humans bristle when confined to old ways. They grow agitated when told there is but one way to do something, or when expected to parrot in agreement when told of the correct solution to a problem. More than two thousand years ago, at a time most of us are told no such artifact could exist, the Greeks were making use of a sophisticated star-mapping mechanical calculator. Two thousand years before that, the Egyptians had figured out how to use crocodile shit as a prophylactic. 13,000 years ago, a sophisticated stellar calendar was in use in France, in a region in Europe where, according to the same folks who deny that the Greeks knew how to make machines, there was no society to be making use of that calendar.

Humans invented the words of every language in existence. We came up with the concept of divinity (I do not believe that we invented divinity, but whether or not you do, you have to accept that humans can, and did, conceive of it, in all its forms) and then actually managed to create the concept of atheism. What's even more amazing, some human somewhere managed to create the concept of admitting ignorance. We actually know that we don't know things. Wrap your head around that one for a while. A human somewhere realized that human intellect has flaws using that selfsame intellect. In other words, our minds contain the seeds for their own future development, a self-diagnostic ability of almost paradoxical brilliance.

Every religion. Every philosophy. Every city. Every device. Every poem or story. Every language. All the accumulate flotsam of our all-too-short tenure on this planet as thinking beings. Some human or humans created it, shaped it, changed it, conceived it, recreated it. We are dancers, and one of our dances makes new things with a frenzy and a zeal unmatched and unheard of on this planet, so far as we know. Much is, of course, lost. For all we know, we are but the latest to rise from the evolutionary ferment to scratch our heads as we stare into the night sky. What am I could be said to be the primary question of any sapient being. Humanity seems to be determined to discover as many possible answers as it can, from artist to murderer, from parent to wanderer, a painting as big as forever created with a mutable palette.

A self-loathing recluse from my home state created a new religion as an aside for his goal of creating stark tales of existential horror, a mythos suited to a basic cosmological conceit, that the universe is far vaster than we can understand and that entities exist that view us with absolutely no regard or favor at all...as less than ticks to be swept aside as their hour comes round again. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos now inspires stuffed toys. I own several. Despite my appreciation for his bleak tales, I'm also enamoured of the mind that saw his idea and decided it would make a good toy. The whirling perversity of the human makes me sick with loathing and inspires the only optimism I can muster, the idea that we simply will not accept any final point, no terminus to development, no end to what can be done. We are told you can't do that, and for good and for ill, we do it.

This will either kill us or save us.

There are paradoxical things...for instance, contemplate this: if Saddam Hussein does not possess weapons of mass destruction, then when the US Military (a military composed of men and women who believe themselves to be in defense of myself and my fellow countrymen's lives and liberty, and thereby to be respected for that even if I disagree with the uses of that defense) attacks him, they will roll over his armed forces. If he does possess them, then we can expect him to use them against said armed forces, causing massive casualties. So if the President is telling the truth, he may well be sending hundreds of thousands of our soldiers to their deaths. If the President is lying, our soldiers will have no difficulty at all in overthrowing Hussein and will with any luck suffer minimum casualties...but we will have had no justification at all in overthrowing Hussein. We are thereby placed into a situation where we must hope that our leaders are lying to us and acting immorally, for the sake of our fellow citizens who will die if they are in fact being accurate. It is a strange thing to think about. To wonder what would be worse: is my nation to be an aggressor invading another for insufficient justification, or is it to be stunned by the use of atomic or bacteriological weapons against its military or even itself?

One atomic weapon in the trunk of a rented car driving into a city could well render September 11th moot. As it is, much of the world already believes that the thousands dead that day did not justify the thousands who died in Afghanistan, few of whom were Al-Qaeda, which has not been much affected by it...but what would one do, nothing at all? It is inconceivable that nothing should have been the penalty for such an unsurpassed act of evil. (Recently unsurpassed, at any rate. When talking about atrocity, there's always a bigger one somewhere in the world.) We had to do something. Yet, in the end, we didn't. We bombed those who had already been bombed by so many others, we overthrew one government and replaced it with another to no real effect...we displayed none of the creativity that we have so often showed before. Unless one counts deciding on September 17th, 2001 to attack Iraq in regards to actions it didn't commit as inventive. Which I suppose it is.

Compare this to the brilliance with which the FBI found Mir Aimal Kasi. Whatever your feelings as to the way they accomplished it, the fact is that the FBI was able to find one man in Pakistan and bring him back to the United States to face trial. How did they accomplish this? In part by being inventive, by refusing to accept that it could not be done and also refusing to confine themselves to the means they had previously employed. Kasi was, of course, nothing like the murderers of September 11th in that he was one man, alone, without the logistics and support network of Al-Qaeda. However, in some ways, that made finding him harder. And yet we accomplished it, whereas in the case of Al-Qaeda, we have made a lot of noise and stirred up a lot of dust and done nothing. It confuses me. This is a consideration merely of the creativity of the contrasting events, and not of the morality of either...it is almost as difficult for me to feel sympathy for Kasi as it would be for me to weep if we dragged Bin Laden in chains into the Hague and tried him. This doesn't make the US infallible.

Our tools are as advanced as any in the history of the world. Did we forget that we made them? The brilliance that created them does not have to stop with mere mechanistic tinkering. We do not merely create weapons. We certainly have, a great many times in human history, done just that. The stone axe. The spear. The war-chariot. The bow. The sword. The longbow and dane axe and crossbow and stirrups and the trebuchet and cannon and the personal firearm...the list is long, and stunningly inventive in its way. But we also created crop rotation and the printing press and diplomacy and international law. Everything that exists in this world that does not predate us is affected by us. Medicine and agriculture and debate and genocide and war profiteering are our creations. We starve one another and feed one another. We offer one another a helping hand and grind our boots into each other's faces. We reach crisis points...many times in the past, we failed to act in the best interest of all, and nations fell, civilizations were wiped out, and the long slow climb back to a community began again, often times made out of the ruins of the old. We could be at such a time again, as we were sixty years ago, as we were twenty years before that...there is a fractal nature to our history, a constant tension between forces that we affect through the intensity of our minds and hearts, the willingness to seek out new ways, to invent our way around difficulty. Sometimes this is seen in the spectacular effectiveness of our panoply and armament. Sometimes it is seen in the men least likely to do so reaching out and planting the sword in the earth.

Sometimes we forget this. We forget that we can choose how, and where, and when, and why to use our fearsome genius towards innovation. It does not have to be limited. We do not need to restrict ourselves towards the solutions of the past. Every situation is new, even as it carries a resonance from past events...and we can change, and adapt, and devise novel approaches to these crisis points, on the macroscale of world events and in the smaller scale of our own lives.

I have seen a child use a kite strung with fishing line to provide a cat with a safe means to escape a rooftop. I have seen a woman turn her back on the hate and bitterness of her entire family to provide love and support to her friends. I have seen a man who could build a gas turbine engine based on a plan in his mind twist the word of God itself to justify xenophobia and fear. We are a relentlessly innovative people. We do not have to fall back on the methods of the past merely because they have been established. It does not follow that we should shun all tradition, either, but just because you have a sword it does not follow that you must use it. Furthermore, if you do use it, it follows that you should use it well.

Often, we forget how good we are at creativity. Often, we twist that creativity into shortsighted uses. Sometimes, we do neither, and the world changes. I think the world could use some more change now, and I think we can still do it. Our rapacious desire to answer the question What are we can still be displayed in dizzying variety, in ways we have never seen before.

Exhaustion, fear and pain

I have not felt at all well this week. In fact, today is the first day I've been able to do more than todder around on trembling legs...while I wouldn't say I'm a hundred percent, I am more capable of action than I was. I can't say I really know why, either, except that I think I had reached a point where I was immune enough to caffeine that the amount needed to affect me was pretty close to the lethal dose, and that cutting it out of my life over the past couple of days was a good thing. It may have been that the shaking in my limbs and the remarkably martial drumbeat of my heart were clues. On the other hand, maybe I contracted a virus of some sort or injured myself while being sick the other day...or maybe both, I can't say for sure.

One thing that being ill always makes me think about is death, especially since I'm now old enough that at many other times in human history, I would be dead. Say what you will about Western Civilization or the particular country I live in, but I personally enjoy my life expectancy being longer than 30. Granted, my mother died when she was 40, so it's possible I don't have a lot longer, but every moment is welcome, even if I am depressingly likely to do little with it. To a certain degree I even enjoy doing what I do...reading, thinking, scribbling, posting these strange little snapshots of the inside of my mind to the web. I'm not concerned with leaving a legacy...with over six billion people, I'm sure others have that legacy handled and I can just be until I'm not anymore. So I think about my life, and my inevitable death...so short the time we're here, so much we could do, so little gets done...and find myself at once terrified and accepting.

I am not ready to die.

Maybe that's a good thing, considering that I have attempted to in my life: maybe the fact that I'm nowhere's near ready for it now means I've managed to weather the storms of adolescence and actually, in my own halting way, become an adult. Maybe not. Maybe it just means I'm selfish. Either way, I am not ready to die. I need more life. Want more of it. Despite everything I'm afraid of, both for myself and the world...all the things I see that distress and alarm me, I still want to live.

Strange that it should take a week of feeling sick to teach me that again.

Fitting, perhaps, that I be reminded of my mortality from time to time. Perhaps being sick is like a favor from life, a note that we should not allow ourselves to take it for granted...although I know many who have been or who are far sicker than I have been most recently, although I myself have been so, it's still a lesson that seems to need refreshing. Life is not yours to keep, Matthew...just a gift that fades in its time and passes on to others. Living my life, I am aware of those that came before me and those that will come after...those who lent me their space upon the earth and those who will be borrowing mine to pass on in their turn.

Today I am feeling better than I have. Tomorrow, I may feel even better, or perhaps worse. No matter how I feel, though, eventually I will end up as a debtor paying back this loan of life...hopefully I have lived it well, if only by my own standards.

Exhaustion, fear and pain

I have not felt at all well this week. In fact, today is the first day I've been able to do more than todder around on trembling legs...while I wouldn't say I'm a hundred percent, I am more capable of action than I was. I can't say I really know why, either, except that I think I had reached a point where I was immune enough to caffeine that the amount needed to affect me was pretty close to the lethal dose, and that cutting it out of my life over the past couple of days was a good thing. It may have been that the shaking in my limbs and the remarkably martial drumbeat of my heart were clues. On the other hand, maybe I contracted a virus of some sort or injured myself while being sick the other day...or maybe both, I can't say for sure.

One thing that being ill always makes me think about is death, especially since I'm now old enough that at many other times in human history, I would be dead. Say what you will about Western Civilization or the particular country I live in, but I personally enjoy my life expectancy being longer than 30. Granted, my mother died when she was 40, so it's possible I don't have a lot longer, but every moment is welcome, even if I am depressingly likely to do little with it. To a certain degree I even enjoy doing what I do...reading, thinking, scribbling, posting these strange little snapshots of the inside of my mind to the web. I'm not concerned with leaving a legacy...with over six billion people, I'm sure others have that legacy handled and I can just be until I'm not anymore. So I think about my life, and my inevitable death...so short the time we're here, so much we could do, so little gets done...and find myself at once terrified and accepting.

I am not ready to die.

Maybe that's a good thing, considering that I have attempted to in my life: maybe the fact that I'm nowhere's near ready for it now means I've managed to weather the storms of adolescence and actually, in my own halting way, become an adult. Maybe not. Maybe it just means I'm selfish. Either way, I am not ready to die. I need more life. Want more of it. Despite everything I'm afraid of, both for myself and the world...all the things I see that distress and alarm me, I still want to live.

Strange that it should take a week of feeling sick to teach me that again.

Fitting, perhaps, that I be reminded of my mortality from time to time. Perhaps being sick is like a favor from life, a note that we should not allow ourselves to take it for granted...although I know many who have been or who are far sicker than I have been most recently, although I myself have been so, it's still a lesson that seems to need refreshing. Life is not yours to keep, Matthew...just a gift that fades in its time and passes on to others. Living my life, I am aware of those that came before me and those that will come after...those who lent me their space upon the earth and those who will be borrowing mine to pass on in their turn.

Today I am feeling better than I have. Tomorrow, I may feel even better, or perhaps worse. No matter how I feel, though, eventually I will end up as a debtor paying back this loan of life...hopefully I have lived it well, if only by my own standards.

You know I'm right

So this morning I was talking to Jay, one of my co-writers on the story thing, and we got to discussing Lensmen, and its influence on both Star Wars and the comic book that I find most interesting out of any of them, the classic Green Lantern. (Superman's my favorite character, but GL has that power ring, you see...) and then I remembered an idea I had a while back. Since the people I asked about that idea never displayed any real interest in it, I'm going to post it. But first...my ideas about how to 'save' the Star Wars franchise. Not that it needs saving at this point...it's made sufficient money to guarantee the creation of the third film, which many will go see despite all the bitching and moaning (some of it generated by me) about the quality of the films. Lucas doesn't have to listen to anyone, and he won't. I wouldn't either, if I were him. It just so happens that I have ideas and a weblog (if the most tenuous of weblogs) and so I see no reason not to throw those ideas out into the ether for my own amusement.

So here we go.

Ezrael's Tips To George Lucas For Making The Third Star Wars Prequel Grab The Audience By The Throat And Shake Them Like That Unlucky Bastard Vader Strangles In The First Film

Start with the duel on the bridge, Obi-Wan and Anakin trying their level best to kill each other. Show Anakin's power, show how outmatched Obi-Wan is in a straight fight, establish that he has no choice but to use every ounce of skill at his possession just to even things up...and show that skill. Show why Obi-Wan Kenobi is the only Jedi of his generation to survive Vader's purge. Of course, we all know Obi-Wan must win the fight...so show that, too. Anakin gets cocky, and Obi-Wan knocks him from the bridge and into the lava.

This is where Anakin's voice-over begins. Rage is supposedly the path to the Dark Side. Anger, Hate...these are the emotions that Yoda preaches against, that the Jedi Council fears. But they are as nothing. It is Love for which I sacrificed everything...Love which condemned me to this. Cut back to several months before. Establish Anakin as a man, fighting in the Clone Wars...and establish him as a heroic man, unabashedly brave and concerned with winning the war and saving lives. Make us like him. It is very important that Anakin be likeable, especially after the last film...we can't have him as a petulant, whiny child with the power to make Jedi Master's uncomfortable, because then there's no tension. Since we know Anakin is going to fall, it becomes important to draw on the lessons of the theatre...this is a tragedy, it needs to be tragic. Anakin's fatal flaw, his desire to do the right thing at odds with his inability to perceive what that is, needs to be highlighted. If he's just a petty kid who wants things now now now, we won't be shaken by his fall. So have Anakin save lives and act like a hero.

From there, set up a conflict between Anakin and the rest of the Jedi. But don't take the easy way out and have Anakin be all scowls and misplaced anger. Have his concerns be geniune and even insightful. By this point in time, Anakin should have been married for a few years...his wife's a politician on the front lines of the Clone Wars, in danger from Separatist attacks, and he's mindful of the Living Force as instructed by his almost-first master, Qui-Gon Jinn (get Neeson back as a ghost for at least one scene with Anakin and Obi-Wan) so he's got real reason to be concerned with the direction the war is going. Have Anakin point out to the council that the Jedi, even master warriors like Mace Windu, are making stupid decisions in the war. Use Genosis as an example. Dropping a host of Jedi into a pit full of battle droids was an enormous tactical blunder...it was the kind of decision people who had managed to shut down their emotions would make, a decision entirely based on Jedi detachment and not self-preservation. Have Anakin, who unlike the rest of the Jedi has something to lose in this war, point out to the order that in the thousand years since the last Sith war, the Jedi Order has become stilted and even passive, reactive instead of active, and the fault for much of that lies at the feet of the almost 900 year old Yoda.

Of course, the Jedi won't turn away from Yoda, and Yoda himself won't even consider Anakin's arguments. I really believe, from a story perspective, that deciding that Yoda is the problem is the only way this will work. It means that Yoda will have to face the fact, when Anakin falls, that it was to some extent his fault, that the Jedi Order had become overly passive and dependent on him to rush to the rescue when things got hard...as shown in Episode II when the gunships bailed the Jedi out, led by Yoda. The Jedi no longer depend on themselves or their connection to the force...they depend on Yoda. They use him as the benchmark for how powerful a Jedi can be, the exemplar of the order. Neither they nor he will consider that Yoda is just one being, and can make mistakes. This will be their downfall, that they have narrowed their vision from the once-great Jedi that protected the Republic for millennia to Yoda's disciples. By limiting themselves to Yoda's teachings, Yoda's vision of the Force, they become one-dimensional. Look at the seminal event of Anakin's life...the killing of Qui-Gon, the one Jedi who was not cowed by Yoda, who made his own decisions based on the promptings of the Living Force. Why was Qui-Gon so important that the future Emperor was willing to sacrifice his apprentice to kill him? Because Qui-Gon was perhaps the only hope for the virus of independent thought to infect the Jedi Order in time to save it.

This is the trap. Because most of the Jedi Order avoids attachments, they don't care as deeply as Anakin does about what happens to them, or the galaxy. I'm not saying they don't have any feelings about it, just that they are wrapped up in the Jedi Code and their training (most of them have been trained by Yoda as small children, before they were chosen as Padawan, as seen in Episode II) and so they are more likely to try and retain their passivity. Anakin, on the other hand, loves his wife and fears for the future. He sees the terrorism of the Seperatists and ultimately decides that the only way to beat someone like Count Dooku is to use the same methods he does...he has to master the Living Force inside himself, achieve a balance between the Light and Dark Sides. Obviously, this flies in the face of the Jedi Order...and paradoxically, it is their refusal to help him that dooms them. Because who, aside from the Council, knows enough about the force to train Anakin in the ways of the Dark Side? Sidious the Sith Lord. But the Sith are not creatures of balance, and in seeking their aid (all the while convincing himself, as Luke would later, that he can study the Dark Side and still come out in the end as a good man, that he can achieve balance unaided) Anakin slowly destroys himself.

We need to see this. We need to see a good man, a loving husband, even perhaps an expectant father who worries for his family, for his teacher (there's obviously a connection between Anakin and Obi-Wan, one that should be highlighted) and remembers the death of his mother and cannot bear to let that happen again...a man who for all the right reasons makes the wrong decision. This is the tragedy, and it has to be the heart of the film. Anything else will be, ultimately, of no importance. Anakin is the emotional heart of the prequel trilogy, and as such, he has to be an epic figure, Shakespearean in his conflict, a kind of fusion of Hamlet and MacBeth. When he falls, it should shake everyone. It should seem inconcieveable that this man would embrace the Dark Side...even though we know it is coming, we should not believe it.

Enough of that. I'll be back later with another sci-fi post...a post that discusses what it would be like if the Lensmen broke up into competing sects, one resembling the Jedi and the other looking a lot like the Green Lantern Corps.

You know I'm right

So this morning I was talking to Jay, one of my co-writers on the story thing, and we got to discussing Lensmen, and its influence on both Star Wars and the comic book that I find most interesting out of any of them, the classic Green Lantern. (Superman's my favorite character, but GL has that power ring, you see...) and then I remembered an idea I had a while back. Since the people I asked about that idea never displayed any real interest in it, I'm going to post it. But first...my ideas about how to 'save' the Star Wars franchise. Not that it needs saving at this point...it's made sufficient money to guarantee the creation of the third film, which many will go see despite all the bitching and moaning (some of it generated by me) about the quality of the films. Lucas doesn't have to listen to anyone, and he won't. I wouldn't either, if I were him. It just so happens that I have ideas and a weblog (if the most tenuous of weblogs) and so I see no reason not to throw those ideas out into the ether for my own amusement.

So here we go.

Ezrael's Tips To George Lucas For Making The Third Star Wars Prequel Grab The Audience By The Throat And Shake Them Like That Unlucky Bastard Vader Strangles In The First Film

Start with the duel on the bridge, Obi-Wan and Anakin trying their level best to kill each other. Show Anakin's power, show how outmatched Obi-Wan is in a straight fight, establish that he has no choice but to use every ounce of skill at his possession just to even things up...and show that skill. Show why Obi-Wan Kenobi is the only Jedi of his generation to survive Vader's purge. Of course, we all know Obi-Wan must win the fight...so show that, too. Anakin gets cocky, and Obi-Wan knocks him from the bridge and into the lava.

This is where Anakin's voice-over begins. Rage is supposedly the path to the Dark Side. Anger, Hate...these are the emotions that Yoda preaches against, that the Jedi Council fears. But they are as nothing. It is Love for which I sacrificed everything...Love which condemned me to this. Cut back to several months before. Establish Anakin as a man, fighting in the Clone Wars...and establish him as a heroic man, unabashedly brave and concerned with winning the war and saving lives. Make us like him. It is very important that Anakin be likeable, especially after the last film...we can't have him as a petulant, whiny child with the power to make Jedi Master's uncomfortable, because then there's no tension. Since we know Anakin is going to fall, it becomes important to draw on the lessons of the theatre...this is a tragedy, it needs to be tragic. Anakin's fatal flaw, his desire to do the right thing at odds with his inability to perceive what that is, needs to be highlighted. If he's just a petty kid who wants things now now now, we won't be shaken by his fall. So have Anakin save lives and act like a hero.

From there, set up a conflict between Anakin and the rest of the Jedi. But don't take the easy way out and have Anakin be all scowls and misplaced anger. Have his concerns be geniune and even insightful. By this point in time, Anakin should have been married for a few years...his wife's a politician on the front lines of the Clone Wars, in danger from Separatist attacks, and he's mindful of the Living Force as instructed by his almost-first master, Qui-Gon Jinn (get Neeson back as a ghost for at least one scene with Anakin and Obi-Wan) so he's got real reason to be concerned with the direction the war is going. Have Anakin point out to the council that the Jedi, even master warriors like Mace Windu, are making stupid decisions in the war. Use Genosis as an example. Dropping a host of Jedi into a pit full of battle droids was an enormous tactical blunder...it was the kind of decision people who had managed to shut down their emotions would make, a decision entirely based on Jedi detachment and not self-preservation. Have Anakin, who unlike the rest of the Jedi has something to lose in this war, point out to the order that in the thousand years since the last Sith war, the Jedi Order has become stilted and even passive, reactive instead of active, and the fault for much of that lies at the feet of the almost 900 year old Yoda.

Of course, the Jedi won't turn away from Yoda, and Yoda himself won't even consider Anakin's arguments. I really believe, from a story perspective, that deciding that Yoda is the problem is the only way this will work. It means that Yoda will have to face the fact, when Anakin falls, that it was to some extent his fault, that the Jedi Order had become overly passive and dependent on him to rush to the rescue when things got hard...as shown in Episode II when the gunships bailed the Jedi out, led by Yoda. The Jedi no longer depend on themselves or their connection to the force...they depend on Yoda. They use him as the benchmark for how powerful a Jedi can be, the exemplar of the order. Neither they nor he will consider that Yoda is just one being, and can make mistakes. This will be their downfall, that they have narrowed their vision from the once-great Jedi that protected the Republic for millennia to Yoda's disciples. By limiting themselves to Yoda's teachings, Yoda's vision of the Force, they become one-dimensional. Look at the seminal event of Anakin's life...the killing of Qui-Gon, the one Jedi who was not cowed by Yoda, who made his own decisions based on the promptings of the Living Force. Why was Qui-Gon so important that the future Emperor was willing to sacrifice his apprentice to kill him? Because Qui-Gon was perhaps the only hope for the virus of independent thought to infect the Jedi Order in time to save it.

This is the trap. Because most of the Jedi Order avoids attachments, they don't care as deeply as Anakin does about what happens to them, or the galaxy. I'm not saying they don't have any feelings about it, just that they are wrapped up in the Jedi Code and their training (most of them have been trained by Yoda as small children, before they were chosen as Padawan, as seen in Episode II) and so they are more likely to try and retain their passivity. Anakin, on the other hand, loves his wife and fears for the future. He sees the terrorism of the Seperatists and ultimately decides that the only way to beat someone like Count Dooku is to use the same methods he does...he has to master the Living Force inside himself, achieve a balance between the Light and Dark Sides. Obviously, this flies in the face of the Jedi Order...and paradoxically, it is their refusal to help him that dooms them. Because who, aside from the Council, knows enough about the force to train Anakin in the ways of the Dark Side? Sidious the Sith Lord. But the Sith are not creatures of balance, and in seeking their aid (all the while convincing himself, as Luke would later, that he can study the Dark Side and still come out in the end as a good man, that he can achieve balance unaided) Anakin slowly destroys himself.

We need to see this. We need to see a good man, a loving husband, even perhaps an expectant father who worries for his family, for his teacher (there's obviously a connection between Anakin and Obi-Wan, one that should be highlighted) and remembers the death of his mother and cannot bear to let that happen again...a man who for all the right reasons makes the wrong decision. This is the tragedy, and it has to be the heart of the film. Anything else will be, ultimately, of no importance. Anakin is the emotional heart of the prequel trilogy, and as such, he has to be an epic figure, Shakespearean in his conflict, a kind of fusion of Hamlet and MacBeth. When he falls, it should shake everyone. It should seem inconcieveable that this man would embrace the Dark Side...even though we know it is coming, we should not believe it.

Enough of that. I'll be back later with another sci-fi post...a post that discusses what it would be like if the Lensmen broke up into competing sects, one resembling the Jedi and the other looking a lot like the Green Lantern Corps.

I do not remember...

I have dead spots in my memory. I know the memory is encoded somewhere in the tangled neurons of my proprietary Amazon, but the paths are overgrown and I can't find any guides to take me to the back trails. It's not that I can't remember, either...to extend the jungle metaphor until it creaks under the tension, I could always hack my way through the underbrush. I have the machete and the time.

I don't get very far before I stop, though. Something somewhat akin to fear yet also somewhat like pride doesn't let me get far back into those blasted heaths I don't remember. They're like scabs on my mind...whatever is under them, it hasn't healed yet.

I think one of the scabs fell off last night. I had a dream more like a memory then most dreams I've had, a quiet little moment that may or may not have actually happened. As I type this I'm testing the neural pathways, running back into the storeroom to retrieve a detail or two and then running back out here before something topples over or the lights burn out. (As an aside, Tara and I live in the apartment of withering light: more and more light bulbs burn out every day and we seem strangely unconcerned. Perhaps we've decided to wait until Edison's foul spectre is banished from our home. Or maybe we're reverting into mole people. Anyway, just something I thought of. Back to the main rant.) For instance, I remember a black snake with a belly like light cream, light glistening off of its scales, with its mouth closed on my father's wrist. (Since my father is still alive, I assume it wasn't poisonous...I don't recall any particularly poisonous species of snake native to Rhode Island, although I'm sure there are a few I know nothing about.) Whether the snake actually looked that way or my memories have embellished it, I don't know.

Another parcel of memory from a recently discovered cache: snow falling from a blue sky, glittering in the red light of dawn as it seemed to heat the Mount Hope Bridge like a sword fresh from the forge, orange-red with light that cut a crescent in the horizon between two green turtle's shells breaking the line of the water. I can clearly recall the handlebars of the dirtbike, black, just beneath the line of my vision and the heat of my face...I must have windburned it, riding around before dawn, hitting every root and stone I could find in the dark. It's surprisingly easy to find them. I think it was December, but to be honest, I couldn't tell you.

I have no idea what these memory scraps signify. Why did I forget them? Why am I remembering them now? I'm not a big fan of the whole recovered memory school of therapy mainly because in my own experience it's not the traumatic or painful memories I've repressed...it's the memories that just can't match up to the emotional pitch those harsh experiences reach. As I get older, it's as though there's a layer of snow over my past packed with burrowed moments slowly digging themselves out. Some of those moments are pretty damn bad...I can retrieve a recent one about the day I had to throw my cousin out of my mother's house, the light inside the kitchen washed out reflected moonlight, like a movie projector without film, and young men drawn up and hissing with what now seems to be almost infantile pride, a human version of baboons drawing back teeth and standing stiff at each other. I don't even remember what we said. I just know my best friend and I stopped being best friends that day more than eleven years ago, and we never got it back, never even saw each other again really after that day. I can't say I'd forgotten it, but neither did I really remember it.

Obviously we don't remember our whole lives all the time...even Proust presumably had to go to the bathroom occassionally...or there would be no room to live and collect new memories. Our personal filing systems get silted over with the continuous rush of new experiences and we misplace things. It's to be expected. What amazes me is the rush of recognition when a memory turns up after having gone unexperienced for a long while...as though I were wandering about and then Oh yes. This is who I was. Many of these 'new' memories are sensory only...colors and images, scents (the smells of fire predominate, from the gentle burn of gathered leaves to the roar of a pile of old boats, the smoke of a chimney, the fumes of an ancient engine) and sounds. The feel of wind in my face as I roared immortal down dirt paths on a bomb with a seat. Autumn's crooked fingers brushing ice past my cheeks. The old clock on the main street in Bristol that I walked past several hundred times. The sweetish rotten smell of old books in a box being sold for pennies at the library in Tacoma park.

So much I only remember in fragments. So much that still hides beneath that blanket of snow. So much that can, and doubtless will, come out to remind me again that I am this, and that, and this as well.

I do not remember...

I have dead spots in my memory. I know the memory is encoded somewhere in the tangled neurons of my proprietary Amazon, but the paths are overgrown and I can't find any guides to take me to the back trails. It's not that I can't remember, either...to extend the jungle metaphor until it creaks under the tension, I could always hack my way through the underbrush. I have the machete and the time.

I don't get very far before I stop, though. Something somewhat akin to fear yet also somewhat like pride doesn't let me get far back into those blasted heaths I don't remember. They're like scabs on my mind...whatever is under them, it hasn't healed yet.

I think one of the scabs fell off last night. I had a dream more like a memory then most dreams I've had, a quiet little moment that may or may not have actually happened. As I type this I'm testing the neural pathways, running back into the storeroom to retrieve a detail or two and then running back out here before something topples over or the lights burn out. (As an aside, Tara and I live in the apartment of withering light: more and more light bulbs burn out every day and we seem strangely unconcerned. Perhaps we've decided to wait until Edison's foul spectre is banished from our home. Or maybe we're reverting into mole people. Anyway, just something I thought of. Back to the main rant.) For instance, I remember a black snake with a belly like light cream, light glistening off of its scales, with its mouth closed on my father's wrist. (Since my father is still alive, I assume it wasn't poisonous...I don't recall any particularly poisonous species of snake native to Rhode Island, although I'm sure there are a few I know nothing about.) Whether the snake actually looked that way or my memories have embellished it, I don't know.

Another parcel of memory from a recently discovered cache: snow falling from a blue sky, glittering in the red light of dawn as it seemed to heat the Mount Hope Bridge like a sword fresh from the forge, orange-red with light that cut a crescent in the horizon between two green turtle's shells breaking the line of the water. I can clearly recall the handlebars of the dirtbike, black, just beneath the line of my vision and the heat of my face...I must have windburned it, riding around before dawn, hitting every root and stone I could find in the dark. It's surprisingly easy to find them. I think it was December, but to be honest, I couldn't tell you.

I have no idea what these memory scraps signify. Why did I forget them? Why am I remembering them now? I'm not a big fan of the whole recovered memory school of therapy mainly because in my own experience it's not the traumatic or painful memories I've repressed...it's the memories that just can't match up to the emotional pitch those harsh experiences reach. As I get older, it's as though there's a layer of snow over my past packed with burrowed moments slowly digging themselves out. Some of those moments are pretty damn bad...I can retrieve a recent one about the day I had to throw my cousin out of my mother's house, the light inside the kitchen washed out reflected moonlight, like a movie projector without film, and young men drawn up and hissing with what now seems to be almost infantile pride, a human version of baboons drawing back teeth and standing stiff at each other. I don't even remember what we said. I just know my best friend and I stopped being best friends that day more than eleven years ago, and we never got it back, never even saw each other again really after that day. I can't say I'd forgotten it, but neither did I really remember it.

Obviously we don't remember our whole lives all the time...even Proust presumably had to go to the bathroom occassionally...or there would be no room to live and collect new memories. Our personal filing systems get silted over with the continuous rush of new experiences and we misplace things. It's to be expected. What amazes me is the rush of recognition when a memory turns up after having gone unexperienced for a long while...as though I were wandering about and then Oh yes. This is who I was. Many of these 'new' memories are sensory only...colors and images, scents (the smells of fire predominate, from the gentle burn of gathered leaves to the roar of a pile of old boats, the smoke of a chimney, the fumes of an ancient engine) and sounds. The feel of wind in my face as I roared immortal down dirt paths on a bomb with a seat. Autumn's crooked fingers brushing ice past my cheeks. The old clock on the main street in Bristol that I walked past several hundred times. The sweetish rotten smell of old books in a box being sold for pennies at the library in Tacoma park.

So much I only remember in fragments. So much that still hides beneath that blanket of snow. So much that can, and doubtless will, come out to remind me again that I am this, and that, and this as well.

The transition of hair into art

Okay, not art. But I did just dye it again, and you can see the photos of the process here at Tara's gallery. And if you want to see pictures we took while driving around to get the hair dye and bleach and all that, you can do that, too.

In a tradition of finding unrelated news, an 11 year old boy was abandoned by his mother in an airport so she could go on vacation when she found out he couldn't fly without a passport. Not much else to say for that, is there? I mean, I could quote the story...It is thought that the family had travelled together to the airport from their home, about 25 miles away. Police sources say that the mother is believed to have had an argument with airline staff after she was told she needed a passport to allow the boy to travel. She is then alleged to have handed him a door key and sent him home in a taxi before flying off on her break. No, that doesn't really help, does it? Not much to say for that, so I'll stop now.

Final update: My girlfriend has fun with sounds. Warning that some of these are, well, nasty. So nasty that they have to call Janet Miss Jackson. All hail Tara and her facility with gastric sounds.

The transition of hair into art

Okay, not art. But I did just dye it again, and you can see the photos of the process here at Tara's gallery. And if you want to see pictures we took while driving around to get the hair dye and bleach and all that, you can do that, too.

In a tradition of finding unrelated news, an 11 year old boy was abandoned by his mother in an airport so she could go on vacation when she found out he couldn't fly without a passport. Not much else to say for that, is there? I mean, I could quote the story...It is thought that the family had travelled together to the airport from their home, about 25 miles away. Police sources say that the mother is believed to have had an argument with airline staff after she was told she needed a passport to allow the boy to travel. She is then alleged to have handed him a door key and sent him home in a taxi before flying off on her break. No, that doesn't really help, does it? Not much to say for that, so I'll stop now.

Final update: My girlfriend has fun with sounds. Warning that some of these are, well, nasty. So nasty that they have to call Janet Miss Jackson. All hail Tara and her facility with gastric sounds.